root salad Lucy Ward
She’s 21, and she’s already got a debut album out on the prestigious Navigator label. Colin Irwin investigates.
I
f cynicism is the curse of the modern age, then Lucy Ward is a breath of fresh air to all the gnarled old hacks among us. Wide-eyed, warm, funny
and respectfully referring to blokes as ‘gentlemen’, she bubbles with excitement and gratitude that people pay money to hear her perform while her debut album Adelphi Has To Fly has been greeted with widespread acclaim.
“I’m absolutely thrilled, she says. “It’s one thing to make an album you like your- self, but I was very apprehensive about how other people would receive it. But so far most of them seem to like it or at least be intrigued by it. I can’t stress how lucky I feel. I’m 21, I’m on Navigator and I have an album produced by Stu Hanna…”
Lucy Ward breaks the usual pattern of
young musicians bursting on to the scene from either the bosom of a folk family spending summers trawling around folk festivals or emerging with a head full of knowledge, clutching certificates from the folk degree course in Newcastle. “I didn’t even know folk music existed until I was 15 or 16,” she says. “I grew up listening to the Beatles and Bowie and didn’t know anything about Shirley Collins or anyone like that. Now my iTunes jumps from The Clash to June Tabor and maybe that gives me a fresh approach because I’m hearing it all anew.”
From Derby, she started playing guitar at 14 and collided with folk music by acci- dent at the open mic nights she frequent- ed, hearing traditional song for the first time and being totally enthralled by the stories it unfolded. When she was invited to sing at a local folk club she was even more enthralled, setting off on her voyage of discovery into the music. “Because I came to it late I was really excited whenev- er I discovered a new song, only later find- ing out it was a folk standard. I remember hearing Manchester Rambler for the first time and thinking wow…”
“When I started those songs myself I had a real naïvety. I didn’t imagine there were any rules and I blundered into singing them whichever way sounded right. Gradually people pointed me in the direction of other songs and got to under- stand a bit more. I just love the richness of the tradition.”
She never imagined she might turn music into a career, but the gap year she took after her A-levels coincided with offers of gigs and a celebrated appearance in the finals of the 2009 BBC Young Folk Awards. She didn’t win – that particular accolade went to Megan and Joe Hen- wood – but such was the momentum she gained after the competition, most people
imagined she did win. “Noooo,” she gig- gles, when you ask if she was secretly cross with Megan Henwood for beating her. “I absolutely loved Megan and Joe and we’re now good friends. The whole event was such a great experience because for the first time I was meeting other young peo- ple interested in folk music.”
The force of her engaging personality, her forthright performances, a broad array of material and the apparently bottomless levels of courage and cheerfulness that help her win over audiences in even the most inhospitable circumstances turned the gap year student into a professional musician. Championed by the likes of John Tams and Barry Coope, her debut album Adelphi Has To Fly has quickly followed and seems to be pressing all the right buttons. It has an even mix of formidable traditional songs like The Two Sisters and The Unfortunate Lass and self-written material. The album successful- ly straddles that elusive great divide between trad and contemporary song and populism and hardcore folk.
“I had this vision of an album that combines tradition with original stuff and me and Stu between us found a sound. I wanted something representative of what I do rather than putting a band on just because I could…I wanted something fresh and raw.”
While her attitude towards traditional songs tend to be along the lines that the more gruesome the better (“One woman
actually gasped in shock the other night when I sang the line about making a fiddle out of her breast bone in The Two Sisters” she says proudly), her own songs are also fascinating. Bricks And Love, for example, was inspired by a real event at a folk club when a man at the back of the room was reduced to tears listening to a resident singing Eriskay Love Lilt. “I got into con- versation with this gentleman and it turned out he’d been on holiday with his wife and while they were away she col- lapsed and they found out she had three months to live. When he heard Eriskay Love Lilt and the line ‘sad am I without thee’ it really hit home to him and I felt I had to write a song about it.” Armed with such background knowledge, Bricks And Love takes on on a new resonance and there’s not a dry eye in the house when the haunting Eriskay Love Lilt refrain takes over the melody.
“I’m really into the stalwarts of British folk like Shirley Collins… those people who in our auto-tuned world would be laughed out of the room on Britain’s Got Talent or whatever shoddy TV show we have now. I’ve spent a lot of time listening to Topic’s Voice Of The People series and old greats like Peter Bellamy. And when I started June Tabor was right up there. She still is.”
And what of the future? “This. I just want to be doing this. I love it. I can’t believe how lucky I am.”
www.lucywardsings.com F 17 f
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