Introduction

What follows is some background on the songs and what I was doing when I recorded them over a period of five years. I won’t apologise for the self-indulgence, it’s your own fault if you read on. The circumstances which surround the recording of this record seem intertwined with the songs. Consider this a dispatch from the front lines of personal ruin and partial artistic resurrection.

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.

I had the idea to record an album of traditional material as I had learnt so many folk songs over the years and was somewhat brought up around them, especially through an auntie who was a folk club regular around the folk scene in Coventry in the 70’s. I have always been pleased to play at so many of the small folk clubs that exist in this country, often off the social media radar. Back-room gatherings where you can hear the most amazing and occasionally strange music made by people who do not realise how brilliant they are - and who would never think to promote themselves and do a proper gig. I hope I end my days amongst them.

 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 woes. 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 court for my activism with a now banned organisation. I had a couple of serious injuries leaving me with a permanent limp. I hit the drink and eventually had to admit I was an alcoholic. 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 in case you’re wondering.

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 music, 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 have chosen songs which reflect my own experience. The mumfordication of folk and acoustic music has made a pastiche of authenticity - organic but shit - which is organic after all. I hope there is some truth in this record and if there isn’t it was an interesting trip.

Seven Gypsies

“Escaping the tyranny of domesticity”

This was the first song I recorded and one of my first goes at proper folk music. As with all the songs here it is very well-known. I knew the guitary arrangements as well as the amazing Stick in the Wheel version. I loved the fact that the young wife in the song leaves her comfortable existence with her handsome squire to run away with gypsies and live a life out in the open. A life choice I fully back. I sought out Shem Fillmore to add some Sarangi, an Indian instrument which produces violin, sitar-like effects. If you’re going to invoke gypsies, you might as well nod to Kashmir and the raga-drenched nomadic sound. I recorded this with no problems and shot the video on Tottenham Marshes. All was well and I was looking forward to finishing the album quickly.

Lowlands of Holland

“No self-reflection, no redemption”

Lowlands is about the same age as Seven Gypsies, dating back to the Anglo-Dutch wars. It is a song that ticks all of the folk stereotypes: Impossible ill-fated love, war with rival a European power, death of ill-fated loved one at sea and finally a stubborn refusal to remarry. The vibe is dark and the key is straight minor, no navel gazing or self-reflection just tragedy followed by drowning. It’s got everything except a chorus of blind prophets. My old friend and collaborator Antoine Reininger added a great bassline to this which gave the song some groove. It is also the first of many tracks on here to feature Duncan Menzies on fiddle.

Traditional Style

“Portrait of working-class life”

This song details the life events of my grandad; Fredrick Wilkes who was born in 1889, the same year as Hitler and Charlie Chaplin. Fred went deaf in his later years but was known to sing to himself while working as a blacksmith’s striker, the only job he could find before passing away in 1947. He outlived Hitler by two years but not Chaplin. If he’d hung on a year longer, he could’ve died in an NHS hospital. All the names of his children in the song are the real names of my aunties and uncles. He provided for a large number including Doreen, Gladys, Harry and Sid as well as Fred junior and the youngest, my dad Stan. All life events are accurate, except in this song I imagine Fred, meets my maternal grandad, the ill-tempered factory foreman: Jack Lester who is stabbed to death by Fred. In real life Jack was known to be a violent Liverpudlian Plymouth Brethren who traumatised his children, so I was quite okay about killing him off in the song. In real life he lived into old age. I didn’t know him well, nobody did, I do remember playing him some songs on my guitar when he eventually went into a care home. On family visits I’d play his home organ which I eventually inherited. Video here

Love Is Pleasin’

“An English Blues”

I was immobilised in a back brace and couldn’t walk for several months when I started playing this lying down. Around 2021, I’d been involved in a campaign to close down a group of arms factories. On one such occasion it ended with me falling through the roof. Thankfully, it also ended badly for the factory which was forced to close and was sold at a massive loss of several million pounds shortly after. I spent my recovery continuing my folk guitar explorations. I’m a fan of the early British guitarists who always brought a lot of blues to their folk. The scene in the late fifties and early sixties overlapped a lot with the jazz and blues clubs. That suits me. I loved the Davy Graham arrangement of this song and wanted to do something musical and inventive with the guitar. I used a funny tuning and did some clever guitar bits in the instrumental.

 When I play this live, I introduce it as an English blues song even though it predates American folk by a century. I met Davy around 2006-7. Later on, myself and Wizz Jones were invited to play with him at Powers in Kilburn. Davy didn’t show this time, just his sister Jill and Tony Reeves his one-time double bassist. I was later asked to support Davy on tour; he ended up touring with Bert Jansch and died not long after. I also supported Bert around the same time. All three are gone now. Wizz just recently. Davy and Wizz seem to carry something of the beatnik in their vibe, which is an attitude and style worth resurrecting. Guitar in their hands was never just about a folk renaissance, but reaching forwards into Jazz, esoteric eastern sounds and beyond.

Hares on The Mountain

“Feminist anthem disguised as Victorian pop song”

Who doesn’t like this wonderfully playful and mysterious song? It’s thought the lyrics might be from several sources. When you sing it, it does feel like two songs that have been squashed together. Sometimes called ‘Blackbirds and Thrushes’. I’m intrigued by what scholar, Steve Roud says that a lot of folk songs are really just pop songs from Victorian times and are not as old as we would like to think. This song feels like that, the ‘Sally my dear’ bit. The verses about turning into fishes are magical. I put this on the B side of Seven Gypsies and released it as a limited-edition lathe cut 7 inch. Cerys Mathews gave it a spin on Radio 3. It features my friend and neighbour John O’Neill on flute. I filmed a video in Greenwich Park during lockdown. Shortly after my mum got ill with cancer. I spent the rest of lockdown taking care of her and eventually burying her. I associate this song with her a lot. It’s often slowed down and played with brooding pathos, particularly the Lankum version which is my favourite. I decided to do it faster and somewhat rough.

The Old Triangle

“Let’s make prison ballads normal again”

Reimagined here in a slightly trippy exotic style which I hope gives it a new feel. I did not try to be precious or particularly faithful to the original. Written by Dick Shannon but wrongly attributed to Brendan Behan on some credits, it describes the Mountjoy prison in Dublin which is still in use. The actual old triangle was sounded when a prisoner was about to be executed. Republican fighters were imprisoned at Mountjoy without being charged and hunger strikes were organised there early in the struggle in the nineteen-twenties. In 1973, it was the scene of a daring escape using a hijacked helicopter by three Provisional Irish Republican Army prisoners. The recording captured a lot of interesting interplay between fiddle and Shem Filmore once again on Sarangi. It’s the newest of the ‘traditional’ songs here. Iain Anderson  (BBC Scotland) closed one of his radio shows with my version.

A Brief History of Time

“The face of Christ on the studio wall”

This was written in an attempt to do something approaching the quality, and mental universe of the fabulous Leon Rosselson. I’ve been lucky enough to play with Leon on a few occasions over the years. He’s 91 now. The first gig I did with him, I think he was celebrating his sixtieth year of touring. Later, we did a gig which happened to be on the same day Bob Dylan was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature. I said I thought Leon should have got it which prompted a long talk, chronicling Dylan’s bad deeds and bad politics particularly around the subject of Israel. Every time I played with Leon, I felt inadequate as a lyric writer which is pretty normal I expect. I love the way he interweaves humour, politics and tragedy. This song was one of many that I wrote where I tried to write a dense humorous lyric. In it, I have chosen various episodes in history to tell a potted, idiosyncratic history of everything that has ever happened, from the Big Bang to the end of time. I included events like The Battle of Hastings but also the fact that I used to stare at a strange face-shaped stain on the wall of a recording studio I used to work in. We used to show ‘the face of Christ’ to prospective clients as a way of enticing them to hire the space but they mostly just thought we were mad. We spent most days drinking and smoking weed so we developed a bunker kind of humour. It’s the most modern song on here in terms of music but the spirit of it feels right to include.

Hard Times of Old England

“Poverty and plutocracy side by side”

This is a song with a message and the message is: you live in England - and it is shit. It fits with my other songs about Britain and nationalism: Settling the Score from my third album, Looking for The Grave of Garcia Lorca and England’s Scheming from my second album, Here on the Frontline and Edge of Terra Firma which I released as a single after Brexit. I have always been interested in Britishness from a left perspective but also from a truthful non-romantic point of view. I am quite proud to be British, (especially when it comes to music) I think you’ve just got to admit to the bad bits. The lyrics describe modern inner-city life better than anyone could if they wrote about it today, despite the centuries that have passed. It has an uncomfortable precision. The re-emergence of Tommy Robinson style nationalism makes me want even more to engage with the fact of being British and be honest about it.

The video was filmed in Tower Hamlets over the winter of 2024 / 25. Tower Hamlets (across the river from where I live in Deptford) has more children living in poverty than anywhere else in the country. As well as poverty, it has extreme wealth. Ellen Rogers shot the video against the glittery backdrop of abundance and prosperity which is Canary Wharf.

 I heard the Roy Bailey version and used his slightly more ‘call to arms’ last verse. I had left the album half-finished in December 2022. I had one of several operations on my hand and complications and slow healing meant that I couldn’t play the guitar again until September which is when I recorded this - so this was my first time playing in a long time and it felt great. The summer had been spent in a deep depression without my guitar. The last line of the song is, ‘in Old England very good times’. Despite the previous verses, despite the grief and depression making the album, the major key and the feeling of playing the guitar again made the final verse seem possible.

When I Was A Young Boy

“From The Unfortunate Rake to Americana fame”

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 a lot of folk-roots DNA running through it. I sometimes play this on the piano and have generally played it as a sort of private song to myself. I never thought to really try and record it. 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 Americana, Appalachia and eventually New Orleans. It has many relatives in the British Isles and US. I play it in different ways, sometimes as a coda pinned to the end of another song. It has the feeling of attending one’s own funeral which is strangely appealing. Charlotte Sometimes introduced me to it before I realised I knew it. I’m especially keen on the Nina Simone version.

We Don’t Talk About The Weather

“Small talk is painful and tiring”

St Augustine said Hope has two beautiful daughters: Anger and Courage. The unfolding horror in Gaza appalled me long before the genocide got going in 2023. I had spent time working in the Occupied West Bank teaching English. Under such circumstances, action born out of anger is the only way to be hopeful. I had been charged with criminal damage to several weapons factories that made parts for the Israeli Merkava tanks and a plant which manufactured parts for the F-35 fighter Jets which have recently been flattening and bombing Gaza. Some of my thoughts about the occupation found their way onto this short song. I always wondered why people stopped writing anti-war songs? The Vietnam War was widely referenced in contrast to modern wars. Maybe we realise the pointlessness of it now, the limits of art? Maybe songs should know their place and not get above themselves? Or maybe we are just more individualistic? Politics has been replaced by identity politics. Artists talk like therapists and accountants which I think is quite selfish and limited.

The title is borrowed from Ulrike Meinhof, who observed that polite society avoids politics in favour of small talk. This song is a rejection of that avoidance. The collection of Meinhof essays: ‘Everyone Talks About The Weather… We Don’t’ are articles she wrote when she was young but I thought the title was great, especially as an Englishman. Small talk is painful and tiring. It wears you down.

The House Carpenter

“Regret on the high sea”

The recording was not chronological but just as Seven Gypsies was the first to be recorded - this was the last. As with Love Is Pleasin’ and When I Was A Young Boy, this ballad is as well known in America as Britain and belongs as much to that tradition. This was the only song that wasn’t recorded live. What I mean by that is that it was the only song where the guitar and voice were recorded separately. Under ideal circumstances the way I record is to play and sing at the same time. This means the feel and emotion of everything is in sync, the small changes in time feel right because the guitar and voice flow together. For technical reasons and because I wanted Charlotte to sing on this, I had to record all the bits separately although I hate doing it that way.

The words to this song and the mood we created gave an otherworldly feeling of an epic storm rather than peace and redemption. There are regrets but no going back and that is how I feel about my own life.

Final thoughts

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 subtle reference to a Robert Johnson album cover. Despite many injuries to my hand over the years and now a chronic 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, maybe more so…

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 mojo 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 some bullshit 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. These songs are not an escape from reality; they surrender to it. 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