Slack Your Horse

Goblin Band are a six-piece who coalesced around London’s Hobgoblin music shop. Their liner notes for this 30-minute set of traditional songs focus on how the politics of previous times are a mirror to our own. Traditional music is the great working class art form, embedded with politics as deeply as it is with story and myth, and the likes of ‘The Brisk Lad’ and ‘The Prickle Holly Bush’ tell of the criminalisation of poverty and the long shadow of punishment. It’s no green and pleasant land and nightmares are close at hand.

Set to a rich, rough, oozy music, and with some dramatic vocal work, the set’s highlight is an 11-minute version of the Copper Family’s ‘Birds in the Spring’ paired with ‘May Morning Dew’, the singers’ voices supported by a visceral instrumental dronescape incorporating accordion and violin. They finish with the jaunty comedy of disaster that is ‘Widecombe Fayre’ – once covered by Benny Hill – a song they describe as ‘well known to older generations, and surely hold[ing] the prize for the most merchandise associated with an English folk song.’ Market forces may well have done for the poor old mare, but I look forward to the Goblins’ merch stand.