Four albums into their career, Bird in the Belly’s core sound remains hard to pin down on Only Dogs as Friends, despite being made up of certain very recognisable elements. The Brighton quartet (Ben ‘Jinwoo’ Webb, Laura Ward, Tom Pryor and Adam Ronchetti) seem to be firmly rooted in the tradition of British folk-rock heavy-hitters like Fairport Convention and Trees, but, like a lot of recent music from the south coast, there are other, stranger sources of inspiration, most notably the darker corners of history. They find fresh ways of telling old (and often extremely dark) tales, combining new and traditional arrangements, and frequently making unexpected musical choices.
The group realise that music’s grasp on history is not always firm, and they make use of the porous boundaries between past and present. In doing so, they create a kind of alternative folk history, unearthing the stories of the downtrodden, the disenfranchised and the dissolute, and fashioning them into new songs along broadly traditional lines. Their stories are easily as valid as anything you’ll read in the textbooks, perhaps more so, as they give a voice to previously voiceless minorities.
It goes without saying that many of these stories still resonate today: take Lambs, for example, a song about Giovanni de Giovanni, a teenager in fourteenth-century Florence who was executed as a result of increasingly punitive laws against sodomy and so-called immoral behaviour. In a world where some nation-states still outlaw homosexuality, nearly seven hundred years on, Lambs is both a startling historical artefact and a song of protest, and the band perform it with a fitting tenderness woven into the sense of injustice. Webb’s vocal has a soft, cracked intensity and the lush, sad chamber-folk backing conjures up a kind of dreamy resignation.
Go Along Bobby – a loose adaptation of a song that many people will know as Katie Cruel – is another song based on a marginalised character. This time it is a woman who becomes a sex worker in order to provide for her moribund husband. More so than other versions of this song, it sympathises with the woman, an unwitting pawn in a larger and more sinister game. Here Webb and Ward combine for a melody and vocal performance full of drama. The comparatively sedate Old Holborn is told from the point of view of Margaret Clap, who ran an eighteenth-century ‘molly house’, providing a space for London’s outlawed gay communities to meet.
These three songs are outliers; for the most part, the protagonists are genuinely villainous, and the band have great fun dredging up weird, gory and filthy details of their lives. The brisk and rousing title track, which opens the album, tells of a criminal in Shoreham who was killed while attempting a burglary and whose nameless body was displayed in public until it was identified by his dog. Pryor and Ronchetti provide a stirring backing of violin and bodhran while the ever-reliable combo of Webb and Ward harks back to great vocal partnerships like Tim Hart and Maddy Prior.
The dark and percussive Hen’s Egg takes a look at the nefarious practice of baby farming and its most famous exponent, the mass-murderer Amelia Dyer. Webb’s lyrics, far from being sensationalistic, are rich and allusive, weaving in passages from Ben Kingsley’s novel The Water Babies. Webb proves to be an expert in this magpie approach: I Once Built a Boy interpolates Tennyson’s poem ‘Rizpah’ to tell the story of a grieving mother who removes her hanged son from the gallows piece by piece in order to rebuild him in her own home and give him a Christian burial. Ward’s clear, plaintive lyrics carry the song, which draws out a great deal of sympathy despite its grim subject matter.
Ward takes the lead on 40 Elephants, a brief, quiet song with a sweet melody which describes the eponymous all-female crime gang that worked in London for nearly a century, while When Your Soul Goes Free marries driving guitar to a heartbeat-like bodhran rhythm. Fairweather MacGregor provides one of the album’s standout moments, with Pryor adapting a broadside ballad, The Land of Poyais, to recount the ultimately heartbreaking story of the hundreds of would-be pioneers who were tricked by a Scottish fraudster into sailing across the Atlantic to take up residence in a land of plenty that turned out not to exist. It is given extra poignancy by Ward’s mournful flute and by the fact that the ballad it was adapted from was originally penned by MacGregor as part of an advertising campaign for his false utopia.
The album’s grisliest moment comes on Black Annis. Annis was a hag-like bogeywoman said to haunt the lanes of Leicestershire, preying on children and lambs. A gentle, melodic arrangement by Pryor becomes increasingly uncanny as the song progresses, and Ward’s singing – clear but elusive – has a siren-like quality. Big Rock Candy Mountain, an adaptation of the famous American folk song, is distinctly darker than the version from O Brother, Where Art Thou? that many will be familiar with, and the closing track Law of Kissing is a gleeful retelling of a legal dispute in which a woman was adjudged by the courts to have been in the right after biting off the nose of a man who assaulted her. Webb’s lyrics play up the cheeky, humorous details of the story, but don’t shy away from the moral implications. It ensures the album ends on a note of positivity and empowerment. It also reminds us of how unique and valuable a band Bird in the Belly are. It’s hard to think of anyone else who draws from the heyday of 1970s British folk rock to create songs about history that have so much significance in the current political and social climate, but on Only Dogs as Friends, Bird in the Belly do it so well that it seems futile to attempt to emulate them.
Only Dogs as Friends (October 30th, 2026) GF*M Records