‘The folk scene is very central. The divide is great’: Jim Ghedi, the musician from Sheffield brings his broken songs to the movies | Country music

LLast year, Jim Ghedi was having a chicken dinner at his mother’s house in Sheffield when he checked his phone. “The director started following me on Instagram,” he recalls. “And there are pictures of him with Nicolas Cage. As a joke, I told my mother: ‘I can tell her, let me get you the next movie.’ As I said, he sent me a message saying: ‘I want you to be in the next film.'”

The director was Michael Sarnoski and the film is a sequel to A24’s The Death of Robin Hood, starring Hugh Jackman and Jodie Comer. Sarnoski had heard Ghedi’s excellent 2025 album, Wasteland, a fun and apocalyptic folk album that depicts the social decay of England. Released on the small Calder Valley Basin Rock label, the album received critical acclaim – and his success and ambition to date – but it didn’t turn Ghedi into a household name. He thinks that the chances of the movie “may be all gone and they will find out who I am”, he says. “Some top manufacturers can raise a red flag.”

Although he had never done a film before, he was offered the gig. He immediately connected with Sarnoski through video calls and a shared love of Steeleye Span, and ended up writing the songs and recording them. He describes the finished product as “doomy, earthy and dark” – but also “light and structured”.

Ghedi was invited to LA to do the job there, but chose to stay in Sheffield. Even so, he had a problem. “Sometimes the fraud was real,” he tells me in an Irish pub in the city, over Guinness Zero and Scampi Fries. “It’s very rare for someone like me, and where I come from, to get that kind of opportunity.” Most of the time, you don’t see the world, but I also had to think: ‘They are asking me for a reason. I held on to that.”

Ghedi, 35, was given a guitar at the age of eight and quickly became a professional player, but his teenage years were illuminated by hip-hop and punk. The songs sung in the first songs were well-received. “Hearing people talking about being raised by a single mother was like, hey,” she recalls. “Someone is speaking eloquently about what I’m going through in my life.”

Then came the breakthrough of Bert Jansch. He said: “It was the first time I heard someone who played the guitar but it wasn’t good. It was very heavy and aggressive. Then I killed him for 10 years. However, the line from hip-hop to folk was clear to Ghedi. “Country music, traditionally, was the music of the working people, from the working people. Hip-hop and grime are the same.”

Ghedi’s early albums were seminal, showcasing his masterful guitar playing, but he was also immersed in Sheffield’s DIY scene, flooding noise, avant garde gigs, and frequent public gatherings. This is how he found his voice and started singing. Soon, the collision of countries began to appear in his music: traditional music used as modern metaphors, along with his originals, leaning towards the experimental.

His latest single, The Hungry Child, is an extension of this. He said: “I’ve made a lot of progress with the story of a child. “This one is big, ugly, dark, very rich.” Based on an early 1800s German poem, later translated into English by Judith Piepe, it’s a raw, vivid song that tells the story of a child begging for food and being told to wait – until it’s too late.

Ghedi only works with traditional things if he can find a real connection to them, and he stayed at this for many years. “Sometimes, it takes time to get you to understand it and do it with conviction,” he says. “I was just looking at where I am coming from and thinking about the workers who have been weakened again and again, and how the failure of the government has caused people who are suffering from hunger to continue to die of hunger.”

Although Ghedi prefers illustration and style rather than presenting a country style, class is very important to his music and culture. He said: “When I was young, I was really ignorant and tried to follow their ideas. But I realized: “I have to own where I come from.

He says, if he would have started doing this today, or in the last five years, “in the current (economic) climate, I don’t think I would have been able to do it. It is important to inform people and for words of this kind to have a place within the things. It has become very important for me as I get older – doing what I am doing.”

Ghedi’s approach to a project as big as The Death of Robin Hood is rare but inspiring. Although he had an unforgettable time working on the film, and the team he praises, he seems unmoved by the idea that he now needs to play any kind of game. He said: “If I keep thinking about my art, nothing else matters. “Whether I’m playing for 10 people in a room or 1,000, it’s the same for me.”