Before we go on, for the dyslexic among you. There is a fantastic folk artist called Jon Wilks who has recorded some of the same material contained on this collection. Jon is well known and highly regarded and therefore not to be confused with me.

Looking back, I’m basically just pleased to be here to tell the tale. The recording, which should have been quick and easy was disrupted by disease, death and legal trouble. I developed a very aggressive fibrotic disease soon after starting recording which has left my fretting hand deformed and painful, despite three operations, radiotherapy and other ongoing treatment. My mum became terminally ill, I spent a lot of time in police cells and crown court for my activism with a now banned organisation which successfully closed down several arms factories which supplied the Israeli Military. I had a couple of serious injuries including falling through the roof of one such factory. It was a busy four years, yet much of it was spent doing nothing: waiting around paranoid or in hospital or in court. I became nervous about gigs for the first time in my life. Despite it being an album of mainly traditional songs, for some reason - and I hope this isn’t too vomit inducing, it feels like the most personal record I’ve made. It’s my fifth.

It is not a collection to impress connoisseurs; I didn’t research songs from the part of the country I’m from (Coventry) - the titles are chestnuts, four are Child Ballads, the others are just as well known. In some ways it’s an introduction to folk song, but it’s good to start again sometimes. Stories about murder and war are often introduced as alarming anecdotes from the past with no acknowledgement of how they might speak to the present. If folk music is to mean anything in the present tense, it must do more than curate quaint laments. It must remind us that the past was a brutal struggle, and we are not exempt from its consequences. Our relatively stable times may quickly descend into the danger and uncertainty of the past. 

I am very grateful to all the musicians who added colour to what would otherwise be a one-dimensional record. I tried lots of songs and different ideas which I didn’t use. I wrote a song for the album early on called ‘Should the Workers Dream’ which stole the first verse from an old blues song, ‘Sportin Life Blues’, where a man appeals to his mother for forgiveness. ‘Should the Workers Dream’ was intended to be the centrepiece of this album. When I decided to leave if off, the rest seemed to make sense. Like the parable about the soup made from a stone, with the vegetables only added after - for taste! The stone is then removed, and the soup is ready.

The cover art is a hand-coloured photo by my friend Ellen Rogers, it’s a reference to a Robert Johnson album cover. Despite many injuries to my hand over the years and now a chronic degenerative condition I’m still a guitar player and although it’s not fashionable my style is as much coming from blues as it is folk.

Somewhere in the middle of all the drama and after a night of heavy drinking, I was hospitalised with a head injury, and I realised I had to stop. I had come to the end of the line and lost my way in so many ways. I am nearly two years sober now but not feeling any real benefit other than that I might be in better health to watch the world deteriorate into fascism and genocide.

Does music tell our collective story or something like that? Probably not. We are all just trying to get by, make money, impress someone. We just happen to have some common interests that overlap occasionally, and we call that ‘connection’. Music does not heal the sick or feed the poor. But it can, occasionally, illuminate something. If there is any hope, it lies in the act of telling the story plainly. It should not have taken me so long. This is my modest contribution to the tradition; I gave it my best under the circumstances.

Happy listening.

Joe Wilkes. November ‘25