Stick in the Wheel: “There’s a long history of protest and we are part of that”

Before delving into their spikily modernist take on the folk tradition, Stick in the Wheel’s Nicola Kearey and Ian Carter emerged out of the London dubstep scene, via the darkly folk soundscapes of Various/Various Production. In 2012 they set out on their own, playing free gigs and home concerts, and releasing homemade EPs. Their first album, From Here, arrived in 2015 on their own label. It was a powerful statement, including their take on The Copper Family’s ‘Hard Times of Old England’, as well as striking renditions of ‘Bedlam’ and ‘Bows of London’.

Around that time, Kearey set out her stall as a contemporary folk artist: “We see this music as part of our culture,” she said. “We’re not pretending to be chimney sweeps or 17th-century dandies, but a lot of people are really disconnected from their past… People live in the present these days. Everything is about the now, and that is part of my reason for doing this: getting people to connect with their past.”

Roll on almost a decade, past two more acclaimed albums in 2018’s Follow Them True and 2020’s Hold Fast, and their fourth, A Thousand Pokes, is here, along with a tour which will see Kearey and Carter joined by drummer Emma Holbrook and a rack of electronic equipment to add a sonic scour, rinse and grind to the acoustic guitars and vocals.

The new album’s inspiration comes from a 15th-century Book of Hours, Myroure of Oure Ladye, from a convent in Isleworth. “Among the logs of deliveries there were little stories, and one was about Titivillus, the recording demon, the patron demon of scribes, that collects errors, or pokes, in texts, into a sack,” says Kearey. “The idea of ‘pokes’ being mistakes is one of the meanings, so all the mistakes you make are kept in a sack and served to you on judgement day. That idea that someone’s always listening, holding you to account. It is perhaps just as applicable today: on social media everything you do and say is recorded for posterity and will haunt you forever.”

We are, perhaps, the sum of our mistakes, and they all add up. Across the album, calamity and struggle duke it out against a backdrop of villainy and need. There’s a snatch of 17th-century nursery rhyme – ‘Oh dear, what can the matter be’ – retooled to accommodate the figure of death as an East End hit man; a lullaby, ‘Hush’, that’s more a warning to the curious than anything to sing you into the arms of Morpheus. Then there’s Tudor songster William Elderton’s raging against the dietary restrictions of Lent, set to an even older dance tune called ‘The Cramp’. As such, A Thousand Pokes is steeped in street history and street cries. A highlight is ‘Lavender’, in part drawn from Henry Mayhews’ 1851 book The London Labour and the London Poor.

“We have a recording from 1938 by a market singer called Richard Penfold,” says Ian Carter, Stick’s producer, synth master, dobro player and guitarist. “If you look at Mayhew’s books from the 1800s when he’s interviewing street sellers, they mention the lavender sellers and that their song is the oldest song – and that was in the mid-1800s. It has such an interesting melody, it’s unusual, [it] leant itself to the harmonisation around it, and was relevant to what we were doing.”

“We sing these songs because we’re the same people that would have sung them 200 years ago,” adds Kearey. “It’s not a fantasy, or a cosplay. It’s a reality, for us. The melody was really old, and the work Ian Rawes [of the London Sound Survey] did in rescuing all those sounds that the British Sound Archive decided weren’t worth anything… He collected these recordings from skips. He found the value in them – and that speaks to how people value music and culture. And it’s another reason why we thought it was important to honour that recording… but we’re doing it for ourselves too. It’s what interests us, and we’re looking to strengthen and reconnect that thread through time.”

Their writing and recording processes bring the past to the present without any filigree of nostalgia or mythologising. A Thousand Pokes was recorded in various East London locations, including the attic of The George Tavern in Whitechapel.

“That sense of place is very present in our work,” says Kearey. Place and time are presences in the songs and in the performances, past and present intermix the way urban populations do, throughout time and from all points of the compass. These are songs that feel as old as the hills, but fresh as milk too. “That is a recurring thread,” says Carter of that spirit of renewal. “Not so much preservation, but more to point out the things that are going on now, the things people suffer from now, they were suffering from them in the past. The same things are happening.”

“There’s been a history of working-class struggle from at least the 5th century,” adds Kearey, “and history keeps repeating itself. Life is the same as it always was. There’s a long history of protest and we are part of that.”

“We’re from London,” adds Carter. “We come from a city that’s been a centre of immigration for 2,000 years. We’re all from all over the place. We grew up in a London where everyone’s from everywhere. People talk about ‘the good old days’, but no – the good old days was everyone from everywhere, all of us poor, dealing with all the shit of living here.”

“Folk can be nice, escapist, gentle, and that has its place,” adds Kearey, “but it’s not anything to do with the actual culture we talk about.”

Which is Stick in the Wheel in a nutshell. A rack of weird electronica, hard-tuned vocals, ancient songs expressing contemporary vernacular and contemporary concerns that are eternal ones too, a rough music of rock riffs scoured by furious rants the way a street kid keys the flash car of the incoming gentry. If you’re new to their repertoire, now more than ever is the time to spin the wheel and get stuck in.

This article originally appeared in the November 2024 issue of Songlines. Never miss an issue – subscribe today