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The Guardian - UK
The Guardian - UK
Entertainment
Daniel Dylan Wray

‘The folk scene is very middle class. The divide is huge’: Jim Ghedi, the Sheffield singer bringing his doomy music to the movies

The Sheffield-based folk guitarist and singer, Jim Ghedi.
‘Government failures have allowed starving people to continue to starve’ … Jim Ghedi. Photograph: Amelia Baker

Last year, Jim Ghedi was having a chicken dinner at his mother’s house in Sheffield when he checked his phone. “This director started following me on Instagram,” he recalls. “And there’s pictures of him with Nicolas Cage. As a joke, I said to my mam: ‘I might message him and say, let me do your next film score.’ As I said it, he messaged me, saying: ‘I want you to do my next film score.’”

The director was Michael Sarnoski and the film is the forthcoming A24 production The Death of Robin Hood, starring Hugh Jackman and Jodie Comer. Sarnoski had heard Ghedi’s excellent 2025 album, Wasteland, a stirring and brooding album of apocalyptic folk that was a reflection of societal rot and collapse in England. Released on the small Calder Valley label Basin Rock, the album was critically acclaimed – and his most successful and ambitious to date – but it had not turned Ghedi into a household name. He thought that the film opportunity “would all blow away and they’d find out who I am”, he says. “Some top producer would put up the red flag.”

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