Merlin Sheldrake's My World interview: “Much of creativity seems to happen at the tension between habit and creativity, between order and chaos”

Recent years have seen a surge of interest in fungi. Glastonbury now build a pavilion out of mycelium, the networks made by fungi; Somerset House in England have hosted entire exhibitions devoted to Mushrooms and Soil; Stella McCartney and Iris van Herpen created fungi-inspired fashion lines; and Björk described her Fossora (2022) release as her “mushroom album”. This is in addition to a host of amateur converts who took up foraging during the pandemic.

At the epicentre of all of this is biologist Merlin Sheldrake and his 2020 book Entangled Life. A personal, evocative and exhaustive account of his research into fungi, it’s remarkable for highlighting just how important fungus is to the earth – stating that 90% of plant species rely on it in some way. “It’s long overdue and very welcome”, says Merlin when I mention the glare coming fungi’s way. Since the book’s release, he has certainly been on a mission to amplify and focus that attention. His 2023 documentary Fungi: Web of Life offers a 40-minute distillation of the book with stunning timelapse photography and narration from Björk. He’s also working with the Fungi Foundation, Society for the Protection of Underground Networks (SPUN), More Than Human Life Project and Vrije University to ensure that fungi get better representation across the board, in conservation efforts, legal frameworks and simply by spreading the word.

While Merlin’s route into science is no shock given that his father is noted biologist Rupert Sheldrake, the constant presence of music may be more surprising, at least until you find out his brother is Cosmo Sheldrake, an increasingly successful musician (and a Songlines regular). “We were brought up in a musical household”, Merlin tells me. “Our father is a pianist and an organist. His parents were both musical and, actually, in the Methodist church in Newark, his hometown, there’s a little plaque on the organ that says, ‘99 years of Sheldrakes on the organ’, because between the years 1900 and 1999, it was his grandfather and his uncle on the organ. We grew up with him, playing with various musical family friends. Our mother works with sound and the power of chant and mantra, and we started having piano lessons when we were young; music always seemed like something that people just did.”

After learning classical piano, a teacher introduced the brothers to blues and boogie-woogie piano. “These lessons changed our lives. Our teacher, Louis Vause, helped us get over this phobia of playing a wrong note, which, of course, is central to any improvisation. He would get us to play a wrong note again and again. And then we’d have to get ourselves out of that hole with some improvised musical ladder.”

The next step was jazz, name-checking Yusuf Lateef and Charles Mingus as two particular favourites. “I had an incredible jazz teacher called Fergus Read at school. As a biologist, I think jazz is a great metaphor for life because all organisms are improvising their way through life, constrained in different ways and with different degrees of freedom. And everyone, from bacteria to fungi to plants to humans and beyond, is improvising their way through a changing world. There are times when structure and form are stretched, and there’s more chaos, and there are also times when there’s more order and more of a sense of structure. In my mind, much of creativity seems to happen at the tension between habit and creativity, between order and chaos.”

While Merlin was undertaking early research into mycorrhizal fungi, he was also playing in the Gentle Mystics, a band formed by his brother and other friends from around Hampstead Heath, where they grew up. “It became a 10-piece band out of various overlapping friendships and then took on its own life, and we had lively tours and gigs”, recalls Merlin. By this time, he was playing piano as well as the accordion because he “wanted something to play that was portable”. This led to an interest in vallenato, a Colombian style of storytelling music with accordion as the lead instrument. “I’ve been playing a lot of vallenato recently on the accordion,” he says, “it’s a current obsession. But I have two pianos in my home, and I play them lots as well. Music is a hobby I take seriously, but I feel lucky that I don’t have to make it work for me financially.” He reveals that, along with Johnny Flynn and Cosmo, he’s been playing at the London Library recently – “Since Helena Bonham Carter took over the presidency, we’ve been kind of a house band there.”

He has also teamed up with Cosmo for a new business, Sheldrake & Sheldrake, selling live, fermented hot sauce, which also incorporates his field of interest. “We started shipping our hot sauce in fungal packaging,” he explains. “It’s made by taking an agricultural waste product like sawdust, and you invite a fungus to partially consume it to create a lightweight material that can be grown into whatever shape you want and decomposed at the end of its life. It can even make a leather-like material, which is being explored in fashion. These techniques have a lot of potential.”

The conversation turns to how fungi could be used to ferment plastic – “it would break [it] down into some kind of byproduct, which you could then ideally use, or at least dispose of safely” – before those interstices between music and mushrooms reveal themselves once more: “We’re about to go on a field trip to the High Andes to sample soils there. [Cosmo] is coming because he’s a field recordist… he has microphones and hydrophones that he uses to listen to the sounds of the soil. You can’t put your eyes in the soil; it’s a cluttered obstacle course. But sound is potentially a useful way for the residents of the soil to manage their lives, so [it] turns out to be a very noisy place. It’s fascinating when we go to these different ecosystems to listen to the soil… as a guide to what might be going on below. It sometimes sounds like someone finishing a milkshake – a crackling, slurping, snapping. It’s not clear who’s making what noise, but you can really tell the differences between different sites. Soil bioacoustics is a rapidly developing field.”

Finally, we discuss a series of shows which have just been announced for The Secret Life of Fungi LIVE, which will differ from a recent tour screening and discussing his Fungi: Web of Life documentary. “In these October shows, we’re going to use incredible fungal footage and experiment more with ways that we can start to think more like fungi, and there’ll be significant input from the audience that will change the direction of [the piece], which will be different every time. I’m having a lot of fun developing it; it’s a real wild ride of an adventure.”

+ Merlin Sheldrake’s The Secret Life of Fungi LIVE is touring the UK from October 20. Full details at fane.co.uk/merlin-sheldrake-fungi