f40
etc.] and my socks were removed even more, especially by Mike Cooper because he had his own style, that nice rolling raggy thing. And of all the singers at the time, even though the piss was taken firm- ly out of him for being the blues Peter Bel- lamy, the Larry The Lamb of that depart- ment of music, I think he was a great singer. He still is a great singer – he’s a born-again blueser, isn’t he?
S.R. So how did you make the jump between that and what you did on your first record?
M.S.Well I don’t really feel there was that great deal of jumping involved. I was horrified at that concept of being a ‘blues freak,’ I was just a music lover. I didn’t want to be associated with any set idea of what you should listen to. I’d had so much stick about listening to blues and old timey music when I was a kid, from people at school who listened to pop music. I’d say “Hey, man, I just bought this album recorded in 1927,” and they’d go “You pil- lock, more fool you!” I found the whole process from listening to the commercial, acceptable folk music, through the blues stuff and then on to the more obscure tra- ditional music, was something that hap- pened very gently and slowly.
And I became very impressed, I suppose it was just after the end of the ‘blues boom,’ by the singer/ songwriters – people like James Taylor and Joni Mitchell’s first albums came out. I couldn’t believe that somebody could actually do what the more personal blues singers did, writing verbatim about what happened to them, but from an ‘artistic’ and a folk point of view about their personal experience. So I did quite a lot of songwriting… aaarrghh!… traipsed around with my bleeding heart for a year or two. One line in forty thousand was actually quite good; you could catch the influence of somebody who could speak the English language occasionally.
I decided that I wasn’t together enough to write about myself in a way that was going to make the slightest bit of dif- ference to anybody else’s life. I thought “Why am I bleating about my problems or my girlfriend’s problems when it’s not going to do anybody any good.” I mean, I’d just go out and whinge to people. I chucked that in! Actually, I’ve started to write again recently and find it very excit- ing, but I’m incredibly self-critical about it. I haven’t sung anything that I’ve written apart from rewrites of traditional stuff and verses that I’ve written in the context of a traditional song – the folk process, in fact.
S.R. In order to get as involved in the techniques of playing as you have, you seem to be more knowledgeable on the mechanics of what makes the instrument work for you than most – things like the type of instrument, the way it’s set up, the strings you use, the little things added together that individually don’t do a lot but put together create the whole sound. Was that just something that happened, or have you specifically tried to find things to make instruments work better for you?
M.S. The whole thing started with lis- tening to the blues singers. I could pretty much figure out what Peter Paul & Mary and Joan Baez did to get those sounds; I
realised pretty early on that they weren’t playing orange boxes from Woolworths. But when I started listening to the blues players, I wondered how the hell you got all that noise out of an acoustic guitar – the vicious solidity that some of those guys can produce out of an acoustic guitar is tremendous; the thumb beats is some- thing that I still can’t do.
I started to get over that by back-pick- ing on the bass strings, which is how I started to frail the guitar, to slap down with the middle finger of my right hand to get that really percussive banging.
I think the second guitar that I got started to teach me a lot – it was a new American Harmony Sovereign, cost me 38 quid. It was huge, and I was fourteen at the time and could just about reach over it. I began to realise that the guitar was very far from being perfect, it was such hard work. Because my hands were so small I used to use ultra-light strings, Red Dragons – fairly naff strings but I’d change them every day if I could afford it. Which was pretty revolutionary at the time!
Although using those light gauge strings meant I could bend them all over the place, you couldn’t hit them hard. So I eventually started using slightly heavier strings and got a smaller guitar – a Guild F20. That was a lovely little guitar, but it wasn’t heavy enough, you can’t hit them. So I went through this whole line of gui- tars trying to find the sort of guitar that I could get all the right noises out of – that I could play softly but it would be loud enough to carry.
I
f you’ve got a guitar that’s really quiet, you can’t play quietly because nobody will hear you – you’ve got to work on your technique so that it sounds as if you’re playing quietly when in fact you’re not. And at the same time you’ve got to be able to push it with- out the tone going. After the F20 I had a Gibson J45 which I liked but was too quiet, they’re bass heavy but quiet; then I got a pre-war Martin Colletti copy of a Gibson which could do a lot of the things I could- n’t do on the Gibson and vice-versa. Then I traded both and got a little Martin, a 00018, new from Ivor Mairants. I had that about eighteen months, I really had played the guitar in, knew what I could do with it and thought it was ideal, then it was stolen. As a fill-in I got an Epiphone Texan, another beautiful guitar that was too quiet and bass-heavy.
I couldn’t stand the thought of trying to find another new Martin and playing it in, and I couldn’t afford a pre-war Martin. Then a friend of mine had a wonderful English hand-made autoharp by P.J. Abnett, so I sent him some ideas for a gui- tar, and he sent some ideas back, and about six months later my Abnett was made. I picked it up and fainted!
S.R. And is that still working? I remem- ber some while back you were worried about how long it might last as it was built so light.
M.S. In fact, it just gets better and bet-
ter. It’s viciously loud. It’s got a very brittle sound, not easy to record so I’ve got a Jon Weir since then which is a better recording
guitar but hasn’t got that incredible loud- ness of the Abnett. I love both of those and sometimes it’s difficult to decide what to do on either guitar.
S.R. I imagine that some of your things
like MacCrimmon’s Lament just wouldn’t play on an off-the-peg guitar.
M.S. I tried to play MacCrimmon’s
Lament at the Norwich Festival guitar workshop one year. I broke a string on my guitar and Stefan lent me one of his pre- war pearly wonders, but it just wouldn’t carry the sustain of the notes. I’ve talked to a lot of Americans about the English guitars, and I think that people with ears would agree that English guitars are markedly different.
S.R. I agree, but I don’t understand
why. Although they don’t sound like each other, there’s definitely a family similarity between the top English makers like say Fylde, Abnett, Thornbory, Le Voi and what have you.
M.S. I don’t understand either, because in many ways the designs are not that different. But certainly, if you want to play replica American music and make it sound authentic there’s not much point in owning an English guitar.
I’ve been listening a lot lately, out of
sheer joy, to Blind Willie Johnson and Robert Johnson. And to listen to Blind Willie Johnson – for a start, it sounds as if he’s using phenomenally heavy strings, probably on an old Stella with a phenome- nally high action, and he’s whacking seven- teen bells out of it. You can’t imagine any- one playing bottleneck better than Blind Willie Johnson for the purpose he plays, it is incredibly subtle and rapid, wonderful stuff. In order to try and sound like that, you can’t do it on an English guitar.
S.R. And it takes years to really hear what those guys are doing, ignoring the sound quality and thinking of it as some- body playing a guitar.
M.S. Oh yes, nearly every time I listen, I hear something new.
S.R. Getting away from these American chappies, what interested you in people like Carthy and Gaughan and being British? Was it the instrumental side or the songs?
M.S. To start with it was the instru- mental side, but also songs, as I said, like Barbara Allen – the big ballads – had rivet- ted me since I was a kid. When I first heard Carthy doing big ballads with that back- up guitar, I really could not actually believe it – what he was doing seemed so incredibly important. What struck me immediately was his thumb technique – the only person I could think of who sounded like that was Big Bill Broonzy (I didn’t know at the time that that was where he got it from) and I thought “Jesus, this man’s got a black thumb!”
Now Gaughan is an increasingly fluid
guitar player. He’s always been nice, but of all the guys on the folk scene that are looked on as solo guitarists and singers, he to me has developed more as a guitarist over the time I’ve been listening. The accompaniments on his first album were very good for their time, and still are, but the fluidity he’s got now is wonderful.
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