f30


The nightmare began. 24 hours later Norma was in surgery having the wound drained and was then on dialysis and subsequently went into a coma. Martin cancelled all his gigs and sat at her bedside holding her hand while Eliza, who was eight and a half months pregnant and had gone on to Edinburgh, found herself stranded north of the bor- der by snowdrifts.


All plans they had, ten- tative and otherwise, went out of the window for three years. Martin only left Norma’s bedside once – to play a couple of gigs. He was away two nights and when he got back to the hospital to resume his beside vigil he discovered, in horror, a ‘do not resusci- tate’ sign had suddenly appeared.


“The person in a coma always knows you are there. You can talk to them and it goes in and there’s understanding and all of a sudden I wasn’t there. And that’s when they did it. I got to the hospital and


knew it would sound like that if me and Dad did it and it worked perfectly. I wasn’t very confident about the tune for a while but then decided you needed to stand up with a straight back and do it like that and it absolutely worked. I’m very proud of it.”


And you pair it with another slow burn meandering epic, Grand Conversa- tion On Napoleon because…


T


“It just fits. And we make it worse with an exceptionally long introduction! We should put warnings on the door! I don’t like to give audiences an easy time at all although I have relented a bit. I’ve accepted it’s fun for everybody to do a ‘Best Of’ now and again. Doing the Way- ward Daughter project was for me a giant concession to people who’d been coming up to me for years saying ‘do Cold Wet Rainy Night’ and ‘do Worcester City’ when I’m sitting there with a completely differ- ent line-up. ‘Do Spacegirl’ and I’m sitting there with a crumhorn and hurdy gurdy! But I do recognise it’s fun sometimes to revisit that stuff but I always had this thing that you should never, ever repeat your- self. That was a big thing of mine. Never give them an easy time. Each time you go out, give them a new album and a new repertoire. I thought that was important. But now I’m mellowing and I accept that people need to enjoy themselves from time to time. Bastards!”


he idea of a Martin / Eliza duo project had been mooted sever- al years ago but events con- spired against them. The most traumatic of these events


occurred when they were on the road together promoting Gift, Eliza’s duo album with her mother Norma Waterson. They were on the M6 on their way from Bridgewater to Scotland and stopped off in Warrington to drop off a friend at the train station. Struggling with a leg bruise, Norma said she wanted to pop into A&E at the hospital because she thought she might need antibiotics.


they said she’s on ‘do not resuscitate’ and I said ‘Whaaat?!’ So I got there and talked in her ear until after midnight when they told me I had to go and I went back the next morning and they said it’s amazing, she’s bounced! I was sure if I talked to her she’d be alright. I can’t say it ever occurred to me she’d die. In fact I can categorically say I was sure she wouldn’t die.”


The other big fly in the ointment was


Eliza’s voice. Or lack of it. She’s been dogged for fifteen years by serious prob- lems with her vocal cords, which eventual- ly took their toll on her health and well - being and were eventually only resolved by a couple of operations.


“Only now I can see how divorced I became from my own personal music because I had to save every single ounce I had for the stage. You could do the gig and go to the party afterwards and have a drink but you couldn’t shout in a crowd. And then you could do a gig and go the party but you couldn’t talk. Or laugh. And then you stop going to the party because you can’t speak after a gig. Or before a gig. It happens over a period of years and you don’t realise it’s hap- pening until you found yourself entirely isolated from the rest of the band. I got pregnant and lost the ability to speak entirely. I gave birth completely silently. I had nothing. It all went.”


“The watershed moment came when I had to cancel a whole tour and went to Harley Street and they put a camera down there and found I had a little friend – Brian the cyst. And under Brian the cyst there were several more little friends. It was quite sizeable and had been there for a few years. So after I had Florence I had Brian removed and then about a year’s worth of physiotherapy and post-operative stuff and tried to get by for a while but realised something was still wrong. So I went back to see the surgeon and he said ‘oh yes, those are the polyps’ so three months before the Wayward tour I had surgery again.”


“Now it’s a completely new world. I can sing all the old material again and I’m a better singer for it. Music became a source of great stuff and pain for me for a very long time. It was just a case of going to the gig and getting the noise out. I never held back, I had to get it out, but it was an incredible effort of will.”


As things eventually settled back into something approaching normality, the idea of a Carthy and daughter album re- surfaced. You fondly imagine they had a fund of ready material at their fingertips but Eliza says it isn’t so. Surely, you protest, the Carthy household in Robin Hoods Bay has always been a hotbed of private sessions producing an endless goldmine of likely music ready to slot into an album made by any configuration of family members?


“Erm no, we’re never all there at the same time,” says Eliza. “Music’s around all the time and sometimes we used to sit down and have a tune but generally we only do it for a reason. You have to make an occasion for everyone to get together. We sing in the car and in the house but we don’t sit down and have a session – hard to do that when you have two children under five in the house.”


So how did it come together then?


“We had ideas. I made a couple of lists and then I moved house a couple of times and lost the lists. Dad would say ‘When are we gonna do this record then? And I’d say ‘I dunno, it’s in a book somewhere’.”


But eventually Eliza came up with a plan. And it was a radical one. They call it ‘hot-housing’.


T


“I don’t always need a concept but I need a reason and a focus for an album. That’s what works best for me. So I sug- gested we come up with a long list and do two songs in a day. Rehearse two songs in the morning and record them the same evening.”


hat’s exactly what they did. Four hours preparation in the morning and four hours at Oliv- er Knight’s studio in the evening putting the tracks


down. It worked. They fell behind on only one occasion when they only managed to get one track down – they think it was probably Grand Conversation On Napoleon – but made up for it by record- ing three tracks on another day. All pretty much recorded live.


There are no safety nets on The Moral Of The Elephant. Martin revisits one of his old hits, Queen Of Hearts, anew with a dauntingly different approach, and other stand-out tracks include Waking Dreams, Eliza’s beautiful variation on Awake Awake and Mike Waterson’s arrangement of the grisly Died For Love as a song cycle that opens relatively optimistically with Her Servant Man takes a wholly more sinis- ter path… or what Eliza describes as “descent into hell”. One of the key tracks in this descent is Monkey Hair, a deeply emotional song by the late lamented Michael Marra about a Scottish minister’s wife who decides to bear no more children because her husband keeps sending them off to war to be killed. The original plan had been to cover Marra’s wondrous Frida Kahlo’s Visit To The Taybridge Bar, but in the event they discovered they couldn’t do it.


“It wasn’t until we tried it that we realised that part of what made it so attractive was Robert McFall’s string arrangement and his entry and delivery. It’s a particular kind of tune he really


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