A shared curiosity in the age-old tale of the Pendle Witches steered Bolton actress Maxine Peake and instrumentalist Adrian Flanagan on a rural road trip through the villages and hamlets nestled under the shadow of Pendle Hill. “As a child, I used to get dragged up Pendle Hill to go walking with my folks, and I’d hear tales of these scary, fiendish women, the so-called Pendle Witches,” said Flanagan, one of the headliners at this month’s SeekOut arts and music festival in the Gisburn Forest. Adrian Flanagan “When you really researched their story, though, then you see how horrifically they were treated and how they suffered awful and terrible injustices.
” He added: “We wanted to give the Pendle Witches a right of reply. “I don’t think you can be a human being without feeling the resonance of their story.” That modern day right of reply came via Flanagan’s Eccentronic Research Council’s concept album, 1612 Underture.
A dozen moving sonnets exploring the mistreatment of the Pendle Witches, many convicted of witchcraft and sent to the gallows at Lancaster Castle 400 years ago. Glued together with an eerie soundscape of sparse Kraftwerk style electronica, pulsing electronics and a gritty spoken word travelogue, Peake delivers the stark historical narrative and polemic of 1612 Underture. And there’s even haunting field recordings of fierce gusts and heaving rain blowing across the bleak moorland on the summit of Pendle Hill, accompanying the poignant trac.
