Music / Reviews
Review: Daisy Rickman, Strange Brew – ‘Daisy is a wizard, a mystic and a true star’
The underground moves once again. It shifts and turns, soil is dislodged, swathes of grass collapse and reform.
Something stirs.
All of the cool kids know what it is and most of them are packed into Strange Brew on a sweltering evening for a full-band show by Mousehole’s Daisy Rickman, as she stops off on her way to Green Man.
They know that the stirring thing is folk music and that it’s becoming cool again.
All of the tattooed and intricately pierced, all of those couples with matching sandals, all of those complicated haircuts. They know.
But this is folk with the drones turned up loud, with the swirl of psych all around you, with an emphasis on hypnosis not tradition. Eyes are closed in ecstasy as Rickman’s band pull their world through the gaps and let it spread through ours.
Rickman starts the evening seated, hunched over a harmonium, summoning drones that are matched by the saxophone of Freddie Watts, Phylly Bluemel’s cello and various bowed stringed-things.
The music simmers. It pulses and breathes. It’s folk music covered in dust, buried deep underground.
Then it explodes upwards. Rickman bashes away at an acoustic guitar and the humming, thrumming thing takes over your senses.
For Majestic Sea, Rickman sets up a repeating pattern on her guitar that eddies around the sax as it bobs to the surface, calling across oceans.
Her voice is back-to-nature deep and it throbs next to a heartbeat bass.
There’s the push and pull of the sea: it lulls but carries with it threat and mystery.
Individual songs become tricky to distinguish as introductions are mumbled or lost.
It doesn’t matter. Rickman, and her band, create an enclosed world, just like The Incredible String Band used to, just like Lankum still do. It’s a world where folk becomes blurry at the edges.
Perhaps, then, a cover of the Velvets classic, All Tomorrow’s Parties, is entirely fitting.
The cello saws away, knobs are twiddled for extra atmosphere, Isaac Ockenden does unspeakable things to his acoustic guitar until it howls, shrieks and begs for mercy and Rickman unlocks her inner Nico.
It’s mesmerising, instantly familiar, oddly uncomfortable and, surely, would have fitted perfectly into The Factory.
View this post on Instagram
For most of this evening, Rickman sits down to play her guitar, but for the last two songs she takes over on drums and, instantly, becomes your favourite singing drummer ever. Better than Karen, better than Phil.
There’s beautifully controlled noise on Blue Morning, taken from her 2022 debut Donsya a’n Loryow, as experimentally jazz-y sax stirs up a euphoric psych-folk wall.
Cello, electronics and that maligned acoustic guitar churn around her as Rickman, once again, drags you into her world.
The counter-culture shifts and the cool kids feel it beneath their feet.
Daisy Rickman is a wizard, a mystic and a true star.
Main photo: Gavin McNamara
Read next:
- Bristol’s month in Folk&Roots – August 2025
- Review: Ham Farm Festival- ‘ A hidden gem’
- Review: Les Caravanes, Bristol Folk House – ‘A folk revolution’
Our newsletters emailed directly to you
