It’s a musical pairing so unlikely that even one of the participants suspected it was a practical joke. Last year, experimental folkster Nathaniel Mann went looking for a pigeon fancier. Specifically, a pigeon fancier amenable to attaching whistles to their birds’ tail feathers to create a flying orchestra. Eighteen months on, a flock of Birmingham Rollers is touring the country’s festivals, giving performances that have moved people to tears. This month, they’re even getting a composition award.

“It was a tantalising dream I thought I’d never actually fulfill,” says Mann, who plays everything from logs to tuned meat cleavers. He came across a dusty museum collection of whistles over a decade ago and became bewitched with the idea of launching a chord into the sky. He made his own using plastic film pots, tuned to 14 different notes. But he still needed musicians.

“I put an ad in British Homing World but none of the pigeon racers wanted to get involved in a music project,” he says. “Then someone said, ‘Well, there’s this guy in Nottingham who has a loft made of an old hutch that he straps to the back of his moped. They call him Pigeon Pete…’”

Handily, as it proved for touring, Pete Petravicius is the only person in Britain who’s trained his pigeons to return to a mobile loft. He jumped on the opportunity to change the popular perception of pigeons and bred a kit from scratch. “I’m not musical minded,” he says, “but when we did the first test flight and heard this haunting, hovering whistle… It’s a sound of its own.”

“It’s a big ask for audiences [when] a beardy musician says, ‘Lie back on the grass and listen, this is going to be awesome,’” admits Mann. “But some responses have been incredible. One woman said: ‘That’s the closest thing I’ve ever experienced to heaven.’ You’re hearing the flight of the birds described in sound. There’s no other soundsystem that offers this sense of space and movement.”

Now the pigeons are looking for guest musicians. Mann has been talking to otherworldly warbler Baby Dee. Pigeon Pete suggests Oasis. He’s also training up a second kit of birds that spin and dive in unison, which could give their live show a new Pan’s People dimension.

They may have WTF? appeal but these pigeons are no cheap YouTube show-offs (naming no names, Disco the Beatboxing Parrot). Their creative input also beats those birds in Liverpool who “wrote” sheet music by shitting on a stave. You really have to be present at a flight to appreciate its musicality. Or, as Petravicius puts it, “Our pigeons are rubbish on record but brilliant live.”

The pigeons will fly as part of The Big Feast weekend in Stoke-on-Trent, 29 to 31 Aug, 2.30pm daily