Single and Video: When I Was a Young Boy

Artist: Joe Wilkes

Label: Frontline Records FLR21

Release date: 20th Feb 2026

This is a song which everyone knows and has always known in some way. There was never a time when this song did not exist. It has folk-roots DNA going back hundreds of years. It’s related to The Unfortunate Rake which might be the origin of the spring, and a constellation of other ‘lament’ songs. St James Infirmary is a descendant, having crossed the Atlantic into the cradle of Appalachia. It has many relatives in the British Isles and US. Arranged here as a gothic hymn, invoking the singers present day ghosts.

This single stands as a final omen before the unveiling of Hope In My Chest, Fire In My Throat, an album of traditional song, five years in the making.

As has been written elsewhere, the recording of the album was dogged, and perhaps even cursed by many of the themes carried within this particular song: excess in drink, incarceration (in the case of Wilkes for damage to arms factories, but here possibly for more anti-social crimes), death and a plea to both mother and doctor for help of some kind. For better or for worse, his time spent in hospital wards and police cells, the death of loved ones, contemplation of his own demise, and his recovery from alcohol abuse all resonate within it.

It's arranged in quite an un-folky way. Like other songs on the album, it’s presented as a singer songwriter would, as an original composition. This is the approach of much of the album. It is also not very British or trad sounding compared to some of the others on Hope. The overall mood is out of time and place, ghostly and somewhat haunted. A mood piece for a desolate eternal winter with only a hint of the spring referenced in the song’s lyrics.

The video was filmed around St Nicholas’s Churchyard in Deptford.