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wandered near the stage at Cambridge Folk Festival. He thought the tune was “really lovely”, but it took him an age to place it as one of his own. His reaction, once he realised, was one of sheer grati- tude. “I just couldn’t believe they were playing one of my songs.”
It’s telling that this key moment should come so recently. Dark Swift And Bright Swallow came out on Murmurs, his 2015 album with Nancy Kerr and Andy Cutting. A newcomer to Simpson’s career might assume that he’s been writing clas- sics since the good old days, but that’s not the case. It wasn’t until 1999 – a full 24 years after the release of his first album – that he put out one of his own songs. In the 1982 interview, he speaks of having a lack of anything interesting to write about. I wonder what pushed him to move beyond that line of thought.
“It happened when I began to look at particular stories, or particular moments in the world… something I might have noticed in nature, or something I’d seen in a film or read in a book, which really moved me and made me think it needed to be expressed in another way. I won- dered whether there was a song in which those things had been expressed? And you’d realise that, no, there was a gaping void where that song should be. So, what’re you going to do about it? Let’s have a go at writing.”
There’s more to it than that, however,
and there’s something of the therapy ses- sion to the following moments as he tells me that “I was in a relationship with some- one who didn’t really want me to write, because they considered that they were the writer. So I wrote, but I wrote sparing- ly. By the time that relationship came to an end, I’d learned that I could write, and not only that but that I wanted to write. Per- haps more importantly than that, I was allowed to write. So I gave myself permis- sion to write.”
he biographies of many folk musicians make for increasingly bleak reading as they enter the 1980s. They either fall on hard mtimes creatively, or the audi- ence seems content to move on. For Simp- son, however, despite being unable to find a songwriting voice, it was a great time for developing his craft. Having recorded his debut album in the mid-’70s with the legendary Bill Leader, he moved quickly into a successful period with June Tabor. He generally has very fond memo- ries of this time.
T
“I think Golden Vanity is a remarkable record,” he says of his debut solo album. “It became a template. It has a Dylan song, a Randy Newman song, a big traditional ballad, frailing guitar and banjo tunes, a Hedy West ballad… it’s a really good pic- ture of what my live set was like. It was a good start, I think. I wasn’t singing very
well, but that’s alright. It took me a bit longer to get the singing up to scratch, but it doesn’t bother me. If you listen to a lot of traditional singers, you’re not listening to them because of the exquisite quality of their vocal performance.”
“The June Tabor record, I think, is beautiful. It has some great stuff on it. There are some things, with
hindsight…[he ponders, brow furrowed, for a moment or two]. Actually, I wouldn’t do any of it the same. Not at all. But I’m proud of it, and I can certainly hear myself trying! I admit that the slide solo on Strange Affair is not my finest hour [laughs].”
In the mid-’80s he upped sticks and accepted an invitation to settle in the Good Ol’ Uncle U.S. of Stateside. “I went to the States for love,” he smiles, “but also because I wanted to learn. I’d been so immersed in American music for so long at that point. I had incredibly strong feelings about it, and an incredible sense of my ability to be able to play that music – not in an American way but in my own way. I went because I felt it was a real opportuni- ty to get to grips with it, and it worked. It took off like a rocket. I went from being on the English folk scene to being involved in all different kinds and levels of Ameri- can music. Blues, old-timey, singer-song- writers – anything you can imagine. It was brilliant. It kicked me right up the arse.”
Photo: © Judith Burrows
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