A Conversation with Martin Carthy

Singer and guitarist Martin Carthy has remained a colossally influential figure in English folk music since emerging as a young musician in the early days of the so-called ‘British folk revival’ of the 60s when, famously, he inspired contemporaries such as Bob Dylan and Paul Simon (the latter somewhat controversially), as well as later artists such as Richard Thompson. Throughout the decades since his self-titled 1965 debut album (with Dave Swarbrick), whether it be solo, with family members such as his daughter Eliza or his late wife Norma Waterson, or with a veritable string of innovative and influential bands including Steeleye Span, The Albion Country Band, Brass Monkey and The Imagined Village, Carthy has remained not simply a stalwart champion of traditional folk song but a consummate artist who fearlessly continues to explore those songs and their changing place in our lives.

With his 84th birthday this year and after 60 years of pondering those songs and their meaning, Martin revisits his much-loved and influential debut on a masterful new album, Transform Me Then Into A Fish. It’s mainly a solo album, with occasional musical support arriving from daughter Eliza and sitar player Sheema Mukherjee (of Transglobal Underground and The Imagined Village). It was recorded over a few days at the end of last winter in Robin Hood’s Bay, the beautiful but rugged North Yorkshire seaside village where Martin and his family have lived for many years. “Eliza insists we’ve been here since 1988, I say it’s since 1989”, he chuckles as I arrive there to discuss the new album and as much of his remarkable career as I can squeeze into an afternoon of chat – as you might imagine, Martin has many brilliant stories to share.

I see you’ve just received some early promo copies of Transform Me Then Into A Fish, so let’s start there, shall we?
I’m really pleased with it and proud. It was planned to within an inch of its life, in a sense. Yes, 1965 was that first album, but there was a build-up to it, so you only got the plum stuff from my time up to 1965. The original idea was to re-record that whole album and do all the songs in that order. It soon became obvious that wasn’t going to work because there were a whole lot of songs just queuing up in my head going ‘me, me, me!’ So, we eventually decided that we would do eight of those songs.

I am very fond of every song on here, but when I finished the recording, I was bloody exhausted! Just take this first track, ‘The Trees They Do Grow High’. I can remember finding it in 1958 in this two-volume Penguin book… published in maybe the 30s, and I learned it when I was still at school. I hadn’t sung it for years, so I had to really cudgel my brain to decide how I was going to do it. I think it’s pretty close to what I sang in 1965, plus a guess at what might have happened to it in between if I’d been singing the same version. I’m not roaring it out like I used to, just being far more measured, and hopefully lyrical.

You’ve said that you remember buying two 78s on the same day: ‘Rock Island Line’ by Lonnie Donegan and ‘Heartbreak Hotel’ by Elvis Presley. Lonnie made you want to play guitar, and ‘Heartbreak Hotel’ was the first song you learned to sing from a record. Was the music you were hearing at home in Hampstead the popular music of the day?

With one or two exceptions, the popular music of the day was mostly crap. But ‘Rock Island Line’ changed everything, as far as I was concerned. There was a guy in my class at school, and one day he was just going crazy: “Have you heard that ‘Rock Island Line’? You have to listen to it.” So, I got home, I turned the radio on and there was a news item, and there was Lonnie Donegan singing that. I was completely blown away and went to find a guitar I remembered my dad having. ‘Heartbreak Hotel’, if you think about it, is a narrative song, and I will always be drawn to a narrative song. I subsequently found out that the song wasn’t written by this list of music business characters on the credits but by a woman, Mae Axton [it was co-written with Tommy Durden – Ed], whose son, Hoyt, was also a songwriter I became fond of. I remember listening to it again and thinking, “God, all you’ve got to do is listen to it and you can tell that a woman wrote it!”

Hampstead was a mostly working-class area in those days, and at the top of Hampstead High Street there was a very cool coffee bar everyone called something like ‘Grebs’, although the sign over the door had a completely different name on it!… [Their] jukebox had things like the Everly Brothers singing ‘Wake Up Little Susie’ on it. But it also had the Gerry Mulligan Quartet with Chet Baker, just some fantastic stuff.

Then you discovered the scene in Soho and, what’s more, that you could get there by bus from your parents’ house…

Ha, yes, I could just hop on the 24 bus and get down to St. Martin’s Art School and dive into Soho. It was a very exciting time… and Soho was the place to go for the hot stuff. Something always seemed to be going on around the next corner. You were hearing new people all the time.

Anybody who could play the guitar better than I could would have me attached to them by a piece of string a couple of inches long, and I would gobble up their repertoire. That’s how I learned. And all around me were other skifflers doing exactly the same thing. With this stuff that I could basically pinch from them, I would listen to the songs and learn them, but I never, ever tried to sing them until I could play them. I made that rule for myself. The serious stuff I was storing up, and sometimes 10 or 15 years went by when I could still remember a song which had completely blown me away, but I wouldn’t sing it because I couldn’t play it. Later on, I’d learned how to play it, and then a few of those songs sort of crept past. I was potty on the guitar and I’m glad I’d come to it all before ‘the ballads’ and ‘the blues’ split and guitars became definitely off the agenda at the union-inspired singers’ clubs. The blues clubs and the folk clubs tripped over each other all the time, and I loved going to the nights that two of the world’s great gentlemen and true blues connoisseurs, Alexis Korner and Cyril Davies, ran on Wardour Street.

During that time, you went to a show that Ewan MacColl, a massively influential figure on the scene, presented at the Blues & Ballads Club featuring Sam Larner, who was very much one of his favourites. That had a significant impact on your own development, you’ve said…

I’ll say! That was a complete revelation to me. It turned my thinking on its head. Ewan MacColl had a reputation for being a bit of a tough nut, and he could look after himself, that’s for sure, but he completely worshipped an old-fashioned singer called Sam Larner. He was a herring fisherman who was 80 at the time but had retired when he was about 60 because he was injured at sea, and he couldn’t do the heavy work anymore. But he could still sing in this beautiful, sweet voice with the most extraordinary repertoire and would often enter the singing contests around the boatyards and win, which was how he made some sort of a living, I guess. Ewan wanted to introduce him to people who’d come to his shows. I didn’t know any of this when a fella called Roy Guest asked me to go with him because he’d told Ewan, in order to get on this show, that he’d been collecting Canadian folk songs for years. But Ray was a fraud and thought he’d get in a punch-up when Ewan found out he only had a few not very interesting songs. In fact, Ewan was absolutely welcoming to him, because he was so excited to get people to listen to his very, very favourite old-fashioned singer. So, Roy disappeared after the first half and didn’t say goodbye to me, but I just stayed on. And I got this fabulous lesson, because Ewan had been getting Sam to sing for a couple of days and Sam was tired, but he always gave his best. I was completely enthralled by this man in his 80s, whose passion was intact – oh, by God, it was. You couldn’t get away from the fact that he had the passion. Ewan knew Sam’s repertoire inside out, so he choreographed the evening so that you would always get the very best of Sam. Ewan didn’t sing one song all night; he just chatted Sam up, and they talked about songs and people and other singers he’d met. As I walked away from that, I was walking on air, realising that’s what I want, that’s what I want to do. This music is worth gold.

When you recorded that 1965 debut, you were already a figure to reckon with on the folk revival scene and had a residency at the Troubadour where you famously crossed paths with Bob Dylan and Paul Simon, and had even had a couple of stabs at recording.

On those records, I was singing someone else’s songs, and I felt like I could never get them to make sense. When I came to make my album, that first one for Fontana, I was actually signed to Topic, but Bert Lloyd apparently said: “He’s not doing anything that interests us, so let’s not make a fuss.” That got me into trouble later on, but I was really grateful that I could make the album I wanted to make at the time.

That album became one of the quintessential albums of the British folk revival. Let’s talk about some of the songs from that album, which you say had been occupying your mind, particularly during lockdown, and that you chose to revisit for this collection. ‘Ye Mariners All’ provides the title for the album and it was performed unaccompanied then, but here Eliza contributes fiddle lines.

It’s a bit of a tear-up, and it’s fun. I can’t help the feeling that when the Hammond brothers collected the song, they heard ‘mariners’ instead of ‘mourners’, and it’s a bunch of people sitting in the pub, watching a funeral procession going by and saying: “Come on, cheer up! Can’t be that bad!” I think they had some fun with it. I cherish the thought of that. At the original sessions, it was Dave Swarbrick who insisted we include ‘Lovely Joan’, even though I told him I didn’t know the chords. He said: “It doesn’t matter. Just play anything you like. No one’s going to know!” So I just shut my eyes and did it, although it felt to me like I was cheating. Years later, in 1978, I actually found out how to play it properly, thanks to a new guitar tuning, and that meant so much to me. I remember singing ‘The Handsome Cabin Boy’ to my mother at home. She had a wonderful long chuckle about it. She loved it. It is just lovely to do, such fun. I started having a bit of fun with ‘A-Begging I Will Go’ a few years back and it’s definitely a work in progress now. It’s going to change all the time, I think.

I first performed ‘High Germany’ at The Usher Hall in Edinburgh in the early 60s. I was feeling cocky. I started to play it and thought, “You don’t know all the words!” I got past the first verse, sang a recognisable second verse, squeezed out a recognisable third… and then thought, you can’t leave it at three, you’re going to have to make something up, which I did for five verses! I hadn’t performed it for years because I thought people were bored of it. But one of the things I do love to do these days is produce a few variations on the melody… that’s the kind of thing that happens when you’ve been playing a song for over 60 years.

This version of ‘Scarborough Fair’ is entirely different to the one on my debut, which people I regard as bandits had made impossible to sing! I was so happy to have been gifted this new version, because it’s a belter of a tune, and I no longer had to deal with all that baggage. A number of years ago, Eliza, Norma and I did some gigs with Peggy Seeger. One of the first things she asked me, and it had clearly been on her mind for a while, was “Why did you change the identity of the person trapped two miles underground in ‘Springhill Mining Disaster’?” I said: “I didn’t, that’s the way I learned the song, probably from Steve Benbow”. I’m very happy in this recording to have included Caleb Rushton, who had been named in Peggy’s version.

A song you didn’t record on that album but has long been associated with you is ‘The Famous Flower of Serving Men’. Here you revisit it in a spoken word version.

When I initially read those first four and a half verses, back in the early 70s, I was set on fire. It’s all about timing. It’s a massive song, and reciting it is devastating. You get this... restraint is the only word I can think of. The ending is so bloody shocking. I’m not one for softening the blow, you may have noticed, but this is the one song where I still consider it.

Subsequently, you became a key player in another seismic upheaval on the folk scene, the electric folk of Steeleye Span.
Fairport had done a bit of it before, but that whole electric thing where I played electric guitar, I really loved it. I used to live in this cottage on the edge of Warminster, and Tim [Hart] and Maddy [Prior] would often pay visits. One night, they announced they were going to go electric, and they didn’t hang around; they just went ahead and did it! At the time, there was this whole thing of renting a farmhouse, and ‘getting it together in the country’. One of the things that would happen then was that the band would have a furious argument and break up. Steeleye had almost completed an album when they had their row, and Terry and Gay Woods went off to Ireland to think about things, intending to come back and finish the album. But people in the band decided that Terry and Gay had left, so Tim got on the phone to me and said, “Do you want to join an electric band?” I said: “Okay, I’d better go and get myself an electric guitar then.” And I went down to this shop called Sound City and got a bright blue Telecaster. They’d already got all the gear and I just plugged in, turned it up and we had a huge, huge amount of fun. We got a couple of visits from Fairport who loved it, Richard [Thompson] especially. He was absolutely knocked out by the fact that we liked to be loud.

Another brilliant ensemble was Brass Monkey in the 80s/90s, incorporating brass into electric folk. How did that come about?

I was working at the National Theatre, doing Lark Rise to Candleford and the trumpet player, Howard Evans, like a lot of classical players, was intrigued by all this stuff I was doing that seemed like it was just another world. The accordion player John Kirkpatrick and I had already done some recording for an album I was making, and I got Howard in to put some trumpet on this gorgeous May Day tune, ‘Lovely Joan’. Then John, typically for him, said to Howard: “Do you want to do a couple of gigs with us?” Howard said he couldn’t do that because he’d need the music. We said: “That’s okay, we’ll just put a music stand there and you can read the dots. Don’t worry about it, just play the music the way you’re comfortable.” Then John, again, said: “We need a trombone player.” Roger Williams was a definite wild card. He could be naughty now and again, but he was a fabulous player and always exciting. Martin Brinsford couldn’t read a note of music but could play anything that would sit still long enough for him to pick it up. We rehearsed once, and then a gig was booked down near Hastings. We didn’t know what we were going to sound like, and we didn’t even have a group name. So we set up, Howard and Roger with their music stands in front of them, and John said, “Are you ready? Shit or bust!” We started to play and we just started laughing, because it was so wonderful, so much more than we could have expected. The whole place went berserk and Howard and Roger were absolutely thunderstruck.

We had to get a name because Ken Woollard called us The Martin Carthy Band on the Cambridge Festival line-up, and I was furious. So that’s when we became Brass Monkey. It was a great band and a very bold thing that reached the end of its natural life. The sound of Brass Monkey was absolutely enthralling, and people have some great memories of it, but doubts creep in, and the fire had gone out of it.

The Imagined Village, Simon Emmerson’s notion to reinterpret English folk song for a multicultural 21st-century, grew, in some sense, out of Simon’s trips to Cecil Sharp House to hear you perform.
I had never in my life done anything that even approached just how brilliant that was. I had never learned as much from playing with people who were as weird as you are! Look at what you can do when you bring together a bunch of people who know their stuff, and say, as Simon did, “Just listen to each other and play. Get on with it, just play to each other and see what happens.” To listen to that was an incredible thrill. When Simon died, it really was like coitus interruptus!

You’ve talked about the impact that seeing performers and hearing songs has had on you, and how important it is to keep the tradition alive without mummifying it. What does it feel like when so many younger artists look up to you as an inspiration?

It’s wonderful. And they’re very welcome to anything I’ve got, because what you’re doing is making music and remaking it a lot of the time. So, it is a great responsibility to at least try to get it right and, to me, it’s obvious that this stuff is bloody wonderful. It’s brilliant, it’s intriguing, it’s exciting. It covers all the bases. So, there it is, take it and run with it.