Lusty singalongs and Brexit portents: the eternal flame of The Wicker Man soundtrack

It’s one of the most disturbing juxtapositions in British cinema: a gigantic wicker figure blazes in a moment of shocking violence as a semicircle of people smilingly incant a traditional English folk song.

The 1973 British film The Wicker Man drew its horror from Britain’s pagan past, and indeed its music – the soundtrack, fusing traditionals with new compositions and bawdy pub singalongs, is now widely recognised as a classic. But the film’s initial failure and the long disappearance of the recordings meant that when the little-known US theatre director and musician Paul Giovanni died in 1990, he likely believed his soundtrack had been entirely forgotten. Instead, its importance is being minted this month by a concert at London’s high-cultural Barbican centre.

The Wicker Man, created by screenwriter Anthony Shaffer and director Robin Hardy, concerns a devout Christian police officer who investigates an alleged disappearance in the fictional rural community of Summerisle, shot on location in Dumfries and Galloway in southern Scotland. It was soundtracked, though, by a jobbing New Yorker.

Born in New Jersey in 1933, Giovanni had fronted psych-pop band Side Show before scoring an experimental folk-rock production of Twelfth Night, which Shaffer had caught by chance on a visit to the US. The steady masculine baritone heard on Wicker Man tracks such as Corn Rigs and Gently Johnny is Giovanni’s – he briefly appears in the film singing the latter track. “Paul wanted to work with students because he thought they would be cheaper,” says Gary Carpenter, who had just graduated from the Royal College of Music when he was hired for the film’s session band Magnet. “He would sing the songs and I’d write them down and flesh them out.”

The soundtrack became a grab-bag of assorted music including the Middle English song Sumer Is Icumen In, a new arrangement of the Robert Burns ballad Rigs O’Barley and children’s nursery rhymes. Original Giovanni compositions such as the sensual Willow’s Song and incidental psychedelic guitar music owed much to the contemporaneous UK folk rock boom of Pentangle and Fairport Convention.

Lesley Mackie was cast as schoolgirl Daisy then invited to the soundtrack’s London recording sessions to sing The Highland Widow’s Lament. “I remember being handed £20 as I left the session,” says Mackie. “It was that casual, but I just loved being there. Paul was a lovely human being.”

Infamously, the film tanked, seen as the B-movie flipside to Don’t Look Now’s high-class horror. “If I mentioned on my CV that I was involved in The Wicker Man, for at least 10 years afterwards it was tumbleweed,” says Carpenter. No soundtrack recording was released, and the film’s fall into obscurity echoed a wider decline in the UK folk scene in the late 1970s as an unusually high number of key performers either died or left the industry.

Much later, in 1988, BBC Two commissioned the late night series Moviedrome, whose remit was to show cult films with recorded introductions by cinema scholar Alex Cox. Its first film was the UK TV premiere of The Wicker Man, and this was the starting gun for an underground revival of the film.

Jonny Trunk, part of a new wave of crate-digging film music collectors, could barely come back from the pub in the early 1990s without a friend putting on a VHS rip of the film. “There’s a graveyard scene with some flute music and I thought it was one of the most beautiful pieces of music I’d ever heard,” says Trunk, “I thought, I need to get that on a piece of vinyl.”

It took him three years of letter writing and unanswered phone calls as the film rights leapfrogged between companies. Trunk eventually cut a deal with distributor Canal+ who would authorise the soundtrack if he could find it.

“I went into the vaults of Pinewood Studios,” Trunk says. “We located 13 enormous musical effects tapes which they set up on these flat reel-to-reel players.” The first sound Trunk heard was the chopping of aeroplane propellers against a low harmonium drone: the opening sounds of the film. “It was one of the most exciting moments of my entire life.”

The 1998 release sold quicker than Trunk could press them up. “Christopher Lee went bonkers,” remembers Trunk of the veteran actor who had long called The Wicker Man his finest work. “He asked me to research Tinkers of Rye. The English Folk Song and Dance Society came back and said it was just made up. He was devastated.” An official release based on tapes owned by Carpenter would be released by Silva Screen in 2002.

“I think Jonny Trunk releasing The Wicker Man soundtrack kind of rewrote history,” says comedian Stewart Lee approvingly, who first owned a bootleg of the soundtrack ripped from the Moviedrome broadcast. “It made younger musicians think that acid folk” – a genre name applied in the 00s to the psychedelic folk of the 60s and 70s – “was a bigger thing than it was. The genre was almost retroactively created by The Wicker Man.”

Suddenly in the 00s, UK folk acts were forming in the image and likeness of the soundtrack – Trembling Bells, United Bible Studies, the Owl Service – while acid folk became a prized tag among collectors, compilers and DJs. Another genre, hauntology (most associated with Ghost Box Records), became an artistic movement which used the forgotten cultures of the 1970s such as The Wicker Man to comment on lost futures in our capitalist present.

David Bramwell, with singer Eliza Skelton, began hosting Sing-Along-a-Wicker Man events in Brighton in 2009. “It started out as a 25-capacity thing but the buzz got around,” he says. “It was more inspired by Vic and Bob than the polished singalongs you get at some cinemas.” By 2023, there have been more than 100 events across the UK. “The Landlord’s Daughter is sung the most lustily,” says Bramwell, “it’s a good knees-up and you can slap your thighs to it. Festival audiences are the rowdiest and we like that; people just lean into it.”

British festival culture would more broadly be shaped by the film’s revival. Scotland’s Wickerman alternative festival ran from 2001 to 2015 while Wales’ Green Man festival culminates with a similar ritual burning each year. Where in the early 1990s, new age travellers burned DIY wicker men at Glastonbury, in 2023 the film will be screened as part of the festival’s official programme.

The soundtrack would find a new resonance during the political shocks of the last decade. “Brexit had just happened,” says electronic producer Gazelle Twin of her decision to record a hypnotic and sinister reimagining of the soundtrack’s Fire Leap with the NYX drone choir, “and I wanted to explore what being English meant to me. I wanted to shine a light on some of these falsehoods that Christianity might present.” The piece is being performed at the forthcoming Barbican concert. “Performing it as a group of women,” says the producer, “[we’re] very aware of violence against women and every time we perform it we feel like there’s this energy.”

Now, the film’s golden jubilee is arriving at a moment of booming interest in Britain’s folk heritage, from neolithic walking group Stone Club to Wiltshire publication Weird Walk, even Stroud morris dancing collective Boss Morris’s appearance alongside Wet Leg at the 2023 Brit awards. “You can tell so much about where a society is at by what they’re listening to,” says writer Melanie Xulu who edits Cornish acid folk zine Moof. “The fact that folk music is having a revival says a lot about where we are now. People are a bit lost and are looking to reconnect with our past, as we’re becoming ever more city-based and global.”

Broadcaster Zakia Sewell, who adores the soundtrack’s “heady mix of high eroticism and haunting darkness,” regularly plays traditional English folk to a young and diverse skewing audience on her popular NTS breakfast show. “There’s a lot of people now looking for alternative visions of Britain, whether real or imagined,” she says. “What that’s connected to is this general interest in the occult, the magical, and a rejection of the rational or objective conservative, capitalist and consumerist way that’s been the way for the past 50 years.”

Fifty years on, The Wicker Man’s imagined folk culture has shaped England’s actual folk culture. “It’s kind of a confection isn’t it?” says Lee. “But folk music, as we understand it, is too.” He cites Cecil Sharp, who collected British folk in the Edwardian era and curated the definitive folk canon. “He picked and chose what he wanted to include and tried to create English folk song and dance based on what his vision was. It’s always been manipulated. A folk culture as we would like it or hope it to be – and then of course that becomes a real thing.” We may not like or hope for it, but on an island engaged in sacrifice and discord post-Brexit, and in violent ceremonial rejections of outsiders by its leadership, it should be no surprise that The Wicker Man still burns bright.