The Secret Team

Much like a frantic movie about “unfinished business” or “the one that got away,” Secret Machines spent the past few years finally putting the finishing touches on what should have been their fourth LP. Long regarded as a lost album, The Moth, The Lizard and the Secret Machines was actually put on pause in 2010 and massaged in the aftermath of 2020’s return-to-form record Awake in the Brain Chamber.

For the BBC series ‘The Secret Life of Elephants’ we’ve revealed the elephant’s hidden world – the depth of their emotions, their remarkable intelligence, and the intimate complexities of their family life. We spent three months in Kenya, filming the elephants and following the work of Iain Douglas-Hamilton and the Save the Elephants research team. We wanted to tell the stories of individual elephants, which meant we spent every hour from dawn till dusk finding and following our stars across the Samburu reserve. We focussed on the most dramatic moments in their lives – a calf from the day of her birth, a bull using tactics to win a mate, a matriarch making decisions to protect her family. We followed the research team on missions across northern Kenya to protect the elephants; we see them helping a community terrorised by crop raiding bulls, uncovering an outbreak of poaching which killed two of their best known elephants, and tracing the new dangers on ancient elephant migration routes.
After weeks of hard work, we were rewarded with astonishing glimpses into the elephant’s lives. But we couldn’t have imagined that we’d become so directly involved in a life or death operation to save a baby elephant’s life.

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