Summer Is Icumen In:The Legacy Of The Wicker Man.

"Sumer is Icumen in, loudly sing, cuckoo! Grows the seed and blows the mead and springs the wood anew, sing, cuckoo! Ewe bleats harshly after lamb, cows after calves make moo, bullock stamps and deer champs, now shrilly sing, cuckoo! Cuckoo, cuckoo, wild bird are you, be never still, cuckoo" - Summer Is Icumen In

Last year I wrote two blogs about 1973's The Wicker Man. One about the film itself (which I had recently watched again) and another about a small, but enjoyable, exhibition in Bloomsbury's Horse Hospital pertaining to the film. So when I saw that the London Fortean Society would be hosting a talk about the film, The Legacy of The Wicker Man - at The Bell in Whitechapel, there was no way I'd be missing that.

But what would there to be say about a film that has already been written about in such depth? Quite a lot as it turns out. The talk was excellent. Enjoyable, funny, entertaining, and enlightening and, on what was probably the hottest day of the year, it wasn't, as my friend Dewi had joked, like stepping into a fucking wicker man when we headed into the upstairs room of the pub. They had the aircon on though the aircon in The Bell seems not to have been used for about twenty years and soon developed a leak meaning it had to be turned off again. A couple of nice cold pints of lemonade kept me cool though.

Speaker David Bramwell, sporting a rather lovely shirt I must say, is an author and performer who has, since 2010, been playing the part of Lord Summerisle in the rather camp sounding Sing-Along-A-Wicker-Man (a subject we'd return to later) and claims to have watched the film over one hundred and fifty times which certainly makes him qualified to speak on the subject. Thankfully he was as funny as he was knowledgeable. The hour flew by.

Bramwell's almost obsessive interest in The Wicker Man started to take shape in 2003 during a holiday in Wales with a group of friends. They decided, for a laugh, to make a low budget super eight version of the film called The Weaker Man with Bramwell playing Edward Woodworm. Somehow, this film ended up being viewed by both Peter Strickland (director of Berberian Sound Studio) who liked it and even The Wicker Man's director Robin Hardy - who was confused by it.

Thirty years earlier, the idea of somebody making a spoof of The Wicker Man would have seemed highly unlikely. On its release, the response was so poor that Christopher Lee (Lord Summerisle in the film) offered to pay journalists to come out and review it. The popularity of the film grew as it became a cult classic in the eighties and nineties and now it is considered by many to be the Citizen Kane of horror films.

Bramwell ran us through of his favourite curios from the film. The penis topiary which features (very briefly) was actually filmed in the garden of Blowup star David Hemmings' house about three years before the rest of the film was made, Lindsay Kemp's (Alder MacGregor - the pub landlord) crap Scottish accent (all ochs, ayes, and wees) is down to the fact that Kemp was so drunk during the making of the film that he can't remember anything about it except for his audition, and there was a study of how Christopher Lee's hair gets wilder and wilder as the film goes on as well as the line that Bramwell considers the best of the entire film:- "animals are fine but their acceptability is limited".

But where did the original idea of The Wicker Man, of a wicker man, come from? Bramwell points to the Britannia Antica, a 1676 compendium of British curios which was replicated, and seen by screenwriter Anthony Shaffer, in George James Frazer's 1890 book The Golden Bough, a comparative study of mythology and religion. But it seems the idea dates back even further to Roman times. Between 58 and 49BC, Julius Caesar wrote a first hand account of the Gallic Wars, Commentarii de Bello Gallico, and some kind of crude wicker man features in that.

Caesar himself had been inspired by the earlier Greek historian and astronomer Posidonious who had written about ritual sacrifice among Celtic cultures. Either way it seems the idea of putting somebody in a giant wicker man and burning them to death has been a cultural idea for a very long time. Despite the sheer impracticality of ever being able to do it.

Of course, The Wicker Man itself has gone to inspire a lot of different things. From films (Midsommar) to music videos (Radiohead's Burn The Witch mixes up The Wicker Man with Trumpton though why Captain Flack wasn't dispatched with Pugh, Pugh, Barney McGrew, Cuthbert, Dibble, and Grubb to put out the fire we'll never know) and from television shows (The League of Gentlemen's Edward and Tubbs) to cartoon strips like Viz's The Alan Whicker Man and, perhaps even better, Paul O'Connell's A Muppet Wicker Man.

A spoof in which Kermit plays Sergeant Howie sent to search for his missing nephew, Robin. Miss Piggy's in the Britt Ekland role as the landlord's daughter and Gonzo is a more than able Lord Summerisle. As Kermit burns to death in the stomach of a wicker man, one can only agree that "it's time to put on make up, it's time to light the lights".

So Sing-Along-A-Wicker-Man is far from the strangest, or least respectful, spoof. Bramwell and his friends, including Eliza Skelton (whose father Roy Skelton was not only the voice of the daleks on Dr Who but also provided the voices for Zippy and George on Rainbow), started the singalong sessions in a small restaurant in Brighton about fifteen years.

Initially, there'd be a crowd of about twenty-five people but that has since grown and they now attract upwards of three hundred and fifty Wicker Man fans to performances. They've played on bills with Buzzcocks and Back To The Planet (!) though they did receive a scathing review from Danny Leigh in The Guardian back in 2010 who, despite not having seen Sing-Along-A-Wicker-Man, wondered if its flippant approach would detract from the eerie menace of the film itself. As the review went on, however, Leigh seemed to convince himself he quite fancied going along.

The Wicker Man has that kind of power, the ability to change minds, to change things. Bramwell made a point about how the UK folk music scene in the fifties and sixties was incredibly austere. Nobody wore costumes, nobody created performances, everything was serious and authentic to the point where Bob Dylan was called Judas for plugging his guitar into an amplifier and Shirley and Dolly Collins were turned away from folk clubs for wearing pretty dresses and lipstick.

When he composed the soundtrack for the film, Paul Giovanni was very much not part of the British folk scene. He was a gay New Yorker on the cusp of his fortieth birthday and though he did his research, including a visit to Cecil Sharp House, and dived into tradition he bought something new to it. An irreverence that, prior to The Wicker Man, had perhaps only been seen in the folk scene with The Incredible String Band and, specifically, their brain frying, acid frazzled, album The Hangman's Beautiful Daughter. To my mind, one of the greatest albums ever recorded.

Some of the lyrics didn't leave much to the imagination either. In Gently Johnny:- "I put my hand all on her thigh. She says to me do you want to try? I put my hand all on her belly. She says to me do you want to fill me?" and towards the end of Willow's Song:- "how a maid can milk a bull and every stroke a bucketful". My word.

Songs from The Wicker Man were later covered by the likes of Doves, The Go! Team, King Creosote, and Gazelle Twin which just goes to show how much its cultural currency has risen. The film is often mentioned as part of an "unholy trinity of British folk horror" alongside Blood On Satan's Claw and The Witchfinder General but David Bramwell had some thoughts about that.

His contention was that The Witchfinder General is, ending aside, a pretty terrible film with far too much time devoted to Vincent Price riding around on a horse and that Blood On Satan's Claw is only marginally better. Neither of them holding a candle to The Wicker Man. Instead, the argument went, a new unholy trinity should be considered of The Wicker Man, Straw Dogs, and Penda's Fen. A rare film in which pagans are portrayed positively. Something Julian Cope picked Stewart Lee up on during an interview in which Cope made clear his unhappiness about cinematic negative portrayals of pagan lifestyles.

So, considering these negative portrayals, and it's worth remembering that the islanders in The Wicker Man are murderers, why do pagans (and druids) identify with The Wicker Man so much? When performing Sing-Along-A-Wicker-Man at Glastonbury in 2022, Bramwell took the chance to ask some?

He considered how the film contains a celebration of capitalism (Lord Summerisle, ultimately, is driven by commercial gain), it looks at women through what we would recognise now as 'the male gaze', and all of the sexual abandon the film celebrates is firmly heteronormative. At the same time, the film has, by modern standards, problematic issues regarding colonial narratives.

None of which, of course, ruins the film. Some of which, I'd argue, make it even more fascinating. But I'm neither a pagan nor a druid. They, according to Bramwell - like me, celebrate the complexity of the film. Christianity has suppressed and crushed paganism and druidism for two millennia in Britain and any pagan heritage, even fictional murderous heritage, is celebrated.

Blood sacrifice is not a real part of pagan culture but present day pagans, on the whole, seem able to overlook what is clearly fictional and celebrate the elements of the film that ring true with them. The ritual, the communal singing, and the respect for nature. Watching The Wicker Man can be a ritual, attending Sing-Along-A-Wicker-Man can be a ritual, going to the cinema can be a ritual, and, for me, attending the London Fortean Society can be a ritual.

A Q&A took in Wake In Fright, Equus, Picnic At Hanging Rock, The Matrix, George Lucas and Star Wars, Alfred Hitchock's Spellbound and Marnie, Amadeus, The Devils, Ben Wheatley, Stravinsky's Rite Of Spring, Leonard Cohen, the Greek gods and Dionysus and Apollo as well as a question about Donald Trump's similarity to Lord Summerisle. Both being charismatic capitalists with wild hair who force their own will on their slavish followers. Thanks to Jade, Dewi, Michael, Paula, and Tim for joining me, for David Barrett, the London Fortean Society, and The Bell for hosting, and thanks to David Bramwell for a really fun and interesting talk. Some things in their natural state have the most vivid colours.