Album review: LADY MAISERY AND JIMMY ALDRIDGE & SID GOLDSMITH – Wakefire

April 28th, 2026 by jason

Bandcamp [Release date 01.05.26]

After several years delighting audiences with their wintertime project Awake Arise, the folk supergroup of Lady Maisery (Hannah James, Rowan Rheingans & Hazel Askew) and Jimmy Aldridge & Sid Goldsmith, have joined forces again to celebrate the summer.

Do make sure you invest in the CD as it is a special double length album-book, wonderfully illustrated throughout and with lyrics and prose, plus the all-important stories behind the songs. With twenty seven tracks in total the listener really does get their money’s worth and more!

The album flows through the summer, starting with ‘Summer’s In’ and ‘The Cuckoo’, going right through to harvest time in September. A folk concept album without any prog rock noodling nonsense!

Being released on May 1, May Day, little wonder there are a few protest songs on the album including ‘May Day’, asking the all important question in its chorus – which side are you on? The song features spoken word, as do many of the songs, and it adds to overall strength of the album.

Highlights include ‘May Morning Dew’, ‘River Came Back’, their version of Bela Fleck’s ‘What’cha Gonna Do?’ and ‘Harvest Festival’, which is built around a spoken word passage from Laurie Lee’s ‘Village Christmas and Other Notes on the English Year’.

An album to be listened to in one go, although the single (an Ivor Cutler song) ‘I’m Going to a Field’ does lend itself to being ‘stand-a-alone’ and perfect for airplay & playlists.

Lady Maisey and Jimmy Aldridge & Sid Goldsmith have created another seasonal delight, full of thoughtful lyrics, impassioned playing and tunes that are both melodious and memorable. ****

Review by Jason Ritchie

If the star system was built on presentation and quantity, then this album would be getting a big five, but unfortunately its not so I have to give it a three for effort.

It is a lavish presentation without doubt – the cd comes in a book, not a booklet in a cd case, a cd in a book, with a hard back, colour photos, lyrics and words. There are 27 tracks in all, yes 27, it wasn’t a typo. Although a fair few of them clock in under two minutes.

Lady Maisery are Hannah James, Hazel Askew and Rowan Rheingans, with Jimmy Aldridge and Sid Goldsmith being two blokes they bumped into in the pub. Just kidding, they are all well respected folk musicians and have collaborated before on a winters themed project called Awake Arise

On first listening, this album sounds like standard trad folk fayre, but delve deeper on subsequent listens and there are some pertinent themes going on, like workers rights and the environment, tackled in clever subtle ways.

There are quite a few spoken word passages among the 27 tracks, but all the tracks reference summer in one way or another. Released on the first of May, the album is a journey from the start to the end of summer and to that end it achieves its point magnificently. It kicks off with Anne Briggs, Summers In which features some new cheeky verses by Hannah James, but most noticeably some beautiful vocal harmonies, which carry throughout the album.

There are some pieces by Laurie Lee, he of Cider With Rosie fame, in fact I think the first passage about him getting lost in some long grass as a child is from that very book. It features spoken word passages and songs written by all the artists individually and even has a dear little Ivor Cutler song, sung a capella, about sitting in field, and what more summer can you get than sitting in a field. Also present is a Robin Williamson from The Incredible String Band song with Good As Gone. from 1965. There are some history lessons about summer traditions in Padworth, Mayday workers celebrations, some recent recollections of summers in Italy, with a poke at global warming, and fires. And here I learnt something new – bonfires were originally made from bones, clean bones I hasten to add, and it doesn’t mean good fire which I have thought all my life. I love shit like this, my head is full of trivia. So the other two fires which people indulged in on Midsummers Day in the 15th century were St Johns fire made of bones and wood, and the wakefire made of just wood. I kid you not it’s all in here.

It is a massive project and must have taken a hell of a lot of preparation and fore thought to collate all the ideas and then execute them in such a cohesive manner.

But I keep coming back to Peter And The Wolf, one of the first musical and spoken word journeys I made as a child, where you were transported right into the moment and the story with anticipation, but on subsequent listening’s it had lost it’s mystique as you knew what was coming. I can imagine it is a great live experience.

I hope it does well as obviously a lot of love as well as money has been poured into this, and it deserves some recognition, at least in the folk world. ***

Review by Andy Sharrocks

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