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Cohen Braithwaite-Kilcoyne on the ties between British and Caribbean folk music: ‘My ancestors could have heard these songs’

The young squeezebox player is illuminating the history of these endlessly intertwined traditions – that is, when his mum isn’t outbidding him for research resources on eBay

His Rotherham-born white dad was an old “not particularly successful” punk: “His closest thing to a claim to fame is that he played in a band with the drummer from T Rex.” His Suffolk-born, Birmingham-raised mum had much more eclectic tastes, but he has now got her into folk too: she’s taken up the bodhrán drum and the whistle, and organises sessions and is forever looking for new songs to learn – hence pipping her son to that eBay sale. But Caribbean songs were harder to find generally, he tells me; that book his mother won on eBay, edited by Trevor Marshall, Peggy McCreary and Grace Thompson, was only published in 1981, and is one of the first examples of the music being collected. Tacoma’s Song - Cohen Braithwaite-KilcoyneAs a young teenager of mixed heritage in the folk scene, Braithwaite-Kilcoyne was aware for a while of being an outsider, he says, but at 13 he was introduced to guitarist George Sansome and violinist Lewis Wood by a teacher, and they formed the band Granny’s Attic soon after.

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