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blue. I thought what the Carolina Chocolate Drops did purely in terms of reclaiming the string band tradition for African Americans was huge, so when EFDSS asked if I was interested in doing it of course I said yes. Three weeks before Dom came over I called him up and we were chatting away about repertoire and I said there was a song Peg Leg Howell had done in 1927 which I’d always wanted to do – Coalman Blues. Great opening verse…’Woke up this morning about four o’clock/got me some eggs and a nice pork chop/cheap cigar and a magazine/and I went to the station to catch the 5.15’. Isn’t that great? Thank you, take the rest of the day off!”
“It’s such a brilliant song and I had a great guitar part for it, but I could never sing it because it was too tricksy. And Dom said ‘I’ve always wanted to do that song but I never worked out how to play it!’ It was great. I got to play stuff I hadn’t looked at since I was 20 or 25. It was an essential part of my playing, but it wasn’t something I could utilise.”
A number of high profile guests feature on the album including Nancy Kerr on fiddle, Andy Cutting on accordeon, John Smith on gui- tar, Ben Nicholls on bass, Toby Kearney on drums and daughter Molly Simpson making her recording debut singing on a cover of Emily Portman’s Bones & Feathers.
does. She’s really great. I thought ‘what this really needs is a mad Kentucky-style triple-time banjo part’, so I put down this banjo part and sang it and overdubbed electric guitar and electric dobro and all kinds of backward slide stuff and mad shit. It’s very organic… just me building this thing up. I played it to Kit and Molly in the car and she sang along to the whole track so I thought ‘That’s it! I’ll get Molly in to sing on it.’ A Scots friend heard it and asked me if it was Heidi Talbot! I said no, it’s actually Molly, she’s eleven.”
“I
Clearly he is very happy with the way the album has turned out. “It sounds very solid to me. The criticism often levelled at me is that I play too many notes but I don’t think you can say that about me on this one.”
Just before he started recording Trails & Tribulations, he had a phone call. From Holly wood. They wanted him to play the sound - track to a new comedy movie, Ideal Home, set in New Mexico, star- ring Steve Coogan as a gay celebrity chef and his partner played by Paul Rudd – a bickering couple who end up having to look after a small child.
“It’s very funny, very raw. They send you the film with dummy cues and say ‘23 seconds here of this or that’. Mostly you would do it with the director in the studio but we couldn’t do that so we had one Skype session and they’d say ‘what we want is something like…’ and I’d go ‘Oh you mean something like this?’ and they go ‘yeah!’.”
He ended up playing sixteen instruments on the Ideal Home soundtrack and there is already talk of another movie on the hori- zon. Could this be Martin Simpson’s transformation into Britain’s answer to Ry Cooder? He’d love that.
“I’ve spent most of my life with the sound down on the TV,
watching images, playing guitar, so it’s perfectly natural for me to play with film. It’s something I have alwayswanted to do. When I was living in the States I did stuff for National Geographic and PBS and things like that. I got asked to do the music for this film Delta Jews about Jews in the Mississippi delta for PBS. At the time I had a small dog. They sent me a cheque for three grand and the dog ate the cheque. The Fed-Ex man wouldn’t come in the garden because he was afraid of dogs and put the cheque through the gate and the dog ate it.”
And the future? “The last two years has been so important in terms of me get-
ting to do stuff. It ups the game. On a very broad level I’ve been working on getting better. I’m an enthusiast if nothing else…”
You can say that again…
www.martinsimpson.com
F
’ve been working on that for years. I got that first record of hers and it became Molly’s favourite – she learned all of Emily’s songs, which are really compli- cated. We’d drive down to Cornwall and play it for six hours and I’ve never once got tired of what Emily
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