We talk about creative practice, the roots of traditions and what it means to be artists exploring those forms now.
Previous guests include: Fielding Hope/John Lewis/George Hoyle/Sandra Kerr/Tasos Stamou/Jon1st/Peta Webb & Ken Hall/Lewis Robinson/2020 Round-up/Nancy Kerr/Olugbenga Adelekan/Mazin Saleem/Richard Dawson/Anna Roberts-Gevalt/Laurent Fintoni/Nabihah Iqbal
Here's an interview we did for NOODS as part of their Resident Focus feature.
We spent an hour in the Brownswood studio chatting about Perspectives, Various and the folk scene back in July. Catch up with our interview over on the WWFM Mixcloud.
We did a mix for the Morning Glory show on Soho Radio. Have a listen.
As a member of US traditional dance team Still River Sword, Fisher talks about the difficulties in engaging with traditional music and dance, when it has roots in colonialism, oppression and white supremacy. It's an essential read.
We went crate digging in the audio archive at Cecil Sharp House, home of the English Folk Dance and Song Society.
This blog is an ongoing source of inspiration. We first met up with The Gentle Author to talk about Street Cries, his book full of rediscovered colourful plates of 17th century London street sellers along with the cries they used to hawk their wares - almost the only portraits of ordinary working people spanning four centuries. We'd also been researching this subject in song form, which turned into 2016's Tales from St Judes, Bethnal Green (7" vinyl and booklet). More recently, he put us in touch with the owner of a restored Georgian merchant's house on Fournier Street previously occupied by Huguenot weavers (religious refugees from 18th century France) and brokered permission for us to film a segment for the Folk on Foot podcast.
He also posted some incredible images from some old herbals, providing the seeds of inspiration for what would become the track Nine Herbs Charm, asserting that these herbs could be found on the last bomb sites of London. His commitment to a unique post every day always reveals something new about this area and beyond - of immigrants, ordinary people - showing the struggles and brilliance of a place constantly changing.
The wheel in the Fake Away video lives in our studio. It comes from an East End market barrow, the last workshop of which we visited back in 2016. The owners wouldn’t let us buy it until we’d played them a song while they welded a new metal tyre to the wooden felloe. The Gentle Author put us in touch and you can read all about Hiller Bros and their barrow business on his blog.
Nabihah Iqbal invited us onto her show to talk English folk music, and about threads of cultures that persist through different genres.