Last year, Jim Ghedi was having a chicken dinner at his mother\u2019s house in Sheffield when he checked his phone. \u201cThis director started following me on Instagram,\u201d he recalls. \u201cAnd there\u2019s pictures of him with Nicolas Cage. As a joke, I said to my mam: \u2018I might message him and say, let me do your next film score.\u2019 As I said it, he messaged me, saying: \u2018I want you to do my next film score.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
The director was Michael Sarnoski and the film is the forthcoming A24 production The Death of Robin Hood, starring Hugh Jackman and Jodie Comer. Sarnoski had heard Ghedi\u2019s excellent 2025 album, Wasteland, a stirring and brooding album of apocalyptic folk that was a reflection of societal rot and collapse in England. Released on the small Calder Valley label Basin Rock, the album was critically acclaimed \u2013 and his most successful and ambitious to date \u2013 but it had not turned Ghedi into a household name. He thought that the film opportunity \u201cwould all blow away and they\u2019d find out who I am\u201d, he says. \u201cSome top producer would put up the red flag.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
Despite having never scored a film before, he was given the gig. He bonded instantly with Sarnoski through video calls and a shared love of Steeleye Span, and ended up writing the songs and score. He describes the finished material as \u201cquite doomy, earthy and dark\u201d \u2013 but also \u201cquite light and orchestrated\u201d.<\/p>\n
Ghedi was invited out to LA to to work on the project there, but instead chose to stay rooted in Sheffield. Even so, he had some wobbles. \u201cThere were moments when impostor syndrome was a real thing,\u201d he tells me in an Irish pub in the city, over Guinness Zero and Scampi Fries. \u201cIt\u2019s very rare for someone like me, and where I\u2019m from, to get those kinds of opportunities. You don\u2019t usually get to see that world. But I also had to think: \u2018I\u2019m being asked for a reason.\u2019 I held tight to that.\u201d<\/p>\n
Hugh Jackman in The Death of Robin Hood, scored by Jim Ghedi. Photograph: Everett Collection Inc\/Alamy<\/p>\n
Ghedi, 35, was given a guitar when he was eight and quickly became a skilled player, but his teenage years were lit up by hip-hop and punk. The lyrical output of the first proved formative. \u201cHearing people talk about being raised by a single mum was like, whoa,\u201d he recalls. \u201cHere\u2019s someone artistically talking about something that I\u2019m also experiencing in my life.\u201d<\/p>\n
Then came the revelatory discovery of Bert Jansch. \u201cIt was the first time I\u2019d heard someone who played an acoustic guitar and it was not pretty,\u201d he says. \u201cIt was really heavy and aggressive. So then I ripped him off for 10 years.\u201d However, that through-line from hip-hop to folk made total sense to Ghedi. \u201cFolk music, traditionally, was music for the working people, from the working people. Hip-hop and grime are the same.\u201d<\/p>\n
Ghedi\u2019s early albums were instrumental, showcasing his deft, dextrous guitar playing, but he was also immersed in Sheffield\u2019s DIY scene, soaking up noisy, avant garde gigs, as well as regularly attending folk sessions in pubs. It was in these that he found his voice and began singing. Soon, this collision of worlds began to manifest in his music: traditional folk songs used as allegories for modern issues, alongside his own originals, while leaning into more experimental terrain.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
His latest single, The Hungry Child, is an extension of this. \u201cI\u2019ve gone even further sonically,\u201d he says. \u201cThis one is bigger, doomier, darker, heavier.\u201d Based on a German poem from the early 1800s, later translated into English by Judith Piepe, it\u2019s a raw, visceral song that depicts the story of a child pleading for food and told to wait \u2013 until it\u2019s too late.<\/p>\n
Ghedi only works with traditional material if he can find a real-time connection to it, and he sat on this one for years. \u201cSometimes, the time has to find you for it to make sense and do it with conviction,\u201d he says. \u201cI was looking at where I\u2019m from and thinking about working-class people who have repeatedly been let down, and how government failures have allowed starving people to continue to starve.\u201d<\/p>\n
While Ghedi favours metaphor and nuance rather than state-of-the-nation-style delivery, class is central to his music and ethos. \u201cWhen I was younger, I was really naive and I tried to assimilate,\u201d he recalls. \u201cBut I realised: I need to own where I\u2019m from. I\u2019m not trying to be a spokesperson, but the folk scene is very middle class. The divide and the drop-off is huge, and in some ways, the disparity is worse now than when I started.\u201d<\/p>\n
He says that, had he begun his practice today, or even in the past five years, \u201cin the current [economic] climate, I don\u2019t think I would have been able to sustain doing it. It\u2019s important to raise awareness but also for that kind of working-class voice to have a place within the material. It\u2019s become more important to me as I\u2019ve got older \u2013 it\u2019s so entwined and ingrained in what I\u2019m doing.\u201d<\/p>\n
Ghedi\u2019s trajectory to landing a huge project such as The Death of Robin Hood is a rare but heartening one. Despite having an memorable time working on the film, with a team on whom he heaps praise, he appears resolutely unmoved by the idea that he now needs to play any kind of game. \u201cAs long as I stick to focusing on creativity, nothing else matters,\u201d he says. \u201cWhether I\u2019m playing to 10 people in a room or 1,000, it\u2019s the same for me.\u201d<\/p>\n
The Hungry Child is out now on Basin Rock<\/a>. Jim Ghedi\u2019s UK tour<\/a> begins 26 April at Howard Assembly Room, Leeds. The Death of Robin Hood is released 19 June in the US and 2 September in the UK.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Last year, Jim Ghedi was having a chicken dinner at his mother\u2019s house in Sheffield when he checked…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":636352,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[64,63,447,134],"class_list":["post-636351","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-celebrities","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-celebrities","tag-entertainment"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/636351","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=636351"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/636351\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/636352"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=636351"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=636351"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=636351"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}