A NEW festival celebrating and showcasing folk culture, Once&Future is celebrating the uptick in interest in folk — especially the darker side of things. There are talks on the “haunted generation”, those who had their brains addled by sinister 1970s television, excellent, politically astute bands like The Witchcraft and Vagrancy Act, songs about death, and yet more songs about death.

“This tends to happen in times of political unease. When the world is crazy you look for something to hang on to. If you can’t make sense of the world politically then you look for other things to tether yourself to,” reckons Once&Future co-founder Hattie Snooks, who is performing songs inspired by tales of her native Hampshire on Saturday under her alter-ego of Queen Mab.

“Maybe if we can reconnect with the land, maybe if we can reconnect with each other, maybe if we can reconnect with our customs, then maybe we’ll gain some control over it, and learn that we don’t need control over everything and there is stuff beyond the capitalist agenda.”

Claire Vine, with loop pedal-enriched folk originals and intelligent covers of the likes of Peggy Seeger, is a good example of this. Performing on the opening night, Vine’s harmonium is decorated with pro-Palestine and anti-capitalist stickers, and her songs speak of environmental and political passions.

And performing last Sunday, The Claras, a Sussex-based duo with gorgeous harmonies and beautiful harp-playing, mix the old and new, with Shirley Collins covers and even Black Sabbath’s Paranoid performed in folk style, allowing your correspondent to shout “Now do War Pigs” at a folk festival for the first and probably last time.

The festival reaches a crescendo this coming weekend. The Star’s own Atilla The Stockbroker gets his crumhorn out for the folk lads on Friday as part of his early music show, and there’s occult stand-up from the brilliant Andrew O’Neill.

On Saturday there’s a folk jam and performances by the aforementioned Witchcraft and Vagrancy Act and Queen Mab, alongside the striking folk vocals of Veronica.

On Sunday, things get even weirder, with talks on labyrinths and their role in folk and magical culture, and a performance by Anglo-Irish folk/electro duo The Lunatraktors, all the way over from a secret location in rural Ireland.

Snooks, who runs a regular night of folky talks and songs called The Court, is excited to see what the younger generations do with our shared folklore and history — especially given folk’s radical history.

“They have these old stories, and then they take their queerness and their class or their ethnicity and use it as a lens to change it, and then folk changes alongside them. I think that’s a very powerful and really important thing.

“It’s also something that people have been doing forever, but it’s been written out of the history books, because... well, who writes the history books?”

Once&Future Festival runs at The Yellow Book in Brighton until April 27.