Sheffield’s Jim Ghedi asked East London’s Stick In The Wheel to remix his 2022 track What Will Become of England, marking a repeated mood present up and down the land—an antidote to, or rather an affirmation of, the state of England’s politics.
Around this time last year, Jim Ghedi released his single ‘What Will Become of England ‘. Ghedi discovered the song in the Alan Lomax Archives from a field recording of English folk singer & farmworker Harry Cox.
The recording Ghedi heard was recorded in 1953 at Harry Cox’s home in Catfield, Norfolk. Harry recalled learning & hearing it from a bloke in a pub who used to play a tin whistle and was the only singer he knew who sang it. Originally, it had 8 or 9 verses, but Harry could only remember two.
One year on, Ghedi has revisited the song, calling upon fellow musical upsetters Stick in the Wheel to join him…
“What will become of England, if things go on this way / There’s many a thousand working man, that’s starving day by day”.
For last year’s single, Ghedi greatly expanded his sonic world and encompassed a brooding, darker, more electronic tone to capture the visceral tone of the piercing lyrics. He also called upon Poor Creature friends Ruth Clinton (Landless) and Cormac MacDiarmada (LANKUM) to create a music video (that we premiered here) that played on apocalyptic imagery, spun with a David Lynch-like alternative reality. If the imagery didn’t engulf you, then the music did – thick, engulfing textures and ominous drones, courtesy of Neal Heppleston, David Grubb, Guy Whitaker and Dean Honer. Ghedi wanted to incorporate a more contemporary Sheffield history into his music, namely the post-punk synth scene, inspired by old Sheffield bands like Cabaret Voltaire and Artery.
How do you revisit such a heady concoction? No strangers to apocalyptic imagery and music shaped by a deep social conscience, Stick in the Wheel were a natural choice…especially when entering remix territory, to which Ian Carter and Nicola Kearey are old hands.
It’s visceral and real…
An antidote to, or rather an affirmation of, the state of England’s politics. In their own words, ‘We’re all fucked’.
Ian Carter’s deft, deliberate dobro draws you into a familiar tale. Everything in England is shit, and it has been for a long time. The words – from a 1953 field recording of Harry Cox – are likely much older. Ghedi’s enraged lament is not a cry of false nostalgia or bullshit nationalism: his plea is real, and world-weary. Nicola Kearey ends the spell by answering Ghedi with a cut-you-slowly, same-as-it-ever-was statement of fact. Brooding, rasping string drones and sub-heavy synths cast a dense shadow of devastatingly relevant introspection, and yet there’s a hopeful twinkle of xylophone and swirling ethereal vocal making the whole thing weird and wildly hopeful.
SITW’s compulsion to rework and re-contextualise the more brutal folk narratives is about as far away from the class tourism of cosplay paganism as you can get. Ghedi’s work shares this desire to keep it real, using apocalyptic themes and juxtaposing folk imagery against that, making the two artists natural collaborators.
What Will Become of England is out now on streaming services and Bandcamp.