(Broadside Hacks)
Born out of a London musical instruments shop where members worked, the Paul McCartney-approved band’s first EP is eager and theatrical, sometimes to a fault

Folk’s latest fresh-faced, vintage garb-wearing sensations formed around central London musical instrument shop Hobgoblin where several members worked (hence the band name), ran sessions in Matchstick Piehouse (the recently closed radical south London arts space known for jazz and cabaret nights) and are a sprawling queer collective, including members with fabulous names such as Rowan Gatherer and Sonny Brazil. So far, so hip.

But they’re loved by scene veterans too, including Martin Carthy (“they can play [and] sing and they’re fearless”, he told Tradfolk this year) while Paul McCartney, whose Soho Square HQ is around the corner from Hobgoblin, used to pop in to play harmonica with them. Their debut EP, an album-length, six-song showcase, mixes a twitchy, eager musicianship with rowdy flamboyance.

Songwriting courses are exploding in popularity, with everyone from Mark Ronson to Alicia Keys as teachers. On a retreat in north Wales, our folk music critic tries to write her first song

Imagine you’ve spent the past 20 years writing about songs but never had the chops to write one. This is my penance: sitting in a room in north Wales, with a tiny keyboard and notebook spidery with attempted lyrics, the only rhythm in my ears my rave-energy heartbeat, the only melody in my mind the lilting panic of my inner critic going: “Argh!”

It’s the final day of a four-day songwriting course at Literature Wales’s 16th-century HQ, Ty Newydd Writing Centre , led by Brian Briggs of folk band Stornoway and Welsh poet and songwriter Paul Henry . Tonight, I have to perform an original song with two relative strangers, in front of people I didn’t know four days earlier. This particular terror is the climax of a bigger endeavour on my part: to explore the growing popularity of songwriting courses, and to find out if they work.

The story of two historians unleashing evil while recording a song is a strong idea and there are good moments and performances, but it is too chaotic and unfocused to resonate

Paul Duane is the film-maker who in 2011 made Barbaric Genius , a gripping documentary portrait of ex-convict, ex-vagrant and tournament chess player John Healy, whose memoir The Grass Arena is a classic of outsider art literature. Now Duane has given us this horror film which, though it begins with interesting subversive and satirical ideas, and an interesting allusion to Guillermo del Toro, finally becomes, for me, simply too chaotic, strained and unfocused.

Anna (Simone Collins) and Aleks (Charlie Maher) are social historians who travel around remote rural pubs in Ireland, recording folk ballads; they become fascinated by rumours of an old woman who lives thereabouts who can sing a thousand-year-old song, taught over generations from mother to daughter, which has never been recorded or transcribed on paper. Asking questions about her makes locals suspicious; Anna and Aleks assure one man that they are not journalists or interested in anything “political”, but he replies darkly: “There’s nothing that’s not political …”

An arts organisation has been seeking out and recording the region’s traditional music and is teaching the lyrics to young singers

In the Jordanian town of Tafilah, a six-year-old boy softly hummed a song. His family were astonished, and his 82-year-old great-grandmother, Jawaher Al Ahmad, overheard and began to cry. She asked the child who had taught him the “ hajini ”, or Bedouin folk song, and said: “The last time I heard that song was at my wedding.”

Her great-grandson, Ahmad, had learned the tune as part of the I’m My Voice project run by Tajalla for Music and Arts, a cultural organisation founded by Russol Al Nasser.

Her struggles with spasmodic dysphonia has led her to write an album for a bevy of other stars to sing. She talks about trauma, ageing and stealing an audience member’s car

The photo on the front of Linda Thompson’s new album, Proxy Music, is nothing if not striking. It features Thompson posing in an identical outfit to that worn by the model Kari-Ann Moller on the cover of Roxy Music’s eponymous 1972 debut , although her expression is noticeably different: in place of Moller’s smouldering look to camera, Thompson offers a faintly disturbing grimace. She looks a bit nuts. “Yes,” she nods. “The photographer kept saying: ‘Do that thing that she does’ and I couldn’t. I’d had some banana cake, and I think I was having some kind of sugar rush. I think it’s hilarious. The original cover is so daft, I just thought I’d make it worse.”

It goes without saying that this all runs very contrary to the image of Thompson forged in the 1970s, when she made a string of incredible albums with her then-husband, Richard Thompson. There was something rather stern and austere about the Thompsons even before they gave away all their money and possessions and retreated to a Sufi commune. Their exquisite music was vastly potentiated by Thompson’s voice, a hugely affecting cocktail of fragility and toughness. On their most famous album, 1974’s I Want to See the Bright Lights Tonight , she sang like someone who had been horribly wounded by life but resolved to carry on anyway. Their releases were no one’s idea of a barrel of laughs.

At the Norwegian event, creators from Europe’s only Indigenous nation used kettles, synthpop and recordings of salmon to create music that drew on their often threatened traditions

On stage in a former industrial building in the Norwegian city of Bergen sits a strange, if not bewildering, selection of objects. There is an upright, warp-weighted loom, one of the most ancient and basic forms of human technology, with a weaving in progress on its frame. There is a kettle, a heating element, and an old-fashioned hand-cranked coffee grinder. There is something that looks like a miniature upside-down table – in fact it is a warping board, the structure on which the vertical threads of a future textile are organised before being fitted to the loom. The only real hint that this is the prelude to a concert is the presence of a looper and some microphones, abrupt visitors from the 21st century.

This is the set-up for a new work by composer Elina Waage Mikalson , artist-in-residence and co-programmer of Borealis . Well-established as an annual festival exploring the outer reaches of music and sound, this year’s event has been focused, for the first time, on experimental music made by Sámi artists – creators from Europe’s only Indigenous nation, Sápmi, which spans the modern borders of northern Norway, Sweden, Finland and Russia’s Kola peninsula. It is not just a first for the festival. The event also represents the first formal gathering of Sámi experimental musicians: a chance to consider how endangered traditional forms of cultural expression can be enriched and renewed – or, possibly, diluted and imperilled – by innovation.

(Hidden Notes)
This spirited adventure in the avant garde is as experimental as it is accessible, delving into hot-blooded Sirba and Transylvanian epics

Yiddish, klezmer and eastern European traditional music are the energetic inspirations for Fran and Flora’s second album together, their first on Stroud-based new music label Hidden Notes. Cellist Francesca Ter-Berg and violinist Flora Curzon also compose with voices and electronics, and their album’s opening track, Nudity, announces their ambitious intentions. Plucked strings whip up a hot-blooded Sirba (a Romanian/Jewish 6/8 rhythm) against a high violin drone and a skittering vocal of the Meredith Monk school. A delirious, desirous mood ensues.

It’s a strangely accessible record. Wordless harmonies create immediate, even poppy effects on the Nign and Hold Me Close, which should interest fans of shimmery, alternative groups like Blonde Redhead and Stealing Sheep; they’re even Radio 2-friendly on the gorgeous Fishelekh Gefinen – To Catch a Fish, by Yiddish poet Aliza Greenblatt. Layers of sound are built up like a modern dance track before the drums, played by Snapped Ankles’ Ursula Russell, arrive with the heft of a hip-hop break.

American actor best known for his role as Gunnery Sergeant Emil Foley in the 1982 film An Officer and a Gentleman

The actor Lou Gossett Jr, who has died aged 87, is best known for his performance in An Officer and A Gentleman (1982) as Gunnery Sergeant Emil Foley, whose tough training transforms recruit Richard Gere into the man of the film’s title. He was the first black winner of an Academy Award for best supporting actor, and only the third black actor (after Hattie McDaniel and Sidney Poitier ) to take home any Oscar.

The director, Taylor Hackford, said he cast Gossett in a role written for a white actor, following a familiar Hollywood trope played by John Wayne , Burt Lancaster , Victor McLaglen or R Lee Ermey , because while researching he realised the tension of “black enlisted men having make-or-break control over whether white college graduates would become officers”. Gossett had already won an Emmy award playing a different sort of mentor, the slave Fiddler who teaches Kunta Kinte the ropes in Roots (1977), but he was still a relatively unknown 46-year-old when he got his breakthrough role, despite a long history of success on stage and in music as well as on screen.

(Self-released)
The UK-based French folk singer embellishes her trad leanings with sultry blues and upbeat swing on a poignant and poetic second album

Her 2020 debut, Numberless Dreams , introduced Bristol-based French singer Julie Abbé as an artist steeped in Irish and English folk with a telling way with WB Yeats poems. The album closed with Yeats’s celebrated line: “Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.” Someone has clearly trampled over Abbé’s since. She frames this second outing as “a full cycle of love, celebrating the beauty of what once was, and honouring the different stages of grieving and healing”. It sounds heavy going, yet opener Lanternes d’Or is a slinky blues that evokes a postwar Parisian cafe, brightly sung and artfully accompanied by a small group in which clarinet and guitar shine.

It proves a lodestar for a song cycle in French and English that is by turns sad, sultry and philosophical, its lyrics locating grief, anger and joy in precise but poetic language. Abbé is a tender, expressive singer – on a brace of tracks she dispenses with lyrics to croon and fly wordlessly – while her quartet, led by guitarist and producer James Grunwell, shift easily between folk, swing, jazz and Abbé’s own Poitou bal tradition. She is well known in West Country folk circles, with a place at Glastonbury’s opening ceremony, but this is a lovely reinvention. Formidable !