I recently dug out some aging slides taken at a Carthy & Swarb gig at Rotherham Arts Centre on 23 September 1989. They’re not the best quality but I thought they would be worth sharing for reasons of historic interest.
This was part of the second annual UK tour (the ‘Second Farewell Tour”) following on from the previous year’s reunion gigs. Support was by Dave Burland.
I made a recording of the complete show and although the only copy was stolen many years ago I still have a note of the set list:
“This is… Martin Carthy – The Bonny Black Hare and other songs” was one of a couple of major compilations of material from Carthy & Swarbrick’s 1960s recordings to appear in the early ‘70s. It was also the first Martin Carthy album I ever heard about 15 years after its original 1971 release, but I’ve never actually owned a copy until today.
I’d been obsessing over The Watersons for months after hearing them by accident on Andy Kershaw’s Radio 1 show in August 1986 and had borrowed everything of theirs I could find in my local record library. At the time, I worked as a printer and my mate and colleague Allan Wilkinson – you may know his tireless work as head honcho at Northern Sky Magazine – suggested I check out Martin Carthy: “He does the same type of songs as The Watersons but sings solo and plays great guitar. You’ll like him”.
I wasn’t interested. Not one bit! The thing I loved most about The Watersons was precisely their lack of guitars (or any instrumentation, for the most part) and the thing that set them apart was their inspiring harmonies. How could one bloke warbling on his own to a guitar accompaniment ever match the intensity of a Watersons album? I wasn’t having any of it, so I forgot about this “Martin McCarthy” bloke for a while.
Eventually, when it became clear I’d exhausted the record library’s supply of Watersons releases I took the plunge and borrowed a Martin Carthy album. This was in the pre-CD era when most mainstream record shops simply didn’t stock folk music, and even if they did it’s unlikely I’d have been able to afford them on my meagre wage so I borrowed. I’ve no idea why I chose to borrow this particular album on this occasion. I suspect it was the only one they had available at the time. The fact it was a cassette copy would seem to back this up – I’d always prefer vinyl back then given the option.
I don’t recall what I thought of Side One – The Fowler; Brigg Fair; The Barley Straw; Byker Hill; John Barleycorn; Streets Of Forbes. There was no Road to Damascus moment just yet, but I must have been impressed, or perhaps intrigued, enough to turn over for Side Two because I know I got as far as Ship in Distress, Jack Orion and White Hare. Then the next track started and everything changed…
Anyone growing up in the British Comprehensive schooling system in the 1970s and early-80s will know the excruciating agony of the weekly (if you were lucky – perhaps daily if you were less so!) communal school assembly sing-along. This is where I first learned – and learned to hate – such dross as Kum Ba Yah, All Things Bright And Beautiful, and He’s Got the Whole World In His Hands – the agonising list could go on! And because the Teacher Training Colleges of the ‘60s and ‘70s were breeding grounds not only for our future educators, but also for a future generation of folkies, the repertoire would invariably also be troubled with a smattering of contemporary folk ‘hits’, one of which was Sydney Carter’s Lord Of The Dance.
God, I hated that song! It was an irrational hatred, sure, but a real hatred nevertheless. I should say that I also hated Streets Of London and several of Simon & Garfunkel’s better-known ditties. It didn’t matter that some – probably all – of these were fine songs by any normal standards. The fact we were forced to sing them to insufferable piano or guitar accompaniments instilled a special kind of revulsion in the souls of those pre-pubescent lads and lasses who would much rather be listening to Sex Pistols, The Specials, Big Wheels Of Motown… virtually anything, in fact.
I wasn’t 100 percent certain the ‘Lord Of The Dance’ listed on the cover of my borrowed cassette was the same song I’d learned to despise several years earlier, but within the first few bars it became clear that it was. Then something weird happened… I found myself actually enjoying it. I mean – REALLY enjoying it! I still don’t know why – all my experience should have told me to hate it but, for reasons I still can’t properly explain, I was strangely fascinated by this odd little quasi-religious song.
Maybe I was finally hearing the song in a new light, or maybe it was just the forceful nature of the performance, driven by Carthy’s occasionally idiosyncratic vocal phrasing and Swarb’s driving fiddle. Whatever it was, it made me sit up and listen in a way I hadn’t quite managed with the previous tracks on the album. When the song ended, I played through the rest of the album – Poor Murdered Woman; Bonny Black Hare – then turned over and started Side One again, this time with a renewed interest in the words, their stories, the phrasing and the rhythmic quality to the guitar playing.
Ultimately, Lord Of The Dance didn’t last too long in my affections and was fairly quickly supplanted by the likes of John Barleycorn and Byker Hill from this album and a whole list of tracks from many other albums. In fact, it may be true to say that Lord Of The Dance is now one of my least favourite tracks from Martin Carthy’s 1960s albums, but I’m not sure that matters. Along with the other tracks on this album it did its job when I first heard it and got me started on a 30-plus-year passion – some may say near obsession (near? Who am I kidding?) – with Martin Carthy’s music. And today I can finally say I own a copy of the album – albeit on vinyl and not the cassette I originally heard – that changed everything…
“My wife calls me Spider-Man… because I can’t get out of the bath”. Dave Swarbrick
It’s been a week since the passing of Dave Swarbrick and social media has been filled with celebrations of his life from some of the thousands of people whose own lives were touched by his music, kindness and wit. I never really knew Swarb but I saw and heard him more times than I can remember over the last 30 years: guesting with the late-80s Fairport lineup at Cropredy; leading the brilliant acoustic quartet Whippersnapper; as a virtuosic solo performer, but by far the most frequent guise I witnessed, maybe not surprisingly, was his duo with Martin Carthy. So whilst the wider media may, perhaps rightly, heap praise on his more commercial achievements with the likes of Fairport, it seems more appropriate for me to pay tribute to his partnership with Carthy.
My best guess is that I saw ‘Swarb and Carth’ 17 or 18 times in nine different towns or cities between October 1988 and September 2015. You never quite knew what you were going to get at one of their gigs, perhaps because they rarely rehearsed and both relished the challenge of ringing the changes and equally abhorred the idea that their music might become staid, petrified, a beautifully preserved fly in Jurassic amber. If you saw them on the first date of one of their annual September tours it’s likely that their first song would have been the first time they’d performed together in anger since their last gig, which could conceivably have been the best part of a year ago. On that basis you might have forgiven them for playing safe when they had the opportunity but that was never their style so that opening number might well have been suffixed by a sly look between the pair and maybe a chuckle, as if to say, “We made it!” and the last gig of a tour could differ vastly from the first as they tweaked and generally mucked about with either the repertoire, specific arrangements, or both.
Right up to the last time I saw them, on what transpired to be their last full tour about nine months before Swarb’s death, they were tinkering with some of the oldest pieces in their repertoire – the likes of Sovay and Byker Hill – as well as some of their more recent work. Occasionally (usually at Swarbrick’s insistence) they would wing it completely, such as the occassion when Swarb insisted on playing a set of tunes they’d not yet fully learned. Carthy was not entirely enamoured of the idea but they did it nevertheless – just about – and in the process displayed not just their musical chops but a collective fearlessness and confidence in their own abilities that is perhaps the greatest clue to the puzzle of how and why they continued to innovate and experiment up until the end.
Despite Swarb’s passing we still have their recordings – their innovative and occasional controversial sixties albums and their all-too infrequent post-reunion CDs from the late-eighties onwards – but these never really reflected anything but the briefest of snapshots of what they were doing at the time they were recorded. Their union really came alive on stage, in front of an audience, and in many ways Carthy and Swarbrick were the ideal partnership. Each was equally the other’s teacher and pupil and the respect with which they held each other was evident whenever they played together. Ask Carthy now who taught him the most about music – not just ‘folk music’ – and the odds are he’ll not hesitate to credit Swarb, perhaps quoting him as saying, “You can do anything to music, it doesn’t mind”. It’s a simple enough phrase but one which, when acted out in the hands of two masters of their craft, resulted in some incredible, diverse and often boundary-breaking, music.
They were the first to admit they didn’t do ‘happy’, but despite the often bleak, if not downright heartbreaking, nature of much of their material, their live shows were scattered with humour and good natured banter. Not for nothing was Swarbrick labelled ‘the world’s first sit-down comedian’. They would often end shows with MyHeart’s In New South Wales – Swarb’s beautiful, plaintive paean to the time he spent living in Australia – which would invariably be introduced through a hilarious catalogue of the various ways in which you could be killed by the country’s indigenous wildlife. It may be this incorrigible streak of humour, often as self-deprecating as it was wicked, that I’ll miss as much as the music about those regular September dates with Carthy and Swarbrick.
My thoughts are with Swarb’s wife Jill, his regular touring companion in recent years and sitter to Ruby, the most widely-travelled dog in the folk world who has no-doubt slept through more Carthy and Swarbrick gigs than I could ever hope to have seen.
Kevin Boyd, 10 June 2016
Here are a few personal favourites of my photographs of Carthy and Swarbrick. The shot above was taken in Bury in September 2011 and is one that Dave asked if he could use for publicity – he thought it made him look almost presentable! I was happy to send him a copy and have been pleased to have seen it used frequently over the last few years. The rest are from subsequent gigs, with the exception of a couple of early shots from their ‘first farewell tour’ in 1988.
Topic Records are to release a limited-edition version of Martin Carthy’s debut album for UK Record Store Day. The edition will carry the catalogue number 12TS2015 and will be limited to 750 copies with audio remastered for 180g audiophile vinyl that has been pressed at Optimal in Germany. It will be available initially in-store only at participating record shops on Saturday 18 April but it’s likely that Topic will make any remaining copies available via their website in the following weeks, as they have with their previous RSD releases.
Previous Topic RSD releases have reproduced the original sleeve notes, artwork and production techniques (foldback sleeves, etc). So far I’ve been unable to determine if that is the case here although Topic have released this cover image showing that they have finally made a decent job of dealing with the old Fontana logo that appeared in the top-right corner of the original release. I’ll post more details once I get my hands on a copy.
Posted by Kevin Boyd 
Come Sing It Plain... 