The Warlike Lads & Lasses of Europe
The Warlike Lads & Lasses of Europe
Semi-topical folk-rock mixtape. Songs old and new. The set is named in parody -- European people are not of course innately warlike at all! The title is a pun on the folk song The Warlike Lads of Russia, played here by Show of Hands. The music flows and varies, alternating between the serious and uplifting with rocking tunes, ballads & laments with a historical tint.
While not a purely conceptual mix, the shadow of war is never far away in 2026 as we see the Russia-phobic and anti-Iranian NATO propaganda machinery surge into overdrive again. The best that we can hope for is that they desist with the idiocracy and that the hue & cry chokes off. Many folk songs give us a window into the psyches of different wartime periods and report the various impacts conflict had on the lives of everyday people in society at large, including the adverse psychological affects simply of living in uncertainty - under the dark, suffocating cloud of war. Roving Revellers take the side of peace, multi-polar cooperation and demilitarisation each and every time. Its the common people who always pay the price, caught between the tongs of economic hardship, an arbitrary judiciary and conflicts that few even understand. And we gotta ask now, what good does NATO actually do for us, especially now that the US keeps stabbing its so-called allies in the back?
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The latest Steeleye Span album Conflict (2025) took many by surprise by its rawness. Heavy metal folk and thrashy jigs! Be not concerned as the set is well worth exploring and has Maddy Prior on vocals. The band lay their empathy bare here with songs like Genocide and Ghost Ship, a song about boat refugees. Tuneful cut of Van Dieman's Land. Tracks from 2015 album Layers of Ages by Peter Knight's Gigspanner Big Band, including original reworkings of Hard Times in Old England and Death and the Lady. Seth Lakeman LP Freedom Fields, released in 2017, is another imaginative collection of closely related songs set presumably during the Napoleonic war. The Bushwackers return from the outback with rocking tracks from their 1979 Bushfire LP. Stringybark Creek tells the tale of Ned Kelly's mountain standoff with the law while Fannie Bay was written by David Charles & Douglas Tainsh and is about a nineteenth century hanging at the infamous Northern Territory jail there. Four interesting, imaginative & melodic tunes by Dave Burland's 70's folk rock group Hedgehog Pie with some out of this world flute licks from Michael Doonan.
With war being never far over the horizon these days, songs that reflect wartime conditions and uncertainty feature throughout. From Napoleon to WW1 & WW2 and older domestic conflicts like the Highland campaigns, the huge impact and disruption of everyday lives cannot be overstated. Selection of well-known Napoleonic era songs like Banks of the Nile by Nancy Kerr & James Fagan, Drummer Boy for Waterloo by Chris Coe, The Eighteen of June by Jim Moray and The Bonny Bunch of Roses & The Dolphin by Tony Capstick. Original Seth Lakeman songs King & Country and Fight for Favour. The Warlike Lads of Russia is vintage Show of hands as is First and Last, a Roscarrock composition. The Battlefield Band bring pipes-heavy marches & laments to help bond the theme together. No coincidence that Fairport Convention's Lord Marlborough starts to fading Battlefield Band bagpipes in remembrance of that lord's harsh actions during the Highland suppression campaigns.
Scottish-Irish folk-rock vibes from Five Hand Reel and the Tannahill Weavers. Songs from the popular old-time Scots group The Corries 1973 album A Little Of What You Fancy, with a beautiful cut of Bogie's Bonnie Belle and an amazing instrumental simply named The River. They remember the mustering of the clans at Sherrifmuir. Albion Band offshoot Home Service perform the heartfelt ode to social ills Sorrow-Babylon. Two interesting covers of popular hits in Fleetwood Mac's Big Love done over by Jim Moray and a deft cut of Dire Straights' Tunnel of Love by Show of Hands. How man, remember the Spanish City at Whiltley Bay like? Just had to drop a serious Dire Straights tune after that: The Man's Too Strong.
Near constant inter-European conflict, and subsequent technological advances, during the so-called renaissance was a major facilitator of later European exploration & military domination. Faced with ever-increasing demographic pressures but also dwindling resources, namely then food and timber (as a fuel & construction material), the continent began its outward push. Do we see history repeating itself again now?
Anyway let us all continue to hope & pray for peace and increased sanity in 2026-27. Enjoy the folk rock everyone.
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