The Dark and Stormy Tale of a ShantyTok Band
March 5, 2026 at 03:30PM
Peter Ward | The Atavist Magazine | February 2026 | 2,495 words (9 minutes)
This is an excerpt from issue no. 172, “Master and Commander.”
1.
Come all you young sailormen, listen to me
I’ll sing you a song of the fish in the sea, and it’s
Windy weather, boys, stormy weather, boys
When the wind blows we’re all together, boys—“Fish in the Sea,” Scottish fisherman’s shanty
As dawn broke on a crisp morning in May 2021, two large passenger vans pulled into the cobbled square of Caerwys, a town in North Wales. The vehicles parked outside Hereford House, a grand Victorian-era building, and a mass of figures emerged sleepily, lugging suitcases and mountains of musical equipment. They were bearded and bedraggled, outsiders in Caerwys, which has fewer than a thousand inhabitants, most of them elderly. Caerwys, like many small towns in the United Kingdom, is the kind of place where curtains twitch, gossip thrives, and news travels abnormally fast. Residents near Hereford House who spied the visitors that morning may have wondered what their arrival portended for the town.
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By the afternoon, an answer was pouring into the square: the sounds of whistles and bagpipes, drums and fiddles, lively disruptions to the town’s usual peace. The visitors were lodging at Hereford House and also using its ground floor as a practice space. They were musicians in a band called the Old Time Sailors, from Argentina, and they were embarking on their first UK tour.
Erica Burney lived just off the town square. A singer who performed locally, she also ran a catering business out of On the Corner Café, a Caerwys eatery. Soon after the band arrived, Burney ran into Russ Williams, the landlord of Hereford House. He told her a terrible tale: The band had endured a nightmare journey from South America to Europe. Pandemic restrictions had forced them to detour to Turkey and then Albania, and they’d arrived months later than planned. In addition to the gigs they’d missed from the delay, their tour faced continuing restrictions on indoor gatherings, causing pubs to close and forcing live entertainment outdoors. Williams asked: Could Burney help them? Drum up some goodwill and publicity?
He introduced her to the band’s leader, Nicolás Andrés Guzmán. Tall and powerfully built, with jet-black hair, a voluminous beard, and a slickly styled mustache, Guzmán oversaw a crew of seventeen musicians. To them he was the Captain. During the band’s performances he played the accordion. When Burney expressed sympathy for the problems the band had encountered, Guzmán replied, in near perfect English, that he had instructed lawyers to investigate. That struck Burney as odd. “You’re not fucking U2,” she recalled thinking.
On June 1, Burney met the full band at Hereford House. They wore their performance attire: a white cotton work shirt layered with a vest and a jacket, tucked into either trousers or a kilt, and accessorized with a leather belt, a neckerchief, and a jaunty cap. True to their name, they looked like sailors plucked from a nineteenth-century ship. They played music to match—sea shanties, mostly, dating back hundreds of years.
The band shuffled into place so Burney could take photos and film them playing, then she posted the content to the town’s Facebook page. “So, as some of you will have no doubt heard, we have a merry band of sailors in town!” she wrote. “Of all the places they could have chosen to stay, I hope we can make them glad they chose here.”
It was strange, this motley group of musicians showing up in Caerwys, cosplaying as seafarers of yore. Strange, that is, if you weren’t on TikTok. The Old Time Sailors were riding the phenomenon known as ShantyTok, which exploded in early 2021, after a Scottish postal worker named Nathan Evans posted a video of himself belting out a traditional shanty and pounding a table in time with the music. The video went viral, and soon other TikTok users were harmonizing with Evans and posting their own shanty covers.
Shanties originated as work songs to accompany repetitive, laborious tasks such as raising sails and lowering anchors, and they’re earworms by design. They have audience-friendly, foot-tapping rhythms—what shall we do with a drunken sailor / early in the morning—and often feature call and response, where a chorus of singers answer a lead vocalist. Media coverage attributed the advent of ShantyTok to the pandemic. “They are unifying, survivalist songs,” one critic wrote, “designed to transform a huge group of people into one collective body.” Trapped at home, staring at their computers and phones, shanties offered people a common, joyful cause.
After a period of enforced isolation in Caerwys to ensure that none of them had COVID, the Old Time Sailors put on their first local show at a glamping venue called Penbedw Estate. They yelled, stomped their feet, and sang at the top of their lungs as roughly fifty people watched and some joined in. The Sailors’ energy was infectious, anarchic. On the town’s Facebook page, one enthusiastic commenter, a fan of shanties well before they took TikTok by storm, declared, “These guys have torn up the rule book!”
The band planned to stay in Caerwys for a few months, using it as a base of operations. Soon they were drinking maté in the square and joining jam sessions with a local band of ukulele players. Friendships formed. One of them was between Alex Sganga, the band’s lead violinist, and Roland Ward, the warden for St. Michael’s Church, an eighth-century stone building that dominates the Caerwys skyline. Ward is my father, and despite previously showing little enthusiasm for popular music beyond the Beach Boys, he regularly sent me photos and videos of the Sailors’ performances. Like others in the community, he quickly developed a passion for the band. “They captured the imagination of people,” he told me. “And the individual band members won them over. Instead of being intruders, they saw them as good musicians—sociable, friendly people.”
Griffith sensed tension between the band members ad Guzmán, and he noticed that the individual Sailors seemed to be scraping by. “They had nothing,” he said.
My dad invited Sganga to perform a solo concert of Irish and Argentinean folk music before his packed church, then organized another show for the whole band at Penbedw Estate. This time there were more than three hundred attendees, each of whom paid ten pounds (about $15) to be there. The profits would be used for building repairs at St. Michael’s.
My father was so enamored of the band that he persuaded a national TV station to send a camera crew and reporter to the Penbedw show. But as they set up their equipment for interviews, Guzmán was nowhere to be found. According to my dad, when he called the Captain on his cell phone, he was defensive, speaking as if the televised gig were being forced upon him. Guzmán finally showed up to be filmed, but he replied to questions hesitantly, like he didn’t speak English well.
Steve Griffith, a grizzled former detective enjoying a peaceful retirement in Caerwys, was one of the Sailors’ biggest fans and a member of the ukulele band that sometimes played with them. Like my dad, he helped them book shows. “As we got to know them a bit more, we were finding out that the majority of them were classically trained musicians,” Griffith said. “They were something else.” Yet Griffith also felt as if the musicians “were guarding something.” He sensed tension between the band members and Guzmán, and he noticed that the individual Sailors seemed to be scraping by. “They had nothing,” he said.
A few weeks into the Sailors’ stay in Caerwys, the UK’s pandemic restrictions eased, which allowed the band to book shows across the country. They were soon gone six nights a week, and sometimes played two shows a day. The shows were dynamic, sweaty affairs that left the musicians exhausted. From the windows of her home, Burney noticed that they almost always returned in the early-morning hours. The grueling schedule was made all the more so, according to several former band members, by Guzmán’s insistence that they practice for long hours when they were in Caerwys.
One evening that August, Burney visited Hereford House and sang with the band during a rehearsal. From across the room, she locked eyes with a man playing two small drums, named Jorge Fernández. (The Atavist is using a pseudonym for this individual out of concern for his safety.) When the rehearsal ended, Fernández grabbed his guitar and asked Burney if she would sing just for him. He strummed a Nat King Cole song, which she knew well: Smile, though your heart is aching / Smile, even though it’s breaking. Fernández told me he thought Burney was “a siren, the most beautiful girl in the village.”
Burney invited Fernández and his bandmate Claudio Toscanini over to her house. They drank, smoked weed, sang, and talked, until Fernández told Toscanini to make his excuses and leave. Toscanini returned a short time later bearing a message from Guzmán: Fernández was out too late and had to return to Hereford House. Burney thought the message was strange, but Fernández paid it no heed. “He told him to fuck off and we had a snog,” Burney said.
She later learned that Guzmán had strict rules for the band. Fernández had violated a nightly curfew, after which band members weren’t even supposed to leave their rooms at Hereford House to go to the toilet. There was also a prohibition on romantic attachments within the band while on tour. The latter was a rule that, according to multiple sources, Guzmán himself didn’t seem to follow. Eighteen-year-old Lola Weschler, a singer and bodhran player, was the band’s only female member and appeared to be Guzmán’s girlfriend—despite his introduction of another woman, who designed the band’s promotional materials, as his wife. Weschler’s father, Daniel, was also in the band and texted Guzmán one day when he was looking for his daughter. “Tell Lola to turn on her cell phone so I can call her,” he wrote in Spanish in a message that was later shared with me. Guzmán sent a string of short, angry replies. “Dani, I’m fucking,” he wrote. “Don’t call out of nowhere, dude. Don’t be annoying.” (When I reached out to Guzmán for an interview, he refused to speak with me, threatened legal action, and blocked my number. He later declined to answer detailed fact-checking questions on the record.)
Money was the biggest source of conflict between the Sailors and the Captain. When recruiting musicians in Argentina, Guzmán had allegedly promised them up to $600 per month for the UK tour, though band members told me that rates varied and Guzmán refused to draft official contracts. Most of the Sailors paid for their own transatlantic plane tickets, a big expenditure for gig musicians. They said they were told that they would eventually be reimbursed, but once the band was in Caerwys, Guzmán was slow to issue payments of any kind.
Guitarist Matías Vergara told me he threatened to quit after he learned that he would only get half the money he was promised when he joined the band in Buenos Aires. He and Guzmán argued about the payment until, according to Vergara, Guzmán kicked him out of the Sailors. Vergara stayed with Steve Griffith, with whom he’d become friendly, for a week before leaving the UK. “Mati was quite upset about it all,” Griffith said. “This guy was just driving them into the ground.”
Before Vergara flew home, he got a voice message from Guzmán, which was later shared with me. “If I see you in Caerwys, I will beat you to death,” Guzmán said. “I’m not exaggerating. Don’t get close to me, because I’ll murder you.”
As Guzmán was losing band members, he also gained a photographer. Lizzie Ferdinando was a mainstay of the British pirate community, a niche social circle of people who don eyepatches and tricorn hats and meet up to drink beer and listen to folk music. Think Renaissance fairs but for pirate fans. The biggest events draw thousands of revelers. In 2012, more than fourteen thousand people in the town of Hastings set the Guinness World Record for the largest single gathering of pirates.
Ferdinando saw the Old Time Sailors for the first time at a July 2021 gig, and she fell in love with the band. “They put on a really good show,” she said. She talked to Guzmán about becoming the band’s full-time photographer and was so enthralled that she offered to do so without pay. The Captain said she’d need to move to Caerwys, because the band couldn’t pick her up every time they had a show. In early fall, Ferdinando moved into Hereford House.
She soon became concerned with the way the band were living. They worked hard, ate little, barely slept, and seemed utterly depleted. Several members told her that Guzmán had yet to pay them the wages they were owed. She could quit and go home at any time, but for most of the Sailors that wasn’t so easy. Flights to Argentina were expensive. The musicians didn’t have savings they could tap into or families with the means to help them. They were effectively trapped in a foreign country and wholly dependent on a man who allegedly wouldn’t pay them. Ferdinando began to wonder if Guzmán might be in violation of UK labor laws. “I said, I’ve got to stick October out to get, if nothing else, just all the evidence of what’s going on,” she told me. October was the final month of the tour.
One day, as Marcelo Salusky was playing his double bass at a gig, he began to feel faint. Back in Caerwys, he stayed in bed for two days. When he showed no signs of improvement, he was taken to the hospital and diagnosed with COVID and a lung infection. He was given antibiotics and told to rest, but he was back on stage three days later. When Fernández came down with a fever and cough, which turned out to be symptoms of COVID, he wanted to stay at Burney’s to convalesce, but according to Fernández, Guzmán wouldn’t allow it. Fernández said the Captain yelled at him for getting sick.
On October 28, the band performed their last show of the tour. It was in Caerwys, at the town hall, an old brick building crammed between modest homes. The community turned out in force to bid farewell to their guests. The ukulele group performed, as did Burney, and videos posted to the town’s Facebook page toasted the Sailors’ talents. Many locals hoped they would return the following year for another tour.
Despite performing alongside the Sailors, Burney quietly seethed over the way Guzmán treated the band, and Fernández in particular. The couple agreed not to confront the Captain, preferring to keep matters friendly until Fernández had secured his salary, even though that went against Burney’s fiery instincts. “I sent Nicholas a lovely message at the end of the tour saying, ‘I admire what you’ve done, blah, blah, blah,’ because I wanted Jorge to get his fucking money,” Burney said. But according to Fernández, that never happened.
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2026/03/05/sea-shanty-wales-atavist/
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