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King & Queen, and he stood up and sang the three-song set that all floor singers sang in those days. But he just blew people away. A fabulous presence. He went to The Singers Club the next night, and from there he came down to The Troubadour. He just sang all sorts of stuff. I remember him singing Hollis Brown, and then he sang one called Emmett Till, which appeared on one of his official bootlegs later on. He sang all of that in ’62.
But he clearly wasn’t one who felt that a traditional song should be kept as a kind of museum piece. He was adapting these traditional songs all the time.
Yes, he was a real magpie, but he had this wonderful creativity that went along with it. There’s this wonderful idea that he’d plant people in the audience with recording equipment and then he’d go away with the tapes and adapt the songs he’d heard. Again, no! What he had was a memory like a piece of blotting paper. If somebody sang something that he thought was wonderful, he’d go back to his hotel and write down what he remem- bered. It might come out as a new song, but that’s where it would be from.
Is he someone you’ve been able to keep in touch with? Do you hear from him now?
I haven’t seen him for years. I occa- sionally get a little, “Hi!” but very, very occasionally. The last time I saw him per- form was when he played Blackbush Air- port in ‘78. I remember seeing him at the Royal Festival Hall in ’64. He filled the place. He was brilliant. He sang songs like Who Killed Davey Moore? and The Lone- some Death Of Hattie Caroll. My god! When he finished – “Bury the rag deep in your face, now is the time for your tears” – the fucking place exploded!
Albert Grossman, his manager, did an interview with a magazine called John Bull. It was about the hit parade of tomorrow. We all fell about with laughter. “Don’t be silly! Nobody’s gonna put Bob Dylan in the charts. He’s too good!” Within a year, there he was. And within another year he was
making Bringing It All Back Home, which I thought was just bloody brilliant. I laughed for days about the line, “I wake up in the morning and there’s frogs inside my socks”. People would say, “What’s so funny about that?” Well, it made me laugh! Every song on that was wonderful. And side two… just extraordinary.
He was racing through albums, but then, so were you.
Well, at that age you are.
How were you making these albums? The Martin Carthy catalogue from the ’60s and ’70s is huge. I wonder how you managed to find the time to research, arrange and record so many songs.
Well, the first album was ‘65, and that was my repertoire. When Swarb came in, he came down the night before recording. He said, “Let’s find a song that you and I can do.” He said, “I’d love it if you sang A- Begging I Will Go.” So we agreed that one beforehand.
We agreed to do Lovely Joan in the
studio! Broomfield Hill, we found the tune for it and worked out a set of words in the studio, too.
First time?
First time! Then there was Sovay, which Bert Lloyd had given to The Camp- bells, and The Campbells wouldn’t do it. So we did it.
Scarborough Fair?
It was a given that I was going to do that. Everybody had a song that was their thing, and then all the other guitarists had to be able to play it. You wouldn’t do other people’s songs at your gig, but you had to be able to play them.
Number one was Davy Graham’s
Angie. Bert Jansch’s thing was Strolling Down The Highway, so we all had to be able to play Strolling Down the Highway. I could do it, but I never did it in public. Mine was Scarborough Fair, so everybody else had to be able to do it.
Do you still do it? Is it a song, for example, Norma Waterson, Eliza Carthy & Martin Carthy, 1997
that you’d put into your set these days? No. I’ve started doing another version
of it recently, but that song’s got too much baggage for me. I love the fact that Bob Dylan got Girl From The North Country from it. It was very typical of him to do that – very him. In fact, he came back and he said [cue Bob Dylan impersonation] “I wanna sing you this!” And he started to sing it, and he was trying to do the guitar figure. He got halfway through the first verse and he said, “Oh man, I can’t do this!” [Laughs] He wasn’t really ready. He was just so excited about it.
And of course Paul Simon did it, and
that’s fine. Once I actually owned up to myself that the people who made The Graduate weren’t going to come banging on my door saying, “Oh, we hear you sing that song – we want you to do it!” Once I got past that… It was my signature piece, but it’s a traditional song, for god’s sake! Why shouldn’t he do it?
You played it together a few years ago, didn’t you?
We did. In ’98 he did a tour on which he was reawakening old friendships and retrieving old friendships. He phoned me, I think from Stockholm, and he said, “I’m doing three nights at the Apollo. Do you wanna come and sing?” I said, “I’ve got gigs on two of the days but I’m alright on your last night at Hammersmith.” He said, “Come along!”
I went along and realised, again, the same thing as when I went to see Bob at Blackbush in ’78. They say sublimely, “Come and see me and we’ll hang out.” Just you try! Oh boy! Deary me. I managed to get in to see both of them, but by god! People like that probably don’t realise the level of security that surrounds them. It’s so discreet that they don’t know. You’ve got to shenanigan your way past them somehow. I managed to on both occa- sions, and it was lovely.
Was there a sense of closure about singing that song together?
Erm… closure… It was lovely to do it. He said, “What do you wanna do?”
I said “Scarborough Fair.” He said, “You sure you wanna do
that?”
I said, “Yeah, I’d like to do that.” He said, “OK.”
He took enormous care. “What guitar should I play?”
I said, “I think you should play the gui- tar you want to play.”
“Is this one OK?” “If that’s the one you want to play,
you play it.”
“Is my singing OK for you?” “Yeah, absolutely fine. Let’s just do it.” “Drumming OK?”
“Oh yeah! I’m absolutely fine playing with Steve Gadd! You wait until I get back and tell Swarb I’ve been playing with Steve Gadd. He’s going to be quite jealous.”
Steve Gadd looks up and says [almost yawning], “I’m just a fuckin’ drummer.”
Can we go back to the question about
Photo: Tom Howard
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