5 hours ago
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I was 15 years old; at that fumbling, awkward age on the precipice of adulthood, desperately trying to figure out who I was, who I wanted to be, and where I belonged in the world. I grew up feeling perpetually “in-between”: half-white, half-black; half-British, half-Caribbean, and on the faultline between what sometimes felt like two worlds at war.
One night in 2008 my dad took me to see Pentangle play at the Royal Festival Hall on London’s South Bank. The band had risen to fame in the late 60s, known for fusing British folk melodies with blues and jazz syncopation. I must have stood out in the crowd – among the bearded men in sandals and socks – with my big hoop earrings and scraped-back hair. And although I dragged my feet on the way in, when I stepped out of the concert later that auspicious summer’s evening, I was changed for ever.
The old folk songs I heard Pentangle perform that night felt haunting and ancient, yet comforting somehow; they spoke to a unnamed longing within me that felt as old as time. I remember being particularly moved by their version of The Cuckoo, a mournful, 18th-century ballad about the migratory bird whose song signals the coming of the summer. I downloaded it as soon as I got home and communed with the song in private, and was instantly transported back in time; not just to the late 60s, when it was recorded, but what felt like even further, to an enchanted British past.
Pentangle’s rendition of The Cuckoo was a gateway drug of sorts; it was my initiation into the mysteries of British folk culture, and it kickstarted an obsession with standing stones, ancient myths, druids, pagans and seasonal folk customs practised in remote parts of the country – a strange preoccupation that I’ve not quite been able to shake. I learned about wassailing, morris dancing and mummers’ plays; about the Welsh Mari Lwyd, Highland folklore and the country’s age-old folk songs, which offer an alternative history of the nation, told from the ground up. These songs, stories and customs seemed to emanate from a very different kind of Britain to the one invoked by anthems such as Rule, Britannia! or by the union jack. They had little to do with monarchy, military or empire; instead they conjured a vision of Britain that was enchanted, subversive and strange: a Britain I felt I could belong to.
For a long time I kept my folk fixation to myself; I always felt it was a bit odd. But as I got a bit older I began to recognise connections between British traditions and those I’d heard about in the Caribbean. Like Carriacou’s Shakespeare Mas, where revellers in flamboyant costumes recite Shakespearean monologues to one another through the streets; Jamaica’s maypole dancing tradition; and the sea shanties that cycled back and forth between Britain and the New World along slave trade routes, absorbing call-and-response refrains as they went. Even the Notting Hill carnival, seen by many as a distinctly Caribbean tradition, was styled, in an early incarnation, as an old English fayre. These fused customs spoke to a kind of meeting place within me; they were the products of Britain’s dark and complex colonial history, and yet they were expressions of creativity, resistance, and exchange: new blooms, risen from the ashes of empire.
Over the years I’ve met countless others, from all walks of life, who are also drawn in by folklore’s radical possibilities and its power to unite us. Parading through the streets in homemade costumes; gathering together to tell stories passed down by elders; and rising at dawn to celebrate the cycles of the sun – these simple acts are the fundamentals that connect us, across cultures and across time. They speak to and from a primal part of us that longs for story, ritual, community and a connection to the ground beneath our feet, wherever on the Earth we might stand.
It was all there in Pentangle’s music, now that I think about it – in their fusion of old English folk songs and syncopated jazz rhythms, which made their way to Britain, via America, from west Africa; much like the cuckoo itself, who each year journeys between the two lands from which my ancestors hail. I’ll be for ever grateful to Pentangle for that transformative gig.
