Lewes gig offers "joyous lambasting of everything that’s wrong in the world"

Nicola Kearey and Ian Carter are promising what they are calling a “satirical celebration of mistakes – a joyous lambasting of everyone and everything that’s wrong in the world, against the real-time backdrop of global uncertainty, corruption and political unrest.”

It features: a London Charivari. Rough Music. A gleeful old-fashioned cancelling. A Chaunter’s delight. 14th-century recording demons collecting mistakes in a sack. Women mugging rich merchants. Nettles being weed on. Rubbish food at Lent. A terrible plan. An undoing. The aftermath of a car crash. Catching people doing something they shouldn’t. And nursery rhymes reimagined as death threats. A Thousand Pokes is about as far away from pastoral folk music as you can get, they promise.

Nicola said: “It's our fourth studio album and we've already put out an EP early this year. The title of the album is based on a 14th-century demon invented by the scribes that were copying illuminated manuscripts day in, day out. Mostly it was convenient that they created someone that was responsible for their mistakes. Our work is very much inspired by tales from the past and relating them to the present. This was the scribe’s demon. He was responsible for the mistakes in the work that the scribes were making. The relevance is that today all our mistakes are visible on the internet and everyone can see the mistakes that you are making.”

Ian added: “He collects the mistakes and reads them back at you on judgement day and it's like with the internet where people say these wild things and behave in a certain way but then actually it is recorded and can be presented back at you.

“We have a long running concept in our work of trying to look at traditional music to a certain extent and seeing the relevance. We have found that there's not much music collected from London that is considered traditional music from the folk canon and there's not much from other cities, like Leicester for example. So we want to do these songs and show the relevance. The relevance can be anything but we really, really don't do pastoral. We're from the city. We talk about London.”

And that shared heritage is important, as Nicola says: “We met each other at sixth-form college. It has been a long time. We are a very equal partnership in terms of how we operate. It's a very long standing and very deep creative partnership and it is very relevant that we've known each other for a long time, that we come from the same place and that our families are from London and came to London at various different times.”

As for the title of the duo: “We wrote a song a long time ago that had that phrase in it. It is an expression that was a shorthand for being disruptors and challenger of the status quo. To be known as Kearey and Carter would have been a little bit dry. So we chose Stick In The Wheel as a good metaphor for what we're doing in terms of our work and challenging and questioning the set-up. Music can be quite rigid and that's what we are challenging. If you've heard our music or seen us live, then the music is definitely very self-explanatory.”