“Folk music has a long history of recording the lives of… ‘ordinary people’,” says Mark Radcliffe.  

Then again, adds the 66-year-old, the phrase “ordinary people” is meaningless. “Ordinary people can be billionaires, I guess. Or paupers. So maybe the term ‘working people’ might be better. Although again…” Queens and astronauts and film stars are all “working people”, right? “Yeah, yeah. So… look, what I’m saying is that folk music has traditionally been the songs of the fields, songs of the mills, songs of the serving soldier.”  

As the Lancastrian DJ’s long-term listeners will know, he has form starting a sentence as a bold statement only to unravel it halfway through. He’ll make a hard case for some obscure B side from the mid 1970s being a band’s best single, only to correct himself as he scrolls through their discography – unless his regular co-host Stuart Maconie jumps in to call him out first.   

Radcliffe has co-presented the BBC 6 Music Folk Show with Maconie since 2007, and their fraternal, accommodating banter has always made space for confessions of emotional weirdness and unconventional thinking. The pair are both big readers and thinkers, who soften their academic pretensions with earthy Northern directness. So a chat about biscuits is as likely to lead them to the topic of Blur or bereavement. At a time when the station felt like a niche internet club, it gave office workers in Northampton and lorry drivers in Swansea the best lines and a regular flow of requests.  

As a convivially inclusive broadcaster, he’s delighted to be promoting a second wave of the BBC’s award-winning 21st Century Folk series, which began in 2023, on which the broadcaster has commissioned five new folk songs telling five extraordinary stories from ordinary (or perhaps “unfamous”?) people from across the UK. Radcliffe and Maconie have long championed contemporary folk music, celebrating its warm embrace of regional detail and dialect in a way that records a more specific 21st century than workshopped global pop could ever aim to locate. For example: the first wave of 21st Century Folk featured a song about a Pakistani born Teesside GP – Dr Lone – who nearly died from Covid-19. Written by Sean Cooney, the breakneck paced acapella song, “Doctor Boro”, celebrated Lone’s twin passions for the NHS and Middlesbrough FC.

“The idea grew up during the pandemic,” explains Radcliffe, “when people felt isolated and there was a sense that the well-crafted tales of specific individual experiences could prove more universal and unifying.” The first series put its focus on five people who live and work in the North East of England. It won Gold for Best Music Special at the Arias, and prizes at the 2023 New York Festivals Radio Awards, too.  

“There are things I’d criticise the BBC for – if not to you,” chuckles Radcliffe, who first started working for the corporation as a news assistant in Manchester in 1963. “But THIS is the kind of noble endeavour that nobody else is funding, so they should be undertaking.”  

The new series is themed around our island’s human encounters with the sea: the unpredictable water socially distancing us from the rest of the world. “We all share that love and fascination with the sea with a fear of it, don’t we?” The question is rhetorical. Radcliffe has spent too many decades alone at the mic to need an answer from me. His thought rolls on like a wave. “We’ve probably all had experiences where we’ve been swimming, surfing, sailing and realised – oooh – there’s a current there trying to snatch me out of my comfort zone.”  

The stories set afloat by this year’s songs include that of Anna Heslop, the first female helm at Royal National Lifeboat Institution Cullercoats; kayaker, yachtsman and former soldier Jeff Allen, who has dedicated himself to boat-building and kayaking as a way to find peace; and Al Kassim, another RNLI lifeboat volunteer in London. “You don’t think of lifeboats in London, do you?” asks Radcliffe. “But there they are! The song about Kassim has been written by Seth Lakeman and Fishermen’s Friends.”  

The Fisherman’s Friends are a group who began singing sea shanties in Cornwall in 1995 and went on to sign a recording deal with Universal music in 2010. Their story – which inspired a 2019 feature film and stage musical – began an unexpected sea shanty revival. “The old shanties had a nursery rhyme quality and a practical rhythmic function designed to dictate the tempo of the work required,” says Radcliffe. “It’s strange that we still feel such a connection to them given how few of us have any connection to anything even vaguely manual. What is the ongoing resonance?” Another question he doesn’t need answering. “I think it’s because you’re welcome to add your voice, welcome to become part of a community.” 

The public engagement with shanties surely peaked during the pandemic, when TikTokers around the globe began adding their voices to Nathan Evans’ 2021 recording of a shanty called “Soon May the Wellerman Come”. Contributing lone vocals to the digital choir helped lonely humans feel that their isolation was part of a communal effort, a hauling together. Both pre and post pandemic, shanty choirs like the Fisherman’s Friends also played a powerful role in taking care of men’s mental health, but pegged to the traditionally macho ideals of seafaring prowess.  

“A lot of men – as well as women – experienced quite traumatising separation from the world during the pandemic,” nods Radcliffe. “The idea of coming together to make a song, a sound, a conversation, often while drinking beer, which I think never does any harm, will always be important.” 

But many of the new folk songs are about women. In traditional folk songs, women often lack agency. They’re betrayed, despoiled, rejected, murdered. The new song that Radcliffe says “really pricked my attention” is the story from Cornwall – about Vicky Murphy who was trapped in a cave flooded by seawater back in 2009, when she was 35-weeks pregnant. “She was in there with her husband. So heavily pregnant. Can you imagine that feeling?” 

The couple were spotted by a surfer, who raised the alarm with the RNLI lifeguards. Introducing the lifeboat crew who rescued them to her daughter, Rae, in 2019, Murphy told the BBC that as the waves crashed against the cliff and filled the small cave she turned to her husband, Marc. “I asked him: ‘Be honest with me. We are not going to make it, are we?’ I’ll never forget the look in his eyes when he replied: ‘No.’” The couple were found clinging to the rocks, and lifeboat crew had to leap from their boat and swim up to rough shore before swimming back and hauling them aboard. 

The other song that really moved Radcliffe tells the story of Emma Neave-Webb, who lives in Orkney and is a marine wildlife conservationist who brought out her local community to bang their pots and pans guiding a whole pod of lost pilot whales back out to sea.  

“We have such a long tradition of whaling songs in folk music,” Radcliffe notes. “Two of my own favourite folk songs are about whaling – ‘Little Pot Stove’ and ‘Humpback Whale’ from Nic Jones’ classic album Penguin Eggs [1980] mention it.” The reference to “whalemeat sausages” washes in on a swell of concertina on that record. “But those are songs that… what do they say at the beginning of old TV programmes?… ‘reflect attitudes that were prevalent at the time’. Today a celebration of whaling is something any sensible person would frown on. Singing about saving whales seems to me to be redressing that balance.”   

The DJ is aware that folk music isn’t “cool”. But he has little time for musical fashions that will pass. “If you like a piece of music, then just like it,” he says. “Cool is an idea that’s hitched to clothes and design and it will move on. That’s why I’ve never had any truck with the idea of ‘guilty pleasures’. Enjoying a good song should never provoke guilt!”  

He also thinks that anybody who thinks they don’t like folk music is probably “just wrong. It’s a genre that casts such a wide net I bet anybody could find a folk song they like. Historically it was a more organic thing. As an old punk rocker I believe it doesn’t require any musical expertise and shouldn’t require an instrument. It just needs a thought to come alive.”  

Does he worry that, in 2024, we’re more likely to sing pop bangers than protest songs of the kind that folk espoused in its 1960s heyday? “Pop has always been the genre for distraction and escapism and there is nothing wrong with that,” he says. “I’d say there’s a need for it.” He turns pop professorial to explain: “Protest folk singers like Woody Guthrie in the dust bowl or Leadbelly in the cotton fields? They were able to sell stories that otherwise wouldn’t have been told. Later, Bob Dylan came out of the post-war folk revival.” He notes that the angrily strumming social critic still survives – “we have the blessed Billy Bragg in the UK” – but that folk has given way to other styles of music.   

“Today a lot of rap and grime – genres I don’t want to label ‘street music’ – does protest about the issues in society. Somebody like The Streets [Mike Skinner] does that very well.” He concedes that the percentage of recorded tracks you could call ‘protest or folk songs’ is probably smaller, but the volume of recorded music is so much vaster now. “Folk music continues to remind us about the issues that really hit home.”

Celebrating the 200th anniversary of the RNLI, 21st Century Folk airs on BBC Radio 2 at 12pm from Monday 29 July to Sunday 4 August