Songbook: ‘Long Lankin’ with Lisa Knapp & Gerry Diver

If you put ‘Long Lankin’ in a sack with a bunch of other songs, they’d all be dead in 20 minutes. ‘The Cruel Sister’, ‘The Cruel Ship’s Carpenter’, ‘The Elfin Knight’ – hell, even Motorhead’s ‘Ace of Spades’, they wouldn’t stand a chance. For ‘Long Lankin’, AKA Child Ballad #93, first put in writing in the 1750s, is an explosive tale of forced entry, motiveless slaughter and pitiless execution without redemption, without meaning, without escape. It’s a gruesome highlight of Lisa Knapp & Gerry Diver’s new album Hinterland, and a song previously recorded by Martin Carthy, Steeleye Span, Shirley Collins, Jim Moray and Alasdair Roberts.

The bare, disarticulated bones of the story are this: the husband goes away and warns his household (wife and child, maid, nurse) to fasten all windows and doors from Long Lankin ‘that lives amongst the gorse’. But Lankin finds a way, like damp or mould, to get in, inveigling the child’s nurse to help him pinch and prick the baby and collect its blood in a basin before tricking its mother downstairs to be slaughtered. And so it goes. ‘There was blood in the kitchen / There was blood in the hall / There was blood in the parlour / Where my lady did fall’. The finale sees Long Lankin hung, the nurse burnt alive. And from start to end, not one chink of light, of hope, of reason, is provided.

For Knapp & Diver’s version, the duo tend to a spectral, liminal music that’s all bone and sinew, glockenspiel and Pete Flood’s restless drums, with Knapp’s distinctive, careful vocal weaving through the horror of what unfolds between the looming shade of Lankin, the false nurse, the doomed infant and mother. “Lankin is bloodthirsty as hell itself”, says Diver of their spine-tingling and dreadful take on the bloodiest and darkest of murder ballads. So, what better song to sing as a lullaby to your little girl growing up in Hampshire?

“I have a really strong and cherished memory of Mum singing the children’s version of this as ‘Wee Willie Winkie’ to me as a child,” recalls Knapp, “trying to get me into bed using a little bit of, well, fear. Classic 1970s parenting style.”

“When I heard Lisa’s demo, the dark gruesome narrative sparked a multitude of mainly dissonant ideas”, says Diver. “I’ve always been drawn to the darker side of folk, and both the lyrics and the minor mode align perfectly with my affinity for that shadowy, introspective aesthetic.”

In Scots variants, Long Lankin is a vengeful mason who hasn’t been paid, or perhaps a leper in search of a bloody cure, but south of the border that context dissolves like a mist, leaving the stark landscape of motiveless horror from the wastes to which Knapp and Diver add their eerie musical airs.

“There are versions with more of a backstory,” says Knapp, “but the creepiness in its distillation into an ‘enemy out there’ gives it a bewitchingly supernatural power – precisely because it doesn’t have answers or reasons that seem to make any sense. What we’re left with is an unknown kind of fear, a fear of the wild. It is a terrible and bloody murder with betrayal, sadistic violence and the slaughter of innocents and a most bloody and gothic scene at the end. It’s also very descriptive and filmic, which appeals to the imagination.”

“Musically, it took quite some time before it finally clicked into place,” says Diver, “with an ominous two-note figure on the glocks. When we went into the drum session with Pete Flood, we both envisioned an almost jazz-like ride cymbal approach, and Pete nailed what we were hearing pretty quickly.”

For Knapp, giving voice to the ballad’s inexorable course to murder and murderous punishment was an intimate, unsettling exploration. “The song speaks through several different voices and personalities”, she says. “A narrator, the Lord, the false nurse, Long Lankin himself, the lady and finally the maid. I focused on being these people and unravelling the story as it unfolds through their eyes. It’s very intense and very alive, the moss, the hay where Long Lankin may be hiding, the house itself, the hall, the basin for the blood; they all feel very vivid and alive. And as dark as dark can be. Just how we like our horror stories.”