FOLK TALKS AT THE TOWN HALL 2023
Johnny Campbell - Saturday afternoon 12.00-1.00pm
Class Trespass: How Radical Histories Interlink with Folk Music and Class Struggles.
This talk will encompass the mass Trespass events of old, the modern Right to Roam movement and how Folk music has always been an integral part of struggles for justice. How he left has always used music and culture to spread it's message.
Johnny Campbell is a musician from West Yorkshire and focuses on Northern English radical song and story and the connection (and disconnection) to the land. He's also a writer for Britain's biggest selling outdoor magazine, Country Walking and an advocate for the Right to Roam campaign.
Emily Oldfield - Saturday afternoon 1.20-2.20pm
Off the (b)eaten track – A Talk Exploring the Local Landscape and Folk Customs, Through Food!
So often contemporary ‘food culture’ can seem like an exclusive field – encompassing restaurants, reviews, arguments about ‘taste’… and usually involving money. It can feel divisive. Yet, the need for food is universal; it connects us to each other and our surroundings, across time. In this talk, Emily Oldfield will explore how the human histories in this landscape have been shaped by food and how food has shaped them – through agriculture, industry, song and story. Routes and recipes intertwine to offer a different approach to this area of the North, with a determination to uncover often-obscured working-class histories that make this place what it is.
Emily is a writer and poet currently working on Scraps, a book following her journey from Burnley (where she was born) to West Yorkshire (where she lives now), wandering the ways of trade and transportation, in search of a much more far-reaching food culture.
Joe Solo - Saturday afternoon 2.40-3.40pm
Where HAVE all the flowers gone?
What do Sir Isaac Newton, Karl Marx, Antonio Gramsci and Monty Python have in common? They have all helped explain the role of Folk music in shaping society. In this talk, we'll explore the symbiosis between Folk and Punk, the urgent need to re-embrace protest, and why one pithy joke in Life Of Brian defines the failure of the Left to combat the rise of Neoliberalism like nothing else.
Joe Solo is an award-winning musician, writer, poet, activist, broadcaster and washing machine engineer from Scarborough.