The Third Folk Revival

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by Mike Hankin
August 2025

When we started OffBeat in 2022, it wasn’t really about anything I don’t think. There wasn’t a grande mission, it was just an opportunity to show our friends some old films. But as it’s grown, it’s become part of what people are rather grandly calling the third folk revival. And, as that revival has grown, I have been asking myself some difficult questions about what it is, what our role is and whether it’s doing more harm than good.

Despite not knowing where we would end up, from the get go OffBeat felt a little different to other folk projects. We always tried to adopt a broader definition of what folk was. Rather than just morris dancers and maypoles, we saw it as being something for ordinary people, the ‘folk’ of this country. Looking back was going to be inevitable but we hoped to paint a picture of these islands today and show people what they had in common with each other. 

So, even though its roots are certainly in folk culture The OffBeat Folk Film Club was never really about folk film (nor was it even meant to be a film club). We saw it as a folk club, cast in the mould of the clubs of the 1960s and 70s. Flat, inclusive, communal and unpolished. We were much more at home in pool halls than druidic rites in stone circles. However, at the time, we couldn’t quite articulate that. 

Before our first screening, my co-founder Rita was feeling low so I suggested we go to Padstow for May Day to see the Obby Oss. I’d wanted to go for years, but life and London and lockdown had always got in the way. May 2022 was going to be my first chance and the first celebration since before the pandemic.

I’d wanted to visit Padstow since 2010, when I lived in Cornwall as an art student. I knew all about Pamplona or the Running Madonna in Italy, but I had heard so little about Britain’s own surviving rites. And to see one in the flesh was going to be very cool.

We drove down in my camper van, stayed in Dartmoor, and ended up in a car park in Padstow. The Osses emerge in the morning, but the real magic was the night before: accordion players and drummers weaving through the town at midnight, circling the maypole and singing the May Day song over and over as the crowd danced its rocking, flailing dance. Raising their hands with the kite and then falling to earth with the lark-o.

As Londoners, we knew we were outsiders, but we felt OK about it. Excitement got the better of us. To be swept away with that crowd is an experience completely out of this world. But, perhaps the real thrill was that it was, quite literally, of this world, our world. This was just after Brexit and the pandemic, when Englishness felt like a pretty uncomfortable identity to carry around. I think like a lot of people at the time I was, perhaps on some level, looking for an English identity that I could get behind. One which was historic without being tied to Empire, rousing but without a poppy or a spitfire in sight. I think I might have found it in folk. 

It was in this hopeful, spirit, carried by the thrill of being part of a counterculture, that we screened our first film. The 1953 documentary Oss Oss Wee Oss! It was about Padstow.

I don’t think I’d screen it again. I’m not sure I’d even go back to Padstow.
Once you’re aware of something you start seeing it everywhere. But what was happening in folk didn’t feel like a Baader–Meinhof phenomenon, there really was a revival of interest taking place. Unsurprisingly, we weren’t the only ones looking for a British identity beyond our new blue passports. Instagram was full of images of the Obby Oss. Likewise, Mari Lwyd, the Haxey Hood, tar barrels and cheese rolling. It seemed like everyone was adding these customs to their calendars, driving to the south west, photographing them and posting them online. We did it too. The cultural cachet came from presenting niche, overlooked, ‘undiscovered’ slices of rural England to the madding crowd. Of course, once they were uploaded, the magic wore off.

These rites and rituals were never meant for mass consumption. The reason that we enjoy them so much is because they’re local and relevant to just a few hundred people. They’re not tourist spectaculars, but genuine, living, extant cultural phenomena. That’s what makes them so appealing but it is also what makes them ‘folk’. However, they have become content for Instagram feeds of a hundred thousand followers. It didn’t take long before books, TV programmes, perfumes and celebrity endorsements started to appear, cashing in on the frenzy. The more niche the ritual, the more cultural (and sometimes actual) capital it enjoyed. The centre of the Venn diagram was always the same: something spectacular but obscure enough to feel like discovery. This is obviously nothing new. People have capitalised on far off cultures for a long time but these cultures are ours. That makes the line between appreciation and appropriation much more blurry.

But what’s going to happen? There is, of course, only so much to “rediscover” and even then, only certain aspects of the culture are deemed worthy of attention. When tastemakers descend (digitally and physically) on Yorkshire villages, Suffolk legends and Cornish monoliths, are they performing a kind of gentrification of folk? A ransacking of culture? And then what happens to those practices considered unworthy of celebrating – those living folk traditions left to wither in obscurity? In selecting and curating, people are bowdlerising folk all over again. Cecil Sharp did it in the 1920s, tidying songs to fit a pastoral vision of England that, even then, hadn’t really existed for hundreds of years. Are we preserving our cultural heritage or are we instead choosing to shine a light on a version of all-morris dancing, all-wassailing, all-stone-circling Britain that isn’t really there? 

Pubs, clubs, pool halls and community centres are places where real ‘folk’ still happens. And it’s alive, but perhaps only just. Maybe our collective attention should be on keeping these spaces and traditions going, because, unlike stone circles, they’re genuinely under threat (even if they are a little less magical!) If we take a cue from the folk revival of the 1960s and 70s, we could channel that energy into making folk urban and political again, rooted in strikes and protest. There is obviously a part of folk which is about the occult, the spooky and the weird, but this isn’t necessarily about what’s real and it maybe doesn’t need reviving. After all, there’s a real crisis unfolding now.

I’m always trying to ask how we can celebrate what survives without exploiting it and to ask what folk means today. But it’s not easy. Most of us can’t afford to rent where we grew up. Work doesn’t pay what it used to. Hope feels thin. That’s why people are looking back. But maybe that’s also why we should be looking harder at the present. Fighting for what we’ve got left.