Humanity at Our Most Unsettling: An Interview with Folk Artist Frankie Archer

By George Clyde

A small canal runs through North Paddington, lined with colorful houseboats and street art on the walls of housing units nearby. It’s a scene that’s unique to this area, which is famous for its ethnic diversity, its history of social activism, and its ongoing relationship with the arts. On the night of Friday, June 7th, if somebody had been walking along the canal and strolled into St. Mary Magdalene church, now used as a venue for the arts called Grand Junction, they would have come upon a dimly lit folk performance, pulsing with the artistic vitality of the area. The night featured traditional folk music from Iran and the US, a solo performance of more modern original folk songs, and reinterpreted classics from the North of England, infused with electronic elements and sung by the headliner, Frankie Archer.

I had gotten a chance to interview Frankie earlier in the day during sound check. At the time she wore blue jeans and a white shirt from 1985 that showed support for miners from the gay community, and she had been cheerful and happy to chat about her music. But here on stage she was transformed.

A golden stagelight illuminated her face; her arms waved gracefully as she looked into somewhere far beyond the crowd and sang these harrowing songs about murder, incest and rape. Clearly Frankie wasn’t crafting her music for commercial success, and this wasn’t the image of herself that she presented in her ordinary life. Some part of herself, deep beneath the person I talked to earlier, was out there on stage.

From a young age Frankie had been doing things her way. Her parents weren’t musical or artistic and she admitted that folk music was “a very uncool thing for a 12 year old to be into,” but to Frankie it just felt right.

“In school I had been taught to read the notes off the page. It was very strict. It wasn’t fun. But this was fun,” Frankie said, remembering her first introduction to folk music.. “There was so much energy in it.”

After many years of playing with a few bands at local pubs and working some jobs in between, Frankie finally made something that she felt was unique to her, so she put it out as her first single. “I was messing around doing everything. I was composing in some contemporary classical styles and then doing lots of Bulgarian influenced stuff and some like synth pop songs. I was doing everything really. And this was the one that just seemed like nobody else or like nothing else.”

The song is called Over the Border. It’s an old tune that Frankie added lyrics to about nature’s indifference to our man-made borders. The video features an interpretive dance along Hadrian’s wall in the north of England, where two lovers are separated by it before coming together.

The single seems fitting as an opening for Frankie’s career, which has carried the same disregard for borders and genres. Her tracks infuse all kinds of different electronic music elements. Throughout the performance at Grand Junction, she was constantly switching back and forth between looping electronic drum tracks and picking up her fiddle.

“I don’t work very consciously,” she said of her writing process. “I just sit down and then a thought comes into my head like, oh, you need to do this thing. You need to add this thing. So I do. And I really, really like that flow of building.”

For Frankie that flow state often seems to take her to some dark places. “I don’t sit down and process the emotions consciously. But obviously, like, this is something I really resonate with. So I think, I think it’s kind of very, very deep in us. And yeah, I think I do make connections with certain songs because of certain experiences, but I’m not digging into where they are. I don’t know exactly. It’s subconscious.”

Frankie pointed out, laughing a little at her own tendency towards these deeply disturbing tales, that she does have some playful tunes in her catalog. But she also compared these disturbing stories to things you might see in a gossip magazine. We all seem to have an often subconscious fascination with the hidden and twisted parts of our own nature.

Frankie’s interest in these songs comes in part from being able to empathize with the women in these stories. Her reinterpretations sometimes give more power to these victimized and helpless damsels. “A lot of songs do have women in their narratives. So, that, I resonate with, definitely when I’m choosing songs,” Frankie said. “In ways I’ve tried to say, like, these shit things, here they are. They’re in the traditional music canon and they’re still happening now.”

The song linked above is Oxford City, Frankie Archer’s most recent release about a girl whose drink is drugged. The lyrics are ancient, but Frankie added audio from a modern bar, signifying that the story remains just as relevant today.

Whatever Frankie might be singing about now or in the future, she has continued to do the things that feel right to her. She’s not interested in what’s going to sell or make people happy or even in fulfilling some bigger self-purpose. She does what excites her, and really, what else can someone do? When I asked her what she hopes for in her future, her answer was simple. “I would like to never get bored of making music,” she said. “I’d also like to make a living from it [laugh], I’ll get there. But yeah, I’d like to still get excited by ideas, no matter if I’ve been making music for 2 years or 50 years.”