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We’d all do it because everybody fol- lows everybody else in the moment. Nobody knows, and nobody else sees it.
What kind of effect did meeting and singing with The Watersons have on your way of performing?
Well, it simplified it for me. It made me stop being such a clever dick. I was quite self-conscious. I’d just gone through a really intense re-evaluation of the way I was singing. Oh god! I went through a dreadful period. A ridiculously mannered way of doing things. I just had to try my best to work my way out of it.
And singing with The Watersons… It was a great way of keeping it plain.
What an interesting word choice. You take any one of those three sibling singers alone, and ‘plain’ is about the last adjec- tive you’d use.
But it was always to the point.
Mike Waterson was an extraordinary singer. He was like a vocal gymnast.
He was fabulous. Phew! His timing was fabulous. One thing about The Water- sons was that they always had an unerring sense of the right tempo – of how to take something. Both individually and as a group. Mike had it from when he was 21 years old. He sang like an adult.
You can see how unwavering he was in Travelling For A Living.
Yes, indeed. He was the best singer that any of the folk groups of the ’60s pro- duced, by a country mile. Louis Killen was good, but he went to live in the States, which was a loss to us.
There seem to have been a few that fell by the wayside. I’m thinking of Anne Briggs…
Well, Annie’s husband didn’t like her doing it and did his best to stop it. Annie was a fabulous singer. A real wild thing. Hearing her sing at the age of 16, you wouldn’t have believed she was 16.
You mentioned that you were thinking about revisiting some of the songs you did on your early records for a new one. A couple of questions spring to mind: how do you choose those songs, but also – on a more day-to-day basis – how do you choose a setlist when you have a reper- toire the size of yours? I mean, how big is your repertoire? Do you know?
I’ve no idea. There’s stuff that I half- remember that I wouldn’t necessarily dig out of the hat and sing without sitting down and going through the words. I mean, I haven’t sung Famous Flower Of Serving Men for years. More recently I’ve been thinking I ought to start doing that again. I think I’ve got it all back so that I can sing it like that [snaps fingers].
Do you have a method of remembering those ballads? When you launch into a song with 30-odd verses, are you relying on visualisation or something?
I’ve just got good at organising them. Sometimes it feels like a film script. “That scene notes a change of scenery, so go to there.” But when you’ve organised it in a particular way, then it becomes very per- sonal indeed. To forget it in performance is almost unthinkable, but that’s not to say
that it doesn’t happen. It happened fairly recently and I said, “Sorry, I’m going to have to stop. This has gone.” Instead, what happened was that I started to speak the story, and then the line came back to me so I dived back into the song again. I’d seen people do it and wondered how they did it, and on this occasion, spontaneously, I did it. The thing was, I wanted to tell peo- ple the story, and just by telling the story, the line I wanted came to me. I can’t guar- antee that will work every time. I think it worked because it was spontaneous.
So, how do you pick the setlist or plan this new album? Presumably, the tour you’re doing – the Martin and Eliza Carthy tours – it’s a strict set of songs?
Yes, we’re singing the album, The Moral Of The Elephant. We’re very com- fortable with that. For instance, Bonny Moorhen I did for the album and then gradually learnt it. It has to be able to organise itself. When I get the words and the timing right, it’s unstoppable. It’s an amazing song. But, yes – the set is more or less the same every night.
But that’s just when you’re performing with Eliza, right? Presumably, on your own, you’re more free to do as you please?
I have two or three sets. For me, it’s usually my current favourites. Then I might spontaneously change the whole thing one night. Then I’m often in trouble, because when you do something sponta- neously it can be very exciting, so you try and repeat it the next night but you can’t because you can’t remember what it was that you did that gave it spontaneity. It’s weird, but it happens to be true. I mean, there are some singers who religiously write down what they did every night. Vin Garbutt, for example. If he was going back to a club, he’d go back to his notes and find out exactly what he sang. Others do a similar thing. They avoid what they sang last time, or take note of which songs to repeat. I’m just not that organised.
The idea of redoing some of these songs on an album – what makes you want to do that? Is it that you believe that there are no definitive versions of a song (a very Dylan-esque idea), and that it’ll have developed and changed over the years since you recorded it?
Yep. And some are songs where I’ve deliberately worked on variations, and made changes, perhaps, for a particular verse.
I wanted to ask you about the song Geordie / Georgie. It’s an interesting example of a song you’ve approached in the past via two different versions. It’s essentially the same song, isn’t it?
Oh yeah. Yes, it is.
I was talking to Nicola from Stick In The Wheel, and in her opinion, your recording of Georgie, as performed in your garden, is pretty much all you need. On the other hand, I can’t get beyond Geordie – the beautiful, fluid reading of it from Crown Of Horn [1976].
Well, curiously, both of them I learnt from recordings of the singer. I learnt Geordie from John Pearse back in ’59 or
’60. He was one of those people who, if you asked him for the words of a song, he’d always give you them. He just gave his songs away like that [clicks fingers]. Everybody else would refuse. They’d usual- ly say [does what sounds like an imperson- ation of Neil from The Young Ones], “No, man. I promised I wouldn’t.” [Laughs] It was the most infuriating thing! So, that’s why I learnt to get songs on one hearing.
So you had that Dylan-esque blotting paper thing going on, too?
It was of necessity. If you wanted the song, you had to learn the fucker! You just had to concentrate. I learnt that song, Domeama, in one hearing. I asked the singer for the words and he said that thing, “No, man. I promised.” I was so angry! I went home and I just sat there. I had a piece of paper and pen by me, coin- cidentally, and I just started noodling. He’d had this little guitar figure at the begin- ning of the song, so I started playing that, and suddenly I remembered the first verse. I played it again, wrote it down. Then I remembered another line and wrote that down. Eventually I remembered the entire thing. I’d gone home from where he was singing and sat down on the bed, so it was fresh in my mind.
Anybody can do it. If you decide you’ve got to have it, it’ll be in there some- where [taps his skull]. I got the whole thing and I wrote it down and sang it to myself. I adjusted some verses, and I was thinking, “Wow. I think I’ve got it.” I sang it the next night somewhere, and I knew I had it. Eventually I heard the bloke sing it again, and I thought, “Yep. Got it.” I had the whole thing. Never said a word.
I learned a few songs on one hearing
that weren’t necessarily all that short. Any- way, John Pearse gave me Geordie in 1960, I think, and I was very happy. It was my sig- nature piece for a few years, and then I abandoned it after a while, thinking it was old stuff – I just put it away.
Then I got a chance to make a pro- gramme out of stuff from the BBC sound archives. One of the recordings I used was Louisa Hooper, who worked in the vicarage where Cecil Sharp first collected songs. She had a sister called Lucy White, and sometimes they sang together, so there are songs collected from both. Then there was a third sister – Lizzie. So there was Louisa, Lucy and Lizzie. There’s a recording of Louisa singing Geordie, not in 1903 but in 1940. She’s a much older per- son. She’s singing to Maud Karpeles, who was one of those old-school collectors who loved the tune but thought the words were rubbish because they weren’t literary enough for them. The Scots stuff was con- sidered very impressive because the lan- guage was beautiful, but English country singers’ stuff was considered less so.
Anyway, Louisa gets to this verse, “Geordie shall be hanged in the chains of gold,” and she stops and says, “Chains of gold. Now, there’s hanging for you.” You know, a tear came to my eye. In the back- ground, Maud Karpeles says, very prim and proper, “It’s such a lovely tune, isn’t it?” Shut up, Maud Karpeles! Stop it!
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