Jim Ghedi

It’s always been a pleasure sharing the film work of Myles O’Reilly. In October, we shared A City Under Quiet Lights, which captured some of the magic of Quiet Lights…a small-scale festival with a big heart, which aimed to shine a light on the new wave of folk and traditional talent that are quietly forging new paths, recollecting old tales and making new stories. The festival takes place over winter, filling Cork City’s nooks, crannies, chapels, and bars.

Last year, Myles captured Jim Ghedi performing Ed Pickford’s Ah Cud Hew in St Luke’s church in Cork. The song appears on Ghedi’s 2021 album In the Furrows of Common Place, a “remarkable album with bags of passion, creativity”. We premiered the original animated video (created by Marry Waterson) for the album song on which he was supported by his band. Here, he performs solo, the echoes of the church giving the song an intense, raw intimacy.

Jim Ghedi previously shared the following with us on the song:

Ah Cud Hew is a song written by North East folk singer & songwriter Ed Pickford, a song from the narrative of an ex-miner suffering the effects of coal disease, a reflection of his working life, his family & the community he was connected to.

I first heard Ed’s version of the song on a folk compilation given to me a few years back. I remember from the opening line it completely flawed me, I had it on repeat for days and couldn’t shake it off, mesmerised by Ed’s voice and his ability with song, to tell a story with such humanity and lyrical imagery.

Around this time, I was doing research into the history of social injustice, the Miners’ strike and more specifically, the ‘Battle of Orgreave’. Watching Yvette Vanson’s powerful documentary ‘The Battle for Orgreave’ and finding a huge resource over on the ‘Orgreave truth and justice campaign’ website (https://otjc.org.uk/). Somehow Ed’s song really hit a nerve and correlated with themes I was becoming drawn towards, the starting point of political discourse into the breaking down of communities, state and police brutality and a further control and privatisation over the working classes. But the beauty of Ed’s song is he displays this through the personal perspective and the individual’s narrative connecting the listener by the raw emotion of it.