41 f Wainwright World
They’re billed as the Wainwright Sisters, and manage to combine the best of the Wainwright, McGarrigle and Roche traits. Colin Irwin waits for Lucy with Martha…
guine about the whole thing. She’s play- ing a gig tonight. With her half-sister Lucy Wainwright Roche. They’ve got a sound- check in a hour. No problem. Except there is a problem. Lucy’s not here. Snowbound in New York. And this Glasgow. They think she’s on a plane now though. Maybe. Hopefully.
W
“I’ll have to play solo if she doesn’t make it,” says Martha, smiling nervously. “Long time since I did a solo gig…”
She seems to know everyone here. Shaking hands with the ones she thinks she knows, bear-hugging the ones she defi- nitely knows. There’s laughter, reminis- cences, smiles, chit-chat, kisses… everyone loves Martha.
But where’s her sister, Lucy? Be a
shame if she doesn’t make it. Their first album together Songs In The Dark is decep-
ill she? Won’t she? These are tense moments in Glasgow’s Holiday Inn, but Martha Wainwright is characteristically san-
tive. It’s seemingly a homage to mother- hood via a dainty mix of ballads and lulla- bies, but closer examination reveals a whol- ly different tone invoked by disquieting songs dripping in eerie wickedness full of black humour and dark deeds. Songs like Richard Thompson’s End Of The Rainbow, their father Loudon’s very funny Screaming Issue, Townes Van Zandt’s shuddering Our Mother The Mountain and Rosalie Sorrels’ wry new mother’s anthem, Baby Rocking Medley. Even ostensibly sweeter territory like El Condor Pasa, the Peruvian song indelibly associated with Simon & Gar- funkel, and the old Bothy Band favourite Do You Love An Apple? seem to acquire a sinister, ghostly dimension.
And that’s before we even contem-
plate the infanticide classic Long Lankin. “Oh, Lucy found that,” says Martha quickly in a slightly defensive manner that suggests that while she’s somewhere over the Atlantic, Lucy will cop all the blame for the album’s obsession with misery. “Just doing that song was painful because it’s so long. I cut out a few of the verses which I found
boring – I had to take these deep breaths just to get through it. I sort of had to drone so we wouldn’t lose our pitch terribly badly. It was a mental exercise just to get through it – and it’s the only track where we’ve added other voices to keep the story mov- ing. It’s a scary song. We don’t do it live because it’s so hard.”
Martha and Lucy are respectively the daughters of Kate McGarrigle and Suzzy Roche and together they aren’t a million miles from what you might expect of a McGarrigles-Roches offspring collaboration: charming, quirky, quaintly ramshackle, funny. They grew up in different countries, never saw a whole lot of one another and, apart from occasional family Christmas shows, had never really played together before Songs In The Dark.
Motherhood has clearly shaped it, though not in ways you might imagine. Martha’s first-born Arc arrived in dramatic circumstances, two and half months prema- turely while she was in England performing her Edith Piaf shows in 2009.
Photo: courtesy BBC
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