root salad f20 Henry & Martin
Phillip Henry & Hannah Martin have a unique approach to West Country themes. Christopher Conder investigates.
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’m not too well. Phillip Henry and Hannah Martin smile politely but look nervous as I explain that I probably should have rescheduled, just in case I’m infectious. The thing is, I’ve really been looking forward to meeting them. They are one of the few new English folk acts that has especially excited me in the last year. I first saw them playing together as members of the now defunct Roots Union at Glastonbury Festival, but their work as a duo came to my attention following an endorsement by that other West Country double-act, Show of Hands.
Ask how this connection came to be,
and the official line goes that Steve Knightley spotted them busking in the back of a pub at Sidmouth Folk Week. “That’s the story, yeah”, laughs the Lan- cashire-born but Devon-based Phillip, as we sit in a Camden pub, nursing a bottle of restorative Crabbies in my case. I suspect a story, and some ruthless journalistic inquisition reveals a longer-winded ver- sion of events, involving a previous meet- ing at Larmer Tree festival. But who would begrudge a mild biographical contrivance when the music is this good?
I’ve seen the duo in concert twice, once at Glastonbury (again), and once quite randomly whilst on holiday in Han- nah’s hometown of Brixham, Devon. Live, Phillip initially grabs the attention. An astounding musician on mostly dobro and harmonica, his virtuosity and versatility is entrancing. No slacker as a fiddler and banjo player herself, I only realised Han- nah’s full contribution when I bought the CD and came to appreci- ate the strength of her literate and com- pelling original lyrics.
Hannah first took up the violin, she tells me, after seeing “someone like Anne- Sophie Mutter on the Last Night Of The Proms wearing this wonderful red dress”, but it was annual family trips to Sidmouth that nurtured her musicianship.
“I remember seeing Steeleye Span when I was very little” she recalls. “I loved [fiddler] Peter Knight, but I also loved Maddy Prior’s singing.” She suspects that Prior was influential in developing her forthright, almost yodel-like singing style. It won’t be to everyone’s taste, but has a strength and clarity of tone that feels very much in the English folk tradition. She mentions June Tabor and Eliza Carthy as influences too (“they’ve got deeper voices and they go for it a bit more”), but gener- ally she just sings as comes naturally to her. “I don’t know really,” she puzzles, “it’s just how it comes out”.
Phillip’s musical development took him from the Beatles to Robert Johnson, via Led Zeppelin, then onto Bert Jansch and Davey Graham. He cites Jerry Douglas and Martin Simpson as inspirations for his slide playing, whilst his harmonica heroes are Sonny Boy Williamson and Sonny Terry, alongside Rory McLeod. Intriguingly, he also studied for two months at Debashish Bhattacharya’s School of Universal Music. “He’s really opened up the possibilities of the instrument,” Phillip enthuses about the Indian maestro. “As far as slide guitar goes, it doesn’t get any better than this and any more technical.” Phillip was cho- sen as one of a handful of Westerners invited by Bhat- tacharya to study in Kolkata (former- ly Calcutta). “You study strictly Indian classical music when you get there; it’s not an airy-fairy fusion thing. The instrumental lessons with him were one- on-one, and we did some group singing lessons with his sister
[Sutapa Bhattacharya] and some rhythm lessons with his brother [Subhasis Bhat- tacharya], who’s a tabla player. I don’t have any ambitions to be an Indian classi- cal performer really, but it’s informed and enhanced my musicality in endless ways.”
The couple’s debut album is entitled Singing The Bones. What particularly sets it apart from Phillip’s previous output is the high concentration of original songs, all co-written, but with Hannah as lead wordsmith. In terms of structure and theme, they fit very easily into the tradi- tional mould. Hannah is only half joking when she explains that “it was quite a big turning point in my writing to realise that actually a song should be about some- thing. So I’m always listening out for sto- ries that I think would make a good song. Also there is the idea of rootedness in landscape and local places…”
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Phillip picks up on this theme. “The subject matter is predominantly West Country on that album.” Take Three Witches for example, a tribute to the last women in England to be hung for witch - craft, who met their fate in Heavi tree, Exeter. “It’s quite a momentous thing to have happened just on your doorstep,” muses Hannah.
hey are currently working on a new album, with an expected release date later in the year. “It definitely builds on the last. There’s still a lot of stories on there,” Hannah reassures me. “The provisional title at the moment is Mynd and that’s the old English word for memory, but it means lots of things. It means ‘consciousness’ and it means ‘act of memorial’. There’s a whole list of definitions which seemed to be very applicable for the songs that we already had. And I think that’s something that we do a lot anyway, draw on older sources, memories, but also try and reinvent them and make them contemporary, keep them relevant.”
With our drinks finished, we head across the road to Green Note, fRoots’ favourite vegetarian-café-cum-music- venue, for the soundcheck. With an audi- ence of just me and a few bar staff, it feels like a mini-concert in itself. But I know another Lemsip isn’t going to get me through the rest of the evening, so reluc- tantly I give my apologies and head home. My only comfort is knowing, on the strength of that what I’ve already heard, that the packed out Green Note is in for a captivating night of great music.
philliphenryandhannahmartin.co.uk F
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