Here’s ‘Burial Club’ a 19th century broadside ballad set to music by Julian and the Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, backed with a hauntingly haunting reading of ‘The Ghost of Maria’.
Taken from our forthcoming Broadside Bangers project, a new anthology of some of the most melodramatic, gruesome and supernatural broadside ballads from the 17th to 19th centuries. These popular ballads, selected from archives by Gaskell, cover everything from funeral arrangements to cat food and rural insurrection. They were printed and sung in the Georgian and Victorian eras but have lain unrecorded and largely unperformed for the last 100 years. Indeed, many of their tunes have been lost to time, and so the words have been rearranged and re-fitted with newly composed music on piano, accordions, violin, drums, bouzouki, bass, banjo and guitar.
There will be gigs, an album and a printed broadside sheet to come in 2023.
Julian Gaskell 