After several years delighting audiences with their hugely loved wintertime project Awake Arise, the folk supergroup of Lady Maisery (Hannah James, Rowan Rheingans & Hazel Askew) and Jimmy Aldridge & Sid Goldsmith, have joined their considerable creative forces again, this time to celebrate the summer. Their highly anticipated second collaboration Wakefire: A Summer Album releases on May Day 2026 as a special double length album-book, and tours at Midsummer.
If Awake Arise established this group as trusted makers of deep and multi-disciplinary folk, then Wakefire delves deeper into the possibilities of both an album and live show, weaving song, prose, poetry and musique concréte into a journey for the audience. At twenty-seven tracks, Wakefire bucks the emergent trend of ephemeral shorter releases. It’s a return to the long form, a double length album, befitting its reverence for the longest days of the year; an invitation to a more immersive and unfolding listening experience.
The album begins at the end of spring, with Hannah’s reworking of Anne Briggs’s ‘Summer’s In’ emerging from a wash of birdsong and carried in by delicate kalimba and banjo. From here we are led to the start of the English folk tradition’s summer: May morning. Beginning in Padstow, we hear Sid’s memories of his first encounter with the ritual, where thousands fill the streets every year, before the sound of the marching drums pulls us along into the rousing choruses of ‘Following The Old Oss’. We then meet other May morning marchers in Rowan’s ‘May Day’, as people across the world gather for International Workers’ Day rallies. Propelled by driving banjo, the familiar but newly charged ‘which side are you on?’ places questions of democracy and protest at the top of summer’s collective call.
We ascend towards June with the whispering gossip of old spells in ‘Midsummer Divinations’, and the discomfort of ancient courting traditions in an eerie cittern and harp interpretation of ‘Staines Morris’. The evening closes in around the midsummer traditions of Sweden, from the traditional shepherding song ‘Limu’ to the rousing dance celebrations of ‘Mikaelidagen’, where we hear this five-piece ensemble at full instrumental and vocal pelt.
The middle of the album arrives in the small hours with a trip to a ‘Free Party’ in a Norfolk field in the early 2000s, where the trance beat leads to visions of ancient ritual. We emerge the next morning, lying among the grass and insects, for a dreamworld a cappella interpretation of Ivor Cutler’s ‘I’m Going In A Field’.
The lydian melody of Hazel’s ‘River Came Back’ entices us into the fantastical story of a lost London river in the hazy magic of high summer and the letting go of things that cannot be. This perhaps foretells the environmental destruction seen in the next few songs: Jimmy’s Aftermath rings out with dissonant harmony and insistent banjo, telling the true story of a goshawk nest that stops a lone tree being felled in a forest; then a car hurtles towards looming forest fires, before an urgent a capella five-part harmony reworking of Béla Fleck’s climate emergency call ‘What’cha Gonna Do?’.
The band then delve into the ritual of midsummer fire making, winding back the clock from 2024 to the 1400s, where we hear the reason for the title Wakefire, finally landing at the Latvian festival of ‘Ligō’, celebrating the longest day with euphoric vocal harmony.
Summer’s end shimmers on the horizon with the earthy a capella harmonies of ‘Harvest Song’, amid Laurie Lee’s irresistible depictions of our changing traditions within the timelessness of the landscape around us.
And so, another summer ends… Wakefire is an invitation to gather the riches of the brightest season, and let its fruits nourish us, until the next summer begins…
Artists’ websites: https://www.ladymaisery.com/ https://www.jimmyandsidduo.com/
‘Good As Gone’:
Tour Dates
12 June – Playhouse, ALNWICK
13 June – City Varieties, LEEDS
16 June – Firth Hall, SHEFFIELD
17 June – Cecil Sharp House, LONDON
18 June – Symphony Hall, BIRMINGHAM
19 June – Stapleford Granary, CAMBRIDGE
20 June – Dome Theatre Studio, BRIGHTON
21 June – Komedia, BATH
We all give our spare time to run folking.com. Our aim has always been to keep folking a free service for our visitors, artists, PR agencies and tour promoters. If you wish help out and donate something (running costs currently funded by Paul Miles), please click the PayPal link below to send us a small one off payment or a monthly contribution.
Thanks for stopping by. Please help us continue and support us by tipping/donating to folking.com via
You must be logged in to post a comment.