In corners around the country, there are rumblings of young folks with an axe to grind. Irked into action by an increasingly austere status quo, those making up the current trad folk scene are drawing from the not-so-distant past and morphing traditional ideas into fresh thinking.
It seems the societal changes undergone in Britain over the last 50 years have seen many local histories plastered over, marginalised, or all-but forgotten. Although this ostracization has been seen time again through history, the current state-of-things appears to be geared fiercely against these ideals of social harmony and local power. Enter Goblin Band – a sextet of folk musicians embodying ideas around community, re-enchantment with the land and queer expression in an endeavour to illuminate more optimistic ways to engage with our surroundings and address a cultural disconnect.
The band have been busy peddling this ethos across the capital and beyond, cementing themselves in a thriving folk scene and engaging new audiences with the allure of trad folk styles and sentiments. Emerging from the central-London folk instrument shop Hobgoblin Music, where several of the band work, the group are not only reanimating songs that have laid buried under a half a century of neoliberal globalisation, but recontextualising them for this current political zeitgeist.
All this is woven into in the band’s debut EP Come Slack Your Horse!, courtesy of Broadside Hacks Recordings. Presenting songs dating back to the mid-17th century, the EP tells tales of persecution and poverty that, though old, bear startling parallels with the travails of contemporary society. While the feeling of political heft can be felt across the EP, the fervour is also directed towards the celebration of personal heritage within the band. The track ‘Widecombe Fayre’ is set in a Dartmoor village close to vocalist Gwena Harman’s family home, and ‘Tumut Hoer’ is the unofficial folk anthem of Wiltshire, where Rowan Gatherer spent time growing up.
Wax met the band in a pub adjacent to Tottenham Court Road station – an area where jagged glass high-rises and concrete plateaus may look devoid of folky charm, but the band tell me this isnt the case…
Sonny: We actually did a big folky performance just outside this pub. We started at the shop and went all round Bloomsbury with a bunch of people and ended up here. There’s an enormous amount of stuff about this small area that is historic and impressive.
So how did the six of you begin making music together?
Rowan: There was a network of folky people spreads across the face of Great Britain. Our friend Áine, who’s currently over at Hobgoblin working, got me and Sonny to meet after lockdown, and we decided to start a folk session. We started doing it in Hobgoblin Music after hours, which was great place for us because there’s loads of instruments on the walls. The shop has an interesting personality with a rotating cast of characters, of which some of the band are main characters, I would say, by virtue of being employed there. The name itself came out of one of those sessions – it was never meant to me a band name but it’s just sort of stuck.
Is the band classically trained or are you mostly self-taught?
Sonny: Alice is the only one who is classically trained – to an unrelatable level.
Gwena: I think we benefit so much from her expertise and ability. I don’t have the terms to describe what she’s doing – I’d be completely out of my depth, but what she’s doing but is absolutely amazing.
Rowan: There’s a great chemistry about the band because of the spectrum of different backgrounds. Alice is the classical music genius and then Gwena and I come from a more visual arts background, and Sonny has been doing folk music for a really long time.
Sonny: I’ve always done outdoorsy stuff and things that involve playing music anyway. I was working on Thames barges, and there’d be loads of folk music played on there which was great for me. I did my formal education in theatre and realised very quickly that it was awful, so I stopped doing it. But this was really all I ever wanted to do with that education anyway.
Rowan: Paul’s been working Hobgoblin for such a long time. He’s obsessed with folk and traditional music from around the world. It’s in his bones.
Sonny: He’s the gadget man. He’ll come out with a weird little folk music gadget that’s like 500 years old or something and sounds like a bird. He loves instruments that are tiny, which is great. One of his main instruments is the Norwegian mouth harp.
With such a rich archive of traditional music at your fingertips, how did you pick out the tracks on the EP?
Gwena: It was mostly songs that we were part of our repertoire at the time that we thought were our strongest.
Rowan: We were trying to represent the strengths were the band – it was basically a snap-shot of songs we could do right now.
How easy do you find it to connect to the ideas and traditions you are communicating in your music within London?
Sonny: I find that when we go out with each other, we’re looking for pockets of history that survived and places where something amazing happened, but you wouldn’t ever know. But as soon as you do know, you realise it’s actually very obvious. It’s around us all the time.
Rowan: It’s the same with our music – we’re looking for things that represent the survival of an alternative to the insane, capitalist hellscape we find ourselves in.
Gwena: I see it as world building through engaging with history’s possibilities to exist outside of modernity as it is right now. Prioritising now over the past and thinking that what’s happening now is inherently better than what’s happening in the past. We’re trying to collapse that and use the past to think about now. These ideas aren’t so present in what you see walking around, but I feel as though we’re trying to find ways to bring it into everything, because it kind of is everything? It’s not just the music – it’s the politics, and it manifests in music as a way of connecting to traditions in England and to think about alternative futures.
With folk music often enduring through being passed between generations, do you feel Goblin Band are playing a role in providing this link for a those in a generation particularly removed from folk and its origins?
Sonny: It’s a weird position to be in, because the folk revival of Victorian times and the folk song revival of the 60s were quite academic in a way. In the 60s people had go to the Cecil Sharp House Library to find these folk songs and listen to people singing them. I feel like there’s a bit of pressure on our generation to carry on doing that. But we don’t really feel like we need to, because it’s very hard to find a folk song that hasn’t had some kind of version done that you can just listen to online.
Gwena: It’s less about passing the songs and more about giving the tradition some kind of trajectory that makes sense. We feel its important to be giving context and explaining how we’re approaching these songs, because if we weren’t doing this at our gigs we could potentially be perpetuating something harmful. Often folk traditions and traditional English identity are bound up together and weaponised by the far right, so if we’re not actively vocalising against that and bringing our lefty politics into it then it doesn’t really do anything positive.
Sonny: Our interpretation of the songs comes from our queerness and talking about queer experiences, which is essential to us and why were doing it.
Rowan: It feels like a healthy culture of traditional music, at least now, necessitates a constant flow of challenging it with fresh interpretations. It’s important to conceptualise it in the world that we live in, because even in the last couple of generations every path of life in this country has changed almost beyond recognition, so it feels like the music needs to be interpreted in a way that keeps up with that. The music has endured because people have always found it to be relevant to their lives in some way, even if indirectly. But in order to keep it that way, the rate at which we reinterpret it has to match the pace at which the world has changed. It’s almost effortless to politicise the songs because they are already political. It’s a kind of alternative history that’s been passed down by ordinary people, and I’ve seen much more political and queer engagement with it in London and around the country – it’s really encouraging.
Gwena: It’s just people wanting to connect with their histories, and when you see threads of disempowerment join up throughout history its very grounding. It makes you feel like you’re part of something bigger than the oppression that you’re facing now because you can look into the past and see similar oppression but also similar joy.
How do you feel about the opportunities for young people in the folk scene, and how easy do you think it is for young people to engage with the opportunities in the city?
Gwena: It looks really good at the moment. Since we got into it we’ve watched it grow exponentially in London and in other parts of the country. I couldn’t imagine that it was going to happen that way – it feels quite spontaneous.
Rowan: The sessions that we go to in London, especially Folk of the Round Table, make an effort with accessibility and approaching it in a way that is up to date. That’s why young people get into these spaces. And with the community that’s sprung up around things like the Broadside Hacks folk club, young people now have the power to organise folks sessions.
Sonny: It feels like young people are geared up for it. Partially because of the internet, people are more ready for weird, kooky things that seem a bit odd, even if it’s just ‘I think this thing is cool, because I saw it in Skyrim’. You can just do that in real life!
Gwena: There’s definitely a disconnect, but thats why the question about opportunities for young people is so important. The spaces that are being cultivated in London by young people for young people are nexuses for this kind of reconnection.
What is the general reaction from those outside of the folk scene when encountering the music?
Sonny: We mostly get positive responses. We’ve played lots gigs where we’re brought in by a promoter that liked us and we’re playing for an audience who have never heard of us, and those are some of the best gigs we do. People are sort of blown away by the fact there are people like them doing this, and they’re able to connect with it in a new and exciting way. It’s good to have gigs with an audience who’ve never heard a particular song before alongside gigs with an audience who have heard the song and have heard every single version of it since the 1950s.
Rowan: We’ve got a foot in both worlds at the moment. We love the traditional folk world with all the people we look up to, but then we’ve also got something new. I think I would have a hard time if I didn’t have both.
Gwena: I suppose it’s about breaking it out if its niche and bringing it to a larger audience as part of a wider conversation, which feels like an important thing to be doing.
Rowan: We’re not under any impression that we’re in a transformative moment thats going to make folk mainstream, because thats not going to happen. But then it’s never been about that and that’s partly why it’s so good – folk music wouldn’t be what it is if it wasn’t marginalised. Its a reflection of our situation as a community that it is the case, and its empowering and inspiring to engage with that and have control over it.
For anyone who isn’t familiar with the styles and ideas inn your music, how would you suggest to start navigating the vast catalogue of traditional folk music?
Rowan: I remember reading Electric Eden, and I found that to be a really good starting point because its one of those music history books just lists bands at you. That then led me to the Voice of the People anthology, which is a collection of field recordings in pubs and clubs in the first half of the 20th century. But I think the best thing you can do is go to folk clubs. We’ve seen lots of people who are the same age and background as us come to sessions not knowing anything about the music, but end up performing there. Folk of the Round Table is the best in London I’d say – its our favourite.
Gwena: A good way into it for me was looking up songs that come from the place I grew up. That was a really important step for me in learning songs that are very specific to an area I’m very familiar with and really connected to. So I’d recommend looking up where you’re from – there should be loads of stuff.
Sonny: Connecting with other people of a similar age who like the same sort of music was the biggest thing for me. I spent quite a few years thinking I was the only one who liked this stuff, and I think that’s the same for quite a few people I meet in the folk community now – it takes a minute sometimes for people to realise they’re not the only person who’s into it. So connecting with other people through going to folk clubs or making as positive-a-use of social media as you can is definitely important.
Words: Dan Webster // Photos: Enrico Policardo
Goblin Band’s debut EP ‘Come Slack Your Horse!’ is out now via Broadside Hacks Recordings. Stream and purchase the record via Bandcamp.