Nightsong - The Peasants' Revolt (2020)

Nightsong is a collaboration between John Reed, Jo Beth Young and Ali Karim Esmaiil, with instrumentation that includes cittern, bowed guitars and, recorder. The Peasants Revolt is a dark progressive folk concept album centred upon the lives of peasants, in medieval England, the feudal system of the time generally tying them to the service of a local noble or clergyman.

It opens with a hypnotic acoustic guitar figure that anchors Pauper’s Son, Reed on vocals for a number that calls to mind the work of Roy Harper and sets the tone, both musically and thematically for the album. The opening line, “Sheep devoured the human flesh”, derives from a quotation attributed to Thomas More concerning the worrying deforestation of large swathes of land for sheep grazing, and the subsequent displacement of those who relied on forests for their livelihoods, resulting in an exodus of labourers and those remaining demanding higher wages. It continues to reference the actual Peasants’ Revolt in 1381 when a tax collector in Rougham, Norfolk attempted to levy the third poll tax in four years and the workers “took their tools and set upon/The house of he who forced their plight”, causing damage to the cost of £50. The rebels of Essex and Kent, led by Wat Tyler, eventually marched on London, prompting the king to abolish serfdom, although, subsequently, following the beheading of Tyler, many of the rebels were executed.

By a remarkable coincidence, the name of the Norfolk collector was John Reed, the attack taking place on 17th June, the birthdate of the John Reed here who, 600 years later would leave his cottage in the same parish, the album being prompted by a print he’d bought depicting the attack on the house of his namesake.

One of six instrumental interludes, Fantasy, is followed by Reed on cittern for The Bridge, a swirlingly atmospheric number that references the fall into ruin of the infrastructure left behind by the Romans when they left in the 5th century, woven into a narrative about revenge taken by villagers on a gang of thieves who find their escape route cut off the collapse of the bridge of the title.

A muted drum, watery tinkles and ethereal backing vocal announce the slow pulse funeral march beat of St.Mary Magdalene, the title a reference to a ‘lazar’ hpsoital situated just outside Winchester for the treatment of leprosy, a disease that ravaged the country from the 11th to 14th Century, as related in the lyrics which speak of those “cast from their homes, cast from their houses” who ended up there “Begging for alms, praying for souls/Tilling and hoeing the soil”.

Sounding like the breaking dawn, the second interlude, Selion, a medieval strip of land between two furrows, heralds the spooked acoustic guitar filigree of The Spell, sounding like a Mancunian Clannad, on which, Jules Bangs on bass, Young takes her first lead vocal bow on a song about how, during 16th and 17th centuries, healers were often accused of witchcraft (“Before the Essenes, there were we/The gift came down from my Mother to me”) that again has a personal link as one of her ancestors, Issobell Young, was strangled and burned at the stake after being accused by her husband of “attempting to kill him with magic after quarrelling about an unsavoury house guest”. Spookily, she only found this out after having written the song.

The throaty bass notes of Hireling lead into another mist swirling track, Wharram, Reed singing of Wharram Percy in North Yorkshire, abandoned after the sheep farming enclusures (“One of Britain’s three thousand/Villages returned to land …Heaps and mounds are all we found/Amid the surly cattle crowd/Grazing there amid the ruins/Where once good folk had farmed the land”), the number gathering pace with throbbing bass pulses, bass drum thump, recorder and rapid handclaps, conjuring an earthy pastoral mood somewhere between Floyd and Oldfield as the song recounts the Percy lineage, Reed’s wife being one of the descendents.

Harper-echoes again resonant, the theme of abandoned villages, their rivers silted up, continues with Offoldfal, the title derived from ‘Terra de Offoldfal’, a term used in the valuable waterways of the Fenlands (“portering cargoes from rights of the common”) to describe the division of land, usually church-owned, between freeholders or by the duties it attracted (“From every man with a house and a fire/For to cut of the turves and lay of the thatch/To graze of the pasture by the open sea/To catch of their share of the fish and the fowl/And to share of the land of the offoldfal”), the enmity between abbeys or the church and the nobles often leading to falsified charters.

The beating hollow drum of Penance shades into the buzzing drone and clangs of the resonant Bury Me Deep, Reed and Young sharing vocals on a number rooted in how archaeological digs and finds reveal the land’s hidden and lost past (“We’ve come to rely/On fragments of lives/To understand/The things that lie/Behind the way/We have become”).

Then, sandwiched between the final two interludes, the recorder-coloured borealis of Bivouac and the Gregorian chant Flame, lies the drone and clicking percussive tribal rhythm of Rushlight with its hints of early Peter Gabriel, a reference to the use of a rush wick dipped in tallow to provide a dim light to work during the winter nights or illuminate the halls of large houses.

It ends, first, with the backwards tape effects that introduce The King’s Feast before the guitar and shimmering keyboard notes arrive to bedrock a song detailing the many different trades of those who worked the forests of the era, the woodsmen, bowmen, coopers, wheelwrights and so forth, would make use of time-limited licences, the ‘feast’ to cut down trees and gather the wood for for their crafts and joining in celebrations with venison and wine.

Death sounds the final knell with Young again on lead for the organ drone-backed, electronics-laced and single drum notes of The Shroud, its tumbling ancient hymnal-like melody enfolding a lyric that, extracted from a 14th-century poem, tells the story of a woman whose working life dedicated to creating garments was only appreciated upon her death, recounting that, while the wealthy would be buried in coffins, the poor would be interred in woollen wrappings the same material they wore in life in support of the trade of the land. A remarkable, well-researched, historically illuminating, contemporary resonating and consummately crafted album that is both musically esoteric and accessible, haunting and atmospheric, it deserves to become a classic of its kind.