Call Upon
The Fiddler To Play
Frankie Archer
Frankie Archer is a North East musician whose career has already seen appearances at Glastonbury, on Later with Jools Holland and a slot supporting The Last Dinner Party, with music which combines traditional melodies and lyrics with electronic elements. She uses her work to highlight the stories of women - often those suffering at the hands of men - while breaking down the barrier between audience and performer. We talk about melodies, misogyny, and avoiding fossilising folk music.
Interview by Arlen Pettitt
Photographs by Christopher Owens
Farmers as they come that way
They drink with Elsie every day
Call upon the fiddler to play
The tune of Elsie Marley hinny
Elsie Marley (trad. arr. Archer)
If it’s true that every good song has already been written, then Frankie Archer is proving there are always new ways to interpret those songs.
Archer is an electrofolk musician who smashes together genres and sounds with an array of pedals and samplers and, in doing so, reveals the perpetual relevance present in songs which might be two hundred years old.
Her latest EP, Pressure and Persuasion, tells the stories of four women fighting against gender expectations and, often, the coercion of men.
Those sounds rarely require much to make them relevant to a modern audience.
“Sometimes I’ve just got to sing the song as it is,” Archer says, “and place it in front of people: “There it is!”. Sometimes I flip things around to change the perspective.”
She gives the example of the song Lucy Wan, in which the title character is impregnated by her brother, who kills her, and lies about it. In most versions of the song he gets away with it, but Archer’s version gives Lucy a voice.
“I added a bit where she comes back from the dead and haunts him to death, because she was just a passive victim with no voice.”
“I decided to empower Lucy,” she continues, “make her more of the main character rather than an accessory to a really traumatic, scandalous song.”
“My sampler is the brain - or is it the heart - of my live performance.”
As he made for the bales of hay
She leapt on his horse and tore away
He called he called but all in vain
And Joan never looked back again
Lovely Joan (trad. arr. Archer)
There's a thread through the majority of traditional songs which marginalises or reduces the role of women. Archer points to Lovely Joan, a song which appears on her latest EP.
In the song, Joan is hit on by a man who won’t take no for an answer, but manages to escape; she’s brave, crafty, wise, and more than a little lucky, but is just ‘lovely’ when it comes to the title and the lyrics.
“That’s the way women are described all the time, based on their appearance,” Archer says, “and their loveliness or attractiveness used as an excuse for the shit things men do to women.”
In taking these songs and centring women, it would take an awful lot of it to redress the balance, but it is still potentially challenging for audiences used to faithful renditions of traditional songs.
But Archer only remembers one audible heckle from an audience member, who after a song said “That was a bit much!”
“Well, if it’s making you uncomfortable,” she says, “what do you think it’s like for less advantaged people?”
That kind of reaction is very much in the minority though.
“I think generally people know what I’m like,” Archer explains, “and that I’ll be unapologetic in the way I put myself and these stories across. I also think people have got more tolerance and flexibility than we assume. There’s this idea of crusty old folk fans, but we got to give folk fans more credit.”
“I added a bit where she comes back from the dead and haunts him to death, because she was just a passive victim with no voice.”
When Pattern interviewed Tom Robinson, he talked about folk music as a genre where it was possible to build a following and make a living, and specifically mentioned Frankie Archer as someone making great music and keeping overheads down. Reviewing her for BBC Introducing, he called her ‘extraordinary’.
For Archer, creating her music and building a following has taken a huge amount of effort.
There’s self-teaching the skills needed to create, share and market music in the modern industry. She shares lots online, and started touring early and building up her mailing list.
Contributing to building a following is the way Archer aims for her gigs to be intimate and authentic.
“The way I put myself across as an artist is pretty much just the way I am as a person,” she says, “I don’t put on an act, it just is genuine.”
She’s honest about performance anxiety and the challenges of being a touring musician, and is careful not to gatekeep the things she’s learned, or the gear she uses.
Technology plays a significant part in both Archer’s records and her live performances.
She uses a sampler to produce her music, and at the centre of her live performances - specifically she uses a 1010 Music Blackbox, which was intended to be an EDM sampler.
“My sampler is the brain - or is it the heart - of my live performance.”
“I’m having a bit of difficulty at the minute,” she continues, “because it thinks in multiples of four - 4, 16, 32, 64, 128 - because it’s meant for blocks of EDM. 16 bars of build-up, 16 bars of chorus. But my music shits all over that, I go in all sorts of weird directions.”
Archer uses the MIDI controller on the floor with her feet, because she’s often singing and playing fiddle when triggering it. The fiddle itself goes through guitar pedals, and she’s recently added a synthesiser to the set up too.
For the audience, there’s also tech which brings them into the performance.
Archer uses a modified Playtronica Touch Me - a little gadget designed to allow two people to touch the controller and then touch hands to trigger a sound.
“I’ve taken a sample of a few Omnichord chords,” she explains, “and programmed that with my sampler and the MIDI controller to trigger different chords randomly, then modded the Touch Me with a load of copper wire so it can stretch out into the audience.”
“The single goes from one end of the controller,” she continues, “through to the copper wire, through to one person’s hand, and whoever that person’s touching, and whoever they’re touching can make a big human chain. The last person in the human chain touches the copper wire on the other end of the controller and that completes the loop, the signal goes through everybody’s bodies and it triggers the sound.”
It’s more than a gimmicky bit of audience participation, as it’s part of a conscious effort to connect performer and listener.
“I want to erode the barrier between the stage and audience, performer and audience, and musician and listener.”
“I want to move away from music being a passive thing,” Archer says. “It’s such a passive thing now, it’s easy to just whack on a playlist and go about your day, and you don’t even really know who you’re listening to.”
“I want to make it a thing where you’re actually physically involved in making music,” she says. “If it wasn’t for the people being in the room, and physically being together and physically connecting then the music wouldn’t exist as it is.”
The human chain is just one example of that, Archer also live samples and manipulates the sound of the audience at her gigs.
“I ask people to hum,” she explains, “then I manipulate it, choose a pitch, sometimes put a filter on, and build up all of these layers until it’s monstrous. It’s a really dark song. It’s different from a normal folk singalong!”
The idea is that, as well as the creative element, it encourages people to get beyond any awkwardness or embarrassment of being at a gig, especially one where there’s audience participation (or reaction). It creates something memorable and experimental.
Archer can get performance anxiety herself, although it doesn’t always hit her and she hasn’t discovered the pattern of what causes it.
Bigger gigs actually tend to be easier, as there’s often production, visuals and lighting, which take some of the onus off her as an individual performer to do all the entertaining.
Those intimate gigs which are her hallmark are a blessing, but also a curse in this context, because if you can clearly see every member of the audience you can also second guess their reactions.
At the top end of the scale, Archer played Glastonbury’s acoustic stage, also performing live on the BBC’s festival coverage.
How does intimate performance and audience performance translate to a festival setting?
“There was one festival where I live sampled the audience,” Archer says, “but I was on a small stage and there was a full band on the big stage just behind, and the kick drum from the big stage spilled into the recording we did. So it was people humming and doof-doof!”
By the time it had been clipped, brought down an octave, reversed and filtered, it turned into “a weird, creepy, and glitchy, ghoulish, monstrous sound, which was very cool.”
“I want to erode the barrier between the stage and audience, performer and audience, and musician and listener.”
When we were silly sisters seven we were so fair
Five of us were brave knights’ wives and died in childbed there
Up then spoke fair Mabel, I’ll never take a man
If ever I lay in a man’s bed, the same way I’ll gan
Fair Mabel of Wallington Hall (trad. arr. Archer)
Archer landed on all this organically, as she is not from a musical family, although her parents supported her interest in the violin, and once she discovered traditional music she quickly became involved in it. As a youngster, she took part in Folkworks at what is now The Glasshouse, as well as summer schools and folk sessions in clubs.
She explored music through learning by ear, playing fiddle along to My Chemical Romance in her teenage bedroom, and she now wonders whether her genre-mashing started there.
While she kept playing and being involved in sessions, as well as experimenting with her arrangements, it wasn’t until 2022 and her first single, Over the Border, that she found what felt like her own approach.
Archer discovered that song, a reworking of a Northumbrian smallpipes tune, in a collection from the early 19th century.
Her take on the song layers vocal harmonies and fiddle lines, imitating the drone and melody you’d hear from smallpipes, with an interlude closer to traditional fiddle playing.
It’s recognisably grounded in traditional music, while undeniably modern in its electronic curation.
That transposing of the traditional into a contemporary setting is Archer’s musical identity.
It’s reflective of a new movement happening within folk music, where a very middle-class, tradition-focused scene is now giving way to new inspirations. Talking about this, Archer mentions the Cornish disco-inspired music of Martha Woods and the electronic Scottish trad of Heen.
“Electronics are the most accessible way of making music now,” she explains. All you need are apps on your phone, so it makes sense for folk music to head that way too.
“You can debate all day what is folk music and what isn’t folk music,” she says. “But, for me, the absolute key things are the lyrics and the melody. Pretty much whatever you do with those, although we kind of dance around it and reframe it, it still retains the soul of it.”
“Sometimes I make a new melody,” she continues. “If I can’t find a melody that really connects with the way I feel about the song then I’ll write a new one. And sometimes I do change the lyrics. As long as the essence of the song is the same.”
“I think fossilising a song
for the sake of preserving the
‘proper version’
is kind of nonsense.”
As with Over the Border, Archer finds inspiration going back through old manuscripts, looking for stories and lyrics which she can connect with - typically that involves things with contemporary relevance, or which are rooted in the North East.
“I’m not interested in preserving in extreme, minor detail things as they were, and fawning over that,” she says. “I think it’s important to do that, but it’s not the point for me as an artist.”
“As soon as you look at something in the past nostalgically and preserve it as an artefact, your perception is a bit skewed,” she continues. “It separates you as a person and your experiences from the people who were experiencing things when that song was sung back then. I think there’s a little thread of all the people who have sung the song, and it’s been passed by ear, something is passed on every time the song is shared with someone else and it’s gone all the way on to today.”
“I think fossilising a song for the sake of preserving the ‘proper version’ is kind of nonsense.”
There are online archives you can scour for these songs, and Archer mentions the FARNE Archive, and the English Folk Dance and Song Society as two key ones. They often hold recordings as well as manuscripts, although these can vary in quality. Frankie mentions trying to pick out a melody from a wax cylinder recording, ultimately failing to do so, and instead taking the sound of the cylinder rotating and putting that on her version of a song to keep the connection.
For Archer, taking the songs as they stand - with bare bones lyrics and melody - is her clean slate, rather than a blank sheet of paper. She’ll play it through, searching for points of connection, then rely on a very mobile recording set up to capture what comes.
“That very first newborn inspiration moment, that’s a really special thing,” she explains, “and you’ve just got to totally fly with it. In that state I don’t consciously think “do this, do that”, thoughts and feelings just come up and I act on it.”
Sometimes it’s also a patchwork. Archer’s song Oxford City contains an instrumental section which was written separately. “I’ve got a million voice notes of random bits of crap ideas,” she says.
I don’t owe you anything
I didn’t ask for your attention
I don’t owe you anything
And lechery is not a compliment
Barbara Allen (trad. arr. Archer)
Making music is a solitary experience for Frankie, and she recalls how her first EP Never SO Red was written, recorded and produced almost entirely at home, before she went to work with musician and producer Jim Moray.
Moray is a natural collaborator, as one of the trailblazers of modern, digitally-driven folk music since he arrived on the scene more than twenty years ago.
Moray is an influence on Archer’s music from within folk, as is her fellow North East musician Kathryn Tickell, whose Northumbrian Voices album Archer calls “a masterpiece of music, humanity and cultural identity.”
Outside of folk Archer lists the likes of Bjork, James Blake and Little Dragon as influences outside of traditional music, but also draws strongly from the emo music, a phase she says she’s “still living in.”
There’s a possible correlation with songs featuring death, despair and loneliness, but it’s another comparison Frankie jumps to straight away.
“Do you know what, emo music was - in my experience - so incel-y,” she says, “and traditional music can be very incel-y too. I think when you’ve got a genre that’s very angsty and dominated by men, that can happen.”
It’s no doubt a difficult space to exist in as an artist, especially when you specifically highlight that mistreatment and that gender injustice in your work.
Archer says although the emotion of performing these songs can be exhausting in the moment, tackling those issues itself isn’t challenging, unfortunately because it’s so much a part of life.
“There’s plenty to go on if you want to talk about misogyny in traditional music or misogyny out there in society,” she continues. “It’s something that I really live in, it does exist, so by bringing that out in music you’re saying to people ‘look it exists in this place, as well as this place’. It’s not difficult because it feels so natural in a way, because it’s so pervasive.”
Shining a light on society today, and how little the story has changed for women in hundreds of years, is a potent driving force in Archer’s creativity, and her combination of trad folk melodies and lyrics with modern production and electronic elements is a formula which is working for her.
In a successful last year or so, as well as Glastonbury, Archer has played Jool Holland’s show, where she met The Last Dinner Party, who she then supported when they came to Newcastle. She has also featured as part of the BBC Proms at the Glasshouse, during a live version of Hannah Peel’s Night Tracks on Radio 3, played a session for BBC Introducing, and compiled a Halloween Playlist for 6Music.
“A very wonderful thing is that the opportunities I’m getting are getting bigger and bigger,” Frankie says. “So almost everything feels like “Shit, I’ve got to get my act together!” I do have my shit together, I work very hard, but everything feels like the biggest thing I’ve ever done.”
It feels like there’s plenty more to come.