f94 Currently Carthy
Thirty-three years after our earlier interview, Jon Wilks had a few hours with the Great Man.
I
pack the last of the chairs away and crawl out from the cupboard under the Whitchurch Folk Club stage, where Eliza and Martin Carthy have just performed. Eliza has a question regarding getting into London for a meeting the following morning. I see an opportunity.
“Don’t drive,” I suggest. “Take the 10:15 into Waterloo. It’ll only take you an hour and you could be back by mid-afternoon.”
“What about my dad?” asks Eliza. “I’ll look after your dad,” I reply. “I’m sure we can find something to do.”
And so, my plan hatched and given the OK by his daughter, I find myself leading Martin Carthy up the garden path – quite liter- ally – only a few hours later. Safely installed in my living room, with a cup of tea in his hand and a guitar resting nearby should certain points require illustrating, I pitch three or four hours of questions at this humble (although he cringes at the word), extraordinary gentleman – a legend by anyone’s standards, but so much more to your average folkie.
They say you should never meet your heroes. When it comes to Martin Carthy, they’re clearly wrong.
So, Martin… where on earth to begin? Well, I started off with skiffle. With this kind of music anyway.
We’re talking Lonnie Donegan – that kind of thing? Yeah. We’re talking about Rock Island Line. That was the trig-
ger, almost, for the whole awakening of popular music, or ‘Peo- ple’s Music’. Popular music in the sense that it was people’s music. Literally millions of people started buying guitars. My family already had one; my dad had a guitar in the back room, and he had a fiddle. The guitar had a couple of strings missing. I don’t know if he ever played it. There was a tutor there who I ignored. I just wanted to play Worried Man Blues or Wreck Of the Old 97. So you picked up on Lonnie Donegan first, or were you straight into people like Leadbelly and Woody Guthrie?
Leadbelly was just a name to me. Woody Guthrie, too. There was a fella at school called Mick Baker, and I’d occasionally go around to his house… I went to school in Bermondsey, where my dad went. My dad was from the East End and he got a scholarship to this school, which was a big deal. His sister was a professional musician, so she had to go out to work.
Music was already in the family, then? Yeah, there’s always been someone who played something or
other. My dad, actually, played the fiddle, but he stopped playing because my mum didn’t like it. She said it was too rough. I never asked the question, “What sort of music did you play?” because I thought he was incredibly uninterested in what I did, musically. He became a really ferocious musical snob. “Do proper singing. Sing properly.” My sister and I used to sing in church – I always loved singing – and I became a chorister. That sort of interfered with my folk music for a while because of the way you sing. I sound like a bloody chorister on my first record! Some of it’s good, but some of
it – when I’m singing unaccompanied – it seems to me to start veering towards Gregorian chant singing. Plainsong. That’s how it seems to me.
Can you comfortably listen to that first album still? Oh yeah! There are some things on it I think I couldn’t have
done better. One in particular, I think, is one of the best things I’ve ever done.
Which one’s that? Wind That Shakes The Barley. I concluded that it’s because I
wasn’t singing right at the top of my register. I always used to try and do that, because I thought it was a more impressive sound. Back then, a lot of it was just about trying to sound good. I was interested in what the songs had to say, but it really had to sound good.
That suggests that, these days, it’s much more to do with what the song has to say.
Yeah, absolutely. I’m not half as well-equipped as I was when I was 24, but I’m a better singer now.
And when you say “better singer”, it’s because you feel you’re expressing the song’s essence more clearly now?
Well, it’s actually even more practical than that. Diction, I think, is so important. A lot of people, if I’m honest… their diction stinks. Frequently, if I didn’t know the song, I wouldn’t know what the hell they were saying. It’s something you have to learn your- self. I can go up to singers and say, “Watch your diction”, and they’ll go, [heavy on the sarcasm] “Yeah, right! Thanks for that!” In that sense, I’m a better singer.
But anyway, I was telling you about this bloke, Mick Baker, and his dad. He lived in Bermondsey, just by London Bridge, and I used to go around to his house. At that time, Gambling Man by Lonnie Donegan was a hit. Mick’s dad said [puts on a heavy East London drawl] “That bloke Lonnie Donegan, he’s bloody rubbish. He gets half his stuff from people like Leadbelly and Woody Guthrie.” Woody Guthrie was a name I knew, but was the first time I heard the word ‘Leadbelly’. I just stored that word away. And then he said, “That bloody Gambling Man is an Irish song. It’s also called The Beggar Man.”
That’s what did it for me. I began to realise that the stories had
a history, that they had a story in and of themselves, aside from what they were saying. The existence of those songs… well, there was something going on there that really caught my attention.
And that was another thing. I heard, on The Third Pro- gramme, a thing called Adventures Of A Ballad Hunter, with Alan Lomax. He did this whole thing on the music of the Georgia Sea islands – songs from the children of slaves, basically. He was singing all this stuff and he said, “Here’s an English folk song and it’s called The Turtledove.” It had this chorus: fa so la si do, and then so la so re. I was completely captivated. How the bloody hell did a song like The Turtledove get over there?
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