Minnie Birch and Time’s Crocodile
‘Travelling’s a pretty amazing thing to have done, have you ever thought about-’
‘I mean, a career is great, but how will you fit this around-’
‘You’re playing all these gigs, but what will you do when-’
‘Isn’t it time you…?’
Can you hear that ticking? It’s the sound of Minnie Birch’s new single ‘Hook’.
Go to a Roxanne de Bastion gig and you run into some great people! We first heard of folk singer/songwriter Minnie Birch back when Twitter was a fun musical hangout and she had just released her EP ‘You’re not singing anymore’. The eight-track collection is a homage to traditional folk songs and their influence on football chants. The EP later became A Sunday Times Top 100 Record of 2020, and will be the focus of Birch’s upcoming show at Edinburgh Fringe 2025.
Going further back, while contributing to various Folkstock Records releases, Birch self-released her first album ‘Floundering’ in 2015. It was around this time she began writing her blog on WordPress, which charts not only moments from her music career, but significant events in her life. This includes setting up her own charity called Josie Dear, bravely leaving her career as a librarian and even volunteering in the Calais refugee camp in 2016.
At the end of 2017, Minnie released her second album ‘Tethered’ and in more recent years has been cultivating her fanbase via Ko-fi. It’s there she’s shared demos, thoughts and poems, and putting together handmade boxes of merch. Minnie returned to playing gigs in 2024 with Kathy Pilkinton as the duo Awake Mother. In November, she released her first new original music since 2020 in her solo single ‘All on the black’. ‘Hook’ is Minnie Birch’s first new music of 2025, and it’s a single with multiple lyrical layers…
‘Here comes that crocodile holding my baby, he swallowed a clock way back in the 80s. Oh tick tock my time’s running down.’
There is no introduction to ‘Hook’. It arrives as if it were something you were already thinking about, a thought you can’t get out of your mind. I said this is a single with multiple lyrical layers. The most obvious is the story of the boy who did grow up, of Captain Hook in Neverland being stalked by the crocodile. The crocodile, who gorged on Hook’s missing hand, also swallowed a ticking clock, giving the pirate a mortal fear of the time-telling machines and an unending sense of impending doom.
And so to time. Minnie Birch goes to painstaking lengths to convey the never-ceasing, relentless passing of time in her instrumentation. Such is the tone of her piano, it could well be the clanging of a grandfather clock in an empty hallway. And beneath that, electric guitar mimicking the kind of double-time second hand you’d hear in a doctor’s waiting room. Percussion clip-clops in a way that a child would if you asked them how a clock sounded.
‘And I got to rock you to sleep my Dear, just to find out I'm the only one here, still you keep me awake all through the night.’
And why? Why is the hallway empty? Why are we so worried about time? When are you going to settle down and have children?
Ah, right. The question every millennial woman dreads to hear. The central lyrical focus of ‘Hook’ is the biological ticking, and the societal pressure that comes with it; ‘They'll keep on asking, they pay no mind, from about 22 for the rest of your life.’ But life is always happening, and it isn’t always easy to follow the ticking where it might lead.
‘Oh look at me now, one hook for an arm, seems I didn't listen when you sounded the alarm.’
And what about the waiting room? In recent years, Minnie Birch has been battling a serious health condition affecting the mobility in her right arm. This not only influenced the lyric to a small degree, but the song’s writing in general with Minnie moving to compose on piano instead of guitar. Her listening habits during the song’s penning were Regina Spektor, Fiona Apple and the aforementioned Roxanne de Bastion.
There are so many emotions in ‘Hook’, coming either from the music itself, or painted in the lyrical imagery. There’s comfort in the melody, like the listener themself is being rocked to sleep. There’s tension in the ever-present sound-design ticking, and you can’t help but feel the second-hand anxiety from her backing vocal, ‘Here comes that crocodile, here comes that crocodile…’ Time is running out.
Artworks from top to bottom: ‘Floundering’ (2015), ‘Tethered’ (2017) and ‘Hook’ (2025).
What if there’s more? If you comb through Minnie’s back-catalogue, you’ll notice the figure appearing in the boat with the blue hood in the hourglass also appears in the artwork for her ‘Floundering’ and ‘Tethered’ albums. Are we following a listening journey going back more than ten years? Perhaps an artist’s work is never just a series of releases, but maybe an interconnected flowing narrative from the heart of its creator.
Continue reading for our Q&A with Minnie Birch. We dive into the lyrical meanings behind ‘Hook’, Minnie’s recording process for the song, her blog and her duo project Awake Mother. We also ask her about life as a music teacher and her recent single ‘All on the black’ – all this and more below!
1. 'Hook' is your latest single, your second after a break from putting out original material. This is a track with many lyrical layers but we'll start with how this was recorded - did you put this together at home? What was that process?
I created the demos at home and then took them to the studio to work up. This one came together pretty quickly when I was writing. It’s inspired by Peter Pan so I think it told itself, it tumbled out in one sitting, there are a lot of motifs to draw on; thimbles, clocks, the crocodile, hooks. So once I’d entered that world it ran away with itself.
2. With reference to your recent past, one of the connotations of this song is your cancer diagnosis. I can't imagine everything you've been through and it also affecting your ability to make music. How did you start considering how this could be conveyed in a lyric?
I didn’t really consider how to convey it. I write in a cathartic way, to process my feelings, and I don’t think I’ve ever knowingly sat down to write about those things. I try to avoid thinking about it but I guess those feelings and emotions are my ever present copilots when I’m writing now. This song was more about Captain Hook’s story. Captain Hook has limited mobility in his arm and cancer can very much make you feel like you’re being stalked by time, just like Hook is dealing with throughout most of Peter Pan so I think having someone else’s story and using metaphor allows me to convey those harder things.
3. Part of the subject matter in 'Hook' is about the societal pressure to have children, where or who do you find this pressure comes from most? What do you think we need to change as a society to ease this pressure on women?
I think it’s wild how comfortable we are with talking to people about something that is so personal and can be so painful. We are always asking, particularly women, when they’re planning on having children, how many children? If they’re gonna have another child, why they don’t have any children? Or suggesting that they might be too old or too young to have children and we place a lot of a woman’s worth on whether she has or hasn’t had children. We can also make women feel like if they are mothers they can’t be anything else and they have to give 100% of themselves to being a mother. We draw these arbitrary lines and definitions about what it means to be a woman, and a lot of that is to do with whether you can or can’t have children. It’s frustrating and it’s excluding and it’s minimising and it’s boring. You can be a mother in many different ways, you can be a Tinkerbell or a Wendy or anything in between, and you can also choose to not be a mother at all, or sometimes that choice can be made for you, but I think it would be disingenuous to suggest that those choices don’t come without societal expectations and pressures. That's all wound through this song, it's what I was pondering when I was writing.
4. The most surface-level meaning of this song is it’s based on the character of Hook from the Peter Pan story, is Hook a villain or just a victim of circumstance?
Oh great question! How long have you got? Pull up a chair, grab a cup of tea.
There’s a few different versions of Hook but JM Barrie’s Hook is without a doubt a villain in the archetypal sense of what a villain is (right down to his physical disability, which is a critical essay/rant for another day).
But he is also presented as very complex, he is chiefly motivated by fear and most villains are, but Hook’s fear is right at the surface of all of his actions. He is representative of how restrictive and difficult it is to be an adult, what it means to grow up and be bound by society’s expectations of what being a grown-up should look like. I think he’s a really interesting character to explore. He is always being pursued by time in this world of Neverland where he’s one of the only people to have grown up. But in short, yeh I think without a shadow of a doubt he’s a villain. He treats his crew terribly and he kind of tried to kill Peter! He’s a baddie but he is a product of the world he grew up in, and most of the time he is acting with little choice, he’s fighting to survive, as so many baddies (fictional or otherwise) often are.
5. I think a lot of people could relate to your previous single 'All on the black'. Was there a particular event that inspired this song? It feels like the kind of lyric that could've been written in one moment?
I’m so glad to hear you say that people could relate to “all on the black” because as a songwriter, that’s what you want, for people to hear the song and put their own story onto it. I don’t think there’s ever one particular event that inspires a song for me though, because even when I’m writing about one particular thing, all of those other life experiences and moments kind of culminate together and wind their way into whatever I’m writing, so there’s just a little bit of everyone and everything in every song.
6. Another project you worked on in 2024 was playing gigs as one half of Awake Mother, how was that experience? Is there music forthcoming from you both?
Thank you for asking me about this. I play in a folk duo called Awake Mother with Kathleen P. Making music is a pleasure, but making Music with your close friend is a treasure!
And yes! There is music coming from us. We started recording last year before I had to have more surgery on my arm, we knew that was coming so we laid quite a lot of the guitar parts and we are just layering up the other parts at the moment. We’re working with Chris Cleverley at his Liminal Space Studio. We are so excited to share what we’ve been working on.
7. I love your quick vlogs on your Instagram page, is this a labour of love? When you're out, do you find yourself thinking 'this is an Instagrammable moment right now'?
Thank you so much that’s so nice to hear because I feel like I have the least aesthetically pleasing Instagram. No I certainly don’t think "this is an Instagram moment". I think like most people when there’s actually a very real moment that would look cool on Instagram you’re actually too busy being in the moment, and the things that you share are kind of the "in between". You don’t get your phone out at the really really good times and you don’t get your phone out at really really bad times either, I think, or at least I don’t. But I do like to capture like just day-to-day the things that I’m up to. I just create and share stuff that I like seeing from others. I mostly follow other musicians and artists and my friends, and I do love those little sneak behind the curtains of just like an ordinary life. I just love the beauty of an ordinary life. I don’t spend too long on them, as you can probably tell. Maybe one day I’ll get better at it but I kinda like my slap dash approach.
8. You post a lot on social media about your work as a music teacher - what's the most rewarding part of your job? What are the most difficult days?
I actually volunteered where I work for years! Not weeks, not months but years so it still feels quite like a pinch me moment when I get a paycheck. Making music with people is just a pleasure and being able to sometimes be the person that gets to introduce people to, or encourage people on, their musical pathway is just priceless. I’m very lucky.
I think the difficult parts at the moment is I’m still recovering from surgery. I am not able to play my instruments and I am in quite a lot of pain still, so everything just feels like a little bit more of an effort, but mostly I find my job gives me energy rather than takes energy from me.
9. I visited your blog on WordPress, how does it feel to be in your tenth year of writing these blogs? It covers so much!
My gosh thank you for reading my blog, that’s really appreciated. I think it would be cheating a little bit for me to pretend I’ve been writing it for 10 years cause it’s very sporadic. I sort of dip in and out, but it’s nice to have that to look back on but similar to Instagram although I am writing and I am being truthful and I am sharing real things that happen I am also aware that I’m sharing on the Internet so there’s always going to be that little filter that you knowingly or unknowingly have in place. There are things that never make the blog or even the songs. Some things just can’t be pinned down in that way. But it’s quite something growing up and getting older and having these little digital footprints everywhere. We should all be mindful of that.
10. I can't claim to have read it all, but one entry that stuck out is your volunteering in the Calais refugee camp in 2016. How do you look back on that time now, with everything you've learnt since and the way society has progressed (or gone backwards)?
Again that’s such a great question. There’s definitely a sadness that this moment in time that seemed like such a catastrophic event, a moment we never wanted to be or ever return to hasn’t, after all this time, been resolved. We are now in a world with even more displaced people, more conflict. I think we do have a lot of collective power still, I believe in that. Music is a really important part of that. My recent songs have been very personal and inward looking, I think that is understandable because I have had quite a personal shake up and shake down but I do think that music and art in all its forms is a really important part of the resistance and a really important vehicle for social change. Music can question, and have conversations and challenge. The best art does that. We need more protest songs.
11. And finally, I know we asked about Awake Mother, but what does your year as a solo artist look like?
Can I say before you wrap up that these questions have been really lush to delve into, thank you for asking such interesting questions that go beneath the surface of the music…but yeah this year my big big focus is on physio to try and get back to playing my instruments.
I’ve got the release coming up with Awake Mother that I mentioned and some more Minnie solo music to release but my big project is that I’m actually taking a show to the Edinburgh fringe this year. I’m there for the first two weeks of August with a show called “you’re not singing anymore” which is a show that asks us to reflect on what is Folk Music? Who gets to decide that and who gets to sing it? Who gets to decide what Folk music is? It’s a celebration of songs heard sung on the Football terraces, and the relationship that we have with Football identity and ourselves.
I’m really proud of it. I’m also really nervous about pulling it off. Sometimes you just got to shoot from the halfway line though you know?
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Purchase and listen to the music of Minnie Birch, including her latest single ‘Hook’ on her Bandcamp page.
For more information about Minnie Birch, visit her official website.
Keep up with Minnie’s Blog on Wordpress!
Get more insight and support Minnie Birch on Ko-fi.
Follow Minnie Birch on Instagram and Facebook @minniebirch.
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