Steeleye Span Archive Pages

Talking with Martin Carthy of
STEELEYE SPAN

(Incorporating a beginners’ guide to folk music)

By Pete ?

©Zigzag No.18

March 1971

These days, when an artiste or group decides that their music has become more than just a hobby and it is time to sign with a Tin Pan Ally manager, turn professional and get ready to dent the charts, a publicist is hired to thrust their name in print. Now, these publicists have become so profuse and persuasive that the pop press is always full of articles they have been hyped or asked to do by such pushers, and it has become imperative to employ the services of these people unless you want your work to go unnoticed.

Thus, when a group like Steeleye Span comes along, realising that by the very nature of their profession they are part of the big-show-biz-thing whether they like it or not, they take the advice of their manager and hire a publicist, who will verbally attack, threaten, terrorize, plead or bribe writers so that ultimately the nation, nourished by ever increasing printed praise, will resound to the screaming Melody Maker headline “SUPERSONIC STEELEYE…ELVIS DIGS MADDY”

Right, now there are about half a dozen groups that I would tremble to interview on the grounds that I hold them in such reverence and awe, and Steeleye Span is one of them. The various constituents of the group, one instinctively feels, are not in the least bit interested in having loads of incompetent bullshit and hype written about them – they just want to get on with their music in their own way.

Tony Brainsby is a publicist. He’s a nice cat, he does his work with just the right amount of oiliness, just the right amount of aplomb, and just the right amount of bonhomie. Every mouth or so he comes on the phone to enquire whether we feel inclined to interview Fred Wilks & the Spoons, the Big Orange Chrome Mind Excursion, Willie & the Sack, and a whole string of other chart topping grist….and occasionally we allow our arms to be twisted and write about one of his bunch, but only if we dig the music. Anyway, good old Tony knew of our keen interest in the work of Steeleye Span and in view of my trepidation ,invented what I consider to be a preposterous (but clever too, mate) piece of scheming. The group, he assured me, were desperate to be featured in the pages of Zigzag (a likely bloody tale), and he wanted to fix a day of interviews with us and lesser periodicals (are there any?) participating, but based around whatever time and date Zigzag could make it. Well, I fixed a date and agreed to go along, knowing full well that he’d probably picked a day when the group was in the recording studio or something (“Oh shit man, have we got to break off from this masterpiece to go and answer a load of banal questions from that berk?” or words to that effect).

Well, I got to the good Mr Brainsby’s residence as arranged, but, as expected, failed to notice any throngs of journalists milling around, deep in conversation with Steeleye Spanners. But presently Martin Carthy arrived by minicab, didn’t seem unduly choked off by being dragged over to Knightsbridge, and we chatted amiably about the group and folk music in general for about two hours. Right, having long-windedly exposed the world of the publicist (and my phobias as well), we’ll begin.

When I first heard about it, the partial disintegration of Fairport Convention aroused in me the most serious misgivings – ‘Mattie Groves’ from Liege & Lief was my favourite track of 1969 and I don’t think it was surpassed in 1970 – but not only did Fairport recover admirably, Steeleye Span grew, if shakily at first, into an excellent group. Their development is, I think, sufficiently complicated to warrant some explanation.

Tyger Hutchins left the Fairport’s in November 1969, and originally planned to extend the remains of the Irish traditional/contemporary folk trio Sweeney’s Men, which would now consist of Tyger, Johnny Moynihan and Terry Woods. Shortly afterwards, the trio was augmented by Andy Irvine (who had previously been with and left Sweeney’s Men) and Terry Woods’ wife Gay. By the end of December the group had split and reformed as Steeleye Span (the name, suggested by Martin Carthy, of the waggoner in the Percy Granger song ‘Horkstow Grange’), with Tyger, Terry, Gay, Tim Hart and Maddy Prior and in this form they recorded their RCA album in the early part of last year.

“They were in the studios for a solid week, working 14 hours a day to complete the album and what with the strain and pressures they virtually exploded and split up”. When they reformed, Martin Carthy came in to replace Terry and Gay Woods (in April 70), and Peter Knight joined (in June) shortly before their radio broadcast. After about five months rehearsal, the group began to do live gigs in September 1970.

THE INTERVIEW

(This is fairly lengthy because it’s designed to introduce readers to various aspects of folk music as well as the group).

Zigzag: I imagine that the change from acoustic to electric music and the differences between folk club and rock club environments were the things which struck you when you joined the group. Right?

Martin Carthy: Well, that’s part of the reason why it took so long before we did any live gigs – Tyger was the only one who knew anything about electric music really. I had a bit of trouble making the transition to electric guitar….the techniques are different, but I don’t really think about it now. If I’m out for a week doing solo gigs, I have to really think about my playing the first night I’m back with the group….you tend to slither a bit….you have to be gentler.

Z: The fact that the left hand can produce a lot of sound through amplification - things like that do you mean?


M: Well I’ve always done that anyway….I’d say that most of the work I do on acoustic guitar is done with the left hand – hammering on, flicking the string with finger that’s fretting it (so it’s played twice). Obviously my acoustic style has been developing over the years, and the stuff I’m doing now is comparatively new, but the change to electric isn’t really that difficult.

Z: What about the venues – they must be considerably larger and the amount of extraneous noise can hardly compare with a folk club atmosphere.

M: Well generally speaking our audiences are quiet and receptive, but the size of places does tend to overawe me sometimes. We did one gig at Ewell Tech in this enormous barn of a place, and we all fell to pieces in the end….we haven’t had a gig as bad as that one since. But we’re still very much feeling our way, but getting tighter all the time.

Z: We never went through a folk-rock period like they did in America – until the Fairport, the only English folk-rock record I can think of is the Animals ‘House of the Rising Sun’, and that’s an American song….though the Byrd’s did a few British traditional songs on their earlier albums. But there doesn’t seem to be much antagonism from folk purists about this wave of electrified folk, does there?

M: No – the thing is, that a lot of the so-called purists in England have always been interested in the possibilities of combining folk music with electric instruments. A.L Lloyd, for instance, has been hung up on those ideas for a long time and he went to Fairport’s do their first gig with Dave Swarbrick and was knocked out by some of the stuff they did….and he’s looked upon as the big white chief.

Z: In the early stages, Tyger was worried about finding a drummer. Are you no longer seeking one?

M: We have some percussion – Maddy plays spoons and tambourine for instance – but from joining the group, I’ve been the one who said “no I don’t think we need a drummer”; and Tyger sometimes agreed but other times he thought we did. We thought we needed one from the time-keeping point of view, because it’s easy to lose time, but as far as I’m concerned, the type of music we’re doing doesn’t lend itself to a drummer. Drums were used on the first album, but we’re not using any on the new one.

Z: What songs are ready for that so far? (This interview was done before Christmas, and the album has been completed since then).
M: So far we’ve done an instrumental track of a couple of Irish jigs, ‘The female drummer’,’Cold,Haily,Windy Night’, ‘The False Knight on the Road’ and ‘The Lark in the Morning’. They turned out quite well – I didn’t take part in the mix, but Tyger and Tim came home very pleased with things.

Z: Do you take an active part in the production?

M: Well I was going to go to the mix, but I was too clapped out. Sandy (Roberton, their manager) is the one who does it all really; he knows how to do it, and Tyger and Tim sit in on the mix to make suggestions. But Tim reckons that Sandy’s a really good mixer.

Z: Do you feel, from response and so on, that traditional music is reaching and making an impression on a wider audience these days?

M: Well I’ve never thought of myself as a crusader, but yes, it’s bound to happen….it’s being spread out a bit more. As you say, people like the Byrd’s were doing it, and Bob Dylan has been doing it for years, so many of his tunes are traditional Irish, Scottish and English tunes.

Z: Even to the extent that you get mentioned on his second album sleeve! That Bob Dylan song you do now – ‘Lay down your weary tune’ - did you get that from the Byrd’s LP?

M: Tyger knew it, but that may have been where he heard it because he’s an avid Byrd’s fan, but he has another recording of it too, I think.

Z: That was a British tune, doesn’t it?

M: It sounds British, yes, as I said, he came over here in 1962 and went back with his head absolutely full of British tunes – and over the next few years, out they came in his songs. But Tyger has always been into a lot of the lesser-known Dylan songs.

Z: So your music is essentially British, despite a couple of American lyrics in your repertoire?

M: Yes, Tyger’s great thing is’British Rock Music’, based on British rather than American form. I mean, when you think of modern American music, you think of a group like the Band; but to my mind, the Fairport is just about the only group that plays British music.

Z: Can you get more specific in your definition of form?

M: It’s one of those intangible things really – but something like the Band couldn’t be anything else than American, and the Fairport playing, say, ‘Sloth’ is very definitely British.

Z: But isn’t it possible to thrust a very basic American song into a British form - like you do with ‘Rave On’ for instance?

M: Well that wasn’t thrust into a British form – we were just singing it in the car and it sounded nice. The way it comes out when we sing it sounds terribly British, but there was no feeling of “lets take this song and make it sound British, chaps….striped trousers on”.

Z: What distances are there between your harmonies? I mean are your arrangements concisely worked out on manuscripts, or are they done by ear and result from a natural feeling for the music?

M: As far as I’m concerned, it’s all down to feel – my theory of music isn’t really too advanced. But Tyger and I were talking about this the other day, and we reckoned that people like the Byrd’s and the Burritos can just play. We went to see the Burritos at the Lyceum, and they covered an enormous field, yet British bands still have this desire to specialise – you know, heavy, blues, etc. And I get the feeling that they latch onto one type of American music and really work to get into it, so they end up playing very influenced blues based rock, or what have you. But Americans just play it – it’s part of them and it’s not difficult. So you had the Burritos coming on stage and doing some really sloshy country songs, then playing some really nice bluegrass on acoustic instruments, them some rock, and so on…. And they were really excellent. There was no effort involved – they just did the music. British bands specialise much too much, and only end up, to my mind, being too intense and over involved. Music is something you do.

Z: One of the things I like about your act was the way Tyger introduced each song and offered brief explanations of broadsides, origins of songs bits of folklore and so on. Supposing that this and your music encouraged members of the audience (who had probably previously thought that folk music was stuffy and dull) to want to delve into the subject a bit, are there any books you could recommend?

M: Well it’s really a question of listening rather than reading – listen and listen and listen and listen, in clubs and to records. That means you have to wade through an awful lot of rubbish to get something you want, and when you wade through it again you find it wasn’t all rubbish, and when you go through it a third time you realise that it’s even less rubbish. Folk is, I suppose, very much of an acquired taste – though if the bug bites you, then it really does bite you.

Z: The oral tradition, the passing of the music from generation to generation; does it still exit at all, or has television, the press and wider education killed it all?

M: No, it still exists here and there. If you go into some of the remote parts of Scotland and Ireland for instance, it’s incredibly alive.

Z: Is it more or less confined to geographical areas, or just within families and very small communities?

M: Both really, and you still find odd people who stacks of songs that they’ve learned from other people, songs that have been passed down. A few years ago, an American called Kenneth Goldstein came over and visited a family called the Stewarts. One of them, Lucy Stewart, was very old and it took him ages to coax her to sing. In fact, hardly anyone in the town they lived in, or her family, know that she sang – and yet she started coming out with these songs – Goldstein got about 200 songs from the family, including about 80 from her. And they were all really nice versions of various ballads with lovely tunes.

Z: Could you talk a bit about these broadsheets that were sold on the streets?

M: Well, they were a sort of early Tim Pan Alley – selling sheet music for a penny a time. At the hangings, for instance, there was this big business; the writers would come from the broadsheet “factory” to the prison where twenty guys were going to be publicly hanged the next day, and the jailer would tell them the stories of each. Then they’d rush back and write ballads about them, print them up, and sell them as the guys were being hanged.

Z: Selling postcards of the hanging. Was it just a commercial racket then, because I thought that broadsheets were a product of love, care, woodcarving craft and so on. I thought it was a sort of art form.


M: Oh there was a lot of that too. But one of the printers, a guy called Catnash (is that spelt properly?), who operated from the Seven Dials area of London, had a million seller on his hands at one time, so there was a lot of money being made out of them too.

Z: Did they die out when newspapers came?

M: No, not entirely. Ewan McColl says that he was sold one on the street the day after the Sugar Ray Robinson/Randolph Turpin fight, and he kicked it around a bit and put in on record. There’s a guy called John Foreman who still makes them – he’s part of the folk scene, and calls himself the broadsheet king

Z: What distances are there between your harmonies? I mean are your arrangements concisely worked out on manuscripts, or are they done by ear and result from a natural feeling for the music?

M: As far as I’m concerned, it’s all down to feel – my theory of music isn’t really too advanced. But Tyger and I were talking about this the other day, and we reckoned that people like the Byrd’s and the Burritos can just play. We went to see the Burritos at the Lyceum, and they covered an enormous field, yet British bands still have this desire to specialise – you know, heavy, blues, etc. And I get the feeling that they latch onto one type of American music and really work to get into it, so they end up playing very influenced blues based rock, or what have you. But Americans just play it – it’s part of them and it’s not difficult. So you had the Burritos coming on stage and doing some really sloshy country songs, then playing some really nice bluegrass on acoustic instruments, them some rock, and so on…. And they were really excellent. There was no effort involved – they just did the music. British bands specialise much too much, and only end up, to my mind, being too intense and over involved. Music is something you do.

Z: One of the things I like about your act was the way Tyger introduced each song and offered brief explanations of broadsides, origins of songs bits of folklore and so on. Supposing that this and your music encouraged members of the audience (who had probably previously thought that folk music was stuffy and dull) to want to delve into the subject a bit, are there any books you could recommend?

M: Well it’s really a question of listening rather than reading – listen and listen and listen and listen, in clubs and to records. That means you have to wade through an awful lot of rubbish to get something you want, and when you wade through it again you find it wasn’t all rubbish, and when you go through it a third time you realise that it’s even less rubbish. Folk is, I suppose, very much of an acquired taste – though if the bug bites you, then it really does bite you.

Z: The oral tradition, the passing of the music from generation to generation; does it still exit at all, or has television, the press and wider education killed it all?

M: No, it still exists here and there. If you go into some of the remote parts of Scotland and Ireland for instance, it’s incredibly alive.

Z: Is it more or less confined to geographical areas, or just within families and very small communities?

M: Both really, and you still find odd people who stacks of songs that they’ve learned from other people, songs that have been passed down. A few years ago, an American called Kenneth Goldstein came over and visited a family called the Stewarts. One of them, Lucy Stewart, was very old and it took him ages to coax her to sing. In fact, hardly anyone in the town they lived in, or her family, know that she sang – and yet she started coming out with these songs – Goldstein got about 200 songs from the family, including about 80 from her. And they were all really nice versions of various ballads with lovely tunes.

Z: Could you talk a bit about these broadsheets that were sold on the streets?

M: Well, they were a sort of early Tim Pan Alley – selling sheet music for a penny a time. At the hangings, for instance, there was this big business; the writers would come from the broadsheet “factory” to the prison where twenty guys were going to be publicly hanged the next day, and the jailer would tell them the stories of each. Then they’d rush back and write ballads about them, print them up, and sell them as the guys were being hanged.

Z: Selling postcards of the hanging. Was it just a commercial racket then, because I thought that broadsheets were a product of love, care, woodcarving craft and so on. I thought it was a sort of art form.


M: Oh there was a lot of that too. But one of the printers, a guy called Catnash (is that spelt properly?), who operated from the Seven Dials area of London, had a million seller on his hands at one time, so there was a lot of money being made out of them too.

Z: Did they die out when newspapers came?

M: No, not entirely. Ewan McColl says that he was sold one on the street the day after the Sugar Ray Robinson/Randolph Turpin fight, and he kicked it around a bit and put in on record. There’s a guy called John Foreman who still makes them – he’s part of the folk scene, and calls himself the broadsheet king.

Z: What about folk clubs? Are they still proliferating, or are the good old traditional strongholds the only ones, which keep going?

M: Oh no, there are new ones starting up all the time, it sort of goes in waves.

Z: Are the audiences primarily students, because they were when we ran ours back in 1965.

M: Well you usually find that the students have their own club at the local college, and that the town club is mainly ordinary townspeople – which is why Tim, Maddy, and I are still doing the clubs. If we spent our lives just singing to student’s…..well it’s such an unreal existence, because students are all 18 – 21 they never grow up. There’s a club in Birtley which is mainly miners for instance – that was set up by the Elliot family, and they knew some fantastic songs.

Z: Can we talk a bit about ballads? There are a lot of lines, situations, adjectives etc that are common to a lot of ballads, aren’t there?

M: Yes – that’s all part of the tradition – the broadside ballads often had a form like “I was brought up in such and such a town, but not of high decree, my parents treated me well or badly, they apprenticed me in a so and so, at the age of 16 I went to such and such” and so on. Some of the best ballads are those with the most repetition in them – ‘Long Lankin’ for instance is over 20 verses long and is mostly repetition:

“Said my lord to my lady as he mounted his horse,
Beware of Long Lankin that lives in the moss,
Said my lord to my lady as he went on his way,
Beware of Long Lankin that lives in the hay,
See the doors are all bolted, see the windows are pinned,
And leave not a crack for a mouse to creep in,
Oh the doors are all bolted, the windows are pinned,
But etc”

And it goes on repeating, and you get a fantastic effect from that.


Z: Ballads obviously change as they are passed from person to person, but it seems that some people radically altered them on purpose.

M: Well the ballad maker had a story from which to write his verses, and through time, bits got put in and, yes, stories got changed quite unashamedly and facts got altered. For instance, the name of the band, Steeleye Span, comes from a song about 100 – 150 years old. There’s this place called Horkstow Grange up in Lincolnshire; the foreman there was a man called John Bolin, and there was a waggoner called John ‘Steeleye’ Span who worked there too… and both men obviously hated each other’s guts. They eventually had an enormous punch-up and the whole thing is commemorated in the ballad. Well the song has got changed somewhere along the line so that Steeleye Span is now a miser, and John Bolin is his foreman. In the song, Span takes every opportunity to shit on Bolin, who eventually loses his cool and hangs one on him. Then Span, instead of belting him back, takes revenge through the counts. So it’s been completely altered.

Z: Who by?

M: People – singers. And that’s now the accepted version.

Z: So how did you find the true story out?

M: It was in a book of old Lincolnshire folk songs, and in the notes it gave the full story of what really happened.

Z: I read some scholarly cat who reckoned that the accuracy of events weren’t important anyway, as long as the action was maintained, but I thought the whole point of a ballad was to put a specific event into song.

M: Well either that, or to perpetrate some kind of moral or lesson. Something happens and a song gets written about it in a sort of parable form, though a lot of these ballads are based on stories without any factual basis – just stories made up by people.


Z: I was reading an old article by Ewan MacColl who reckoned that the entertainer was required to put himself over to the audience, but the traditional singer was concerned only in putting over the song. Being in a showbiz context as Steeleye Span is, where does the group stand with reference to those ideas?

M: As far as I’m concerned, we’re putting the song over – and I think what he’s saying is true. For instance, when you’re singing a ballad, you cut yourself off completely and focus your attention on the song itself, and something happens…. You’ve alienated yourself in a way, but something happens – the people are there, and they make a difference as to whether you do it badly or whether you do it well. With a group it’s very difficult.

Z: A lot of your act seemed to be on an entertainment level, but it was the audience rather than the group, which dictated that. They enjoyed the music as a whole, but didn’t really fully appreciate the songs individually.

M: Yes, well that’s problem – especially when you’re working with volume. But we’re aware of this and I suppose it’s one of the reasons that we’re continuing to work as solos – because you maintain that sort of contact. When you’re working on your own, you can get really stuck into the music and get on top of it, but when you’ve got 5 people all contributing, it can sometimes be very difficult.

Z: How about interpretation of folk songs – do you tend to sing the songs the same way each night?
M: Well no matter how much well you know a song, there’s still an amazing amount of spontaneity can go into it’s interpretation – and sometimes you know you’ve done it very well – there’s a spark there which tells you. On the face of it, one interpretation is hardly different from the next but it’s down to timing of tiny little areas, or one word even.

Z: I can appreciate a personal satisfaction when you know you’ve done a song well but can the audience really notice such detail?

M: Sometimes yes. I think on the folk scene exclusively, you get audiences that have to put themselves out a bit and concentrate….more than any other musical field. They have to follow words and music, get the point of a pause, follow the thread of a story and so on.

Z: We were talking the other night, and we reckoned that the rock scene has got to the point where most of the audience prefers their opinion to be formed for them. There’s a hell of a load of pretension about the way music affects them, which I would have thought is a danger of a group like you going into the electric field and becoming part of it.

M: Right – and I’m sure I don’t know what to do about it. That’s yet another reason why I’m keeping a foot in the folk clubs. A lot of people slag folk music and say it’s dull and so on, but there are a great many pieces of gold in a folk audience and you have that contact, I mean, I don’t specialise in chorus songs or anything, but I really love to hear a roomful of people all singing out.

Z: Do you think today’s folk audiences identify with the songs like they used to?

M: I don’t see why they shouldn’t – people haven’t changed that much…. emotionally they’re the same and probably always will be.

Z: Folk music owes a lot to Cecil Sharpe and his song collecting work in the early half of this century. I read from one source how he discovered folk music when he threw open his window on Boxing Day morning in 1899 and heard a concertina in the street below, and how that prompted him to take an interest in the subject. Is that just a bit of over-romanticised nonsense?

M: Well the accepted story is that he was aware of the existence of folk music, but was staying at a friends house somewhere in Somerset – and he was in the lounge of conservatory and heard the gardener singing - so he stuck his ear to the window and listened to the song, which was called ‘The Seeds of Love’. Anyway, he couldn’t believe it, and rushed out and look the song down, arranged it on the spot, and had someone come in and sing it at a sort of soiree. The gardener was invited, but didn’t like what these gentry had done to his song. And Sharpe went on to become the first really thorough collector, though others had attempted to cover various areas of Britain. He collected thousands of songs in England, and thousands more in America, because he had this theory that there must have been versions of the songs taken over to America by the pioneers.

Z: When Child was collecting his songs in America in the 1850, he reckoned that folk music was dead and he was sort of embalming the corpse with his work, didn’t he?

M: Yes, there were a lot of people who said “when this lot of singers die, folk music will die with them”, and there are still people saying that today. You know, they think about these guys walking behind ploughs in the fields of Sussex, singing their old songs as they work, are the last remaining carriers of the music.


Z: Hey, I wonder if any of the old farmers out our way know any ancient Buckinghamshire folk songs?

M: Oh yeah, they are sure to….but you can’t just walk up to them and say “here, sing me 85 songs”. There was this Danish guy I met up in Edinburgh, who had been given a grant by the Danish Folklore Archives to research into the origins of music and was up in the Hebrides recording these waulking songs, which the locals sang as they were waulking the tweed…. with a row of women. Then they’d soak the cloth in sheep’s piss and bash it, to shrink it. Now, co-ordination was necessary to do this properly, so they sang to get a sort of rhythm going. Well, all this primitive work stopped about 40 years ago, but this guy went up there and found an old waulking team, all in their 80s, and he got them together and chatted to them for weeks and weeks until he gained their confidence enough to be able to record them singing all these old songs. And you should hear it – really beautiful.

Z: I feel that some of your rival groups, the ones working in the same musical area as you, don’t seem to know their subject enough – their roots aren’t deep enough, Do you think that’s important?

M: Well it’s essential. I mean, I could hardly go and form a blues band….I love blues, but I really don’t know the first about it. There are a lot of groups with excellent musicians, but it would make such a difference if they had a more solid grounding too. Look at some of the American bands….the Burritos for instance – they come on with all this country stuff, but they can also play all the music it developed from – they can play old tunes like ‘The Clinch Mountain Backstep’ which is an old modal tune. They know their stuff, and it makes a difference.

Pete.

Right, go and listen to Steeleye Span, dig out some nice folky LP’s, read ‘Song in England’ by A.L.Lloyd (Panther), go and investigate Cecil Sharpe House near London Zoo, sniff around in Collets Folk Record shop in Oxford Street and peruse the magazine rack and chat to the cat behind the counter, and discover that folk music really is a gas after all.

© Zigzag Magazine, March 1971. N° 18