Bardcore

And now, as they used to say on Monty Python’s Flying Circus, for something completely different.

There’s a bit of a YouTube phenomenon at the moment in which musicians make covers of popular songs in a (quasi) medieval style. Some of it’s quite fun, so I thought I’d share some of my favourites with you this week. As they also used to say a lot on 60s TV (at least in my part of the world), normal service will be resumed shortly.

Most of the covers aren’t terribly different from the original, because the performers have used a synthesizer to play what is more or less the same music and rhythms in a medievalish style. Others, the ones I prefer, have been arranged sympathetically and are recorded by musicians on medieval-sounding instruments in a fairly medieval style.

I’m not terribly familiar with modern popular music. There hasn’t been much that has appealed to me since the Beatles split up, so I hope you’ll forgive my idiosyncratic tastes, but these seemed to be good examples of the genre.

You can see from the number of views how popular some of these videos are. That’s not entirely surprising, since we’re living through a twenty-first century version of the Black Death, albeit with, so far, less death. Whilst concept itself is fairly light-hearted, the music produced isn’t always.

We’ll start with my favourite, and it’s not just because she plays the recorder and sings. Hildegard von Blingin’s videos are made by someone who knows a bit about the Middle Ages and is a good musician. If you listen to nothing else in this post, give this one a go, because it’s definitely worth it.

This next one is worth watching for the video, especially the last few seconds.

It’s the vocals and the lyrics on this one that I like.

This is a fun, but creepy, version of Thriller.

Finally, if you’re still here.

April Munday is the author of the Soldiers of Fortune and Regency Spies series of novels, as well as standalone novels set in the fourteenth century.

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