'Music is a privileged existence'
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| Martin Carthy |
It's nearly half a century since Martin Carthy rode 200 miles from London to perform at the then-fledgling Topic Folk Club in Bradford, but the memory is still fresh in his mind.
The journey, on fellow folk singer Louis Killen's Lambretta, he recalls "took hours and hours and hours. We arrived late. It had taken about nine hours to get there. It was the first time I had sung outside London. I loved it."
It was to be the start of special relationship with the North - and Northern audiences - which has endured throughout his long, varied musical career. Since marrying Hull singer Norma Waterson in 1970, he has adopted Yorkshire as his home - living on the East Coast, in picturesque Robin Hood's Bay, and reviving the county's traditional songs at every opportunity.
Here in Bradford Martin has a particularly strong following. In the Seventies hardly a New Year passed without a visit to the Topic Folk Club, and though his last visit there was in 1993, he and Norma did receive a hugely enthusiastic welcome when they played at The Priestley in 2005. His solo trip to the Topic's current venue, The Cock & Bottle, in April is expected to be another sell-out.
Back in the late 1950s when Martin first played in Bradford he was still finding his way with traditional music. His earliest inspiration was Delta blues singer Big Bill Broonzy whose records he "used to sit trying to copy for hours", but then he discovered the Ballad and Blues Club, run by Ewan MaColl. "It was hugely important," he remembers. "There can't be anybody from the folk scene at that time in London who does not owe Ewan MacColl an enormous debt of gratitude. He started it originally at the Princess Louise in High Holborn. I first went to it when I was still at school. There was a bloke in the year above me who said you could hear the original versions of skiffle hits there."
Through the club he also discovered left-wing politics. MacColl and his partner Peggy Seeger were commited Communists and they had a major influence on Martin's thinking. Even now he sees socialism and English folk music as intrinsically linked. "One of the times when things went wrong for the folk scene was the time when politics disappeared from folk clubs," he says. "I certainly think the two were connected. We used to do tours for CND and anti-apartheid. It was part and parcel of the whole thing. There were some in the establishment who thought the whole thing was a left-wing conspiracy. There were investigations." (MacColl was indeed closely monitored by MI5.)
Martin himself was particularly drawn to the working class songs of the 18th and 19th century, into which breathed new life with his own arrangements.
"I don't update everything, but there's a whole part of the repertoire that requires you to update it," he says. "When they were originally written they were protest songs. They have at their core a really interesting idea like honesty is all out of fashion' or work life out to keep life in'. They were written 150 to 200 years ago and were updated regularly but then that stopped. It tells you something about the process beginning to grind to a halt. I think it's incumbent upon us to update them. Songs like being messed about. It's music, it enjoys being messed about. That's part of the traditional process."
He is adamant though that he won't claim authorship of any of the songs which has rearranged. "It's vital. The whole notion is the ownership is everybody's and the copyright nobody's. Having agreed with that you can do what you damn well please. The cardinal sin is to claim authorship. Tradition is a process. You are slamming the brakes on the process, finishing it, it's over. That should not happen. You take it, if you need to you mould it or mess around with it, then pass it on to the next person."
Of the 100 or so albums which Martin has collaborated on since the early Sixties, he picks out the ones by Waterson:Carthy, his family band with wife Norma, daughter Eliza and honorary family member Tim Van Eyken, and the genre-busting group Brass Monkey as among his personal favourites.
"I like a lot of them for different reasons. The first solo one Martin Carthy, 1965 was very important. I still have a tremendous attachment to that and the second one. I was so proud of the first one, I had to do something that was worthy of the first one.
"The one which taught me a lot was Prince Heathen one of the albums he made with Dave Swarbrick of Fairport Convention. A Priest To See the King, the Steeleye Span album, was full of holes but it's got something special. The Albion Country Band's Battle of the Field has a tremendous quality because all of us were contributing. That was true of the Steeleye album.
"I am where I am because of what I've done in the past. Some of it you would think is not very interesting but some is. It's part of the learning process. When everybody came into this in the 1950s we had to write the rule book. Now there are people ripping it up, which is a good thing."
Nevertheless Martin remains hungry to try new things. "Music," he says, "is a privileged existence. It's an opportunity to keep exploring. There are a lot of people about who feel the same way, thank heavens."
And remarkably - at 66 - he still finds time to perform around 250 gigs a year. "There's nothing like standing up in front of people and doing the job. You have an audience that's prepared to work. They come in and sit down and are prepared to do some work. If you don't then you are sunk. You are not showing off what you can do, you are showing off what they know. This music is everybody's. Most of the time they get pretty excited about it."
Gigging is what he will be doing for the rest of this year. Next month he's off to America, after that... "Brass Monkey are doing their first tour in quite a few years in October. We've lost Howard (Evans, the band's trumpet player who died of cancer last April). We're going to operate as a four-piece. You don't replace somebody like Howard. If somebody came along who seemed a good idea to us then we will certainly ask, but at the moment we're working as a four-piece, having a look at old stuff."
Then there's an autumn tour with fiddle player Dave Swarbrick, who has recovered from a double lung transplant.
"Swarb and I are doing a tour in September. The tour last September was wonderful. We had a fabulous time. He was extraordinary. What he has come through, breathtaking is the only word. He's playing sensationally well - as well as he's ever done. The only thing he does not do is jump around, but that's not a bad thing.
"The Waterson:Carthy family is doing some touring. I'm looking forward to that.
"It's a pretty good life," he chuckles.
Martin Carthy plays at the The Cock & Bottle, Barkerend Road, Bradford on Thursday, April 5.
6:00am Thursday 22nd February 2007
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