Goblin Band (Live Album Recording)

Relative newcomers on the thriving UK traditional folk circuit, Goblin Band are a collection of queer, musicians based around Hobgoblin Music, a folk-instrument shop with a branch located in central London. Inspired as much by medieval and early music, as they are by the folk traditions of Britain and abroad, the six-piece set their stall on re-energising timeless, much-journeyed songs for an ever-growing new community of young folk enthusiasts.

Debut EP ‘Come Slack Your Horse!’ - featuring songs dating back as early as the mid-17th century - sees the band doing just that. While some tracks here - such as instrumental opener ‘Black Nag’ or ‘Widecombe Fair’ - express a boundless, escapist joy, and the band’s deeply infectious enthusiasm for traditional music, many tracks across the collection, despite their age, bear startling parallels with the travails of contemporary society.

The sorrowful ‘The Brisk Lad’, for instance, offers a tale of breaking the law in the face of poverty; it’s one that feels extremely pertinent during the current cost of living crisis in the UK as people become increasingly forced to resort to criminal activity to feed themselves and their families. Or take ‘May Morning Dew’ - an Irish song that follows the experience of somebody forced from their home and then returning to find it in ruin - is a story of violent occupation, persecution and displacement that has been repeated many times since, not least - at the time of the EP’s release - in Palestine.

While there’s this strong feeling of recontextualising old songs for the current political zeitgeist, there’s also a pervading sense with Goblin band of artists reclaiming their personal heritage via the medium of folk music. ‘Widecombe Fair’ is set in a Dartmoor village close to the family home of vocalist Gwena Harman. ‘Tumut Hoer’ (or ‘Turnip Hoer’) is the unofficial folk anthem of Wiltshire, where Rowan Gatherer spent time growing up. The latter is sung here with an attempt to pull the track’s working class roots away from the winning Conservative MPs that sing the track upon election victory.

Often organising their own seasonal events around London, Goblin Band themselves have played alongside many musicians forming the new folk-vanguard in the UK - Daisy Rickman, Shovel Dance Collective, Milkweed, Junior Brother - as well as some of the genre’s living legends - Peggy Seeger, Martin Carthy and Martin Simpson.

With gigs across the UK circuit already to their name, the band and its members are integral members of London's blossoming folk movement, centred around the Broadside Hacks Folk Club and their regularly sold-out events at Hackney's Moth Club. Broadside Hacks themselves have been described by So Young Magazine as "a revelation in introducing predominantly indie centric audiences to the allure of trad folk." by TradFolk as "a contemporary folk treasure trove", and by Hard of Hearing, “as fundamental to the forward-thinking folk music landscape, as Speedy Wunderground is to contemporary post-punk”

Presented by Broadside Hacks.

This is an 18+ event