f48 W
ith a perfect storm gath- ering velocity, both Lloyd and MacColl had a big hand to play in the rise of the folk club move-
ment – and with it, Topic Records. Impor- tant records followed from the label… there were plenty of American releases from Woody Guthrie, Rambling Jack Elliott & Derroll Adams, Peggy Seeger and Hedy West, as well as key figures in British traditional music like the Stewarts of Blairgowrie, the Campbells , the McPeake family, Margaret Barry and Michael Gor- man, and themed compilations, such as the shanties collection The Singing Sailor, which even included Harry H. Corbett, a young actor at the Unity Theatre, who soon became a household name in the role of Harold Steptoe in Steptoe & Son.
The folk movement grew fast. Not everyone agreed with Lloyd and MacColl’s policies – and it soon became apparent that they often didn’t agree with each other and consequently fell out – but the musical youth of a nation, armed with instruments in the wake of the swift rise and fall of skif- fle, found a new cause in folk music. Clubs sprang up all over the country – the best of them identified by the passion and quality of their resident singers.
None were better than the Watersons, who shifted their club around different venues in Hull, before settling at the Blue Bell. They’d started off singing exclusively American material with a banjo player, Pete Ogley, while their cousin John Harri- son played guitar. However, as they became more and more absorbed by the English folk tradition, they jettisoned instrumentation and – without any real sense of planning or arrangements – evolved the unique unaccompanied har- mony vocal style that came to electrify the nascent folk scene. You couldn’t really explain it – they couldn’t really explain it –
but it was so special. It was simply some- thing they’d always done as kids.
Norma’s first encounter with Topic came in 1964, when the Watersons came to London to appear at the Troubadour, the first time they’d sung outside Hull. Bill Leader was there that night. Like them, Leader was from Yorkshire, and had come to London to join the staff of the Workers’ Music Association; he went on to become Topic’s production manager, driving around in an old Morris Traveller with a Revox in the back doing his recording in makeshift studios.
He was blown away by the power of
the Watersons’ singing and the passion in the performance he saw that night, casual- ly sidling up to them afterwards to ask if they wanted to make a record. They did, returning to London to sing some songs for an LP called New Voices alongside Harry Boardman and Maureen Craik. Bert Lloyd, who was also working for Topic at the time and came along to the recording session at Bill Leader’s flat in Camden, was especially enchanted. At one point he studied them carefully and asked them to re-sing a song they’d just done. Norma asked why he wanted to repeat the song: “Pure indulgence,” said Lloyd sweetly.
In 1965 the Watersons recorded their first full album in their own right for Topic – the iconic and hugely influential Frost & Fire. At Bert Lloyd’s instigation it was a the- matic “calendar of ritual and magical songs” and they fired up the British folk scene with the fervour of their singing and their total commitment to the cause. They became massively popular and, with their cool looks, were dubbed in some fanciful quarters “the folk Beatles”. They galvanised British folk music. They were idolised by audiences. They were lauded by the press. They even had a TV documentary made about them called Travelling For A Living or, as Norma called it, Grovelling For A Pittance.
B
ut that’s not what they were in it for. Norma once told me that their intent had been to re- ignite the singing tradition and the revival of old customs in
local communities. Due to TV, globalisa- tion, the influence of America and the increased speed of life, this could never happen and she felt the revival had failed in some degree as a result. Sure, they gave a voice to the music, helped to bring peo- ple to it and, by doing so, played a role in establishing a platform from which they – and others – could earn a living; but that wasn’t what it was about for them. Mike Waterson, for one, tenaciously hung on to his day job as a builder even while they became the most popular folk group in the land and in 1968, exhausted by all the travelling and the pressures of perfor- mance, they decided to call it a day.
“We never set out to become any-
thing. That’s why we gave up,” said Norma. “What had been our hobby and we enjoyed so much became our job and it wasn’t the same any more. It had taken on a different life.”
Norma departed for Montserrat, as you do, wound up as a DJ spinning the discs on Radio Antilles (“it was all pop music and news”) and for four years had a fine old time singing things like Leaving On A Jet Plane at what she refers to ‘wash your feet and come’ dances. Eventually, though, the call of family became irresistible.
Her return coincided with Lal and
Mike’s new collections of songs, which developed into the Bright Phoebus album… but that’s another story entirely. And when the Watersons resumed singing their traditional stuff with first Bernie Vick- ers and then Martin Carthy – whom Norma had recently married – it brought them to new audiences, albeit steadfastly avoiding the mad pressures that had got to them first time round, picking their gigs carefully.
And when they were ready to go back into the studio again in 1975 to record For Pence & Spicey Ale, they went right back home to the welcoming arms of Topic, by now firmly established as the essential folk music label. Shirley Collins, Anne Briggs, Martin Carthy, Martin Simpson, Dick Gaughan, Vin Garbutt, Nic Jones, Alistair Anderson, June Tabor and, yes, eventually Norma’s daughter Eliza Carthy… essential- ly all the Brit folk greats of the day released their work on Topic.
And the paths of Topic and Norma have followed parallel courses. They are both survivors, overcoming the vagaries of fashion, wilfully following their own instincts and resisting financial pressures and the nightmares the music business invariably flings at you.
Under the guidance of Gerry Sharp,
Tony Engle and, more latterly, David Suff, Topic has continued to defiantly champion the folk tradition and release material it felt needed to be out there, irrespective of any sordid reasoning surrounding prof- itability. None more so than – perhaps the label’s crowning achievement – its critically important Voice Of The People series, origi- nally involving 20 themed CDs of old recordings of the traditional singers and
Photo: Jak Kilby
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