Wolf People: 'Folk songs are there to tell a story' Jul 20th 2013, 23:05
The band's psychedelic folk might hark back to the early 70s, but they bonded over a shared love of hip-hop
St Mary's church at Clophill in Bedfordshire is barely more than a ruin now, but you can get to the top of the tower if you crawl through a small hole in the brickwork and ascend a twisting, narrow, pitch-black staircase, strewn with loose impediments. Jack Sharp, the lead singer of progressive psychedelic folk band Wolf People, seems kind of casual about the perilous climb. He grew up a stone's throw from here and knows every corner of the landscape; the church even features in one of his best songs, Painted Cross, in which he sings about its 1963 desecration by satanists. "I wrote it from the perspective of the families of the people whose bones were dug up," he tells me. "Thinking about how they would have felt about it."
Wolf People are light, bright people who sing about dark events: four scruffy, polite men in their 30s who know their Pentangle from their Pentagram, and, via blasts of fuzz guitar, sweaty funk blues drumming, pastoral melody and a folklorist's sense of storytelling, are on a mission to evoke a magical – and often brutal – rural England that is under-represented in modern songwriting. "I'm really surprised that people today don't write more about their surroundings and people other than themselves," says Sharp. "One of the things that draws me to folk music is that it's so illustrative and diverse. It throws up pictures while you listen."
When Sharp writes, he creates a bona fide environment: a place for the listener to live inside that becomes more real and tangible for the exhaustive research that Sharp does around a subject, whether it's an infamous local murder (for One By One from Dorney Reach, from Wolf People's 2010 first album proper, Steeple) or a seaside folk superstition he's read about in David Thomson's 1954 book People of the Sea (When the Fire Is Dead in the Grate from their new album, Fain). "Richard Thompson did a lot of research for his songs, which he completely discarded for the final lyrics, but you can still sense the depth behind it more because of that," says Sharp. It might be this attention to detail that makes Steeple one of the finest, if underrated, British albums of the 21st century, with Fain a close second. That, and the fact that each album seems less a tribute to the great era of rurally oriented English rock music (1969-1973) and more an attempt to add to it with something every bit as vital.
The view from the top of Clophill church is like a map of Wolf People's past. To the south is Sharp's family home, where his parents still live. Cast your eyes west, and a couple of miles distant is Deadman's Hill, where James Hanratty murdered scientist Michael Gregsten in one of the most notorious murder cases of the early 60s, which Sharp – who has his doubts about Hanratty's guilt – wrote about in Dorney Reach. Swing around a little to the south and you find the childhood home of Wolf People's drummer, Tom Watt. It was here that the 14-year-old Jack Sharp, having heard drumming coming from the garage, knocked on the front door and asked Tom if he'd like to join his band. Tom shrugged and said yes. What Jack didn't realise was that Tom couldn't play, and the sound had been made by his drummer sister. "It worked out, though. He's very good now and I think she has forgiven him."
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The pair initially experimented with hip-hop, which led Sharp to an unlikely rediscovery of folk. "I'd had a copy of Pentangle's first album for years, which I'd picked up for sampling, and one day it just clicked. I realised my mum used to sing Let No Man Steal Your Thyme to me when I was a kid, so there was already a deep emotional connection. That was a gateway drug to folk for me. I started listening to Anne Briggs, Shirley Collins, the Young Tradition. What draws me to traditional music is that the songs are there to do a job, to tell a story, to make work easier. There's no pomposity or celebrity or ego."
Wolf People have arguably only recorded one true folk song – The Banks of Sweet Dundee from Steeple – and, with Fain, they've made a heavier, more jam-oriented record than Steeple and 2010's singles and outtakes collection, Tidings. But there's still a strong sense of ancient storytelling amid its general atmosphere of Commer vans, corduroy bean bags and facial hair. "I love prog!" shouted a man behind me at a Wolf People gig in east London earlier this year, at the end of All Returns, the first single from Fain. But even associating Wolf People with the less bombastic, sexier fringes of prog rock (they do exist, contrary to popular belief) does their nuances a disservice. What they really are is a convincing argument that punk killed off a more interesting kind of English music that, even in the deluge of great post-psychedelic sounds of the early 1970s, wasn't fully explored: something dark, heavy, history-soaked and hugely imaginative.
"We're used to people saying we're stuck in the past," says Sharp. "It doesn't bother us. Dalí said: 'Don't bother about being modern. Unfortunately it is the one thing that, whatever you do, you can't avoid.'" Our music couldn't exist as it is now without the way people share music on the internet – without the sampling culture of hip-hop, without the way that you can now listen to the majority of recorded music instantly."
In today's world, the musical past is all around us, constantly, and Wolf People sound like they're rolling around ecstatically in lots of its most interesting bits.
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