Stick In The Wheel
Not your average folk group – along with Irish band Lankum, we meet the Londoners tackling harsh issues in challenging ways
The thing is, Nicola Kearey says, she doesn’t really like folk music. She ended up singing it, with Stick In The Wheel, if not quite by mistake, then with a certain amount of happenstance. “It took me a long time to realise I could do singing,” she says, sipping a soft drink alongside Ian Carter, the guitarist and other founder of the London five-piece, in a quiet pub on a cold Sunday night in Walthamstow. “But in order to make sense of it I had to sing the way I talk. Then there was no turning back. But no, I don’t like folk music.”
Stick In The Wheel, then, are not your average folk group. even in a world whose leading artists are constantly aware of the need to overcome preconceptions about the Aransweatered finger-in-the-ear beardy – to the extent that most of those preconceptions no longer hold any truth – they are something unusual. Uncut gets a taste of that later that Sunday evening, after travelling from Carter and Kearey’s home turf to their rehearsal room in hackney. For a start, drummer Si Foote is wearing that most unfolk of garments, the Morbid Angel T-shirt. And then there’s the music: richly melodic, but angry, and sometimes taking folk in directions unexpected even by the standards of folk’s adventurers. “Witch Bottle”, a standout from their new album Follow
Them True, is something almost monstrous when they perform it in the tiny room, a story based around working on an art project at a nature reserve, when disgruntled locals kept thrusting bottles of urine through the fence. Si Foote’s drumbeat comes from “Be My Baby”, and both ellie Wilson on violin and Fran Foote on accordion generate a drone that washes over everything: it sounds like nothing so much as a weird english reinvention of The Velvet Underground, with a bottle of piss taking the place of a syringe of heroin, Carter’s matter-of-fact delivery somehow accentuating the oddness.
“Nicola’s voice really struck a chord,” says Billy Bragg, an admirer who got them to play his Leftfield stage at Glastonbury in 2016. “They say they play the music of their people, and I think I might be her people – she’s got that east London suburban twang. It’s not always easy to sing in your own accent, particularly if you’ve been listening to a lot of pop music, but Nicola manages to get between the trad folk voice and what you might call the urban voice and find something really original.”
“What they do is come at it from outside the standard tropes of traditional music,” says Jon Boden, late of Bellowhead. “The guitar playing has a real edge that you don’t get when people have come through trying to emulate the musicians of the ’60s. They have a great respect and knowledge for the great instrumentalists, but they’re not beholden to anything.”
Stick In The Wheel aren’t alone in their singing to the dispossessed, to those marginalised by society’s rush to a version of progress measured in house prices and the prevalence of artisan coffee shops. Across the Irish sea, the Dublin quartet Lankum are doing something similar, taking traditional songs that speak to the times and writing their
own. Both groups, too, use drones and musical vernacular taken from outside the folk tradition to make their music sound new and alive – so while you will get acoustic instruments, don’t be surprised to hear modern studio effects (Lankum deploy AutoTune in places on their new album, Between The Earth And
Sky). It’s no surprise that Stick In The Wheel selfreleased a single featuring a song apiece from both groups, when Lankum were still called Lynched.
Both Stick In The Wheel and Lankum, tellingly, are made up of musicians who came from outside the traditional music scene: Ian and Daragh Lynch, who formed Lankum, started playing on the squat punk scene in the Irish capital 15 years or so ago, while Carter and Kearey came up the London urban music underground, what Carter calls “the continuum from jungle to dubstep to grime”. In both groups there’s a willingness to break rules, as well as a love of traditional music – they’ve both been embraced by the folk scene for that fascinating combination of respect for their predecessors and a willingness to cleave steadfastly to their own way of doing things.
CARTER and Kearey met back in the ’90s, at sixth-form college in Walthamstow. Kearey loved the bands her dad listened to – The Who, The Kinks, the Small Faces – and got into guitar music, then playing in bands. Folk music was present in Carter’s home – “My mum knew all those cats from the ’60s, and she has all these stories about telling them that while she appreciated their skills as a guitarist, she wasn’t going to go back home with them” – but jungle was his musical year zero, the moment when he found a self-sufficient musical scene that reflected the world he saw around him.
In 2002, Carter co-founded Various Production, an electronic/dubstep duo who made a minor splash with their single “Hater” and were signed to XL (“With all due respect to XL, I didn’t really enjoy the experience. They didn’t seem to know what to do with us”). Unlikely as it sounds, this was where he started making folk music, of sorts – the B-side of “Hater” was an edit of one of Peter Bellamy’s tunes for “The Young Tradition”. “I always had this angle of adding folk music to it,” he says. “A lot of people romanticise the blues players, but when you’re a person making music of your time, my thought was that you should always know what your musical traditions are, from whatever country you’re from. It doesn’t matter what it is – you should be informed about it, and let it inform you. So I started doing proto-grime and dubstep beats and I was always messing about, sampling folk stuff.” He roped Kearey in to sing on some of the tracks – the folky material usually appearing on B-sides.
Carter left Various Production in 2009, and though he and Kearey remained friends, they weren’t making music together. Both were parents – Kearey says her kids were such hard work, she didn’t have time for much else – and Carter was busy engineering and producing, working with the psych-folk-sludge group Wolf People among others. By 2013, both realised they had the itch to do something musical of their own again, and set about scratching their itch. “I felt like we’d done all that crazy futuristic folk music from space,” Carter says, “and I wanted to do it without using any electronics. I wanted to do stuff where you could actually write the song and play it and have everything ready before it had even got to any recording devices.”
Kearey gave Eliza Carthy one of Stick In The Wheel’s early demos. It sat around in the van for an age before Carthy stuck it on, but when she did she was transfixed: “It was different; nicely anarchic and homemade,” she says. She thinks it’s important that they were coming from outside folk and bringing something new. “It’s important not only that we don’t become a closed shop, but that we pass it around. My thing is: what are we keeping this music alive for? For ourselves or for the culture? For me it’s important to bring in outside influences to keep things fresh and exciting. It’s good to pass songs around and see what happens to them.”
Stick In The Wheel don’t have any songs about Walthamstow, but in a way their music is about what’s happened to the area – and countless others – which has transformed from one of London’s working-class enclaves into a place where a terraced house might cost a million quid. “That period of change coincided with when we started this project,” Kearey says. “I was cross because of the gentrification. I’m not saying I love living in a shithole and shitholes are great, but no one’s sticking up for the regular working class.”
STICK In The Wheel were never going to be soft, or nice. They wanted to make people’s music, not what they thought folk had become. “The first experiences of folk we had when we went to see it was what we call crywank music, where it’s a male singer-songwriter with an acoustic guitar singing about how his girlfriend left him,” Kearey says. “They weren’t singing about everyday life, and that’s what that traditional material does tell you about.”
“It seems to me that the material that they write or choose talks about that time when people from rural communities were coming into close contact with the Industrial Revolution,” Bragg says, “moving from a feudal routine that runs on the seasons into the dislocation of the Industrial Revolution. My ancestors came from the North Essex borders – and what anger did they bring with them about having to work a 12-hour day? Some of our ancestors weren’t agricultural labourers – they piled coke into ovens. What did they sound like? And I think Stick In The Wheel somehow capture that.”
“The way people see folk music now is very much dictated by how it was collected in Victorian times, mostly, when it was a pursuit of the upper classes, mostly,” Carter says of the conflict inherent even in trying to define folk music. “In Ireland it’s called traditional music, but here it’s called folk music because they wanted to hear the music of the folk. The common folk of England, of the great Empire.” “Untainted by people in cities,” Kearey adds. “Like immigrants.” “They didn’t want anything influenced by outside culture, or anything that showed any kind of artiness,” Carter continues. “They didn’t want to know about it. They were looking for idiot savants. It’s like the blues boom, where you had to be a blind sharecropper who had never heard music past a certain point.” They knew London, their own London, would have to be a presence in their music. They didn’t realise, though, that the repertoire is desperately short of music from London – at least in part because of the purist, paternalistic attitudes of the collectors. They searched for songs by poring through YouTube clips (“Some people are frightened of saying that,” Kearey says. “They think unless you’ve gone and captured the breath of the person who sang that song, you’re not a proper folk musician”) and visiting the English Folk Song And Dance Society in North London. When they went to the Vaughan Williams Memorial Library and met its director, Malcolm Taylor, they learned about the lack of London tunes. Carter recalls, “He said, ‘I get loads of people in my library and they all want to know where the London folk songs are. Well, there aren’t any.’ Oh right.” Then the music-hall expert John Foreman, father of Madness’s Chris Foreman, explained to them that because London is a collection of villages, there’s no such thing as a London folk song, anyway. Still, between the old songs and those they wrote, they gathered enough material for their stunning debut album, 2015’s From Here, where the sense of rage and anguish was palpable, and their own songs fit seamlessly alongside the traditional songs. On “My Barra”, Kearey sang of car-boot sales, portraying them as a fight every bit as ruthless as the life of an 18th-century villain:
“I’ll shake your hand, oh/Then stab you in the back and off I go/I look like the others in the cold /But a wolf in sheep’s clothing I am.” “I always like to talk about car-boot sales, because for me they’re such a microcosm of society,”
“Car-boot sales are a microcosm of society” NICoLA kEAREY
“We don’t say we’re a protest band. It’s in the music” IaN carTer
Kearey says. “They’re sort of lawless as well. You’re down to that place where people bargain and haggle. People get stabbed at the car-boot sale. With a screwdriver. That’s what happened at mine, in Hertfordshire. If you look at each family’s pitch, it’s like a little snapshot of their life, the shit they got for Christmas that they don’t want. That and ‘Roving Blade’, those two tales, are interchangeable. That sort of stuff was going on then.”
“Me N Becky” took a similar tack: over what sounds like a bucolic accordion and guitar backing, the kind of thing that usually accompanies a lyric about gathering in the harvest, Kearey sang of a pair of friends going looting after the London riots of 2011, and getting caught on CCTV. Change the time, and the nature of the crime, and it’s a tale as old as the ages. Eliza Carthy highlights that song, saying it’s “as relevant an addition to the repertoire as ‘Georgie’ [a song Stick In The Wheel learned from listening to Martin
Carthy]. They’re both songs about crime, and what happens to you afterwards. That shows to me what folk music should be about – ordinary people and their lives.”
From Here was followed in March 2017 by the almost identically named From Here: English Folk Field Recordings (see panel on previous page), which reflected Carter’s belief – bred during his time in the London urban music scene – that if you’re part of something, it’s your duty to put back, to help and support others. And now there’s a new album, Follow Them True, which carries on where From Here left off, mixing old, new and in-between and making them sound of a piece.
There’s no hint of purism in Follow Them True. “Weaving Song” is a borrowed song, not from the libraries, but from Bagpuss. “White Copper Alley” is an old song about a man robbed by a prostitute, which Carter altered and rewrote to change the perspective. “The original one is a bit of a jolly jape, which you do get in songs written about London from people outside London – ‘Oh, I went to London and met a lady and turned out she ripped me off!’” he says. “But do you think she was doing that for a laugh? London in the 1800s was fucking horrible. People didn’t do stuff like that because they thought it was fun, so I thought that needed to be readdressed.”
“The pay-off that we wrote into that is that her son is sick and she’s got to pay the doctor, and that’s why she’s doing it,” Kearey says. “It’s trying to offer an explanation for why people are in these situations without being judgemental and not saying all rich people are bad and poor people are great.”
THE whole point of Stick In The Wheel is to reach outside the traditional bastions of folk music, and find the people with whom these songs will resonate. People like the cleaner at Islington Assembly Hall who heard them rehearsing “The Roving Blade” in their dressing room before a show supporting Wolf People, and who came in and asked about the song. Or the fella who, when they played at the Bermondsey Folk Festival in the marketplace, came out on to the balcony of his council flat to see what the racket was. “And then he went and got a chair and sat and listened to us,” Kearey says. “Tick. Job done. That’s what I like.”
Later that chilly Sunday evening, watching Stick In The Wheel play, the truth of what they sing is the thing that’s hardest to avoid, though it is never bald sloganeering: as they well know, the truth of ordinary lives is the greatest tool in fighting injustice. And, they say, it’s truth that will get people to listen, not any sort of gimmick. “You can’t force it down people’s throats,” Kearey says. “You can’t go, ‘Hey young people, come and see the trendy folk band!’ That’s like your fucking uncle’s going, ‘Hi guys!’”
To be fair, Stick In The Wheel seem anything but the trendy uncle type. They show, rather than tell.
“Which is why we don’t say we’re a protest band,” Carter says. “It’s in the music. If you’re conscious person you can’t help but be aware of how shit things are.” Stick In The Wheel, though, prove that bad times can spawn great things.
Follow Them True is released on January 26