S.O.S From The Kids: Save The Planet

SOS from the Kids formed when brothers Sim (12) and Noah Macaulay (14) got together with their cousin, Coen Baines, and close friends to record, ‘SOS from the Kids’.

Sim had written the song with his mum, Dorry Macaulay, as a wake-up call for climate action.

The troupe first performed the song in July 2019 to politicians. They busked on the street outside the Winchester council chambers, attracting a crowd of MP’s and policy makers who were gathering to debate and vote on climate issues. Word spread fast and before long hundreds of kids joined the troupe to sing at September’s ‘Global Youth Strike for Climate’ at Parliament Square in London. This prompted Sir David Attenborough to write to Sim and Noah saying, ‘thank you for all you are doing to help tackle the problem’.

A bit about the song…

‘SOS from the Kids’ was written after Sim and Noah learnt about humankind’s destruction of nature at school. The brothers came home telling their mum about the number of trees cut down per day, the state of the insects and the amount of energy and resources that are consumed to make a t-shirt.

Watching David Attenborough’s ‘Climate Change – The Facts’ alerted them to the crisis this destruction was causing. It had been Attenborough’s nature programmes that had first inspired their boyhood fascination with bugs and insects, so they started to talk about changes they could make at home that would help the insects and animals.

Being a musician, Sim’s mum started writing a song about this realisation she was seeing in her children. Sim immediately took interest. He asked to sing it, but it didn’t have proper words yet so he started suggesting lyrics and re-phrasing words to make them ‘how he would say them’.

Dorry says, ‘the lyrics of this song are very much pointing at me’, I, as an adult, need to “change the story”. It’s my generation that need to take responsibility. We’ve left a legacy that my kid’s will bare the consequences of. This song is a wake up call to myself and all “grown ups”. The song started as a way to channel our family’s feelings of despondency into something proactive, something that has hope and that other people could join us in.’

SOS from the Kids invite young people worldwide to join them singing. Do let us know if your group perform this song. We’d love to share what you are doing.