Martin Carthy and Norma Waterson Interview

Interview conducted with Martin Carthy and Norma Waterson, Saturday 3rd August 2002, as they prepared for an appearance at that year's Cambridge Folk Festival.

Neither of you are strangers to the Cambridge Folk Festival. Can you remember the first time you played here?

Norma Waterson I was here at the very first Cambridge festival in 1965. It was small - one stage in a field and a few seats out the front. Paul Simon was on, and the Clancy Brothers. It was a pound to get in.

Martin Carthy I was on the second one and it wasn't much bigger. The first one he had to make a thousand pounds to break even. And he did and that's why it's still going.

NW The thing I really remember was the Clancy Brothers arriving on site in an open top jeep. They roared through the crowd in this open top jeep. Nowadays pop stars would come in on helicopters.

The most obvious change for Cambridge is the size, but do you think the atmosphere of the festival has changed much since the early days?

NW Yes. It's much more populist than it was. It used to be very much a straight folk festival, although it wasn't a traditional one in the sense that you could only get up and do stuff from your own country, but it definitely has got more poppy. But then I think the whole folk scene in general has become much more pop orientated than it was in the 60s.

Do you think people see folk music as a viable career option these days?

NW I think the media have got hold of it. Certainly since we've been singing there have been three or four occasions when nothing's been happening in the charts and someone's realised that there's this thing called traditional music happening - let's have a folk revival! Are there any young and pretty people that we can put pictures in our papers of? It's no bad thing if it gets people interested in folk music, though.

MC It's really bad news for us to be isolated. You get an awful lot of righteousness around, but not a lot of sense. And frequently not a lot of music either!

But neither of you have ever been accused of being purist in any way…

MC I've never really understood what purist meant, honestly, because I don't really know what impure music is.

NW The music in England is a hybrid music anyway. In fact, most of the music in the British Isles is a hybrid - none of it is pure. To go back to pure you're going to have to go back to the ancient Britons.

MC Back to banging rocks…

You're playing with Blue Murder tonight, and there is a definite buzz about your appearance. Expectations are heavy.

NW I hope they're not disappointed!

MC It's very much a band that hits or misses. If it works it's fantastic, but it requires everybody to be on song. There's a lot of chances get taken and a lot of opportunities for falling off the wire, walking into the door and falling over your own feet. But we have a great time.

The way the group started was fairly informal, wasn't it?

NW In the 70s our local school in Robin Hood's Bay was bursting at the seams and needed a new room. We did a concert and all the money went to building this new room. We grabbed as many people as we could. There was Peter Bellamy and Swan Arcade and the Watersons and various other people. We did a concert and we did a few songs together at the end and really liked it.

MC Then in 1987 Iain Anderson asked The Watersons and Swan Arcade to put together a one off concert with an hour's worth of stuff. After the first gig we decided to call ourselves Blue Murder, but the party aspect took over from the music and it fell to bits basically. We had a fantastic time…

NW Rehearsals were very boozy!

MC We started being really industrious then got to talking, telling stories, drinking a bit of wine…

NW …you know, like folkies do.

MC It just got silly, so we gave it up for a while. Then when Jim started up with Lester and Barry we decided to give it another go and it's great fun, it really is. I mean, Barry Coope is a stupendous singer.

Shall you be leaving the boozing until after the gig tonight then?

MC Well, we don't do much of that now. I think 'cos we're older our livers have given up!

NW I think this is about the third time we've been together as Blue Murder. We did the 70s and 80s, but we missed the 90s.

Can we expect another Waterson: Carthy album in the near future?

NW It's finished already, but Tony at Topic didn't want it to clash with the Blue Murder album. You can't flood the shops! We were happy that the Blue Murder album came out first and our album, A Dark Light, comes out in September.

It's been a remarkable couple of years for you, Martin, what with the boxed set, the birthday concert and the honorary doctorate…

MC Yeah, that's astonishing…

…What's the betting on a knighthood?

NW There's no betting. He wouldn't accept it.

MC Knighted folk singers is silly. I mean, knighted rock and rollers is bad enough. Sir Elton John, Sir Cliff Richard… come on lads! To go on from there to knighted folk singers, I mean, what a ridiculous idea. Sir Mick Jagger is bad enough...

NW What would be really nice would be something like the French Legion of Honour, which is just your country recognising you've done something really good. But it's not going to happen in our lifetime.

So what about your solo careers? Can we expect more of that?

MC For the last few years I've been doing an instrumental album, but I'm not entirely happy with doing an entire album of guitar tunes, so it'll probably turn out half and half. I've no idea what I'm going to call it yet.

There's a lot of young talent emerging. When you look to the young talent does it give you hope for the future of the music?

NW Oh, yes. There's some young performers doing some really good stuff. John Boden and John Spiers, they take risks, which is what we did. It doesn't seem risky now, but when the Watersons came along, nobody was singing unaccompanied apart from the traditional singers and people like The Copper Family. We really like it when there's something wild about what the young people do, and there's a few around like that, which is great.

MC The only reservation I had about a lot of the crop of the new singers was that they were all tremendously accomplished and there was not one hint of a risk anywhere, and performing is about risk. But people like Boden and Spiers really are risky. They may make mistakes, but by God, the passion's there, and that makes up for a lot. But they both happen to be very good instrumentalists and very good singers.

NW What I do like is that the young performers specialise in English material. Irish and Scottish material is so lovely, it's easy to go that route, but English songs are weirder, they need more listening to. It really does please us that people have taken that route. It's very exciting.