Western Daily Press (Saturday)
Why the world loves sea shanties
Two centuries ago the world’s oceans echoed to the sound of sea shanties. Now thanks to a group of four men – definitely not fishermen – the sea shanty is back in fashion with social media the driving force. Tristan Cork donned his oilskins to report on the latest phenomenon
IT’S the newest viral craze for 2021, and has catapulted four Bristol men onto the world’s stage: Sea Shanty TikTok.
The latest phenomenon from the video-sharing app has gone mainstream and involves people recording themselves singing along to a 180-year-old song, sung by a shanty group from Bristol called The Longest Johns.
The song is called Soon May The Wellerman Come and was recorded two and a half years ago by the Bristol group, but it and them being at the heart of this new global viral craze is no fluke – it’s something they’ve been working towards for years.
The song itself is a classic sea shanty. It was written and first sung as a shanty by the crews of whaling boats working for the biggest whaling and export company out of New Zealand, named Weller.
The whaling boats would be out for weeks or months on end, and the company would send supply boats out stocked with food and drink to meet up and keep them going.
The song’s catchy chorus sings of longing for one of those supply boats, the Wellerman, to “bring us sugar and tea and rum”.
The Longest Johns – Robbie Sattin, Dave Robinson, Andy Yates and Jonathan Darley – formed by singing a sea shanty for a bit of a laugh at a barbecue a friend held to celebrate the Queen’s jubilee in June 2012. It was only a year ago that the final one of the group was able to commit to going full-time – just before a pandemic hit and scuppered all music
They considered it bad luck back then to be singing sea shanties on land. I don’t think they would have been singing many sea shanties in Bristol itself, but the moment they get out into water, they would have DAVE ROBINSON
artists’ main bread and butter – singing live.
The Longest Johns aren’t exactly gnarly old fishermen, and are more at home on social media than on a ship. And that has held them in good stead in their mission to spread the world of sea shanties to a younger generation.
In the second half of 2019, they recorded a video for their version of popular Wellerman which involved them virtually joining people playing a pirate computer game online, as another member of the digital pirate crew, and then suddenly bursting into the close harmony shanty of Wellerman.
The other players’ reactions – and whether they joined in or not – was recorded, and that placed Wellerman firmly at the front of the idea of sea shanties in a 21st-century digital world.
From there, their videos and clips of people randomly singing Wellerman have gone viral on a number of different social media platforms in the 18 months since, but it is this new year and TikTok where things have “exploded exponentially”, according to Johnathan ‘JD’ Darley.
“It kept on popping up, these viral spikes,” he said.
“The first release of the video was really big on Youtube, Spotify, then a little while afterwards it did the rounds on Tumblr and that went huge and brought even more people to our channel.
“They clipped our video in the computer game.
“Off that going really viral there, it brought in even more people, then stepped up even higher,” he added.
It was no accident or fluke that Sea Shanty TikTok is now a thing, and that Wellerman is the song.
“We released our song to be able to be used on TikTok,” said JD.
“People started making jokes and memes using the song, because it had already been our most popular for a while so they latched onto that.
“Every single time someone created something, it jumped even higher – it brought more people to our channels, it kept on growing, as a spiral up and up until now, it’s suddenly exploded exponentially higher again and busted out straight into the mainstream,” he said.
The nature of TikTok, which allows people to record their own video over the top and next to another person’s video, is tailormade for the harmonies of sea shanty singing, which typically have one person leading the song and then more coming in for choruses and harmonies.
“That’s why shanties have picked up there in a bigger way than they have previously on somewhere like Tumblr or Facebook,” explained Dave Robinson.
“It becomes a massive fractal because someone records something, and then when the next person does it, everyone records several versions of that and several versions of those again,” he added.
The group of four are now realising their mission of the last nine years – to get everyone singing sea shanties.
“It’s so cool to see because it’s been our goal and aim for quite a few years now, with making videos in computer games, to get sea shanties and folk music in front of people who have never heard it because it’s a fantastic genre,” said JD.
“And from our experience, people who’ve never heard it before actually really like it, and really engage with it and really enjoy it, more than they’d ever believe,” he added.
“But it’s such an insular scene, if you never knew about it, you’d never hear it, so it’s been our aim for years now to find ways to get it heard by new people, which is why we do weekly videos and stuff like that.
“TikTok has suddenly become this perfect storm in not only hearing it but also engaging with it as well,” he added.
It’s also apt that the men who took sea shanties around the world in 2021 have done so from Bristol – a place that sent so many ships out around the world full of sailors singing.
“They considered it bad luck back then to be singing sea shanties on land,” said Dave.
“It’s a technicality, but I don’t think they would have been singing many sea shanties in Bristol itself, but the moment they get out into water, they would have, maybe,” he added.
One theory about why Wellerman has struck such a chord, apart from being ideal for harmonising to, and a rocking good tune too, is that it resonates with us all in lockdown, maybe even in a subconscious way.
It’s a song of being stuck on a boat, in hardship, with little provisions, waiting for supplies. “It’s a bit like Soon May the UberEats Man Come,” joked Robbie.
They haven’t done a 21st-century version themselves, but countless others have – even mainstream US entertainers like Steven Colbert have written new versions of it.
The group say they now have ten times the online following they had at the start of lockdown, and are now desperate to get out and perform live and see what the world will be like after the pandemic.
Although the lockdown has perhaps helped drive Sea Shanty TikTok, it hasn’t helped their ability to sing together. Andy and JD live in the same house, but the others live separately, so they haven’t been able to come together much.
“Singing together online is just impossible. The delays make it just ridiculous,” said JD.
“We’re able to do some little tricks with audio to make it work a bit better for livestreams, but even then it’s hard,” he added.
Now though, with Wellerman set to go into the Top 40 as it’s downloaded by the world, the foursome are prepared for the fame.
“We’ve had contact from all the record labels, it’s been crazy. Everything we’ve done has been self-produced, self-made self-financed. We’ve never had a manager, never had an agent. Even our merch store is out of a shed we built last year, managed by my wife,” JD said.
“But one thing that gives us hope that it’s not just a flash in the pan is that while Wellerman is number one on the viral charts, another of our songs, Santiana, is now at number 37, so it’s spilling it out into other songs,” he said.
For the group, the real aim is that the world emerges from lockdown desperate to see people sing sea shanties in real life, that the postCovid world is one of rollicking good singalongs.
“Out of all of this, the real dream I would love to see all of the other sea shanty groups and festivals we know and love who have struggled to get finance for their festival or get booked and heard – I can’t wait to see them singing to a whole new audience, and the festivals who have struggled to put on festivals being told ‘hell yes, you have all the money’ – that’s something that I can’t wait to see,” he added.