Interview by Nell Whittaker
Portrait by Buster Grey-Jung

NW In the book, you evoke Albion as an “astral alternative” for the UK, a folky shadow-self, also haunted by colonialisation and Britain’s more recent racist histories. How did you come to this conception of Albion?

ZS Albion dwells in ethereal and immaterial realms. It is connected to Britain and its history, and yet it’s subjective. Many different people have been drawn to the idea of Albion throughout the ages, and it holds different significance for each of them. In our earliest myths, it signifies a time and place before Britain became a nation-state. For William Blake, Albion is a primordial giant who represents the potential and fate of Britain: a giant who has fallen asleep but promises to rise again, much like King Arthur. Albion often represents a pre-immigration utopia for the right-wing – the glory of empire, whiteness and military might. For me, Albion is connected to a mischievous, magical and subversive spirit of Britain that runs through our culture. It is in the acid tones of rave culture, the sitars of 1960s psychedelic rock and the hand-stitched costumes of Morris dancers. It is in Arthurian medieval imagery of a damsel trapped in a turret, but it is also in contemporary visions of Dean Blunt reclaiming the Union Jack. Our traditional symbols and anthems become static. The mutability of Albion as a dreamscape is what makes it powerful.

NW How do you navigate those narratives that assert nationalism in a way that excludes some people from Britishness? For instance, Morris dancing has a history that is intertwined with minstrel performances.

ZS When I first became interested in folk culture, I didn’t know about its dark side. At first, I was hoping I would find an unsullied, uncomplicated alternative to mainstream British culture, but I soon realised that this utopia doesn’t exist: in fact, it shares a lot with far-right fantasies. Writing the book, I realised how important it is to embrace these complexities, the brutality and the oppression, to hold them up against the magic and enchantment, to say that you cannot have one without the other. At May Day celebrations in Lewes, in Sussex, it was the first time that I’d seen Morris dancers. I was drawn to it because it felt anti-establishment, but when I learned more about its connection to minstrelry and blackface, my initial fantasies were punctured. Through writing, I began to revel in bristling the ugly against the beautiful. There’s something captivating about the juxtaposition of a magical and enchanted land, which is also a place of oppression and brutality.

NW And there’s not a huge distance between the folklore of the UK and the Caribbean, where some of your family is from – ghost stories, for instance, and rituals around death. 

ZS One of the reasons I was initially drawn to folk culture was that I’d grown up with Caribbean traditions. This meant dressing in funny outfits at certain times of the year to honour seasonal changes, but also recognising shared seasonal celebrations across cultures, and coming together as a community to honour those who’ve come before us. There is something unifying in solstice traditions and harvest customs being celebrated across the world. A costume made of hay and sticks in a West African village shares DNA with the Whittlesea straw bear in England. Folk traditions hold the radical possibility to remind us of these fundamentals. If we are honest about the darkness, such as racism and blackface, we can also honour the light and connection that we have in common. My book is an attempt to hold the light and dark together. 

NW You speak to Elin Gittins and Meg Elliott, who brought the Hunting of the Wren ceremony to Oswestry, a town near where I grew up. Oswestry is – in their words – “a little bit shit”. It’s not all rural idyll: high streets and urban spaces often feel like appropriate settings for these ad hoc folk rituals. Why do you think that is? 

ZS A lot of folk rituals take place in villages where these traditions have been passed on and preserved for generations. In urban spaces, these traditions are more transient. Folk collectors of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, such as Cecil Sharp, have largely handed down these rural visions to us. Cecil Sharp had a very specific vision of what English folk culture was, tying into his belief in the unchanging English village, untainted by modernity and foreign influence. He projected this view when collecting folk songs, so he would have overlooked evidence of folk traditions that fused cultures, especially as England by this point had already been the centre of an empire for 300 years. This vision of a pure folk culture was often an explicit rejection of the vast changes occurring in Britain. If you look at the Jack in the Green tradition, for example, it started off as chimney sweeps on the streets of London in the 1700s. It was an urban tradition among working-class Londoners at the bottom of the social ladder. Industrial folk songs in the North, sung by people working in factories, have always been a massive part of folk culture. There have always been urban people living miserable lives, who need a reason to come together, drink ale, sing songs and be merry. What is exciting about the current folk revival is that people are looking at aspects of these traditions that have been historically erased because they didn’t conform to a particular narrative. More folk gatherings are happening on crappy high streets, which is simply a reflection of Britain today and where many people live. It also demonstrates how these customs and traditions are constantly shifting and adapting. What I love about folk music is that it is the complete opposite to the kind of jingoistic idea of “Rule, Britannia!” It is the expression of the real woes of the disenfranchised classes of Britain throughout the ages: their longing for lovers lost across the sea, and the injustice of poachers being transported to the colonies. This folk repertoire reveals an alternative history of the nation, centring those who are excluded from telling their stories in high culture. Shirley Collins once told me that it is the music of the downtrodden, and that’s why there’s so much darkness. When we search for alternative histories, we want to reintegrate the voices of those who have been excluded from the national imagination. In Carriacou, the Caribbean island where my grandparents are from, it is through dance, rhythm, costume and certain steps and movements that you see hints of an alternative story of enslavement. You see how people remembered the journeys their ancestors made, and how they managed to preserve the parts of their culture and heritage from which they were severed. .