The Wicca Men – Albion’s Darkness
Independent – Out Now
From very many years ago, as a child, I have a passing memory of the Radio Ballads, a series written, recorded and performed by Charles Parker, Ewan MacColl, Peggy Seeger and others. Many years later I became more acquainted with these programmes, illustrations of what the BBC called Features. They are not straight documentary and they are not fiction; I suppose in this day and age we would refer to them as faction.
The Radio Ballads took important themes and wove stories around them, whether it be about an individual such as the Ballad of John Axon, or about a group of people combined by a job they do and the associated way of life. The Big Hewer is about coal miners, Singing the Fishing about the herring industry and The Travelling People about Gypsies, tinkers and travellers. Written and produced in the late 1950’s and the early 60s, they provide a snapshot of a way of life that we now think of as long gone, of working-class people struggling against the elements, the pressures of production, the poor wages, in order to make a living and be proud in doing such. Ordinary heroes whose heroic deeds normally go, literally, unsung.
Come forward sixty years and has the world changed? Have we changed? The Wicca Men clearly voice the answer that we have not. Some of those industries may have gone, and all to the good in many cases, but the need to earn a good wage, the need to put the food on the table and have pride in your job, whatever it is, is as pertinent as it ever was. The Wicca Men’s album, Albion’s Darkness reflects this lack of change, combining songs from the past with new ones just to illustrate how far we have not progressed. It is, by their own admission, more important as a political statement than as a musical masterpiece, but you do need to listen to it in order to get the message, so my question is, does it do that?
To save you waiting until the end, yes, it does work. The songs are clear, important when the words are the carrier of the message, and the collection is very relevant for today. The main theme is one of the chasm between the super-wealthy and the ordinary person, between those in power and those turning the cogs. In the era of the Radio Ballad these may have been the pit owners, the manufacturers, the land owners; today some of these have gone but in their place are the media owners, the tech company giants, the bankers and the hedge funders. In many respects, the stories are the same.
Goblins by Adrian Renton and The Mansions of England by Steve Lake, home in on the power and wealth of the privileged few. The former is inspired by William Langland’s Piers Plowman, the latter a song of press gangs, the slave trade, enclosure and how these contributed to the monied landed gentry.
The two tracks on the album directly from the Radio Ballads are The Moving On Song and The Big Hewer. Both written by Ewan MacColl, The Moving On Song is probably the most familiar and the almost jaunty accompaniment only accentuates the issue of continually having to move, stories of which are as often heard today as yesterday. A very modern take on the movement of people comes in Steve Lake’s By Moonlight to Dover. Based on a conversation between Steve and a Syrian refugee, the story reflects how migration is no glorious mass trespass into a land of milk and honey but a journey that “was hell with so many misfortunes”.
How we see people and how we make our definitions of what is good and what is not is even harder in this age of echo chambers and fake news. Spending time to listen to some of the past misinterpretations, such as the case of Derek Bentley, written by Karl Dalls in 1953, the year that Bentley was hung, may make us consider injustices past and present. However it becomes harder and harsher to reconsider, re-evaluate, those people who played pivotal roles in the life of the nation. Adrian Renton’s Young Winston aims to rebalance the books but I think that there is a bigger message here in that we must not make the same mistakes again. History is written by the winner, and if we are all seemingly on the same side, it is written by the most powerful.
This is an album that is unashamedly political and whilst it contains stories back from across history, these serve to remind us of how we got to where we are now, and that we should think before we are led down the same route again. An album of protest and of warning but also of hope and of aspiration:
Get up in the morning and step out of the door,
People pass by one, two, three, four and more,
Some doing great and some of them poor,
They all need some tenderness that is for sure.
https://www.thewiccamen.org.uk/