You’re heading out for a 20 date concert tour and literary festivals soon. You’re now in your early 80’s – how has your singing and playing changed as you’ve aged? I started out as a very straight singer – when I got on stage I sang the songs as best I could, trying to be faithful to the way I had heard the songs, folk songs that is. It’s possible I might have been taken as what they called a field singer. Te real folk singers were mainly working class but I had had a classical education which did affect me. It was piano that I trained in, so I didn’t sing like a classical singer but it did have an influence. I’ve been singing for 60 years and there are certain songs that I’ve played literally hundreds of times in my life, and it’s possible to get bored with them, but also it’s possible that singing them straight and almost unemotionally won’t do when you’re singing them for a community of people that have come from a different background. You have to become an entertainer. It’s a one off experience between people who don’t know each other, and that’s very different from the fact that a singer in the old communities, where these folk songs were made where they would know everyone in the room, and the people in the room would know the people as well as the singer did. Tat doesn’t happen when you become a performer and travel from one city to another, so you have to develop ways of keeping yourself interested, of not feeling like the audience is hostile when you come onstage, avoiding the pranks that your own ego plays on you…it’s very very different. Folk songs were not created to be sung on stage to strangers, unlike pop or classical or music hall. So I became an entertainer, hopefully a restrained one. You and family members performing your husband’s and your songs– your sons are both playing with you – how do you go about choosing what to play, and how do you get on working together? Oh yes, isn’t that wonderful? It is so hard to choose what to play because between the three of us we
literally know hundreds of songs. Tey usually leave the choice to me but on this tour I want them to sing some songs themselves. On their last tour each of them sang two songs – I’d like them to sing four songs each and I’d do backing vocals or just sit and listen because they are both beautiful singers and lovely instrumentalists. I have some new songs also, written with my son Neil’s wife, and some with my son Callum. Te boys are both in their 50’s now so we’re all getting on! How did you find writing your memoir? I’ve been involving in assembling anthologies of songs in the past but never been involved in writing a book. It’s out in October. It’s not only about my life and what I remember but also about what I think about things, and of course what you think about things develops as you get older. I have a visual memory that holds literally thousands of
done things I’m ashamed of, there are things I shouldn’t have done, and maybe you have too. We’re all the same in the end. It takes a lot of courage to get on stage and some people still have horrendous nerves, they suffer. But you suffer not for your art but because of the urge you have to be there, so the memoir is to close the gap and also so people won’t have to interview me anymore, ha ha ha! Can you tell me a bit about the Critics Group that you and Ewan ran? Ewan MacColl was my first life partner for 30 years, and we had a group that we worked with called Critics Group, whose purpose was to help people to sing traditional songs if their main form of music from childhood was not folk music. If you’d been brought up singing pop, music hall or anything else you’d perform a traditional song differently. Traditional music is
“Norwich has always been one of my favourite towns.”
photographs of different events in my head almost as if it’s a camera. I’ve drawn on those quite a bit, but being honest, Lizz, I found it emotionally gruelling. Reading over the trial bound copy I think it’s good, it says what I want it to say but I’m opened myself up a lot and laid myself on the line and there are going to be people writing to me outraged at some of the things I did and said so I have to be prepared for that. But I’m 82, I won’t live past a lot of other people’s reactions to it, and I’ve written what I thought was important. I felt that I didn’t want to be secretive about my life – people think because you get up on stage you’re some kind of special being. Well, you’re not – you’re just a person with a bigger ego that other people! So one of the things I’m trying to do is to close the gap and say look, in reality I’m just like you, I shit, I fart, I piss, I fall in love, I’d
very different to other forms as it springs out of community and the working class community, so they’re generally sung without pretention or any external stylistic components put on them. Tey are songs not made for patronage or money. With the Critics Group, one of the ways we helped to teach the mostly city people was that we used theatre techniques – ways to use your imagination when singing these songs, and looking at the attitudes you have towards yourself and the place where these songs came from. Did you come up against criticism for some of the subject matter of your songs like feminism and domestic violence, especially during the early days? I wasn’t trying to make those issues more public, I was writing songs that I felt needed to be written. A lot of the reception of the songs depends on what they were about, but now
OUTLINEONLINE.CO.UK / OCT-NOV / 21
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