WYCH ELM

‘We're all playing the role of the Bard’

After performing hundreds of gigs for the better half of a decade, it seems almost surprising that there’s still something that seems so coy and secretive about Caitlin Elliman, the frontwoman of wych elm. Perhaps I’d guessed that having given so much of her art, of her story away on the stage and in her band’s three EPs, she’d be an open book.

But she’s a trinket box, a doll-eyed bag of tricks. She picks up a rosary from our prop box and asks if she can wear it – hers broke on their last tour – opens the parasol, grimaces, wonders whether it's unlucky to have opened it indoors. She flips over old photographs from East Berlin, glances at a collection of Anne Sexton’s poetry, asks if I liked To Bedlam and Part Way Back, smiles when I nod.

This is all to say that wych elm – and the brainchild behind it – are an amalgamation of every interesting influence.

Their new EP, Field Crow, is a Pandora’s box of folklore, and the way Caitlin falls to the things she likes like a magpie chased on by some ancient impulse is just how it feels to listen to their art; some confirmation of good taste, some forced acceptance there’s a girl – and a group – out there with a better eye than you. The place that Caitlin's pilgrim to is invisible to the naked eye, but you’ve just got to follow her; the band’s ex-drummer, Immy Done, described it as sitting shotgun while driving down a country road, blind but fully trusting.

Caitlin is followed closely by Jack, their guitarist, dressed in a dandy’s seersucker blouse; they have delicate, almost Victorian features, and eyes so bright and sober they look like morning windows. When it comes to all three of them, there’s something otherworldly and faraway there; they’re all thin-wristed, absurdly well-read, and wear matching shoes, as if they found them as strangers and decided to keep the formation. Like the Brontë painting with the brother smudged out, there’s something deliberate, romantic, and yet too-far-gone about them, even in repose.

I ask about the influences they draw on, considering how encyclopaedic they seem. Jack explains that so much of it is so ancient, so otherworldly because ‘we're all southwest kids, where there’s so much folklore; Merlin, the Arthurian legends, but then Aleister Crowley with the Golden Dawn.’ The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn was an occultist order: they had a temple in Weston-super-Mare, where Caitlin and Jack grew up, established in the late 19th century called ‘Osiris’, the Egyptian Lord of the Underworld and Judge of the Dead.

‘It’s my only way to engage in folklore really; the modern folklore of creation. We’re all playing the role of the Bard, like from the druids in ancient England. You’re either the Healer, the Druid, or the Bard, and it’s quite an empowering role to be able to tell stories, engage with them, look at the history, but also rewrite them and give them new life. Every now and again you’ll get a message from someone who’s related to something, and you can see that there’s real magic there, when you’ve touched someone.’

A lot of wych elm’s influences are deeply unsettling, and you can see it as clearly in the stories they tell one another as in the stories they tell you: Susan Smith, the American woman who drowned her two sons, say, or the story behind their own name. Caitlin explains it came from a story described in cult circles as ‘Who put Bella down the Wych Elm?’ ‘Back in the 1940s in Birmingham, a body of a girl was found by some boys inside of a wych elm tree; she’s never been identified. I just really connected with her in such a weird way; I just instantly fell in love. I actually changed our band name before I even asked my other band members if they liked it.’

It makes sense. Caitlin says that ‘most of my creativity stems from the macabre; things people don’t like to look at. I felt like that was my life in a way; I felt ignored. No one wanted to look at me and my struggles. So I always wanted to spotlight things like that. It’s forbidden, but that’s what draws us in. We all went to Christian schools, where you turn a blind eye to the thing that’s always there.’ Immy adds, ‘I grew up in a religious background, so to join a band like this means we’re constantly touching on that imagery, constantly looking at things that growing up I was told not to engage with. What’s really appealing to me in this band is being able to look taboo in the eye.’ Immy’s dad was a vicar; she grew up in the church, not even celebrating Halloween.

I asked whether there were specific events or issues that, like these, the band had been keen to meditate on with Field Crow. Caitlin says, ‘it was having heart problems and being high risk during Covid: there was this fear of death which was full frontal in my brain. One of my friends passed away before Covid. He died quite young, he was 21. So it was just in the forefront of my mind, and field crows in mythology are harbingers of death, which was a big inspiration to those songs.’

'Virgin Mary' was written in the studio while we were recording, and it was this Frankenstein of a few different songs I’d put together. There’s a line, ‘Being a woman is a wound that keeps getting infected’, which was actually meant for ‘Plague’, but it just didn’t fit right. And then I wrote ‘Virgin Mary’ around that lyric, just about the trauma of being a woman, having to deal with grief, loss. Heavy stuff.’

Immy nods. ‘It’s a very arresting lyric. That song was the one that stopped me in my tracks: to talk about womanhood, to talk about any gender identity is such an important thing to do as non-males, to be able to say how it fucking sucks. Music about being a woman or being non-binary tries to shed light on it but it’s about looking at the stuff that’s ugly, that’s unpleasant. It is a wound that keeps getting infected. It’s the song that embodies who we are.’

Caitlin says, ‘We’re also living in such a weird time where so many people think that being a woman in music is easy now; that there are more opportunities for women in music. For me, it’s like we’re being treated as a gimmick or token women-slash-non-binary band.’ Jack adds, ‘There’s always a question of, are we being booked because they want us, or are we meeting a good equality quota?’

The band’s EP output have all revolved around animals – the first, Rat Blanket, about being a greasy 17-year-old, the second, Rabbit Wench, about overcoming sexual trauma, and the last, Field Crow, using the symbol of death as inspiration. For the first time in seven years, though, fans will have a full album to fawn over. Caitlin says the band are going back to the beginning of their story. ‘It’s going to be a lot more anatomical. I feel like a lot of my brain problems have come from me being born with a heart problem and being in and out of hospital; it’s very common for that to happen to people who have been born with defects. It’s going to be a lot more collaborative as well. All of our voices on this one.’

Caitlin smiles, and for a moment I wonder if she’s going to spill a tear. ‘I’ve always had this psychic premonition of what kind of art is going to connect with people and how I can integrate that to my music, and then make it so that they get it. Jack said that people like things that are rough around the edges. They can love it because it's kind of hard to love something that’s perfect. Like even when you're in love with a person you are in love with their faults.’ Jack adds, ‘It’s ‘in spite of’. ‘I love you even though.’’

It’s been formative for Jack. ‘It’s been seven years in March that I’ve been watching [Caitlin] write music. It was never my intention to stay in this band forever. I was in the studio with another band at the time I realised I didn’t want to do anything else. Caitlin's always had this immaculate – maybe not immaculate, it has been rough around the edges – vision of what needs to happen. We’ve always said we’re a slow-burner... We were never going to pop on the scene, do a debut album, American tour, and then die. We’re in it for life because we recognise that we need it.'

Words: Kate Jeffrie

Photos: Kirkland Childs & Isaac Stubbings

Illustrations: Mia Breuer