How does it feel to have made the Guardian writers’ favourite album of 2023?
It’s bonkers. The benchmarks we set for ourselves when we started 10 years ago – we’ve gone so far beyond them that it’s hard to comprehend. We’d go: “Let’s imagine we could be successful enough to have a sound engineer. Let’s aim for one day being able to do a tour of the whole UK.”
Why do you think False Lankum has been a breakthrough album?
I think we finally nailed what we wanted to be. We nearly got it on the last album [2019’s The Livelong Day], but that was a bit too bleak.
What did you do differently this time?
We pushed our instruments further, sonically, giving more contrast between the dark stuff and the lighter. This album also has a fully realised arc, linking tracks with little pieces [the three fugue tracks on the album].
You made False Lankum in a Martello tower on the east coast of Ireland. Where were you creatively at the start of that process?
We were in a working bubble, as this was still Covid times; you know, going for solo jogs and all that. I think that might be part of the craic of the album – we had no immediate things on, no tours, but more space to work things through. So we sat down as we always do and made a list of possible ideas: things we’ve sung at sessions, heard on records, learned from friends; things we’ve written. We always get stuff from all sorts of places.
Alongside the album’s two original songs, Netta Perseus and The Turn, the repertory on False Lankum spans nearly five centuries, from Newcastle (lyrics from 1620, tune from 1651) to Gordon Bok’s Clear Away in the Morning (1983).
I’d found that Gordon Bok song online a few years back, on a Rolling Stone list called something like “Ten folk albums you’ve never heard before”. I was all: “Yeah, right,” going through the list going: “Heard it, heard it, heard it – oh, what’s this?” And I heard this song and I thought: oh my God, this music is class.
How does the band choose what songs to include?
You sit there for seven hours trying to put an arrangement on something you like and you lose it. You go off for lunch, make a cup of tea, come back. Then someone will suggest something tiny that will set off a spark and within 20 minutes it’ll be happening. We’ve learned to trust that it’ll happen at some stage, but it’s gruelling when it’s not working.
With which False Lankum tracks did that happen?
Most of them. With The New York Trader, we eventually went: “Maybe we should stick another tune on to the end?” And Cormac [Mac Diarmada] said: “Well, there’s an American tune I’ve been learning [Big Black Cat] that might work with a bit of tweaking.” And it did. Twenty minutes later – fucking yes!
Sonically, this album is huge. What moments from making it stick in your head?
Doing Clear Away in the Morning with Spud [the producer John Murphy], making it woozier, spacier, like Xanax. Being in the studio when Radie [Peat], her sister [Sadhbh Peat] and Cormac [Begley] were doing Master Crowley’s [as an accordion trio]. That’s possibly the best thing I’ve ever heard in my life.
You were the first folk group to be nominated for the Mercury prize in 11 years; you performed Go Dig My Grave, the album’s uncompromising opener, at the ceremony in September.
It felt like we were in a very weird world – we didn’t feel part of the industry at all that night. That song wasn’t on our original list of possibles for the album, by the way – we remembered it late on. Now, it seems to be our big tune. It just fell out one day and worked.
What else just fell out? Cormac [Mac Diarmada]’s singing on Lord Abore and Mary Flynn. He’s got a voice like Alasdair Roberts; he just makes your heart melt. And my guitar arrangement on Netta Perseus popped out in two minutes.
You’ve just played a sold-out gig at Roundhouse in London. How was that as an end to your year?
It was one of the coolest gigs ever. To play to 3,000 people and for them to be dead quiet – I couldn’t believe it.
What comes next?
It’d be good to see parts of the world we haven’t before – Japan, South America, maybe. And after doing TV this year [the BBC Two adaptation of Benjamin Myers’ The Gallows Pole], we still want to do a film soundtrack. Something properly weird and creepy, please.
