Salut! Live

Andrew Curry writes: Frankie Archer is one of the emerging stars of folk music. She combines vocals and violin with samples and sequencers, and created a buzz when she appeared last year on Later… with Jools Holland. Credit, by the way, to the show’s producers for spotting her.

She’s also from Consett, in the north east of England, which is a sure way to endear yourself to the Salut! Live team. We’ve mentioned her here before.

That appearance on Later prompted Matthew Bannister, who runs the Folk on Foot podcast, to get in touch with Frankie Archer, and so he found himself meeting up with her at the clock in Consett Bus Station at the start of a recent episode.

If you don’t know the Folk on Foot format, it’s a show that likes to get its boots dirty.

Rather than staying inside, Matthew Bannister meets up with his guests in a part of the world that means something to them, and goes for a walk with them. They take their instruments and play a few songs in the locations that they visit.

Until 1980, Consett was home to one of the largest steelworks in Europe—the site has long been flattened—and Archer takes Bannister on a route that includes Barry’s Bargain Shop in Consett town centre, out to the site of the steelworks, then on to the Tanfield railway line—the oldest railway track in the world—before finishing at Sunnyside, on the edge of the Pennines, with views across to Gateshead and Newcastle.

Along the way she sings a mining song, Guard Yer Man Weel, Oxford City, which she played on Later, and the lively north-eastern song Elsie Marley.

Frankie Archer. Photo (c) frankiearchermusic.com

Frankie Archer found her way into folk music partly through the Folkworks scheme run by the Sage (now Glasshouse) centre in Gateshead, which gave her the opportunity to meet, and play with, other young musicians from Scotland and across the north of England.

When I learned that you could just play by listening to each other, and jumping in and playing intuitively, that was really so much more exciting.

Matthew Bannister has spent a lifetime working in radio, and he is an informed and engaged interviewer who makes the most of the surroundings. The production also brings the setting to life. (Folk on Foot subscribers can also get access to a video version).

She first used the sequencer and sampler just as a way to play live on her own, but they’ve now become an integral part of how she writes and makes music. We learn quite a lot about how it all works during the episode.

One of the benefits of working with electronics is that she ends up performing in places that aren’t folk venues. She talks about playing at Cobalt Studios in Newcastle—a favourite independent venue of hers—and someone in the audience telling her how good it was that she was playing folk music, because no-one else was.

“I said, ‘They are, they’re just not doing it in places like this.’ It did show us how the folk music world is a bit of a bubble. It sometimes can be a bit insular.”

She ends up singing Guard Yer Man Weel, written from the perspective of a miner’s wife by the North-eastern folk singer and former miner Johnny Handle, at the site of the steelworks. It is a mesmerising performance, with electronics, reverb and blackbird song. There is also a version online of her playing the song live in the Cobalt Studios.

Afterwards, she reflects on the meaning of songs like this.

The souls of the songs are the stories of the people in them, and what they’ve been through, and what it means for us today... Heavy industry is going on around the world. People aren’t dying in mines in the UK any more, but it’s happening around the world. It’s not just rose-tinted nostalgia about times gone by. These songs are relevant everywhere.

Later in the walk, they get to an engine shed on the Tanfield railway, which first opened as a ‘wagonway’ carrying coal in the 1720s, and is the oldest railway line in the world. The acoustic in the shed provides the setting for Oxford City, which she reads as being a song about spiking drinks and incel culture.

I’m drawn to this one because of how old it and how relevant it is now.

She does seem to like dark songs, although she tells Bannister she’s not sure why she chooses the songs she does. He asks her if she sometimes changes songs because of the way that women are treated in them. As he says, “women [in folk songs] are often the victims of attacks or violence.”

She does sometimes. Lucy Wan, which is on her EP, is a grim song about incest and murder. In her version of the song, she has Lucy coming back as a ghost to drive her brother to his death—which of course adds another layer of darkness to it.

This is the trailer for the episode.

All of the Folk on Foot episodes, as well as the monthly folk chart show, can be accessed here.

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