I don’t know any. As I gather, musicians use acoustic instruments but take their songs and performances into unusual directions. To this end, in repurposing recent samples here, we can see that We’ll Take Them In has the subject matter for a conventional folk song but the lyrical approach that is both dense ‘We’ll absorb the orb of their undoing’ and has multiple points of indeterminacy.

Rather than being a combined voice that a political event can get behind, the first verse is a clumsy reach to understanding and sympathy and the second is both self-condemnation and a lash out at other ways. It then leaps again, in the third verse, to the  viewpoint of those captives who are just to glad to experience freedom but ends with a couplet that examines the debate itself and what fuels it.

Would this be freak folk if you played it on a guitar and a set of bongos, or would it constitute something different again? I think the subject matter gives it the license it needs to remain in the freakier fields of folk. We’ve been crying out for that old firebrand folk that picks up on issues and it wasn’t like you could escape it; other premiers got on board and there were protest groups spouting up on street corners across the region. Whether the folk groups are okay with the ambiguity is another matter.

II

There’s a couple of Berkoisms that threaten the plain speaking of folk rock in Barbed Wire Blues. I deliberately chose an object from my childhood in the broader landscape and wanted to use it literally rather than to, say, engage in a metaphor for the plight of those asylum seeker children or – stretching it further – a kind of mental imprisonment. And there is a rambling feel that is troubled at the same time.

It is the double meaning of the third verse that freaks the folk then the fourth eases out of it only to freak out completely in the fifth. I mean, what the heck does ‘I’m green to the mean‘ mean, man?

III

Careful of the Freak

Hail the hairlip let the truth slip  
grasp what you clasp close in your grip
Sneak up on the snaggletooth
wagers in stages the solemn sleuth 

Jumps at the bumps leaps at the lumps
packs in acts all wearing pumps
Jaws that jut and see sore strut
The reason you'll find you're anything but
Shiny dome in gnomic pose
tip of ear to bridge of nose
In tatters that matters
a taste for waste and seldom chaste
The guidance of the guards replaced

The nurses in nightsweat have noticed   
the way that they fit in the photos
Clubfoot closeness humpback humility
what harm to the charm of humanity