goblin band

Goblin Band In association with Broadside Hacks Goblin Band formed from sessions of the same name run out of the HobGoblin Music shop in central London, organised by a collection of young queer folk obsessive friends and shop employees looking to forge their own way into folk music. This gave rise to a band of multi-instrumentalists firmly rooted in the folk music of Britain, interpreted via the leftist tradition concerned with folk’s relationship to the history of the working classes, capitalism, and colonialism. Through a fusion of harmony singing, fiddle, squeezebox, hurdy gurdy, recorders and more, Goblin Band deliver a charismatic alternative expression of English traditional culture in a way which is at once 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. With multiple gigs across the UK already to their name, Goblin Band have already received a Quietus Feature and Guardian’s Folk Album of the Month. The band and its members are also integral cogs in London’s blossoming new folk movement, centred around the Broadside Hacks Folk Club and their regularly sold-out events at Hackney’s Moth Club. Often organising their own seasonal events around London, Goblin Band themselves have played alongside many musicians forming the new folk-vanguard in the UK – Daisy Rickman, Shovel Dance Collective, Milkweed, Junior Brother – as well as some of the genre’s living legends – Peggy Seeger, Martin Carthy and Martin Simpson.