Folk Opposition in 2023
This week's shows, new music and more
Cantilever Recommends is a weekly rundown of London-based gigs, new releases and great writing about music. This week, we’re starting with a longer essay about contemporary UK and Irish folk music.
Not a day goes by when I don’t hear of someone who is struggling with rental payments, having their rent raised or frantically looking for a place to live in a London rental market that is ludicrously inflated and operated for private greed. Against this backdrop, it’s surprising that anyone can do anything other than work and hope for the best. The enormous effort that goes into grassroots music scenes often goes un-noticed and is, at the very least, poorly remunerated. If you’ve ever played a few gigs or have peers who have, you’ll know it can be gruelling, knackering and demoralising. It can also be the best thing you’ll ever do. There are already huge financial access barriers to any music making and it remains astonishing and inspiring that musicians, organisers and fans have the motivation and the spirit to put on grassroots shows, play them and get out to part with their hard earned cash supporting their peers.
One of the most unique places I hear these renters’ anxieties addressed is in the music of Dublin’s Junior Brother, particularly on his 2022 album The Great Irish Famine. The first single released from that project was the aptly titled ‘No Country for Young Men’ — a track which consists solely of Ronan’s guitar finger-style, tambourine played with his foot, and vocals — here’s how it is described by Ronan (JB):
"I wrote this song in response to the tangible feeling of dread and anxiety I felt across Dublin city during my first few months living there. Increasingly hostile and violent evictions, police complicity in such acts, the housing crisis in general, among other factors seemed to cultivate a distrust of authority, particularly in the youth of the country. The day after a police-backed violent eviction of peaceful protestors from an abandoned house in North Frederick Street, Dublin, I stood with many others my age outside the empty house, and remarked upon seeing the photograph of the balaclava'd police next to the thugs dressed in all black that you couldn't tell the goons from the guards."
Today, we’re used to hearing messages of inner city class solidarity and calling policing practice into question in grime, hip-hop, and spoken word, though perhaps less frequently in contemporary guitar music, or genres adjacent to the tricky term Folk, a word which seems to more frequently refer to a set of instrumental timbres — “this ones a bit folk-y” (see also: Spotify’s ‘Fresh Finds Folk’) — than it does to any sense of a located-ness of place, or sense of representing a particular people through music, which is, truly, what Folk music is.
Back to the acoustic guitars for a second though — the Folk-y within the Folk — ‘No Country for Young Men’ and The Great Irish Famine at large address various, not necessarily interconnected political / politicised topics: the housing crisis (also recapped on ‘Landlord’s Hum’), male body image and masculinity on ‘This is My Body’ and ‘No Country…’ and a host of eerie, merely suggested violences that surface all over its janky frame. The defeated line from ‘Life’s New Haircut’ — “Nothing can be done / When Nothing’s in your hands” — just about sums it up. The album is not what you would call easy listening: the guitars stretch and twang almost to breaking, strings are scratched, discordant piano rings sharply, vocals are pushed further than it feels they should comfortably go. You get the impression of a need to break out, for the whole record to rip itself to shreds and take off somewhere.
Junior Brother’s music, in its convergence between alternative and experimental music on one hand and folk or, as it is more commonly referred to in Ireland, traditional music on the other, is far from an isolated example right now. Nor is it the only example of a music that grappling with the social and political issues of its immediate locale and channeling them into sounds that are undeniably born from the sonic templates of the British and Irish Folk tradition. In fact, for many, these experimental and the political tendencies seem to go hand in hand.
To the growing list of exponents we’d have to include Lankum (also from Dublin) who play their biggest London show to date at The Barbican on May 4th. Their project showing how interpolations of traditional tunes take on new, contemporary meanings, with, ‘What Will We Do When We Have No Money?’ from Between the Earth and Sky (2017) becoming an increasingly prescient anthem during the cost of living crisis and the inclusion of anti-fascist anthem ‘Peat Bog Soldiers’ on the same record remaining an emotive peak.
Similar examples of re-contextualising traditional music into an alternative context can be found in the work of London’s Stick in the Wheel who play King’s Place next Friday (April 28th)— hear personal favourite ‘Hard Times’ aka Hard Times of Old England — and latest addition in London (and perhaps the most vehemently on the experimental side) Shovel Dance Collective, whose latest, The Water is the Shovel of the Shore, weaves a patchwork field recording almost documentary aesthetic into its performances of traditional tunes. Shovel Dance’s primary vocalist Mataio Austin Dean explains that ‘for me it was always a political project […] something we’ve always done is perform on picket lines. The idea of solidarity is very much at the centre of what we do.’
Elsewhere, Newcastle’s Richard Dawson — who headlines the Barbican the day after Lankum in May — has continued to explore a hybrid of experimental and folk music from a number of angles, weaving traditional tunes into his live show and across his trilogy of records Peasant (2017), 2020 (2019) and The Ruby Cord (2022) (which address a past, present and future image of Northumbria respectively). In a documentary called ‘The Smudging Ritual’ from 2015, before his breakthrough with Peasant, Dawson speaks to the practical benefits his living with a degenerative visual impairment afforded him as an artist:
“It enabled us to work part time, so I had more time to practice. Because of the benefits you qualify for, the disabled living allowance. Which they’re now attacking, but that’s another topic.”
In light of this fact, there’s something heartbreaking and very personal about the track ‘Civil Servant’ from 2020 in which Dawson explores a first person character sick of the bureaucratic infrastructure in which he works:
“I don't want to go into work this morning
I don't think I can deal with the wrath of the general public
And I don't have the heart to explain to another poor soul
Why it is their Disability Living Allowance will be stopping shortly”
He wants to act but can’t, reduced to the messenger of bad news. The track contains a similar tone of helplessness and lassitude in the face of adversity to The Great Irish Famine: “nothing can be done / when nothing’s in your hands”. But what strikes me about all of these songs is the feeling of solidarity they evoke.
Both lyrically and musically, all of the music discussed here puts me in mind of Folk Opposition, a slim book from 2011 by Alex Niven (formerly of the band Everything Everything). In a brief chapter, Niven suggests a correlation between the turn of the decade popularity of a music genre, referred to in the music press as nu-folk, and what he terms ‘The Cultural Logic of Green Toryism’. It’s no coincidence, he argues, that Mumford and Sons and their ilk reached their ‘mainstream apotheosis’ in the same year that the Tories changed their logo to an oak tree: a particular form of cultural conservatism was becoming emboldened at the time, one that looked to a bucolic, village-green image of “England” and “Folk” as its aspirational ideal, reflective of a ‘middle-class zeitgeist’, but wasn’t having any conversations around who was or wasn’t included within those terms. Ten or so years on from Niven’s book, the irony of M&S’ Banjo player's recent right wing affiliations isn’t lost and just last month, folk musicians canceled gigs affiliated with the Oxford folk society due to historic racist views expressed by one of its organisers. It should be said that this reactionary idea of folk maintains a far more clear cut conflict within folk circles in the UK (or more specifically England) than it does in Ireland, where nationalism, as members of Lankum explained in a recent interview with
, also has a history of more left-wing allegiances.Folk Opposition went on to discuss many inter-related notions of folk and its relation to the complexities of regionalism and nationalism but the musical question the book asked was: where had the protest, the opposition that had historically been a part of folk traditions in the UK gone and why had it come, in the popular imagination, to be replaced with at best an anodyne sound, evacuated of context and at worst an active parochialism, reflective of a culturally reactionary project?
Without wishing to straw man the “nu-folk”, which was also called “Indie Folk” at the time, too much, what it does represent is the last peak, at least in recent memory, when alternative music (whatever that might mean, at least something quite different to what it did in 2011), broadly, was being combined with sounds that, again broadly, were reflective of a folk or traditional template. Among musos who wouldn’t usually pay much mind to traditional music, Lankum (signed to a very large indie label, Rough Trade) are an increasing touchstone. Richard Dawson, similarly, is signed to an imprint of Domino records (who also put out Arctic Monkeys, Wet Leg etc etc). So it feels good, after a decade of Conservative austerity, to be able to pinpoint some contemporary artists on something of a rising tide who are doing the folk opposition Alex Niven was looking for, and reaching what appear to be increasingly large audiences with it, taking the folk outside of its potentially negative contexts and — in the case of many of England-based musicians discussed here — using it as a razor sharp critique of the very foundations upon which notions of Englishness and regionalism are built. As Alex Niven puts it in his new book The North will Rise Again :
‘Dawson’s solo output – and his work with the band Hen Ogledd (‘the Old North’) – combines hallucinatory discord with excavations of the medieval history of Northumbria. For Dawson, this psychedelic approach offers a way of transcending portrayals of northern subjects as ‘humble worker bees’, in the crass, arts-funded version of northern regionalism which goes in for flat caps, exaggerated accents and sentimental reveries of industrial community.’
And on a national scale, Shovel Dance Collective’s Mataio, of Guyanese heritage, asked in a recent interview with Trad Folk: “What does it mean to claim Englishness as a person of colour? All those questions around blackness and brownness in English folk song are a big concern of mine.”
While drawing on different contexts, scenes and musical cultures, what’s clear is that each of the artists discussed here have been created and sustained by regional grassroots music communities, with many having worked for a decade or more before reaching anything close to a “mainstream alternative” audience, whatever that may mean. Experimental, alternative musics in the UK, Ireland and beyond need these grassroots in order to keep the culture alive. So it’s with awe that we look to all of those involved in creating this new wave of Folk Opposition over the last decade, both the musicians themselves and all those behind the scenes during these Hard Times.
London shows from this article:
Junior Brother — Moth Club, 28.04.23
Stick in the Wheel — King’s Place, 28.04.23
Lankum — The Barbican, 04.05.23
Richard Dawson — The Barbican, 05.05.23
Shovel Dance Collective — Cecil Sharp House, 18.06.23