Release The Kraken

Meet Bill. He’s just an old salt trying to get in a quick pint in before last orders. Unfortunately for him, he lives at the lighthouse, and the Atlantic has decided to throw a bit of a tantrum. We’re talking rain like stair-rods, waves the size of a terrace house, and a certain multi-legged guest from the deep who doesn't know when to quit. 

Picture the scene: December 1807. Loe Bar near Helston. A howling, ferocious Cornish gale is ripping up the coast, and the 44-gun frigate HMS Anson is driven mercilessly onto the sandbar. Over a hundred souls were lost that day, right within sight of the shore, because there was simply no way to get a line across the raging surf.

This beauty didn't come cheap, Krew. She cost over £40,000, with a whopping £6,691 spent just on the carvings and gold leaf! To pay for it, the King raised the "Ship Money" tax, which got the locals so riled up it helped start the Civil War. Talk about a high price for a fancy hull!

Why they called her the "Golden Devil":

The Look: While other ships were painted "sad colors," she stayed draped in gold and yellow.

Now, Cochrane was never one for a quiet night in. He decided the best way to deal with the French fleet blocking the bay was to build his own floating mega-bomb. He packed a converted transport ship (plausibly dubbed The Medius in our musical universe!) with a terrifying cocktail of thousands of barrels of gunpowder, hundreds of live artillery shells, and enough scrap iron to make a shipwright weep.

Cochrane—being the absolute madman he was—didn’t just order someone else to sail it in. He personally steered the floating powder keg right into the enemy lines himself!

This track takes Herman Melville’s legendary tale of Moby Dick—the obsessive Captain Ahab, the white whale, and the ill-fated Pequod—and compresses it down into a traditional, driving sea shanty. We’ve binned the modern drums and electric guitars, keeping it entirely organic with raw acoustic strumming, a weeping fiddle, a reedy accordion, and a booming crew chorus that sounds like it was born right in the middle of a roaring gale.

We’ve taken this legendary tale of hidden gold, mutiny, and the smooth-talking Long John Silver into a traditional, high-energy working shanty. True to the classic style,  a lively fiddle playing a soaring counter-melody, a reedy accordion, and a booming bodhrán drum layered with the heavy stomps of the crew on a wooden deck. When that chorus hits, the whole crew chimes in for a massive, boisterous chant that’ll have you reaching for a mug of rum.

This track was inspired by the 1922 classic adventure "Pirates' Gold" by H. Bedford-Jones. We’ve taken the spirit of that old pulp-fiction treasure hunt and given it a proper Kernow Krew twist. It’s got the clink of the shovel, the roar of the swell, and that creeping feeling that someone—or something—is watching from the shadows of the cave.

"The Bells of Forrabury" tells the haunting tale of the silent tower of Forrabury Church in Boscastle. As the story goes, a proud and blasphemous captain mocked the heavens as he brought a cargo of heavy bronze church bells into the harbor. The ocean humbled his arrogance in an instant, sending a freak rolling wave to shatter the ship and cast the bells to the bottom of the sea—leaving only the pilot alive to tell the tale.

The Night Raid: Cochrane was captaining the frigate HMS Pallas. Spotting a fleet of French merchant vessels anchored tightly in the shallow Gironde estuary, he realized his ship was too big to navigate the shoals. Did he sail away? Bless your heart, no. He anchored outside, ordered nearly his entire crew into tiny rowboats, and sent them creeping up the river under the cover of night.

The Dawn Catch: By sunrise on the 6th of April, our brave boarding parties had successfully captured the 14-gun French corvette, the Tapageuse. But as daylight broke, three more heavily armed French warships came barreling down the river to smash the British boats and take her back.

Step aboard with The Kernow Krew as we tell the gritty, true story of the original voyage in 1492. It wasn't all grand adventure and billowing sails; it was a sluggish cargo boat (nao being the old Spanish word for a carrack), a crew of slightly pirate-y sailors, some very "creative" double-entry logbooks by Columbus to stop a mutiny, and a disastrous Christmas Eve where a tired crew left a mere cabin boy at the steering wheel!

Meet Jago, a lad from Penzance who’s got more ambition than sense and a bank balance that wouldn’t buy you a medium pasty from the petrol station. After a few too many pints in the Admiral Benbow, he strikes a "legendary" deal with a fisherman who couldn't see a lighthouse if he was in it—buying a vessel for the princely sum of six pounds.

What he thought was a sleek Cornish lugger turned out to be a collection of splinters held together by barnacles and bad memories. But is Jago defeated? Is he heck!

Gather 'round, me beauties! The Kernow Krew are back with a bit of a tear-jerker (but with enough stomp to keep your boots dry). This here is the true story of Henry Williams, a Truro draper from way back in 1629.

Now, Henry was a proper legend. When he popped his clogs, he didn't leave his gold to some fancy lord; he left it for ten poor widows so they’d have a roof, a bit of silver, and a meadow for a cow. Proper job, Henry! 🐄

But, wouldn't you know it? His business partners—the Bray brothers—tried to say he’d gone "completely mazed" (insane) just so they could keep the loot. They didn't win, but the town council in later years wasn't much better. They paved over the widows' cow meadow to build a prison! Talk about a "teasy" bit of business, eh?

Bit of a departure here krew, I recently read a poem on "Nextdoor" that inspired me to write this, taken from memories of groing up in the 60s and 70s

It’s a proper, foot-stomping, pint-raising Cornish shanty celebrating everything that makes this land home—from the granite mines and standing stones to the stormy seas, silver darlings, and Saint Piran’s flag flying high.

Grab a cold ale, turn the speakers up, and sing along!