Goblin Band (Drive the Cold Winter Away III)

It made sense for the group, to announce themselves with a live LP, says the band’s Rowan Gatherer, who sings and plays hurdy-gurdy, recorder and reeds. “Goblin Band gigs are such a cornerstone of what we do,” he says. And this show in particular, at the MOTH Club in their home city of London, in October 2024, was a special one. “It was the culmination of us building our audience in the town we live in, the people in the audience being a mixture of strangers and friends, the energy all coming together in a way that made it feel amazing.”

Connection was core to Goblin Band’s very formation. The group – Gatherer along with Sonny Brazil (vocals, concertina and accordion), Gwena Harman (vocals, drum, pump organ and recorder) and Alice Beadle (violin and recorder) – formed out of sessions they organised themselves, carving out the space that was lacking for traditional and early music obsessives that, like were similar to them. At London’s more mainstream sessions, says Gatherer, “you’re going into an environment where you’re aminority. Automatically because we’re young, but also because we’re queer. I’ve been to so many sessions where it’s just blokes sitting around the table trying to steal the moment off each other. We were desparate to play with people who were our age and who were like us. We were longing for a community, so we threw one together.”

Before long, it became apparent that that community was larger than just those intimate early sessions. The band swiftly embedded themselves within a larger movement of young London folk musicians finding the radical and progressive energy at the core of traditional music, honing their skills on stages across London and beyond. An EP, Come Slack Your Horse! provided an early indication of what they were capable of, but by the time it was released it had already been outstripped as their repertoire grew. “We’re incredibly dynamic for a folk band. By most standards I’ve observed, we’re incredibly quick at working on new stuff.” Seasonal songs emerged as key, “because it feels important to reflect on nature, where we come from, and the values of that,” while the group’s left-wing politics remained at their absolute core.

Outliers from generations before them took notice – they count all-time folk great Martin Carthy among their admirers, for instance. “They can play and they can sing and they’re fearless…” he has remarked. “They go back to versions that we were too snotty to touch and they turn them into stomps.” One piece of advice that Carthy offered, and that has stuck with them ever since, is that “the music is enough, that you don’t need to go overboard, try to add something to it,” Gatherer recalls. “You don’t need to go overboard trying to add something to it, because the whole point is that something about it is of enough value that it’s survived this long.” Indeed, Goblin Band’s music doesn’t require bells and whistles in order to speak directly to today. A Loaf Of Wax is more powerful still for the way Goblin Band’s energy courses through those ancient instruments and out into the present. It is radical work, but thanks to the people who are performing it, rather than any surface level indicators. “It’s about using those aesthetics to express our personalities as individuals, to use it as a platform.”

Nor does Goblin Band’s obsession with traditional songs, their instrumentation, or their visual aesthetic, mean that they’re turning away from the present. “There’s an unspoken generational understanding that we’ve inherited a dying planet overcome by a giant genocidal profit machine – and nobody’s happy. Everyone wants to escape, and when I’m onstage I do escape, but it’s without leaving reality. We make sure there are constant reality checks, that we’re talking to the audience directly.” That’s tempered, though, by a self-awareness that “this isn’t to be taken as the most reverent thing ever,” by the band’s sharp sense of humour, and their playful relationship with their audience. Some of the best moments on A Loaf Of Wax are to be found songs, in the back and forth between Goblin Band and the Moth Club crowd.

In a way, they have more in common with DIY punk music than with they do with those staid, overly formal approaches to traditional music. They know because they’ve played in those spaces, “and whenever we get asked to do those things by radical people, hardcore punks and metalheads, who aren’t primarily into folk music, people absolutely love it.” Whereas in more mainstream spaces for traditional English folksong audiences are often supposed to be passive, treated to a recital of dusty old songs, for Goblin Band “that doesn’t make any sense, given the radical history of this music.” They see that “young people have been robbed of their ability to enjoy traditional music in a way that involves dancing, singing along, genuienely being carefree. That’s been taken away from them by the establishment,” Gatherer continues. “We’re trying to tap into a rebel tradition which in the English perspective has been separated from traditional music – which isn’t fair.”

And it’s that energy that’s at the core of A Loaf Of Wax, a record that captures in microcosm what makes Goblin Band not just outliers within a burgeoning young folk scene, but among the most vital bands in all of England.