Having shared their experimental reimagining of Raglan Road earlier this month, Brown Wimpenny have now confirmed what that single hinted at: a debut album. Long Live Brown Wimpenny is due 5th June via Broadside Hacks Recordings, and to mark the announcement, the eleven-piece Manchester/Liverpool/London folk collective share Old Molly Metcalfe today (31st March) — a cinematic reinvention of a Jake Thackray song about the life of a North Yorkshire shepherdess.
Thackray’s original was an a cappella piece, spare and direct. Brown Wimpenny’s version freely extrapolates beyond it, enriching the melody with an eerie, enchanting arrangement whose labyrinthine instrumental passages bridge the gap between the traditional and the experimental. The track opens with a live archive performance by Thackray himself, recorded at a 1974 Cardiff show and provided to the band by his estate.
Old Molly Metcalfe also documents the idiosyncratic sheep-counting methods used by the farmers of North Yorkshire — a fitting source of material for a collective defined by its complex and multifaceted sense of northernness. Where an earlier single, Sheffield Grinder, channelled an Ewan MacColl-esque industrialist folk socialism and Raglan Road probed the relationship between cacophony and beauty, Old Molly Metcalfe finds Brown Wimpenny actively inhabiting the spirit of the songs they cherry-pick to reinvent — practitioners, not interpreters; participants in a living tradition rather than custodians of a dead one.
The band say: “Though ‘Molly Metcalfe’ is a fictional character, her story is not fantastical. Upon first hearing it, we were reminded of Hannah Hauxwell, the subject of the Barry Cockroft documentary ‘Too Long a Winter.’ It is refreshing as a folk song, both for the fact that its female protagonist is portrayed without the gaze of sexuality; and that it goes against a romanticised view of pastoral life, something that the modern folk revival is often guilty of.”
Stream Old Molly Metcalf: https://brownwimpenny.lnk.to/OldMollyMetcalfe
The album announcement follows a growing live reputation that has seen Brown Wimpenny open for folk legend Andy Irvine, record multiple sell-out shows in Manchester and London — including a headline at Hoxton Hall — and appear at Green Man, Fire in the Mountain, Cambridge, Sidmouth and Manchester folk festivals. Summer headline shows are confirmed, with dates below.
Long Live Brown Wimpenny is released on 5th June via Broadside Hacks Recordings.
Pre-Order: https://brownwimpenny.bandcamp.com/album/long-live-brown-wimpenny
Upcoming live shows:
10 APR // London, Piehouse Co-op
1 MAY // Stroud, Neo Ancients festival
6 JUNE // Manchester, St. Margaret’s Church [Headline]
25 JULY // Lancashire, Seek Out festival
26 JULY // Birkenhead, Future Yard [Headline]