root salad From Here
Stick In The Wheel’s latest venture is a set of field recordings. Tim Chipping asks why…
W
hen fRoots first featured Stick in The Wheel on the cover of the magazine, they were part of a feature with
the working title ‘Outsider Folk’, the notion being that there were musicians and singers working with traditional mate- rial who were not part of any perceived folk scene. But while we might’ve been enthralled by the unaffected way in which they found their own voice in these songs, what would they make of the club they’d now been invited to join?
The answer is a compilation album
called From Here: English Folk Field Record- ings which features well- and lesser-known names performing largely traditional mate- rial in single takes with no overdubs or frills, in their own homes. I met Ian Carter and Nicola Kearey in the pub where it all start- ed, to find out their reasons.
“We’re not people who’ve grown up with folk music,” begins Nicola. “Ian had a few records, but we’re quite new to the whole thing. Walthamstow Folk Club at the Rose & Crown was the first folk club that we went to, and all of a sudden we find there’s this community of people that’s replicated up and done the country. People who were passionate about their indigenous music, or the roots music of England. It was happen- ing on our own doorstep and yet we were unaware of it. In the club that night Peta Webb and Ken Hall did a song and it was so powerful, so raw and full of energy.”
“They reminded me of the Young Tradi- tion,” says Ian, “they were just amazing. I only owned a couple of folk records, by The Young Tradition and The Watersons. But with most folk records I’d heard apart from them I couldn’t understand why they were so polished and produced. All that stuff is fine, there’s nothing wrong with it if that’s what you want to do, but there wasn’t any- thing that conveyed the live experience that we’d had in that folk club.”
“I was surprised by the way so many folk records sounded,” adds Nicola. “Espe- cially if you think about the icons of the English folk world, their amazing records when they were at their peak are very raw sounding compared to what goes on today. And when you go and see singers in that traditional setting, that seems to own so much power.”
Relying on minimal equipment, Ian and Nicola attempted to capture that intimacy – travelling up and down the country to record the likes of Eliza Carthy, John Kirk- patrick, Jon Boden, Lisa Knapp, Sam
17 f
Stick In The Wheel’s Ian Carter records that Martin Carthy
Sweeney, Bella Hardy, Spiro, Martin Carthy and more. Only two of the artists they asked to take part said no.
“Confusingly our first album is called
From Here. And we named our record label From Here. So we decided the artists’ brief for this record would be to interpret those words. You could do a song from where you’re from or a piece of music that’s to do with your musical journey; what does ‘from here’ mean to you? We asked the biggest artists we knew but also some other people no-one seems to know about. So there are a few strands to the album.”
“W
e decided to stick to just English music because our traditional culture is the least
appreciated in the British Isles. Go to Ire- land, everyone can sing an Irish song. Scot- land and Wales too. But in this country… Ian would say England is the most fucked in knowing what its traditional culture is. And it’s nothing to do with immigration or anything like that because England always has been a melting pot.”
“We’re taught not to respect it,” adds Ian. “Martin Carthy says that all the time. I
mean, I’m sure if you spoke to an Irish or Scottish musician they’d have their com- plaints too…”
“Whatever complaints they have they’re still not as fundamentally fucked as English folk music is!”
The album is much more than Stick In The Wheel satisfying their desire to hear the scene’s brightest and best without the stu- dio polish. They hope it can do for others what Peta & Ken’s unaccompanied floorspot did for them.
“We would like it to draw more people into folk music; it’s a gateway drug!” laughs Nicola. “I really believe more people would like folk music if they got rid of their preconceptions of what it might’ve sound- ed like 20 years ago. I think that sound is very much the model for now and that’s sort of insane.”
“I used to go to sessions in a pub called The Old Spotted Dog in Plaistow,” says Ian. “And people used to play and sing but there was no stage or PA, and it had such immediacy. Traditional music is something that happens in the corner of a room.”
stickinthewheel.bandcamp.com F
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