When I was very young, I was convinced that the great John Holt track Ali Baba was a folk song. It’s hard to pin down exactly what constituted a folk song for me in those days: I had been raised on a diet of predominantly white male guitar music (Deep Purple, Black Sabbath, various prog rock monstrosities), and my only real exposure to ‘traditional’ music was through my dad’s copy of Steeleye Span’s greatest hits. Of course, subtlety has a fractal nature: the closer you look at something, the more varied and hard to define it becomes. But that doesn’t explain the gut feeling I got when first listening to Holt’s reggae classic that it belonged to some kind of strange folkloric world. It could have been the lyrics – a vague but somehow enticing mishmash of fairytales seen through the lens of a dream – but it had just as much to do with the strange lope of the melody, something that sounded both familiar and foreign.
Perpetual Musket, the new release by UK dub maestro Elijah Minnelli, might go some way towards explaining my reaction to Ali Baba. Or if it doesn’t explain it, it certainly recaptures some of the satisfying weirdness of that song. In simple terms, Perpetual Musket features four folk songs translated into the musical language of reggae and a b-side of four dub versions of those songs. One of Minnelli’s great gifts is highlighting the ambiguous hinterland of a melody, the space between childishly sweet and outright sinister. In the case of Soulcake (which features the vocals of Shumba Youth), this means slowing the tune down a bit, juxtaposing a clear, powerful lead vocal with strange and disembodied backing, and laying down an insistent rhythmic skank. It’s every bit as otherworldly as the famous Peter, Paul and Mary version but occupies a very different corner of weird Britain.
Minnelli has previous experience in this area – he has poured the deeply weird dub on cumbia and Jewish traditional music in the past – but Perpetual Musket represents his most consistent and concerted attempt to reconcile two improbable genres. Those early releases were bright individual moments; this is a more complex constellation. On Vine And Fig Tree (with roots legend Little Roy on vocal duties), he manages to create a creeping, slippery melody that cuts across the grain of the song’s message of peace and prosperity. A simple Christian hymn becomes a subtle, modern song of protest.
Earl 16 gives a stirring, soulful vocal performance on Lifeboat Mona, a Peggy Seeger song written in 1959. Seeger herself has given her blessing to the rendition, describing it as ‘just right’ and ‘truly excellent’. The song has evolved in terms of both medium and message: the images of ‘men who never see land again’ can’t help but remind the listener of huge numbers of small boat migrants losing their lives due to the policies of various European governments. It’s an excellent, if chastening, example of how folk music can still be politically potent.
Performance-wise, Perpetual Musket’s most striking moment comes with Wind & The Rain, a song made famous by its use in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night and which was given a definitive performance by famed countertenor Alfred Deller in 1967. Here, the Bristol-based reggae singer Joe Yorke makes the song his own so absolutely and so thrillingly it begins to feel like it was written to be performed in this way. So persuasive is Yorke’s version that after a couple of listens, it seems to have been with you for as long as Deller’s.
The dub versions of each track that make up the record’s second side offer a different perspective: airy and stripped-back by necessity, they create landscapes that feel both ancient and apocalyptic, where wind-blasted post-agricultural tracts meet areas of urban decay. This all goes to reinforce the hauntological credentials of Minnelli and of Breadminster County Council, the label/cult/imaginary collective/archival resource where his music appears. Minnelli’s spirit is evidently playful, but his intent is serious: Perpetual Musket is a highly unusual release, but it is brilliantly executed and bitingly relevant. And after one or two listens, you’ll never think about reggae or folk music in the same way again.
Perpetual Musket (21st June 2024) Breadminster County Council (FatCat Records)
Live Dates
27th July 2024
Perpetual Musket Album Launch
Loki, London, UK
05th August – 08th August
Cosmic Roots Festival 2024
Basingstoke, UK
29th August – 09th September
Meakusma Festival
Belgium