Some of you may remember that for a while we had a performance wing of the project called The Ominous Folk of Hopeless Maine. Ominous Folk gigged for the last time about two and a half years ago.
Some of us went on to start a new project called Carnival of Cryptids. Nimue and James are the core of this project. Other regulars have sung with Ominous Folk and can be found in YouTube videos. Robin Burton, Jessica Law and Keith Errington are core Cryptids, and we did get Susie out with us for one event.
Carnival of Cryptids sings some of the same material as Ominous Folk, but has a bigger seasonal repertoire and more content we’ve picked up for local events. We mostly stay in Gloucestershire and sing at community events.
Carnival of Cryptids has just released an album Feral Folk which you can find on Bandcamp. It includes the Hopeless versions of Haul Away Joe and Prickle Eye Bush, which are Nimue’s reworkings, plus her original song Three Drops. There is also a Jessica Law song about eels, a traditional song full of ravens, a May song and an ominous thing about fairies.
It’s available to pre-order now, and will be launched at the Stroud Wassail on the 21st February.
For a while, we had a side project called The Ominous Folk of Hopeless, Maine. This (for those of you who missed it) was a performance team that took music and stories to events. We did a couple of stage shows, set on the island that each went out for a season, with high points including performing at Festival at the Edge.
The original team was Tom Brown, James Weaslegrease, Susie Roberts and myself. The largest team we ever had added Jessica Law, Keith Errington and Robin Burton to the mix for a gig at Woodchester in 2023. Towards the end, the whole project showed signs of opening out into something larger involving more people.
However, between Susie getting ill and Tom and I separating, the original project became unviable. Four of us became Jessica Law and the Outlaws (myself, James and Keith supporting Jess) and the last few Ominous Folk gigs were handled with that line up.
Back in the autumn of 2023, James and I gave some serious thought to what we wanted to do next, because we both wanted to keep much of the repertoire we’d developed for Hopeless, and have room for people to get involved. Most especially we wanted something Susie could come back to if she recovered. She’s doing really well and we’re looking forward to being able to sing with her again.
Carnival of Cryptids keeps the weird, magical, sinister mayhem that was at the heart of Ominous Folk. It’s a project with a lot more people involved – we wanted to make it flexible so that people with health issues, care commitments, work commitments and the like could be part of it without risking being over extended. It’s gone really well, and we have some great new voices in the mix.
The above photo shows a selection of the team at a fairy event in Gloucester. The lineup varies a lot (James, Keith and I are constants, Jessica almost always sings with us), but it’s not a wildly different sound from Ominous Folk. At the moment we’re not offering shows, only sets, but I can probably be talked into writing something if anyone turns out to be really keen. We are mostly performing in Gloucestershire with this project (Jessica Law and the Outlaws go further afield). I am open to suggestions, if anyone fancies some folky steampunk cryptid eccentricity for an event.
I’m glad that we’ve been able to evolve something new – fewer tentacles, more wings and the occasion fish hat, it’s a joyful sort of project, and getting good things done.
Without Susie Roberts, there would have been no Ominous Folk and no stage shows.
I first met Susie through environmental activities in Stroud, and we were both regulars at Piranha Poetry. When I started putting together a Stroud mumming side I asked if she might be interested, and she was. There was some singing involved, and Susie expressed an interest in doing more of it.
At that point, Hopeless, Maine music was a trio called A Cup Full of Tentacles (Nimue Brown, James Weaslegrease, Tom Brown). There had been some singing at events, but there was no momentum and it wasn’t that strong a sound. Adding Susie to the mix changed everything.
Susie is an excellent harmony singer, and her innovative arrangements brought new life to the material. As a consequence of her involvement I felt emboldened to have a go at writing a show, and it rolled out from there. It helped considerably that Susie drives and was willing to drive to events. Prior to that, Hopeless, Maine had been dependent on public transport and there are a lot of places it isn’t easy to get to without a car. Her driving also made it possible for me to keep doing events during the years when I was very ill. Unreliable blood pressure and public transport do not mix well.
Susie brought her own brand of humour to the project, and a longstanding enthusiasm for goth music. It was thanks to her that Keith Errington ended up writing a song about Annamarie Nightshade. She’s also contributed to Hopeless, Maine theatricals at events and to the online festivals.
Since the autumn of 2023, health problems have meant that Susie hasn’t been able to do gigs. James and I would have tried to keep Ominous Folk going had she been up for it, but it wasn’t viable as a project without her.
For those of you who enjoyed the music, we are exploring a new project that won’t be Hopeless, Maine related – Carnival of Cryptids is shaping up rather well, and is likely to be a larger and more anarchic group. We very much hope that Susie will be able to come and sing with us later in the year.
I first met Keith Errington on a stage at a steampunk event. We hit it off instantly and it was because of him that over those two days I wrote a Hopeless, Maine sea shanty. That was the second song I’d written for the setting – No Hope At All came first. The existence of The Ominous Folk as a project owed a lot to that weekend.
Keith came onboard at some point after then, writing stories for the blog, and getting Hopeless out to events. His Hopeless, Maine radio shows in the style of Garrison Keillor also pre-dated the shows that I wrote and led me towards trying that. Performing at events makes a huge difference to how people see the work and he led the way for us on that.
It was because Keith wrote The Oddatsea and was willing to organise a kickstarter for it that we first got New England Gothic out into the world, too. Those two books have been published in one volume by Outland Entertainment,
Over the years he’s written songs for the settings, enabled us to do online events, supported Hopeless through Patreon, sung with The Ominous Folk, recorded us, and made a lot of things more feasible. He’s done much of this very quietly.
Keith is also responsible for a horribly funny children’s book that mostly isn’t for children – Once Upon A Hopeless, Maine.
Last year when things broke down with Tom Brown – who stopped communicating with me about Hopeless, Keith was the person who kept me going. His love of the setting, and his speaking up for the community of people around this project gave me the reasons I needed not to just give up on the whole thing. That things are still happening on Hopeless now is very much thanks to him.
At this point I am fairly confident that if the story of the island is going forward from here, it will be in Keith’s hands next. I’ve got two novellas set after the graphic novels and I need to figure out how best to get those into the world. Those stories bring in some new elements (thanks to Dr Abbey!) that I didn’t know how to take forward, but Keith has a sense of how things might progress from here. And let me tell you, he’s got some pretty darn exciting ideas.
In the coming weeks I’m going to be doing more posts like this to highlight contributions from the wider Hopeless family. There are a lot of people who have significantly contributed to this project over the years, and I want to celebrate that.
Recently at the Raising Steam festival, Mark Hayes helpfully pointed his camera at The Ominous Folk. He’s now turned his videos into a blog post.
There are a couple of technical things here – because we’ve migrated to a different host, while we still look like a wordpress site we’ve lost the power to reblog, so we have to take a slightly different approach to sharing things.
Thing number two is that Mark is a lovely author who is hugely supportive of other authors. If he’s not on your radar already, do take a few minutes to explore his blog and get a sense of the wonderful creative things he does.
What we’re going to get in a bit is a charming little insert block (wait for it….) If this was a reblog we’d start with the opening text of Mark’s post and then there would be a link, so I shall try to replicate that effect….
“Probably because there was no one competent available I was asked to record the Ominous Folk of Hopeless Maine performance at Rising Steam 2023. So I did…
The first song is about demonic devices, which is to say it is a song form the perspective of a demon forced to power a device. Possibly a steam roller, may be a kettle, or possibly a really over engineers rotary washing line. Please remember not to try this kind of thing at home unless you have a 5th level summoning circle and an emergency banishing spell to hand…
