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Parenting Skills T
“It’s more fun being on the road with your dad than you’d imagine”, says Eliza Carthy of her recent duo tour with Martin. Colin Irwin sips green room tea, while Judith Burrows takes her camera to Scarborough Fair.
he Green Room. Queen Eliza- beth Hall. London. Sporting another decorative new shirt (who on earth is this man’s stylist these days?), Martin
Carthy is at his most solicitously gracious, heading straight for the kettle to take charge of the tea run. Daughter Eliza’s voice – and trademark cackle – is clearly heard from the corridor outside before she enters the room proffering infectious grins and generous hugs.
“It’s more fun being on the road with your Dad than you’d imagine,” she laughs by way of explanation, as Martin returns to kettle duties in search of an extra cup. It’s a process that is repeated several times, Martin rising to greet each passing acquaintance in the Green Room with offers of hot refreshment, unblinkingly seeking out the ever more complicated ingredients required.
Eliza has honey in hers and is sounding
good on it. Very good on it. In fact she’s in spectacular form, having emerged from a stressful and problematic period in her life with an unmistakable spring in her step.
Later, Martin and Eliza will take their
guitar, fiddle and vocal cords on stage and deliver a mesmerising – and at times utter- ly gripping – performance of their first album together as a duo, The Moral Of The Elephant. They are joined in the first half by their Imagined Village comrade Sheema Mukherjee, brilliantly dexterous sitarist of this parish and a vision of poise and cool; and actress Gabrielle Drake (she was once in Crossroads, you know), who glides onstage as Eliza sings her mother Molly’s song Happiness and heaps further poignancy on the occasion with a dignified recitation of one of her mother’s poems.
Yet the real revelations come in the second half when Martin and Eliza are left alone and in their pared-down state with some seriously heavy material. They are up there, totally exposed – just a bit of affec- tionate banter to stave off the tension – making hefty demands on the concentra- tion of their audience. The audience rises to the challenge.
“I believe audiences like being chal- lenged. If they see that you believe in what you are doing and you are doing it with passion, they will respond,” says Martin.
He’s right, too. Eliza, who never likes to serve her audience anything on a plate, came up with the idea of putting their two longest, most difficult and broody songs –
Grand Conversation On Napoleon and Ele- phant – back to back. Both are slow, excep- tionally wordy, philosophical discourses which demand the sternest attention on both sides of the microphone. Partisan they may be, but it’s still almost humbling to feel this audience hanging on every word of the two epics, beguiled by every seemingly obtuse note, almost afraid to breathe lest they miss a single nuance of the story. And when they finally end there’s the sort of paused hush preceding the applause that only occurs when an audience is totally wired into a perfor- mance. It’s as remarkable as it’s rare.
Meanwhile, back in the Green Room, Martin finally sits down with his own cup of tea when someone comes in to ask for a set list to supply to the mollycoddled hacks in attendance so they can pretend to know what they’re on about when they file their reviews. Martin and Eliza swiftly run through their set list but there are a couple of blanks at the beginning. This is because, well it’s because they haven’t actually decided what to play there yet. It is, after all, only an hour or so to showtime.
Eliza: “I haven’t got much to do in the first half so I tell you what, Dad, you do Famous Flower and I’ll go and get pissed…” Martin: “Oh no you won’t!” Eliza: “Corrie’s on!” Martin: “Is it?” Eliza: “Yes, it is. Screw you! On you go, Granddad!”
In essence the album is defined by Ele-
phant. A deep, thoughtful, philosophical treatise about the importance of seeing the whole picture rather than an isolated part, it is based on a John Godfrey Saxe poem, The Blind Men And The Elephant. Eliza heard it on the radio in the car one day, went home, dug it out on that there internet and became totally consumed by the story, the message and indeed the moral. She actually borrowed the phrase ‘the moral of the elephant’ from the rele- vant internet site and now lives in fear of someone coming up to her at a gig berat- ing her for nicking the phrase.
“I worked on the tune for a long time,” she says. “I used to sound check with it and I was footering around with it for a long time. I knew what I wanted to do. I’ve got this thing about unison at the moment. I wanted us to sing and play in unison and do what the Watersons do and sing the tune until you can’t sing the tune any more and then use harmony. We’ve done that quite a bit on this album. So I knew what I wanted it to sound like and I
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