f38 Simpson Speaks…
In this interview with Ian Anderson published in Southern Rag in 1982, Martin Simpson talks about his early career and making guitars work.
M
artin Simpson would be many people’s candidate for the position of best guitarist on the English folk scene, not to mention
banjo player. His debut album Golden Vanity (Trailer) helped establish him as that almost overnight on its release in 1976, and he’s been a crowd puller in folk clubs since then. Oddly, in spite of regu- lar rumours of impending follow-ups, it took nearly six years before his second album Special Agent was released last autumn by Waterfront. In the intervening time, he’s also done a lot of work with other musicians including The Albion Band, Andrew Cronshaw and June Tabor – the latter partnership producing the best-selling duo album A Cut Above for Topic in 1980.
Ian Anderson’s conversation with Mar-
tin for Southern Rag in January 1982 was recorded just before Martin was due to escape snow-bound, rail-strike-hit England for a month playing in sunny Kenya.
S.R. What even happened to the famous missing album in the end?
M.S. Well I started recording it about four months after Golden Vanity came out, in the summer of ’76, with a huge budget, a 24-track studio, Rick Kemp pro- ducing and half the world guesting. But unfortunately, the one thing that was at fault was that I’d never played with that kind of musician before – I’d never played with drums or a bass player, it was right in at the deep end. Some of it worked very well indeed, but with hindsight, some of it was absolutely desperate! There were a couple of things that I did with Dick Gaughan, one of which was a duo outing on The Rocky Road To Dublin which worked beautifully, but then we did a ver- sion of a reel called Mountain Roads with bass and drums which is a study in how not to keep time!
But we completed the album, the art- work was all finished, and then it never escaped for reasons I can’t go into in great depth because I don’t want to wake up with my nose poking out the back of my head! Then I decided I’d like to do some
more acoustic tracks; to salvage the best of what we’d done and do another half dozen or so.
S.R. Did any of those end up on Special Agent?
M.S. No, none of it ever got used in fact. I did half a dozen tracks with just Rick Kemp that I was very pleased with, and again another set of artwork was complet- ed, and then Tony Secunda (the guy who was managing me) liquidated his company and left the country. The tapes and the art- work disappeared, so Paul Brown and I approached the liquidators and eventually got the tapes back on the premise that if they ever were released they’d get a share. But they will never be released. They’re not good enough.
S.R. Haven’t you re-recorded a lot of those anyway? You seem to have used this album to clear out all the ‘greatest hits’ of the last four or five years.
M.S. That’s exactly what I’ve done, for the simple reason that people have asked for them. After all this time it would have been a very difficult album to make if I’d sat down and tried to decide what to do, but I just did what people had asked me to do – the songs that people really wanted to hear. After that space of time, it was the only way to do it.
S.R. You certainly couldn’t have missed
out things like MacCrimmon’s Lament, Desperadoes Waiting For A Train or The Red Headed Boil…
M.S. I had to call it that! It’s really
called The Red Haired Boy, but I did the opening night of a club in London and a whole load of friends came along to look after me. It was a bit of a khazi, and peo- ple kept buying me brandies to cheer me up. My playing didn’t suffer, but my speech in between times got a little slurred with the result that when I announced The Red Haired Boy, half my friends fell about hooting and howling. I couldn’t understand why, until at the end they told me they were sure I’d called it The Red Headed Boil, and then what else could it be? Duck Baker says he knows an American version called The Crimson Car- buncle but I think he’s making it up!
S.R. You’ve also been doing Joshua Gone Barbados for quite a while.
M.S. In fact, what I’ve found recently is that a lot of songs I was singing when I was fourteen have come around again in relevance. I’ve just started to do Masters Of War again, which I used to do then because I was frightened by the state of the world, and now I’m even more fright- ened it seems to be such a good, applica- ble song.
S.R. It’s funny – Bob Dylan went through a period of being unfashionable on the British folk scene, for reasons I don’t really understand, yet a lot of his earlier songs especially, both from the point of view of construction and content matter, are timeless.
M.S. Absolutely – they’re wonderful songs. I think Dylan became very unfash- ionable with the critics. I remember [1970s Folk Review editor] Fred Woods saying that as Dylan’s songs weren’t heard in folk clubs they were of no lasting value, which made me want to do awful things to him! Silly man.
S.R. What were other early songs that you played? I remember you mentioning Tom Rush as an influence.
M.S. Oh yes. The first people I heard, having two elder brothers, were jazz things like Kid Ory, lots of rock and roll – my brothers used to buy 78s of Elvis Presley and Little Richard, which I thought was ghastly, but I heard it a lot – and at the same time Harry Belafonte and Paul Robe- son got bought quite a lot, especially by my mother. I loved all that. My father was very musical, he was a very good baritone, used to teach the piano and sing in operat- ics and things like that – he made me inter- ested in the idea of singing. Not that I can sing like he could – he’s 82 now and he can take the polish off things when he decides to let rip.
So the first thing I wanted to do, hav- ing heard these songs, was sing. I didn’t particularly want to play an instrument to start with, but then I realised I would have to. And when I was at school – everybody seems to knock the way that English folk music is referred to in school, but I really
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