Stick in the Wheel

Wardrobe Theater


To the Wardrobe for a packed and sold-out performance by minimalist folk-rebels Stick in the Wheel. If you don't know this band, you need to: they are one of small number of acts trying to do folk music in a new and original way.

Some folk bands are so elaborated that the songs become almost secondary to the arrangement; vehicles for the bands virtuosity. This is at the other extreme: voice, fiddle, guitar, hand-clapping; tunes deconstructed to their purest narrative component.

The act depends very heavily on Nicola Kearey's on-stage persona. Which is for all I know the same as her off-stage persona: taciturn to the point of being monosyllabic; continuously losing the set list and muddling up her cables; slightly surprised to be on the stage in the first place. There is a lot you could say about Bedlam Boys: that it's Nic Jones' arrangement of an eighteenth-century broadside; that olden-days people really did go and look at mentally handicapped people as if they were zoo animals, shout-out to anyone in the audience who works in mental-health, etc. Nicola's introduction runs: "This song's about nutters."

It's quite funny; but I do start to think that it's become slightly mannered or self-aware. But it reflects the musical performances: direct; unfussy; songs which every folkie knows re-imagined; not melodically lush but so punchy they could knock you down.

They aren't po-faced about the Tradition. One first half highlight is a catchy little song about the weaving trade.

Hear the din of loom and shuttle
Weaving is a noisy trade
See how even, soft and gentle
Lies the cloth when it is made. 

They say that they learned it from the singing of, er, Bagpuss.

Some of the songs require multiple listens to get the hang of: I got totally lost in the long-drawn-out ballad about a London criminal called Jack Shepherd. They are developing beyond their trademark "punk knees-up" style: one song consisted of an experimental drone with Nicola reading middle-English poetry over the top; and there is a laptop on stage so they can do live loops and special effects. (The seventeenth century source singers didn't know what guitars were, but we entirely accept that the guitar is a folk instrument. So there is no reason that an Apple Mac won't become a traditional and authentic part of the folk arsenal. I blame Jim Moray.)

I did feel that all the really show-stopping numbers came off their earlier albums. The lightening fast run-through of Ewan MacColl's Champion at Keeping Them Rolling. The aforementioned song about nutters. An absolutely stunning treatment of the Raggle Taggle Gypsies. In this version, there are "seven of the gypsies.". And their own song about the London riots ("strangest shopping I'd ever seen/no-one was getting receipts")

Stick in the Wheel blew us all away when they were doing a New Thing, but they may not have quite worked out what their Next Thing is. We can wait.