Now this song was one of the ones that I had to think hard about. The lyrics for this one seem to be original, while the concept – a tale of a tinker full of innuendo, isn’t (see the Jolly Tinker for instance, though there are some versions of that that ditch the innuendo for actual filth)
The trouble with this one is it seems to have been made specifically for Lee’s baritone and also light opera is not as malleable as folk music. I needed an artist with both an empathy for the material and a proven track record of doing interesting cover versions.
It seemed like The Owl Service were needed. After all, it wouldn’t even be their first tangle with the Wicker Man.
But what really swung it for me was hearing this recent and brilliantly inventive version of the old folk song “She Moved Through The Fair”.
The word came back, I had the Owl Service but it would be a collaboration with new singer-songwriter Harriet Bradshaw. I went and checked her Bandcamp and the feeling was very, very right.
So, while I knew this was a track that probably nobody would want to try and tackle, at the same time I knew it was in a safe pair of hands. The results are, of course, radically different and yet also actually very intuitive and a natural evolution of the song. I’d worried that this was the mission impossible but the crack team from Leigh On Sea took care of it.
The May Pole song is an old folk song known as “The Rambling Bog” or “The Rattlin’ Bog” (very old songs passed on orally often ended up in different versions like a musical version of Chinese whispers/telephone).
Mahpahi is the nom de plume of Alison Cooper, formerly of Twisted Nerve act Sam and the Plants.
She was into this sort of thing long before the rest of us. Here’s her first EP from 2008:
Yet Alison’s connection runs deeper than music as a curator, visual artist and educator, with a deep knowledge of folklore and customs through her work in museums and with the scene-setting Folklore Tapes label. Here’s her 2012 work on Devon folklore
However, those of you who have followed her on social media will notice she’s also been very interested in building synthesizers in recent years. This might explain why her take on the May Pole song has this astonishingly warm synth sound, like the elegiac touch of an old church organ, a very distinctive (to my ears) sound. A distinctly hauntological touch that works fantastically.
A shortened version of the old folk song “Gently Jonny, My Jingalo” aka “The Fair Made of WIckham”, I never even heard this song until I finally got the extended version of the film in 2006.
Coming to me nearly 15 years later than the rest of the soundtrack makes this song feel really special and it seems perverse that it was cut in the first place.
This was quite an easy one to figure out as I’d been listening to the debut album from Good Shepherd a lot in 2021. It’s called “Let’s See What The East Wind Brings” and is out on Irish label Rusted Rail.
I think you can see from the song above how I made the connection. I wanted someone who could make it even mellower without losing any of its beauty. Mission accomplished!
Why do a tribute album to the Wicker Man soundtrack when the original was so good? That’s a fair question to ask, forgive me if I give a long answer.
It’s all down to January 2022. I’d just received the folk horror box set “All The Haunts Be Ours” from Severin FIlms and was binging through it that month. So folk horror was really in my thoughts and in my blood. I was out in my back yard, raking the gravel back into place (not a weird tribute to Hugh from The Owl Service but a necessary chore as my doodles send the stuff flying) when the idea crept up on me and wouldn’t let go.
Take that classic soundtrack and take a step out. Make things a bit more experimental, more raw, less commercial, more soul. Pick the artists well and tell them they can do whatever they want. Straight covers welcome, radical rearrangements welcome, even starting something new from scratch inspired by your given track would be OK too.
For me, and I suspect many others my own age, the soundtrack was their gateway into the previously reviled world of folk music. I discovered the Wicker Man around 1994 (whenever the Terror Vision VHS came out, I was definitely still a teenager – it was in the new releases section at Leeds HMV). The heydays of the folk revival were long gone and the classic albums all out of print.
The only encounters with folk music were the dying embers of the UK’s club scene, where people tried, and usually failed, to recapture the lost spark. I saw the Wicker Man many years before I heard the classics like Pentangle and Fairport Convention or the new wave of acts like The Owl Service or Espers.
Now, with folk in a burgeoning, innovative, vital movement once again and buoyed by Facebook groups like ‘Folk Horror Revival’, It made so much sense, I couldn’t believe it hadn’t already been done already. What followed was two months of intensive hard thinking, all carefully logged in a spreadsheet for future reference.
I’d always loved Finders Keepers compilation “Willow’s Songs” which delved into the past of the songs from the Wicker Man. I wanted to make a companion to that, a future of the songs. For the whole point of folk music is songs passing on to new musicians and evolving and changing.
I looked at the plan I’d laid out. The plan looked good. This was going to be a lot of work. Most compilation albums, if someone drops out, you can just forget about their track. With a set track-list like this, any drop outs had to be replaced and that would cause huge delays and knowing the fickle nature of creative inspiration, it was inevitable.
I hoped to have it all in place in just five months, though I knew that was perhaps overly optimistic. It took over eighteen. Which ended up pushing it on to the fiftieth anniversary of the film. So, there’s lots of anniversary stuff going on, including other musical tributes onstage and even bundled in with the 4k box set. It’s all good, though, I feel like these other tributes are coming from a different place and in no way clash with what I’m doing.
This is the raw, stripped-down and out-there version. It’s been mind-blowing having all these songs slowly trickling in and I can’t stop listening to this. I love it when a plan comes together.
