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Brass Monkey at the Tricycle Theatre, Kilburn, 3rd May 1981. L to r Roger Williams, Howard Evans, Martin Brinsford, John Kirkpatrick, Martin Carthy.
We get accused of being very narrow minded all the time. I get the question time and time again, “Do you only listen to folk music?” There was a time when I used to really lose my rag over that and say “Do you realise that you’re talking about the collected experience over a few thousand years of the world’s popula- tion?! And you say to me ‘Don’t I listen to rock’n’roll,’ which is like an over-devel- oped muscle on the little finger of popular music.” I happen to like rock’n’roll, I love its energy because it’s the same as what makes folk music interesting – it comes right from the bum, right from the shoul- der-blades, and it hits you.
So my earnest wish is that people would be a little more imaginative in where they go to look for things. It doesn’t take a lot. But Topic Records lose money if they want to make a record of an English traditional singer – that’s tragic. Imagina- tion is what’s missing now, which there was in abundance in the mid-1960s – there was this momentum. You could go into folk clubs then, any week, and there’d be two hundred people because they had a reputation for interest, spark, excitement, love – because imagination was loose, and imagination is not loose any more. I blame James Callaghan…!
But aren’t you falling into the danger there of assuming that the clubs are still the hub of the folk scene, from which everything else comes? Certainly in terms of the records that we’re deluged with, there’s an absolutely bewildering variety of sources that people are going to, the instruments they’re playing, and an incredible amount of commitment that certainly wasn’t seen on records much in the ’70s. You’re certainly right that you
don’t detect much of that in the folk clubs, but is it not possible that instead of being at the hub, the clubs have now moved out onto one of the less important spokes?
I think it actually dates from earlier back than we would like to admit. I can remember even back in the ’60s, people were saying “This is great, but it isn’t half hard for new people to get in.” The root cause lies there. There was apparently a tremendous breadth of stuff going on in clubs, but I think the conservative element had already set in, with both small and big C’s. The next generation, the people who came along after ’65, were already there then. People like Robin & Barry Dransfield were already around. Nic Jones was a shadowy figure in the back of Dave Moran’s group, The Halliard. It’s really quite alarming when you think about it – most of the people who have made their mark had started by then, somehow. One or two hadn’t. But I remember meeting June Tabor by ’68; Dave Burland was around, Peter Bellamy of course.
That doesn’t mean that there aren’t any good young singers around, or that there haven’t been for 12 or 15 years. There have, but they don’t get a look in, And that hasn’t changed. The death-knell was sounded when committees took over clubs and musicians stopped running them.
One of things that happened to the
Watersons was that when they broke up and a committee took over their club, an air of seriousness descended upon it. They talked about “the Watersons’ legacy,” and never once booked the sort of people that the Watersons would book. The Watersons booked anybody who had the level of skill – you’d have Ewan MacColl & Peggy Seeger
one week, Reverend Gary Davis the next, Jack Elliott the one after. The requirement was just skill and love, and it was an abso- lutely dynamite club which people would come to week after week regardless of who was on. There’s no committee I can think of that has managed to produce that level of commitment from an audience.
Do you still listen to all the floor singers?
Oh yes. And the standard is appalling at the moment, if that’s the next question! Over the last twenty years, the standard of floor singers has dropped while the stan- dard of guest singers has risen. People have got bogged down in mannerism, including me, but skills have improved, performers have got better at their jobs. It’s hard to say generally about floor singers, because on some nights you get a really good surprise, but there are a lot of people satisfied with a very poor standard. They’re not what I’d call committed to improving their skills – the level of satisfac- tion is a good deal lower than twenty years ago. And it’s particularly noticeable in shanty singers – there are a lot of very, very bad shanty singers around now. There’s a kind of singer who chooses to sing shanties who’s satisfied with a not very energetic level of performance.
All the same, do you sense that there’s a good climate for things to happen again now? Often when pop music goes through a really glossy, manufactured phase, peo- ple start looking for alternatives.
Well, looking at it in its broadest sense, folk music is a very important strand of pop music. A country’s pop music is not interesting if all the layers right down to the bottom, which is us, are no good. If the top layer takes no notice of the bot-
Photo: Ian Anderson
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