It was spooky': folk singer Olivia Chaney on how a song reflecting her own Bronte-ish love triangle wound up in Wuthering Heights

"An hour into Emerald Fennell's Wuthering Heights, Margot Robbie is in a gauzy wedding dress, gliding forlornly across the moors towards the man her character feels she has to marry. A lone female English voice appears to accompany her, high and pure against the buzzing drone of a harmonium, singing about a woman roaming alone, and a man who, for seven years, left the land, before his eventual return."

"I was at the beginning of my relationship with the man who is now my husband and the father of my two children he nearly married someone else, and I nearly had kids with someone else. She recounts this from her Yorkshire living room, minutes after getting home from the nursery run. So to see this song first pop up to support Cathy's emotions around her being with the wrong man it was very spooky."

"The song's rescue from the vaults came at a serendipitous time for Chaney, a wide-ranging artist recently returning to folk. Her previous three albums, mainly of originals, include 2024's Circus of Desire; its title track was remixed by Vessel, and Chaney's dancing in the video recalled the two years she spent singing live with Zero 7. On 27 February, she plays her first gig with her new British folk-rock band, News From Nowhere, which has quite the lineup: Tom Skinner, the drummer from the Smile"

Margot Robbie's Cathy drifts across moors in a gauzy wedding dress while Olivia Chaney's lone English voice sings the 19th-century ballad Dark Eyed Sailor over a harmonium. Chaney prepared the song for a 2013 BBC Radio 2 folk session during a Brontë-esque love triangle in her own life. Chaney recalls the early, fragile stage of a relationship that later produced her husband and two children, and describes the song's cinematic placement as uncanny. Emerald Fennell chose the track from three options, valuing Chaney's raw, un-orchestrated vocal. Chaney is returning to folk, released 2024's Circus of Desire, and will debut News From Nowhere with Tom Skinner and Owen Spafford.

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