I love summer in Ireland, It’s my favourite day of the year – and so no finer day to write about 'Wakefire: A Summer Album', released on May Day.
First thing to mention is the incredibly beautiful packaging of the CD – bright orange embossed with golden swirls and summer imagery – it includes a booklet spanning over sixty pages of lyrics, background details, stories, poetry, illustrations and colourful photography – the packaging in itself is a carefully crafted work of art.
Their last collaboration celebrated winter (‘Awake Arise’). Now the folk supergroup of Lady Maisery (Hannah James, Rowan Rheingans and Hazel Askew) along with Jimmy Aldridge & Sid Goldsmith – have joined creative forces again – to celebrate summer – with this 27 track album-book.
‘Wakefire: A Summer Album’ delves into the possibilities of crating an album and live show, weaving song, prose, poetry and ‘musique concréte’ into a journey for the audience/listener. It’s a return to the long form double length album, reverential for the longest day of mid-summer – an invitation to a more immersive and listening experience.
The album begins at the end of spring – with Hannah James’ reworking of Anne Brigg’s ‘Summer’s In’, merging from an opening sequence of birdsong and carried in by a delicate kalimba and banjo – before moving on to the start of the English folk tradition’s summer: ‘On May Morning’.
Beginning in Padstow, we hear Sid’s memories of his first encounter with the ritual – where thousands fill the streets every year, before the sound of marching drums pull us onto the rousing choruses of ‘Following the Old Oss/ Padstow May Song’. Marching on to Rowan’s ‘May Day’ as people around the world gather for International Workers’ Day rallies. Propelled by driving banjo, the familiar newly charged ‘which side are you on?’ places questions of democracy and protest at the top of summer’s collective call.
June is bursting out all over with the whispering gossip of old spells in ‘Midsummer Divinations’, and the discomfort of ancient courting traditions in an eerie cittern and harp interpretation of ‘Staines Morris’. The evening closes around midsummer traditions in Sweden, from the traditional shepherding song ‘Limu’ to the rousing dance celebrations of ‘Mikaelidagen’, where we hear the five-piece ensemble at full pelt.
Mid-album we’re in a Norfolk field for the small hours at a ‘Free Party’ in the early 2000s, where the trance beat leads to visions of ancient rituals, for a dreamworld a cappella interpretation of Ivor Cutler’s ‘I’m Going in a Field’.
The Lydian melody of Hazel’s ‘River Came Back’ entices us into the fantastical story of a lost London river in the hazy magic of high summer and the letting go of things that cannot be. This perhaps foretells the environmental destruction seen in the next few songs: ‘Aftermath’ rings out with dissonant harmony and insistent banjo, telling the true story of a goshawk nest that stops a lone tree being felled in a forest; then a car hurtles towards looming forest fires, before an urgent a capella five-part harmony reworking of Béla Fleck’s climate emergency call ‘What’cha Gonna Do?’
The band then delve into the ritual of midsummer fire making, winding back the clocks from 2024 to the 1400s, where we hear the reason for the ‘Wakefire’ title, finally arriving at the Latvian festival of ‘Ligo’, celebrating the longest day with euphoric vocal harmony.
Summer’s end shimmers on the horizon with earthy a capella harmonies of ‘Harvest Song’, amid Laurie Lee’s irresistible depictions of our changing traditions within the timelessness of the landscape around us.
And so another summer comes to an end… and the planet keeps on turning. ‘Wakefire: A Summer Album’ is an invitation together the riches of the brightest season, and let its fruits nourish us, until nature – in all its blazing glory – turns in on itself – until next year.