‘It was terrifying’: Folk singer Olivia Chaney on how a song that mirrors her Bronte love triangle ended up in Wuthering Heights | music

AAn hour into Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights , Margot Robbie, donning a gauzy wedding dress, glides desperately across swamps toward the man her character feels she must marry. A lone English female voice seems to accompany her, high and pure against the droning of the organ, singing about a woman wandering alone, and a man who left Earth “for seven years,” before his eventual return.

Long before Emerald Fennell found Olivia Chaney’s version of the 19th-century song “Dark Eyed Sailor” on the Internet, Chaney was preparing to sing it in a 2013 live session on Mark Radcliffe’s popular BBC Radio 2 show, in the midst of her own Brontë-style love triangle. “I was at the beginning of my relationship with the man who is now my husband and the father of my two children, and he was about to marry someone else, and I was about to have children with someone else.”

She tells this from her living room in Yorkshire, minutes after returning home from nursery. “So to see this song debut to support Kathy’s feelings about being with the wrong guy…it was very scary.”

Vinyl told Chaney that she was choosing between three of her songs for the film. She settled on this “because she related to it,” says Chaney. “There’s something about the way you use my voice that’s not surrounded by it [an] Orchestral at all, which shows how raw and emotional I feel.

Rescuing the song from the vaults came at a serendipitous time for Chaney, a wide-ranging artist who has recently returned to popular music. Her previous three albums, most of which are originals, include 2024’s Circus of Desire; The title track was remixed by Vessel, and Chaney’s dancing in the video recalls the two years she spent singing live with Zero 7. On February 27, she played her first gig with the new British folk-rock band, News From Nowhere, featuring an impressive lineup: Tom Skinner, drummer from Smile and Sons of Kemet (“one of my favorite musicians on the face of the Earth”), Owen Spafford on violin and electronics, singer-songwriter Clara Mann, and composer/producer Leo Abrahams, with whom Chaney recorded her debut EP in the same year as Mark Radcliffe’s ill-fated session.

Chaney discovered folk music as her path in her twenties. She knew some folk rock and singer-songwriters from her parents’ record collection, but she sang the music of Hildegard of Bingen with the Oxford Girls’ Choir, won a scholarship to Chetham’s School of Music at the age of 14 to study voice and piano, and went on to study jazz at the Royal Academy of Music in London in 2000.

Seven years later, after standing up on a date – “feeling a bit sad, in my own world, not knowing where to go with my singing” – she went to an after-party with friends at London’s Southbank Centre. “And I saw this shy musician playing this heavenly music. So I ran and begged: ‘What are you playing?’ Who are you? Do you want to work together? “The player, Matthew Ord, now a lecturer in folk music at Newcastle University, was playing Planxty Irwin, a tune by the blind 17th-century Irish composer and harpsichordist Turlough O’Carolan.

Ord taught Chaney several traditional songs, including Dark Eyed Sailor: “I really responded to the lyrics and the emotion in it,” she says. Then, one day, he came to her house with the organ and asked her if she wanted to play it. “And that was the case.”

Chaney became one of Britain’s most exciting new folk artists, earning the respect of established folk artists. She supported Shirley Collins on her 2017 tour, sang with Richard Thompson at his 70th birthday concert at the Royal Albert Hall, and performed last year’s all-star tribute concert for Martin Carthy in Hackney. She also fronted folk rock giant Uva Rex with December. Their breakthrough 2017 album Queen of Hearts was nominated for a Grammy Award.

This summer, she will also release an album of songs by composer Henry Purcell and perform them with a chamber ensemble at London’s Kings Place, where she is an artist in residence this year. “Purcell wrote for kings and queens, but he was also at the bar listening to folk songs and ballads,” Chaney says. “His ability to write a catchy tune, almost like pop music, made his songs go straight back to the street culture of the time. I’m very interested in those connections.”

This multicultural mindset is typical of Chaney’s outlook. The only other voice heard singing on Wuthering Heights is that of Charli xcx, who produced an album accompanying the recording. “I think her music is great and very in tune with my songs — and it all ties together so well,” Chaney says. “Although there are some bangers, harmonically they are in a world similar to the Dark Eyed Sailor. There are even sounds and voices in a tonal-vocal world similar to my organ world.”

For years, Chaney’s version of Dark Eyed Sailor existed only in live YouTube clips, but she finally released a recorded version last Friday, produced by Olly Deakin (the mastermind of the CMAT albums If My Wife New I’d Be Dead and Euro-Country). She had recorded “many” versions of it before – three were even mastered for albums, but they “just weren’t quite right”. I finally heard it proper at the premiere of Wuthering Heights in Leicester Square on February 5.

How was the evening? “Drinking champagne after Richard E. Grant?” She laughs. “Crazy. I held my husband’s hand so tight when the song came on – hearing my voice alone – that it reminded me of childbirth, and I held my doula’s hand so hard I almost broke her knuckles!”

The song appears again when Heathcliff returns to Cathy, now rich and grown up, and in the final minutes of the film. She adds that it was always Chaney’s husband’s favorite recording. “It’s a song I love so much. It comes back and haunts you.”