To Rouse The Spirit Of The Earth: British Folk Rock As Folk Horror Weird - Jonathan Thornton

 A woman must save her lover from becoming the Fairy Queen’s tithe to hell. A schoolboy is challenged by the devil to a battle of riddles. A woman leaves her husband and child to be with her lover, only to discover he is the devil taking her to hell. These are all the plots from traditional folk songs that feature prominently on albums by folk rock bands Fairport Convention, Steeleye Span and Pentangle. The folk rock movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s may not seem like the most obvious place to look for the Weird, but by drawing on what Robert MacFarlane would later call “The English eerie”, the British folk rock bands engaged with a tradition of British Weird that stretches back to the Child Ballads, filters through pioneering Weird fiction writers like M. R. James and Arthur Machen, and has a lingering influence today on books, films and music broadly categorised under the folk horror revival. For this reason, I argue that the classic folk rock albums of this era deserve to be understood as key texts of folk horror, British Weird fiction and Fantasy.

The original trio of folk horror texts that inform much of the movement still today are Robert Hardy’s The Wicker Man (1973, British Lion Films), Piers Haggard’s The Blood on Satan’s Claw (1971, Tigon British Film Productions) and Michael Reeves’ Witchfinder General (1968, Tigon British Film Productions). These films helped to set the tone for much of the genre. Not only did they coincide with the peak artistic years of many of the folk rock bands – 1968-1970 for Fairport Convention, 1970-1971 for Steeleye Span, 1968-1972 for Pentangle – The Wicker Man makes heavy use of its folk rock soundtrack, composed by Paul Giovanni and Magnet. Like the classic folk rock albums, The Wicker Man soundtrack mixes traditional British folksongs with original compositions, and combines acoustic folk music with psychedelic rock to achieve much of its unusual power. Although the soundtrack would not be released independent of the film until 1998, the prominent use of Giovanni’s music in many of the film’s most iconic and distressing scenes form a permanent link in the mind of the viewer between folk rock and the resurgence of Britain’s repressed pagan occult history. By the time The Wicker Man was released in cinemas in 1972, the movie-going public would already be familiar with the folk rock sound. Fairport Convention’s Liege & Lief (1969, Island) spent fifteen weeks in the UK album chart, reaching number 17, whilst Pentangle’s Basket of Light (1969, Transatlantic) reached number 5 in the UK album chart and spawned two hit singles, one of which was used as a theme tune to a BBC series. Yet for all its popularity, the music clearly still evoked a sense of atavistic eeriness that allowed Hardy to use it prominently in his iconic horror film.

The Wicker Man soundtrack by Magnet & Paul Giovanni Trunk Records BARKED 4 1998. Artwork and design by Jamie Paton and Paul Ritchie. Adapted from https://www.discogs.com/Magnet-Paul-Giovanni-The-Wicker-Man/master/69624

In Robert MacFarlane’s essay ‘The eeriness of the English countryside’ (The Guardian, 2015), he codifies a lot of what would come to be known as the folk horror revival:

A loose but substantial body of work is emerging that explores the English landscape in terms of its anomalies rather than its continuities, that is sceptical of comfortable notions of “dwelling” and “belonging”, and of the packagings of the past as “heritage”, and that locates itself within a spectred rather than a sceptred isle.

For MacFarlane, whether discussing the short stories of M. R. James or Paul Kingsworth’s The Wake (Unbound, 2015), what’s crucial is the willingness to explore “anomalies” and “spectres”, to revel in the unease of the English landscape rather than toxic nostalgic misremembering of a non-existent golden age. The self-consciously postmodern approach of the folk rock bands allowed them to atavistically evoke the past whilst crucially opening a space to critique nostaltic nationalism. Clare Button (2018) describes how the folk revival “fused a nostalgic ‘new Albion’ haunted by the weird and primal” (260).  Arthur Newman argues that

Electric Folk, borrowing, adapting, combining the vibrant newness of rock ’n’ roll with self-conscious antiquism—a reflexive adoption of the emblems and modes of past times to emphasise progressive modernity, analogous to today’s Steampunk—forged something with a cultural relevance and vitality far greater than that which could be mustered by the retrograde interiority of the staid revivalists. (738)

Thus the classic albums of Fairport Convention, Steeleye Span and Pentangle engage with the ghosts of the past in order to evoke the changing world of the present. This interpretation would no doubt enrage folk purist Ashley Hutchings, who left Fairport Convention to form Steeleye Span because he was unhappy with the extent to which the group was embracing rock and wanted to move in a more traditional direction. However Steeleye Span’s greatest artistic achievement Please to See the King (1971, B&C), with its loud electric guitars and bass creating a disorienting drone, was likened to the Velvet Underground by Rob Young in his Wire primer on British psychedelic folk (2007). Although Fairport Convention’s later work lacks the primal intensity and purpose of their best work, and Steeleye Span would become poster-children of the cheesy and twee, the early work of these bands and their contemporaries, from the well-known like Pentangle to the obscure and cultish Comus, chimes with MacFarlane’s conception of the English eerie.

Steeleye Span's Please to See the King B&C Records CAS 1029 1971 Art Direction and Design by Grahame Berney and Keith Davis

If we can think of cover versions of songs as being haunted by previous versions, then the traditional songs and ballads that make up the bulk of folk rock’s canon are made up of multiple hauntings. These are songs that by the time they were catalogued by folklorists like Francis James Child in the 19th centuries were already many centuries old, their origins lost to the mists of time, passed on from generation to generation. They are also particularly resilient ghosts – many of these traditional ballads exist in multiple versions, subtly adapting themselves to their new home and customs, across England, Scotland and Wales and then transplanted to the Americas. This is seen particularly strikingly in ‘Blacksmith’, the opening song on Steeleye Span’s Please to See the King, which is haunted directly by the very different version of the same traditional song that appears on Steeleye Span’s previous album Hark! The Village Wait (RCA, 1970). The radical change in Steeleye Span’s approach can be seen in the differences between these two recordings made only a year apart. The version on the first album is characterised by a driving rock rhythm, set by Gerry Conway’s drums and Ashley Hutchings’ thunderous bass, over which Maddy Prior’s strident vocals brim with passion for the song’s wronged heroine. The version that opens Please to See the King could not be more different. The driving rhythm of the previous version is replaced by a chiming guitar figure in a syncopated rhythm, and Prior’s righteous anger is replaced with a chilling, spectral serenity, as if the heroine of the song has been driven by her sorrow to take her own life and is singing from beyond the veil. This atmosphere of hauntings runs throughout the album, particularly in the closing track ‘Lovely on the Water’, a song originally collected by Ralph Vaughan Williams in 1908, whose arrangement sonically echoes the chiming guitar figures of the opening track. The song tells the story, told again through Prior’s crystal clear ethereal vocals, of an encounter with a sailor and his lady, who both turn out to be ghosts, the sailor killed in battle and his lady pining away for him. The album ends with this apocalyptic image:

For Tower Hill is crowded

With mothers’ weeping sore

For their sons are gone to face the war

Where the blund’ring cannons roar.

Pentangle's Basket of Light Transatlantic TRA 205 1969. Cover design by Diogenic Attempts Ltd.

A crucial part of the folk rock’s sonic approach of melding the traditional with the modern was its embracing of musical traditions outside of traditional British folk. The folk rock bands cheerfully adopted the electric instrumentation of rock music, but also were open to musical traditions from other cultures. Lee Robert Blackstone (2017) argues

Many of the most important bands—Fairport Convention, Steeleye Span, and The Pentangle—combined art worlds by featuring musicians who had cut their teeth in both rock and folk clubs. Songs and tunes were passed on via interaction and oral transmission. (569-570)

Fairport Convention’s arrangement of ‘A Sailor’s Life’ from their third album Unhalfbricking (Island, 1968), draws as much from Indian raga as previous traditional arrangements. No band epitomised this eclecticism as clearly as Pentangle, a group as influenced by jazz as traditional folk. Pentangle covered both Charles Mingus’ ‘Goodbye Pork Pie Hat’ and blues standard ‘Turn Your Money Green’ by Furry Lewis on their album Sweet Child (Transatlantic, 1968), alongside traditional English folk songs like ‘So Early in the Spring’ and ‘Bruton Town’. Pentangle’s two guitarists John Renbourn and Bert Jansch were expert folk musicians who brough in the banjo and the sitar into their arrangements, and the rhythm section of Terry Cox’s drumming and Danny Thompson’s double bass was easily as versatile as their better known and more frequently rated rock contemporaries. Pentangle’s sonic range can be heard across Basket of Light, from the jazzy rhythms and mutating time signatures of opener ‘Light Flight’ to their joyous rendition of The Jaynetts’ ‘Sally Go ‘Round The Roses’. The most sonically adventurous track is the closer ‘House Carpenter’, a Scottish ballad that has been traced back to 1685, which tells the tale of a cheating woman who is taken to hell by her lover the devil. Pentangle’s arrangement mixes seemingly disparate instruments, with Jansch playing the banjo whilst Renbourn plays the sitar. The strangeness of the arrangement adds to the uncanniness of the song’s narrative, with Jacqui McShee playing the faithless wife and Bert Jansch playing her demonic lover. At the opposite end of the sonic spectrum is ‘Lyke-Wake Dirge’, which is arranged as a ghostly choral for McShee, Cox and Renbourn and tales the tell of a soul trying to reach Purgatory. The group’s blended vocals moving in harmonic fifths create the atmosphere of a medieval church service as the souls leave Earth and face the dangers of Hell on their journey, where this fate awaits those who have acted selfishly: “The fire will burn thee to the bare bane”.

Fairport Convention's Liege & Lief Island ILPS 9115 1969. Designed by Fairport & Roberta Nicol

Fairport Convention’s Liege & Lief is troubled by a more personal haunting, following the death of the band’s drummer Martin Lamble and Jeannie Franklyn, guitarist Richard Thompson’s girlfriend, in a road accident which injured the surviving members. The crash occurred in May 1969, after the band had finished recording Unhalfbricking but several months before its release, leaving the band’s future in question. Following a period of reflection the band decided to continue with new drummer Dave Mattacks, and Liege & Lief was recorded between October and November the same year. Fairport Convention biographer Patrick Humphries in Richard Thompson – Strange Affair: The Biography (Virgin Books, 1996) links the lyrics of ‘Farewell, Farewell’ and ‘Crazy Man Michael’, two of the album’s original songs penned by Thompson, to Franklyn’s death. Certainly Liege & Lief is a lyrically dark album, with moments of joy making themselves felt amongst an atmosphere ranging from gentle mystery to occult frenzy. This atmosphere extends to the cover art, which Clare Button (2018) describes:

Fairport Convention's Liege and Leaf is famous for its gallery of the more outwardly disturbing attributes of folk custom, such as Padstow's Obby Oss and the Burry Man of South Queensferry. The carved wooden head on the album's back cover explicitly evokes a sinister prehistoric past, although the jury is still out whether the head was discovered by Ashley Hutchings, in a suitably M. R. Jamesian fashion, under a pile of leaves in a churchyard, or whether it was just a knickknack belonging to the wife of fiddler Dave Swarbrick. (265)

The inner sleeve of Liege & Lief...

...showing various figures and customs relevant to British folklore...

...and the back cover. Photographs by Eric Hayes, concept & design by Fairport and Roberta Nicol

 The uncanny cover art is an apt reflection of the record’s contents, which are full of folklore at its most dark and disturbing. Album opener ‘Come All Ye’ promises “To rouse the spirit of the earth / And move the rolling sky”, setting out the album as an invocation of England’s sleeping spirits. ‘Reynardine’ tells the tale of a werefox seducing a beautiful woman. Sandy Denny’s ghostly vocals hover over lush washes of ambient guitar that call to mind the misty mountains of the werefox’s castle home. ‘Matty Groves’ is a murder ballad in which Lord Donald discovers his wife cheating on him with the handsome working-class man Matty Groves and kills them both in rage. The album’s centrepiece is side two’s epic reimagining of the Child ballad ‘Tam Lin’. One of the more famous Child ballads, ‘Tam Lin’ is a human man who has been kidnapped by the fairies so they can use him as a human soul to pay the fairy tithe to hell. Janet, his lover, saves him by puling him off his horse as the fairies ride past on Halloween and hanging on to him as the Fairy Queen transforms Tam Lin into all manner of hideous shapes. The song ends with the furious thwarted Fairy Queen shouting terrifying threats at the happy couple:

Then up spoke the Fairy Queen, an angry queen was she,

Woe betide her ill-far’d face, an ill death may she die.

Oh, had I known, Tam Lin, she said, what this night I did see,

I’d have looked him in the eyes, and turned him to a tree.

‘Tam Lin’, with its strong elements of supernatural threat and theme of forbidden love triumphing, is a perennially popular source of inspiration for Fantasy writers who want to engage with the darker side of British folklore. The ballad has been successfully adapted numerous times over the years, with takes as varied as Diana Wynne Jones’ Fire & Hemlock (Methuen 1985), Pamela Dean’s Tam Lin (Tor Books, 1991) and Kat Howard’s Roses and Rot (Saga Press, 2016). The Wikipedia page for the ballad lists 43 prose adaptations from the years 1949 to 2021, which gives some idea of the story’s enduring popularity and influence on Fantasy fiction. Given the chart success and enduring popularity of Liege & Lief, it is not unreasonable to assume that at least some of the authors inspired to retell the ballad learned of it originally through the Fairport Convention version. For this reason alone, Liege & Lief deserves consideration as an integral part of the canon of Western Fantasy literature.

The British folk rock boom would largely be over by the time The Wicker Man was released in cinemas. Pentangle broke up, Steeleye Span abandoned the wild intensity of their first three albums to make a living hawking exactly the kind of nostalgic kitsch that Please to See the King wasn’t, and Sandy Denny, Richard Thompson and Ashley Hutchings would all leave Fairport Convention within a couple of years, leading to the band becoming a fixture on the folk music festival circuit. But the wild and haunted spirit of those early albums lives on in MacFarlane’s conception of the English eerie, influencing not just the soundtrack to The Wicker Man but subsequent generations of Fantasy and Weird fiction writers who draw on British folklore. Their influence also hangs heavy over the freak folk movement of the early 2000s, inspiring musicians like Joanna Newsom, whose album Ys (Drag City, 2006) could also be read as a work of feminist fantastic and the Weird, and the post-industrial apocalyptic folk of Psychic TV and Current 93, whose Thunder Perfect Mind (Durtro, 1992) is a powerful mixture of Coptic mysticism and Weird inspired by M. R. James and Thomas Ligotti. The music of Fairport Convention, Steeleye Span and Pentangle from this era continues to exert its uncanny pull on the unwary listener.  

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References

Lee Robert Blackstone. The Aural and Moral Idylls of “Englishness” and Folk Music. Symbolic Interaction, Vol. 40, Issue 4, pp. 561–580

Clare Button. ‘See Not Ye That Bonny Road?’ Places, Haunts and Haunted Places in British Traditional Song. IN: Folk Horror Revival: Field Studies: Second Edition. Wyrd Harvest Press, Durham, UK 2018 pp 260-269

Current 93. Thunder Perfect Mind. Durtro DURTRO 011 1992

Fairport Convention. Liege & Lief. Island Records ILPS 9115 1969

Fairport Convention. Unhalfbricking. Island ILPS 9102 1969

Piers Haggard. The Blood on Satan’s Claw. Tigon British Film Productions, 1971 

Robert Hardy. The Wicker Man. British Lion Films 1973 

Patrick Humphries. Richard Thompson - Strange Affair: The Biography. Virgin Books, 1996

Robert MacFarlane. The eeriness of the English countryside. The Guardian 10 April 2015, https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/apr/10/eeriness-english-countryside-robert-macfarlane [Accessed 26 April 2021]

Arthur Newman. Robert Graves and the Modern Ballad Tradition. Critical Studies pp 730-739

Joanna Newsom. Ys. Drag City DC303 2006 

Pentangle. Basket of Light. Transatlantic Records TRA2O5 1969

Pentangle. Sweet Child. Transatlantic Records TRA 178 1968

Michael Reeves. Witchfinder General. Tigon British Film Productions 1968

Steeleye Span. Hark! The Village Wait. RCA Victor SF 8113 1970

Steeleye Span. Please to See the King. B&C Records CAS 1029 1971