# Folk Revisited: Shirley Collins — Part 3 (Desert Island Discs, Crowlink, Archangel Hill, and more Personal Favourites)

### In the final part of our Folk Revisted three-parter on Shirley Collins, we learn about who else she likes to listen to and take a deep dive into her Crowlink EP (2021) and Archangel Hill (2023)

[Alex Gallacher](https://substack.com/@klofmag)

Jun 18, 2026

Welcome back to Folk Revisted, an ongoing series that I kicked off with the wonderfully influential **Shirley Collins**. **[In part 1](https://klofmag.substack.com/p/folk-revisited-shirley-collins-returns)**, we covered Shirley’s return to music in 2016, taking in her **15 favourite songs**, a review of **Lodestar**, and a live review of a remarkable evening at **The Roundhouse, London, in 2019**. **[In part 2](https://klofmag.substack.com/p/folk-revisited-shirley-collins-a)**, we covered **The Sweet Primeroses** (a Topic Records Reissue Review), **House & Land** performing ‘Ca the Yowes’ for Shirley, **Heart’s Ease** (Album Review) and the documentary **Southern Journey (Revisited)**.

For our finale, we’ll be covering: **Crowlink** (2021) and **Archangel Hill (2023).** You may recall from the last set of reviews that KLOF’s Tom Blake concluded that **Heart’s Ease** was an album even better than its predecessor, an album as good as folk music gets. The reviews you’ll be reading below are also from Tom.

## Shirley Collins Mixtape

Following the release of Heart’s Ease, Shirley Collins also curated a Mixtape for BBC Radio 3’s Late Junction in 2020. This was a very different offering from the 15 favourite songs we shared in **[part 1](https://klofmag.substack.com/p/folk-revisited-shirley-collins-returns).** During the show, which unfortunately is no longer available to listen to, she made no secret of the fact that she rarely listens to new music, instead preferring to read. Even when the evening light fades, and she can no longer read, she turns to memory rather than a music player to hear those ballads that have inspired her for so long.

That said, she does have some clear favourites and during the show, she enthuses about some of her favourite singers including **[Radie Peat](https://klofmag.com/2019/09/watch-radie-peat-my-bonny-boy/)** of Lankum:

Radie Peat :: My Bonny Boy - YouTube

Tap to unmute

[Radie Peat :: My Bonny Boy](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aqhv_Pgw6SU) [Myles O'Reilly](https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/channel/UCODbae1LOpPJfun8VNRrWhQ)

…and **Alasdair Roberts**, in her words, they can do no wrong (Anne Briggs told me pretty much the same thing).

Alasdair Roberts "Ice Age" (Live at Home) - YouTube

Tap to unmute

[Alasdair Roberts "Ice Age" (Live at Home)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4L8cWcuyjA8) [Drag City](https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/channel/UCOxV9BCCIQU6HLev3oLH1Tg)

### Also played during the show:

#### Lankum - The Granite Gaze (from False Lankum)

Lankum - The Granite Gaze (Official Video) - YouTube

Tap to unmute

[Lankum - The Granite Gaze (Official Video)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cZo5qs2VamE) [LankumDublin](https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/channel/UCCBY35FoIPE7twB7je8H2pg)

#### Alabama Sacred Harp Singers - Sherburne

Holly Springs Sacred Harp singing: Sherburne, #186 (1982) - YouTube

Tap to unmute

[Holly Springs Sacred Harp singing: Sherburne, #186 (1982)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rT7GkureYiE) [Lomax Film Collection](https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/channel/UCInpAOuv6nqdf6EheU4Wfjg)

#### Bessie Jones & Georgia Sea Island Singers - Sheep Sheep Don’t You Know The Road

Sheep Don't You Know the Road - YouTube

Tap to unmute

[Sheep Don't You Know the Road](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=34Bhi7A3sI8) [Bessie Jones - Topic](https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/channel/UCQVYbBpIhyiLKkuaMuItHnw)

#### Current 93 - All The Pretty Little Horses (feat. Shirley Collins)

Current 93 feat. Shirley Collins ~ All the Pretty Little Horses - YouTube

Tap to unmute

[Current 93 feat. Shirley Collins ~ All the Pretty Little Horses](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=juTiy2NBgbQ) [AnaStasia](https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/channel/UCGJY9mpHcjJzuysndfP2oyw)

## Desert Island Discs (2023)

In 2023, Shirley was also a guest on BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs. Several folk singers and musicians have been featured over the years, including **Martin Carthy** (2013), whose luxury item was his guitar (not surprisingly), and his book of choice was a volume of ‘The collected works of Charles Dickens’ (a popular choice of many castaways). **Peggy Seeger** (2001) took her Banjo with an inexhaustible supply of strings & pegs (her book choice was ‘A Scots Quair by Lewis Grassic Gibbon’), and **Joan Baez** (1993) chose a personal pouch with a silver lion in it over her guitar, and The Diary by Anne Frank.

Shirley Collins chose a collection of Brodie detective novels by Kate Atkinson; her luxury item was a solar-powered fridge filled with Italian Ice cream and two lipsticks, her Castaway favourite track was Poor Sally Sits a Weeping.

#### She played
- Concerto Caledonia – “Chiling O Guiry” ( _The Red Red Rose: Songs & Tunes from 18th Century Scotland_, Delphian Records)
- The Copper Family – “The Birds in the Spring” ( _Come Write Me Down_, Topic Records)
- Maddy Prior & The Carnival Band – “Who Would True Valour See” ( _Sing Lustily and with Good Courage_, Saydisc)
- Sheila Smith – “Dear Father, Pray Build Me a Boat” ( _I’m a Romany Rai_, Topic)
- Mississippi Fred McDowell – “61 Highway Blues” ( _Southern Journey Vol 3: 61 Highway Mississippi_, Rounder)
- Dolly Collins – “Poor Sally Sits a-weeping” ( _Harking Back_, Durtro)
- Richard & Linda Thompson – “A Heart Needs A Home” ( _Hokey Pokey_, Island Records)
- Mark Knopfler – “Going Home” ( _Local Hero_, UMC)

## A Flexi-disc Single

In 2020, ahead of Christmas, Domino Records released a special signed, flexi-disc Christmas card release. The single was ‘The Christmas Song’, taken from he Heart’s Ease album, in his review, Blake notes:

> The milkmaid protagonist of _Rolling In The Dew_ makes a cameo in _The Christmas Song_, a brief sparkle of a song that manages to convey both the hardship and the beauty of a cold December morning in less than two minutes.

For those too young to recall the delight of getting a free flexi-disc with your favourite music magazine, they were essentially a floppy piece of plastic with a moulded groove, like a vinyl record has.

Shirley Collins - The Christmas Song (Official Audio) - YouTube

Tap to unmute

[Shirley Collins - The Christmas Song (Official Audio)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=85aILoQaJrs) [Domino Recording Co.](https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/channel/UCA8xMhX1DfxA8UKsfjn9vQg)

## Crowlink EP (Album Review)

_By Thomas Blake (2021)_

Traditional music’s eternal paradox is that it is always changing. It has to change in order to stay alive. As one of folk’s true pioneers since the late 1950s, **Shirley Collins** has seen – and indeed played a part in bringing about – many of these changes. She has earned the right to do things differently, and _**Crowlink**_, her latest EP, is perhaps her most experimental and exploratory work to date.

The final song on last year’s stunning _Heart’s Ease_ album was also called Crowlink – after a hamlet in Collins’ home county of Sussex – and the five tracks here take their cue from that record’s hauntingly beautiful endpoint, with its sound of thunder and birdsong. But these are more than reflections or riffs on a theme. Each song is perfectly self-contained and the EP as a whole is a small wonder. Opener _Across The Field_ is a spoken snippet, less than half a minute long, which somehow encapsulates Collins’ past and present as a recording artist. Listeners may recognise some of the words from _Just As The Tide Was Flowing_, a song she previously recorded as a solo artist and with the Albion Country Band. Here, with its field recording of birdsong, it becomes a kind of mantra, an almost magical link with a creative spirit that seems to exist outside the passage of time.

The field recordings – provided by collaborator Matthew Shaw, who also produced the record – are important here. They help to pin the music to a particular place – in this case, rural Sussex – but they are also vital to that timeless quality Collins has perfected. On the highly textural instrumental _At Break Of Day_, Shaw’s synths take centre stage. It is a melting pot of dreamy new-age sonics and ancient, almost religious mysticism, but it is always anchored in the earth. Collins’ presence on this track is essentially a spiritual one: she is a presiding figure, benign but never banal, whose overarching vision is always discernible.

At the EP’s centre is _Through All Eternity_, a gentle hymn (a reworking, in fact, of the American song What Wondrous Love Is This) that speaks of music’s power to live on beyond death. Collins imbues it with a new significance – it shakes off its narrow Christian meaning and becomes something wilder and more pagan, a kind of cosmological pact with the afterlife. Her voice is both earthy and otherworldly, like a profane ornament in a church, deeply marked but honed with evident skill. _My Sailor Boy_ sees her set this incredible voice against a windswept, wave-crashed soundscape, with results that are truly beautiful and genuinely moving.

These songs are simultaneously ancient and new: often, an old folk song will be given a new name, but when that happens here, it is always something more subtle and interesting than a straight update of a standard song. There is something slightly – thrillingly – awry in the delivery or in the way the vocal scratches against the field recordings that underpin it. These songs exist on the edge of song, looking out at something more natural, more wild, less human. Closing track _The Briar And The Rose_ – ostensibly a version of the well-known _Barbara Allen_ – manages to convey something sinister in the nature of human interactions, but also something more hopeful. Here she is accompanied by Ossian Brown’s hurdy-gurdy, providing an unusual flourish to a release that can be elementally charged or unnervingly intimate, but is never less than exquisite.

## Archangel Hill (Album Review)

_by Thomas Blake (2023)_

The folk songs that **[Shirley Collins](https://klofmag.com/2021/09/shirley-collins-crowlink-ep/)** sings are often small, condensed things, full of the bright strangeness of the Sussex countryside she calls home and the half-remembered stories of the wider English landscape. She is a folk singer in perhaps the truest sense: largely untutored but with an uncanny ear for melody, not outwardly political but always aware of the working-class roots of her material, seemingly at ease with the ever-changing nature of her medium. But that only tells part of the story because Collins’s career has always been defined in terms of vast swathes of time, set against a backdrop of sweeping personal and cultural change. She once entirely lost her singing voice, not for a week or a month but for 38 years, a period of silence precipitated by events in her own life. But even 38 years is the blink of an eye in the history of musical expression: perhaps the biggest influence over her singing has come from the Copper family, the Sussex singers who performed, generation after generation, for over 400 years, interpreting and adapting songs that may have existed for much longer.

**Archangel Hill** is her third album since returning to the studio half a decade ago, and the insanely high quality of those two records shows no sign of letting up. While Collins’ voice may have changed since the days she spent performing in folk clubs in the 1960s, not much else has. She still surrounds herself with some of the finest musicians on the scene – now, instead of the Albion Band or Richard Thompson, she is backed by the current iteration of the Lodestar Band: Pip Barnes, Ian Kearey, Pete Cooper and Dave Arthur.

There are some songs on here that will be reasonably familiar to many folk music fans: _Hares On The Mountain_ and _Oakham Poachers_ sound fresher than ever. _Lost In A Wood_ is a slightly different version of a song she first recorded (under the title Babes In The Wood) on her 1967 album _Sweet Primroses_: here, its melancholy subject is brought into even sharper focus. An older live recording of _Hand And Heart_ (accompanied by her late sister Dolly), from 1980, is notable less for how much Collins’ voice has changed and more for the consistency of her overall artistic vision.

_Archangel Hill_ is less austere than 2018’s _**Lodestar**_ and perhaps less complex than _**Heart’s Ease**_ (2020). Songs like opener _Fare Thee Well My Dearest Dear_ seem outwardly simple, but Collins’ voice manages somehow to convey both resignation and deep longing. _The Captain With The Whiskers_ offsets sentimentality with youthful sauciness. The band get to show off on the jaunty instrumental _June Apple_ and the brisk dance tune _Swaggering Boney_, while Collins’ almost conversational vocal style is shown at its best on _The Golden Glove_.

The album’s more unusual moments are also some of its most rewarding. _High And Away_, an original with lyrics by Pip Barnes, is partly taken from an account in Collins’ recent book of a 1959 meeting with Arkansas singer Almeda Riddle. It’s a wonderful moment of musical serendipity, where you can see tradition changing and stories cross-pollinating before your eyes. _How Far Is It To Bethlehem?_ is a surprising and tender rendition of a carol that started life as a rhyme in a Christmas card by Frances Chesterton (wife of G.K.). Best of all is the title track, which ends the album. Backed by a wandering melody plucked out on impressionistic strings, it is a spoken hymn to Collins’ home county and seems to contain all the wisdom that she has accrued, all the history that has made her folk songs some of the most important and enjoyable in the English tradition. It’s not so much that she is making up for all the time she has lost: this album and its predecessors seem almost to relish their maturity. Either way, at 87, she is still making some of the finest music of her career.