by Martin Popoff
One of the treats with any Skyclad album is the socially conscious literary persuasion of bard-in-residence Walkyier. Folkemon is filled with the manŐs famous puns and double entendres. I wondered what his own favourite lyric moments were on the album.
"I like Polkageist! very much. It's a song about a Victorian British gentleman with a very stiff upper lip who's walking through a forest. He's an explorer in some foreign land, he's walking along and he hears the distance sound of a violin and out of the trees comes a wild chicky witch who seduces him. And it's kind of a song for all the macho man out there who view women as second-class and inferior in some way to man. Because I think at the end of the day, women can be very, very strongly indeed, when they what to. And a lot of the time I think they've got us poor men exactly where they want us. So it kind of reflects that and it's also a bit about repressed sexuality. It's a bit of a perverse lyric, a bit tongue in cheek; it's funny, there are a few little plays on words in there that are quite naughty and made me laugh. I think the most direct lyric is Think Back And Lie Of England which is about all the naughty things we British have done, what the English had done to the Scots, Welsh, and Irish really, over thousands of years, persecuting our brothers and sisters who we share the British Isles with. And also what the British did when we were in our little empire-building phase, the things we did in India and Africa and China with slavery. And also the colonies in the States and Canada. We were quite bossy and walked into people's countries and said this is our country now, which I don't think you can do. At the same time I'm very proud to be British, and I think there are a lot of very cool things happening and that have come out of Britain. But I think it's important that you acknowledge the dark side."
Did anybody in the band want to keep pursuing a folkier direction and subsequently had to be dragged screaming and quicking into this heavier album?
Skyclad - Folked-Up And Metal Thrashing Mad Page 4