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matches it, and there you go. If we could write words, we’d have loads of original songs! I don’t have a writing partner to be the Lennon and McCartney of the fake traditional world with, so this is how it comes out. For instance, I had the tune that we use for Song Of The Lower Classes, and the version on Tim Dalling’s album reminded me of the text. It used to be that I always came up with a tune and then found words which would fit it, rather than writing tunes for specific texts – but it can come either way, now. Some- times a tune will just come out through a particular guitar or banjo tuning…”
t’s not quite just whether the words are going to fit,” Cath qualifies, “because the way we modify words into a tune is, quite often, very particular. Syl- lable by syllable, sometimes. The word selection pro- cess can involve narrowing down your options for the number of syllables, when you start singing existing songs to different tunes. Like with Wallington – there are two lines in it that I almost constantly get wrong because the original version of the text had two too many syllables but was really nicely phrased. The version we came up with is a nice phrase too, but if I start singing the wrong version I can’t then change it back. It’s a jug- gling process to ensure that the story isn’t lost when you’re modi- fying an old story.”
“I The considered detail of Cath’s response seems somehow typi-
cal of her. She really isn’t the type to just sing some words because they fit a tune. “What, like heavy metal rhymes?” she laughs. “No, I’m not so keen on that. You have to pick a version that you like the plot of and the way the verses go and then you have to fit it to the tune you’ve written. So there’s various things to be done.”
“We like Lady Dysie,” offers Phil, warming to the theme. “I remember hearing Martin Carthy do that song on a John Peel ses- sion a long time ago and, to my knowledge, he’s never recorded it. I decided that the song needed an airing but couldn’t just play it in his style. Quite often, when we try and sing something to the same tune that someone else has already recorded, it feels like it’s just not as good as their version. So I actually consciously wanted to make a new tune for that song.”
“I’m really comfortable singing that one,” confirms Cath, “and I was right off the bat. I think that’s part of our teamwork thing – just being aware of what the other can do. We were pretty much in agreement about these recordings before we even started thinking about them as an album. A lot of the take choices were pretty much a case of us both just agreeing that the feel was right.”
Cath originally learned one of the album’s songs – Rainbow – for an extraordinary spoken word, music and visuals performance project called I Made Some Low Enquiries, which I had the good fortune to witness at last year’s Leigh Folk Festival. “Justin Hopper [like Cath, an American resident in the UK] is the guy who came up with that,” she tells me. “He’s got a new book out called The Old Weird Albion – one of those ‘weird and creepy things in the place you live!’ books. He’s a writer who does spoken word perfor- mances and he originally created I Made Some Low Enquiries for the SPILL Festival in London in 2015. Justin got in contact after Richard Thompson (the Lost Harbours rather than Fairport Con- vention one) tagged me into a query Justin posted on Facebook asking ‘does anyone know anyone in England who can sing like Almeda Riddle?’ We made contact and had a Skype conversation and I tried the song out for him and we hit it off pretty well straight away.”
“That first presentation at SPILL Festival was with Susie Hon- eyman from The Mekons on violin, Jem Finer from the Pogues on prepared banjo and hurdy-gurdy, Richard and Mark Pilkington on electronic things. Those people are all top of their small, specific, detailed, delightful stuff, and we all worked together with almost no rehearsal, other than knowing what you were doing, yourself. I got to sing Rainbow unaccompanied and Wayfaring Stranger with Susie and Jem, which was great. There were also recordings used of Shirley Collins. Shirley was supposed to be there, but it was just after her 80th birthday, and she, err, overdid it at her party, so was- n’t able to come! We’ve got a Cath & Phil duo show coming up in London soon, and Justin’s supposed to be coming and reading at that, but I’d really like to tour the full-wacker at some point.”
Both Tylers seem to be very musically active at present, with several projects outside the core duo.
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