Stick in the Wheel are described in these pages as one of the most ground-breaking and unpredictable acts in any of the countless genres they move between. Alongside this, KLOF Mag’s Thomas Blake has highlighted their fearsome, uncompromising and unashamedly experimental attitude to folk music, alongside their ability to still engage with listeners on the most visceral of levels.
News of a new studio album is always cause for celebration, and A Thousand Pokes (releases October 11, 2024), described as a satirical celebration of mistakes, feels incredibly timely. Like experimentalist Thames mudlarks, they have an uncanny ability to scavenge tales from the past and make them eerily relevant to today.
In their own words, A Thousand Pokes is a joyous lambasting of everyone and everything that’s wrong in the world against the real-time backdrop of global uncertainty, corruption and political unrest.
A London Charivari. Rough Music. A gleeful old-fashioned cancelling. A Chaunter’s delight. 14th-century recording demons collecting mistakes in a sack. Women mugging rich merchants. Nettles being pissed on. Shit food at Lent. A terrible plan. An undoing. The aftermath of a car crash. Catching people doing something they shouldn’t. Nursery rhymes reimagined as death threats. Behind the sarcastic acerbic delivery, Nicola Kearey and Ian Carter convey thoughtful, essential interpretations encouraging us all to check ourselves, through the multi-layered music of cities through time. This is about as far away from pastoral folk music as you can get.
Listen to “A Thousand Pokes”:
15th Century devotional treatise on divine service, Myroure of Oure Ladye, for a community of nuns at Isleworth on the bank of the Thames. Titivillus is the patron demon of scribes, or recording goblin, that collects errors (or pokes) in texts, mispronounced, syncopated or omitted syllables into a sack, to be read out on the day of judgement, preceding a person’s entry into hell. This condemnation of loose and idle tongues is perhaps just as applicable today: on social media everything you do and say is recorded for posterity and will haunt you forever.
Pre-Order A Thousand Pokes: https://stickinthewheel.bandcamp.com/
releases October 11, 2024
Stick in the Wheel Live Dates
25.10.24 Nottingham Bodega
26.10.24 Manchester Deaf Institute
28.10.24 York The Crescent
30.10.24 London Oslo
01.11.24 Aldershot West End Centre
02.11.24 Ramsgate Music Hall
03.11.24 Bristol Thekla
28.11.24 Oxford Common Ground
30.11.24 Totnes Things Happen Here
02.12.24 Birmingham Kitchen Garden Café SOLD OUT
03.12.24 Liverpool Philharmonic
05.12.24 Kendal Brewery Arts
08.12.24 Lewes Con Club
10.12.24 Hayling Island Costa Festival
Website: https://www.stickinthewheel.com/