Fieldwork

When siTW turned modern-day Cecil Sharps

DesPiTe being newcomers to the folk scene, stick in The Wheel staked a claim to be upholding the tradition in March 2017, when they released From Here: English Folk Field Recordings. Capturing their subjects in the raw, outside the studio, stick in The Wheel recorded singers – some well known, such as Martin Carthy, Jon Boden and sam Lee; others, including Peta Webb and Ken Hall, less so – singing songs from their home regions.

“a lot of folk music, in my opinion, is overproduced,” ian Carter says. “i wanted to do that thing where you put mics in front of cracking musicians and they’d recreate the conditions of a singaround. and being a metre away from them watching them sing, or laying it down on a fucking accordion, you think, ‘Oh shit!’”

Peta Webb and Ken Hall were singers Carter and Keary had encountered at the folk club they visit in Walthamstow (“They were some of the first people we saw who made us go, ‘Oh, fucking hell!’”). and one of the the things that most pleased Carter about the project was turning on Verity sharp’s radio 3 show one saturday morning to hear her playing Webb and Hall’s track “Just a note/Wild Whiskey”. “i was like, ‘dah! Got them on there!’” and that, he says, summed up the point of the project: showing the world the “tremendous musicians” at work in english folk.