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

Offsetting Charli xcx, Chaney’s take on 19th-century ballad Dark Eyed Sailor accompanies Margot Robbie on the moors – but it’s just a tiny part of her culture-crossing, history-vaulting musical catalogue

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.

Long before Emerald Fennell found Olivia Chaney’s version of 19th-century ballad the Dark Eyed Sailor online, Chaney was preparing to sing it for a 2013 live session on Mark Radcliffe’s BBC Radio 2 folk show, in the midst of her own Brontë-esque love triangle. “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.”