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excels in but which I couldn’t really get a handle on, and I was going to try an approximation of a string quartet arrangement by one of my heroes, Robert McFall, and that wasn’t possible either. So we went with Monkey Hair instead, which is a great song.”
Much attention, inevitably, is directed
towards Happiness, an impossibly infec- tious crooner written by Nick Drake’s mum, Molly. It sounds like a classic from the 1940s, the sort of thing you might find in an old collection by Judy Garland or Julie London or Ella Fitzgerald. Or maybe Norma Waterson.
It arrived in Eliza’s heart by accident via a circuitous route involving a man called Cally who designed the sleeve to her Neptune album, is involved in the Nick Drake estate and, it turns out, is a big fan of Martin’s dating back to his Crown Of Horn album. In the course of working on the Neptune sleeve he gave Eliza a copy of the Molly Drake album, which she put in her bag and promptly forgot about. Months later she borrowed her mam’s car to go off on tour with Tim Eriksen but, alas and alack, there were no CDs to play in the car. Then Eliza suddenly remembered the unplayed Molly Drake CD she’d been carry- ing around in her bag for months and that became the soundtrack for the whole tour.
“It’s such a beautiful thing. It reminds
me of Teach Me To Be A Summer’s Morn- ing (the Lal Waterson book / CD collection of music, drawings and poems) with the loving way it was put together and the writings within. She wasn’t making a demo, she was just recording at home with her husband, who was apparently interested in tape recording equipment. When we were recording the album I was thinking
‘what else can we do?’ and this song kept going round my head and I was going round Sainsbury’s singing it and wonder- ing why I couldn’t think of what else to record. And then it suddenly hit me! I went into the house singing it and Mum and Dad were watching television and I said ‘what do you think about this? Work the chords out…’”
Norma did The Very Thought Of You album of songs paired together. Joe Boyd proposed a Nick Drake song (Riverman) to go with Solid Air (the John Martyn song written about Nick Drake). Actual- ly,” Martin offers, as an aside, “Norma’s very cross about one moment in that song. She did something that she consid- ers to be a cliché. She does something that anybody else would do and kicks herself every time she hears it and regards it as a piece of laziness on her part. Because Norma can sing anything – like you can Eliza, you’ve inherited that – and she forgets she has to think about it. Give her a jazz piece and she knows exactly what to do.”
Y
The conversation now takes an inter- esting detour as Martin and Eliza discuss the art of singing and the curse of deco- ration.
Eliza: “Mam always told me to with- draw from cliché and never do what every- one else does. She used to say ‘never do that folkie decoration thing’. I thought she meant don’t sing adorned ever. So I sorted out this one note dispassionate delivery to start with, no embellishments whatsoever.
ou’d imagine Martin must have met Nick Drake back in the day, but apparently not. “The only contact I ever had with his music was when
Then I figured out what she meant was express yourself within that. Learn from traditional singers and put yourself into it. Don’t do what other people do just because it’s convention. It’s one thing she passed on to me – never do that folkie thing. It’s important not to just sound like everyone else but find something else, your own expression.”
Martin: “If you don’t do the decora- tion then you give yourself time to find the variation and the variation is what sets a lot of old-fashioned singers apart when they do it.”
Eliza: “You can get stuck on a decora- tion and end up doing the same thing all the time on the same bit of melody – oh we have to put some decoration there. I don’t think it’s in the English tradition which has a lot of freedom there.”
We talk about modern singers and Martin sings the praises of Emily Portman (“She goes for variation which I think is wonderful, and she’s fabulously imagina- tive”) while Eliza bemoans the current obsession with purity.
“In the last 20 years there has been a real concentration on tone and when peo- ple criticise The Unthanks, that’s where they are coming from – a land of purity which I don’t think we really need. That’s one of the reasons I love The Unthanks. It’s not all about tone and the purest singer you’ve ever heard. Bollocks to that! I don’t wanna hear the purest singer ever, I wanna hear the best singer ever, not the purest. The pure ones have got some living to do as far as I’m concerned.”
“The concentration on tone has a lot to do with advances in recording tech- niques. At one point in the late ’90s some-
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