"They can play and they can sing and they’re fearless...When I saw Goblin Band singing recently, I just thought, “Why didn’t I think of that?...They go back to versions that we were too snotty to touch and they turn them into stomps!” - MARTIN CARTHY
Goblin Band formed organically from intimate sessions of the same name ran out of the HobGoblin Music, a folk music instrument shop in Central London, and organised by a group of queer folk obsessive friends and shop employees.
These sessions have given rise to a six piece band which, though firmly routed in the traditional music of the British Isles, draws widely on medieval and early music, as well as the folk musical traditions from abroad. The sound concocted employs all manner of strings, squeezeboxes, hurdy gurdy, flutes, horns, jawharps, and literally bells and whistles.
The Goblins interpret folk song in relation to the political upheavals of past and present and strive to make a space for new audiences to experience traditional music in a manner which is both riotously joyful and deeply sincere.
Their debut EP Come Slack Your Horse! sees Goblin Band revitalising songs dating back as early as the mid-17th century. While some tracks – 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 and the realities of the contemporary queer experience. The Prickle Holly Bush, and its story of one condemned for execution while one family member after another refuses to offer salvation, becomes, in Goblin Band’s hands, a metaphor for the rejection and estrangement often experienced among the queer community. 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.
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