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Sister Tales T
The best tribute to the late Kate McGarrigle is the music she made with her sister Anna. Elizabeth Kinder talks to Anna McGarrigle and producer Joe Boyd about two recent retrospectives.
here have been at least two moving and fitting tributes to Kate McGarrigle who died last year, a stellar concert at the Royal Festival Hall and more
recently two brilliant nights at New York’s Town Hall. But possibly the most moving and fitting tributes of all are the new CD releases, the sublime three-disc set Tell My Sister (Nonesuch) and Odditties, a charmingly irresistible single CD of previ- ously unreleased material out on Kate and Anna McGarrigle’s own label, Querbeservice.
Tell My Sister is the beautifully re- mastered compilation of the first two McGarrigle Sisters records, the now classic Kate& Anna McGarrigle and the follow up Dancer With Bruised Knees. Both received widespread acclaim when first released; their debut was named Melody Maker
album of the year in 1976 and it was listed in the New York Times top ten records with the comment “This folkish debut disk was the most charming, purely beautiful and sentimentally moving record of 1976.” The third CD in the set is probably the most haunting: demos and unreleased recordings, simply done, with the sisters harmonising around the piano, or singing along to strummed guitar, or sometimes Kate is by herself, and on occasion with Roma Baran with whom she worked in New York in the late ’60s.
It is, Anna thinks, “probably the disc that sounds most now”, (though they all have a timeless quality); it was also the one that was the most difficult for her and Joe Boyd, who produced the original records and did the re-mastering, to hear. The whole process proved to be highly- charged emotionally for them both, as
Boyd tells me over a coffee in a Notting Hill café. “With the demos is that rawness, that freshness, particularly those ones of Kate at the piano, just Kate, because she does the songs faster than she did them later, she’s in a hurry, she’s younger, she’s got that passion to get her songs across, there’s such intensity. By the time I came to master it, I’d heard them many times because I’d play them to anybody who’d sit still and listen saying ‘this sounds amaz- ing, just hearing that passion.’” And still it affects him, he’s clearly moved just talking about it: the sense of his loss of a long- cherished friend is almost palpable.
Later I spoke to Anna on the phone, who told me “When you hear the demo tapes, they’re unadorned. It was a long time I’d spent not listening to them, and they affected me in ways I couldn’t have imagined. I spent a lot of the time crying.”
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