root salad f22 Nick Hart
Hey, hey, it’s the new wave of new folk blokes, part 1. Tim Chipping reports.
ne of the most rewarding and accomplished albums we’ve heard this year was actually released at the start of 2017. How much time needs to pass before we can declare a record a lost classic? Because that’s what Nick Hart Sings Eight English Folk Songs already feels like. I’ve known Nick off and on for a few years. We even sang on a Jackie Oates record together. But it occurs to me I know nothing about his background or the origin of his passion for traditional music.
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“No one does!” he laughs, over a pint in an authentically old inn.
Where are you from? It’s hard to place from your singing voice.
“My accent fluctuates a lot. I grew up in Cambridge. My dad was in North Essex, the next village along from Thaxted. Watching videos of myself as a kid I’ve got a really thick old Cambridge accent. It’s an identifi- ably East Anglian accent, which kind of got knocked out of me. But I think part of the reason I sound more East Anglian on these songs might subliminally be a musical deci-
sion. There’s a greater richness in the diph- thongs, those two-part vowels. It’s quite hard to learn those songs, and for that to be such a strong feature, for then to deliber- ately write that out.”
On Butter & Cheese (learned from Sam
Larner) it’s notable that you sing “chimley” as he did. “That’s the one piece of East Anglian dialect that I had without any affec- tation! I remember going to primary school and calling it a chimley and people being like, ‘It’s chimney with an ‘n’, you idiot.’ Old people in Cambridge always said chimley.”
How and when does traditional music arrive in your life?
“My dad, after he and my mum split up; he was looking for things to do. And what he decided to do was learn morris dance. Divorcee morris dancing! So I was always around morris from the age of about three. And obviously I fucking hated it. But when I was about thirteen or fourteen, someone bought me a penny whistle as a Christmas present. And it was a real lightbulb moment in that I thought, ‘This is really easy. You can just play all the tunes you’ve already got in
your head.’ And I had this repertoire of morris tunes I’d already known. But it was- n’t until university that I started getting my head around the tradition of English song and becoming head over heels obsessive.”
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hat was it that got you obsessed? “I think if you read too much of the literature to do with the first folk revival
and couple that with your experience of contemporary folk music, it’s quite easy to be left with the impression that it hap- pened, it died out in about 1911 and then it was revived basically from scratch; recon- structed from books. When I realised that was nonsense and there had been a far greater continuity… I’d never been pre- sented with Sam Larner and Harry Cox, these brilliant singers singing beautiful songs really well. It was such an epiphany.”
“I started singing at Sharp’s a bit and going to festivals and wanting to sing all night at unaccompanied singing sessions. I liked the nuances of metre and the fact that you can play with pulse, and the virtue of not having a harmonic framework to sing to. It took me six years to be comfortable with accompanying the music.”
I think of you as chiefly a box player,
but it doesn’t appear on the album at all. “I found it quite hard to sing over.
There’s a reason why so many people do this with a guitar, I think. That gentle decay that you get on a guitar is just easier to sing over. All my guitar accompaniments are essential- ly heterophonic; I’m playing a basic version of the melody with some occasional bass notes. I think for me, finding an approach to doing something, there has to be a con- sistency there. I like being able to apply the same formula to all of the songs.”
Why didn’t you tell anyone about the record you’d made?
“Laziness. And I don’t like self-promo- tion. I’m very happy to talk about myself at length, as you will have noticed, but I don’t like asking for help.”
Are you uncomfortable in modernity? “That’s often levelled at me! I’m doing
up a Victorian house at the moment, and it makes me angry about how I’ve got to undo all the shit things people have done to it over the years. I don’t know if I dislike modernity but I definitely do like antiquity. But more than that, without wishing to sound like a Tory, I also value continuity.”
Nick Hart Sings Eight English Folk Songs deserves to be found.
nickhartmusic.com F
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