35 f King O’ De Banjo
Quite good on guitar too. Martin Simpson – self-styled luckiest man on planet Twang –fails to reveal the colour of his favourite dog to Tim Chipping.
Stanzas, his newest and finest album to date, we handed some of the questioning duties to familiar names in the folk and rock firmament. It’s like a cross between This Is Your Life and those Saturday morn- ing kids’ shows where people would phone in and ask Jason Donovan what his favourite kind of dog was. Although sadly, no one asked Martin that.
W The first question comes from Folk
Award winner and fox aficionado Jim Moray: In your song Home Again you talk about searching for somewhere to belong. Do you feel you've found that since returning to the UK, and is that responsi- ble for you hitting your peak at a time when other artists would be coasting?
“That’s a nice question. Yes I do feel that I’ve found where I belong. It’s a funny
hat do you ask the man who’s done everything? On the occasion of Martin Simpson’s 60th birthday and the release of Vagrant
thing to talk about. It’s ten years ago that I got together with [my wife] Kit – at which point I was 50. And curiously, early on in my life, everybody said to me, ‘You know, your life begins at 50’. And I kind of sneered at them and said, ‘Don’t be ridicu- lous,’ you know. ‘I’ve done all these things… I was a child prodigy for heaven’s sake!’ I just thought, what a peculiar thing to say. And my life began at 50. It seriously did. Since then I’ve done my best work and I still feel like I’m hitting my stride.
“And yes I do feel I’m at home where I am. So does most of the folk scene, I think, in Sheffield.”
Although there are only a few of your
own songs on Vagrant Stanzas it feels like your most concerted attempt to say “this is me”. Would that be a correct assumption?
“I think so. Basically what happened with this record is I’d been hanging out a lot with Richard Hawley. I played on his last record. And he said, ‘I’d love to pro-
duce a record for you.’ And so the first ses- sion we did, we went into the studio and Shez Sheridan, who is Richard’s guitarist, and Colin Elliot his bass player and engi- neer – they’re all there. And I basically demoed stuff and at the end of the day Richard said to me, ‘Well look, it’s perfectly clear to me what you need to do. Go away and make this record all on your own. And don’t have anybody play on it. Go away but remember that playing across the kitchen table has been the most perfect way to hear your music – I want you to try and do it like that.’”
“That’s the hardest thing to capture that there is. What I did with most of the material on this record is if I couldn’t get first take, I might try another one. Or I might come back the next day and get first take. But the whole idea was to catch that sense of immediacy. And I know there’s stuff that I didn’t intend to do on some of those takes. I don’t care. It’s the way they came out. They work.”
Photo: Judith Burrows
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