While regular readers of Folk Radio will be familiar with Frankie Archer, more recently, she has become a more visible up-and-coming artist. I saw her at a small Manchester venue in February when the audience didn’t quite reach double figures, and at the end of this year’s Cambridge Folk Festival, where she appeared for the first time, Frankie was announced as the recipient of the Christian Raphael Prize 2023. Then a few weeks ago, on the same night, she shone brightly on Later… with Jools Holland and played to a big audience as the support for headliners The Breath at Manchester Folk Festival (sharing that her appearance at the festival a year ago was only the second time she had played live). The release of her debut EP, Never So Red, is a chance for anyone, not yet in the know, to discover what an exciting, vibrant talent Frankie Archer is.
The above-mentioned Oxford City is the EP’s opener. It encapsulates how at ease Frankie is in how she blends her love of traditional music with her electronic music tinkering. The song, about a jealous man who kills the women he is obsessed with, as well as himself, is in different versions, widely sung, and Frankie found it in the Penguin Book of English Folk Song. An insistent but subtle electro beat underpins Frankie’s crystal clear, appealingly North East accented singing, which is layered for a fuller effect after the first verse and a beatbox-like rhythm is added in the mix. Towards the end of the first tension-building fiddle break, there’s a short sample of women talking in a bar, which adroitly alludes to the song’s contemporary relevance, notably seen in this verse:
‘That glass of wine now which I gave you,
That glass of wine did strong poison hide,
For if you won’t be my true lover,
You’ll never be no other man’s bride.’
Another fiddle break follows that verse, more jittery and tense, this time accentuating the drama in the lyrics. Frankie had this to say about the song: “Oxford City is a traditional song over a hundred years old, but when I first read the lyrics, I was reminded of things happening right now; incel culture and drink spiking.” She purposefully sets out to challenge such persistent misogyny, to re-frame canonical traditional songs on the basis that women are not responsible for men’s projected feelings and should never be subject to associated abuse or violence, but rather that women are powerful and wise, not voiceless victims.
Lucy Wan is similarly sung far and wide and also appears in the Penguin Book of English Folk Song. Frankie released it as a single last year, the video for which premiered on Folk Radio here. The song gives the EP its title, as she explains:
“The name of the EP, Never So Red, comes from the lyrics of the traditional song Lucy Wan, where Lucy’s brother and murderer tries to escape the blame and pass off Lucy’s blood as the blood of a dog or a mare. His mother sees through his lies straight away and says ‘the greyhound/grey mare’s blood is never so red’. This speaks so much about the perceptions of women’s experiences and the skewing of these perceptions by those who want to diminish women’s voices. Often, truths that women live are belittled or censored by people in power. Things that women go through can be called taboo and not talked about. This is isolating and can make women feel like their experiences and feelings aren’t valid. I don’t want to perpetuate this in the music I sing. I want to challenge harmful stereotypes and narratives. I want to empower people with my music, those in the songs and those listening to them.”
The first few verses have a simple plucked fiddle accompaniment; the tension builds as the plucking is looped, and Frankie’s fiddle, in between verses, is matched by an eerie synth sound. At the key moment of the brother confessing to their mother – ‘It is not the blood of my grey mare, but the blood of our Lucy’ – Frankie sings unaccompanied, which brings the listener’s entire focus on the admission of guilt. Frankie challenges the standard narrative in this case by doing what singers have always done with songs by partially re-writing it.
“As a female folk musician, it is irritating and boring when, in song after song, women are murdered, raped, deceived, burned – you name it – by men. Lucy Wan is a perfect example of this. Man impregnates woman, man murders woman, lies about it to his mother, runs away and ultimately gets away with it. I wanted to give a voice to Lucy in my version of the song, because in most renditions all she can do is cry and tell her brother he has made her pregnant before he swiftly kills her. I gave Lucy Wan power and a voice in the song, just as she and endless other women in endless other folk songs deserve.”
The verses added by Frankie change the ending, allowing Lucy, even in death, to ensure her brother pays for killing her.
By night he laid down his head
Upon the cold dark sea
A spirit drew up by his bed
Vengeance for to seek
Lucy she appeared so fine
Her body cut in three
Brother I will haunt thy mind
For what you did to me
By he is possessed with shame
He ails with guilt and dread
He’s pushed the knife in his own heart
And now he’s laid there dead
Alone Maids Do Stray, the E.P.’s only non-traditional song, written by Frankie, sounds more effectively disconcerting in its directness – it has a content warning for being about rape – as in the absence of any electronics, plucked fiddle is the only accompaniment to an incongruously cheerful, traditional sounding, melody. There is no attempt to hide the reality of the sexual violence as narrated in the song by the perpetrator. His propositioning of a ‘pretty fair maid’ is met with an unambiguous ‘my answer is no’, to which he replies, ‘I seek to lie with you by decision or force’. The force he proceeds to use and exclaim – ‘I raped her in the green bush’ – is inevitably the unwilling women’s fault, ‘these things can happen when alone maids do stray’. It is a very powerful piece of songwriting, refreshing, if disturbing, in its bluntness, in terms of both the man’s casualness in relaying what he did and the defencelessness of the women in the moment.
The final two songs on Never So Red are firmly rooted in the traditional music of the North East of England, where Frankie is from. Peacock Followed the Hen is played both as a song and as a tune, though more commonly as a tune in England, especially the North East – Alistair Anderson and Kathryn Tickell have recorded it – and also in Ireland (the Scottish version is titled Brose and Butter). Frankie sings the somewhat risqué lyrics that were first printed in Joseph Cawhall’s A Beuk o’ Newcassel Sangs, published in 1888, and her spirited singing and bouncy fiddle playing give it the feel of a nursery rhyme. O the Bonny Fisherlad is definitively Northumbrian in origin; the verse starts ‘On Bamborough shire’s rocky shore’, and it was first published in Bruce & Stokoe’s Northumbrian Minstrelsy in 1882. Frankie’s version starts, appropriately, with the sound of the sea and a first unaccompanied round of the chorus, then into an electro dance beat overlayed with suitably lively fiddle. The track culminates, after a brief synth interlude, with a full-on all-together chorus, beats and fiddle, reinforcing the sense of fun that Frankie brings to traditional songs. She had this to say about O the Bonny Fisherlad:
“O the Bonny Fisherlad for me is just an explosion of Joy. Someone proper fancies the bonny fisherlad and isn’t afraid to tell people, wants to shout it from the rooftops. This for me is a song about fun, freedom, expression, innocence and love. I don’t really imagine the person singing about the bonny fisherlad in any particular way. The point is that whoever they are, whichever way they identify, they feel free to express their love unashamedly and joyfully. It’s also about breaking the unwritten rules of folk music. Why can’t a 150 year old Northumbrian tune go hand-in-hand with a driving synth riff and four on the floor?”
That lack of musical constraint is a big part of what makes Never So Red such a persuasive, innovative release. Too often, on other records, electronic sounds intrude and make almost every track a dance track. Frankie Archer’s music is not at all like that; her use of electronics, synths and loops is carefully crafted and nuanced to always be in service of the song. She describes herself as primarily a fiddle player, and her playing is excellent throughout the EP, but for me, it is her singing that really stands out; her quiet yet convincing vocals are never hidden in the mix, always bringing your attention back to the song. As Adrian McNally of The Unthanks said: “Not many manage to sound so modern and traditional at once”; it’s quite unlike any other folk music release out there today.
Order Never So Red via Bandcamp: https://frankiearcher.bandcamp.com/album/never-so-red
Frankie Archer’s Upcoming Dates
Thursday, November 2 – The Lubber Fiend, Newcastle-Upon-Tyne*
Thursday, November 9 – The Folklore Rooms, Brighton
Friday, November 10 – St George’s, Bristol
Saturday, November 11 – The Taproom, Oxford**
Sunday, November 12 – Riverhouse Barn Arts Centre, Walton-on-Thames
Saturday, November 18 – The Hermon, Oswestry
Sunday, November 19 – SOUP, Manchester
Tuesday, November 21 – Kitchen Garden Cafe, Birmingham
Wednesday, November 22 – Green Note, London
Thursday, November 23 – Bishop’s House, Sheffield
Friday, November 24 – 45 Vinyl Cafe, York
Saturday, December 2 – St Cuthbert’s, Allendale
# Frankie Archer at HARK! The Sound of Stories: Haunting Histories
* plus Amy Thatcher & Francesca Knowles + DJ Awkward Black Girl
** plus The Bobo
Tickets and full details here: https://frankiearchermusic.com/shows