Martin Carthy and Ashley Hutchings:
The ‘executive producers’ discuss the making of Bright Phoebus
What were Mike and Lal like? HUTCHINGS: Mike is one of my very, very favourite male singers. I love the character and the depth in his singing. He’s unlike any singer I’ve ever known, and without any pretensions whatsoever – salt of the earth. I hardly got to know Lal, but respected her enormously, and loved her writing. CARTHY: She was lovely. Very reflective, very inward looking. When she wrote a song, she wasn’t satisfied until the words sounded right. I don’t know much about poetry, but Gerard Manley Hopkins used to write like that. She was a really unique voice. Unorthodox doesn’t begin to describe the way she played the guitar. It was so complex. It was more sophisticated than you can imagine.
How did you hear the songs?
CARTHY: I used to go and sing in Hull quite a lot; with Steeleye, solo, and when I was still singing with Dave Swarbrick. One day I was staying at her place and Lal just said, “I’ve got these songs”, and she sang me some, and I was absolutely knocked over. I told Ashley Hutchings and he heard a tape and thought it was wonderful. Ashley is the kind of person who immediately wanted to make a record of it and he set the whole thing in train, and got Richard Thompson involved, and Dave Mattacks.
HUTCHINGS: Martin and I were the executive producers; the people who put the music together, but everyone enjoyed doing it for the Watersons. Everyone loved the songs. Everyone pitched in.
It seems quite bold to have made such a genre-blurring record in Cecil Sharp House – the home of trad orthodoxy?
HUTCHINGS: Maybe there was a glint in the eye when they agreed to do it there. It was basically a room in the basement – I think it was the Trefusis Hall – and we turned it into a recording studio.
CARTHY: Norma came home from Montserrat, and almost immediately we all went to the studio to make Bright
Phoebus. It was an extraordinary week. Bob Davenport was always going to sing that little bit in “Child Among The Weeds”. It was a single take, and it was absolutely astounding. It was like we’d lassoed something very special. That sort of thing happened all the time.
Do you think it is a folk record?
HUTCHINGS: I don’t know. It could be. It’s an album of music. I think it’s impossible to categorise. My favourite tracks tend to be the strange, gentle ones: “To Make You Stay” – I love that one – and “Never The Same”. It’s very rich. They’re not like anything else. Except for Berthold Brecht, Kurt Weill.
CARTHY: It was the Watersons. We never gave that too much thought. When I first heard them sing, the beginning of ’64, it was like nothing else anybody had ever heard. Straight away people were saying: “That’s not traditional music.” But what they didn’t get, all the people whose chips were being pissed on by what the Watersons were doing, was that it was unique, and that was what folk music is. Everyone does it their own way. You just sing the fucking thing.
Things got a bit complicated after the album was released…
CARTHY: Everything was done on the cheap: the first 1,000 were printed with the hole off-centre, and with some of the first ones I got the feeling the cutting was done with a knife and fork, but we were really quite startled at its reception, because people were horrified. “The Watersons sing traditional stuff.” People didn’t realise just how cosmopolitan the Watersons were. They were brought up with music… their dad would play a bit of jazz, their mother sang show tunes, Uncle Ronnie played the cornet and he was absolutely mad on opera.
HUTCHINGS: At that time, with Fairport, Steeleye, we had a lot of barriers we had to clamber over, built by a certain section of the folk scene. We almost went through the Dylan thing when he went electric. With
Bright Phoebus, the media was on our side but the music scene was completely split, for and against. It was not like anything the Watersons had done at this point. The more you tried to break the barriers down, the more people dug their heels in.
Do you think Mike and Lal were discouraged by that response?
CARTHY: They are basically the kind of people who just shrug and walk away. Lal carried on with some of her writing and Mike would carry on with some of his, but he rarely sang many, because it had all been rejected out of hand. I’m so happy that it’s coming out again. It was just wonderful that week – that Monday to Friday – the whole thing was a total delight. And when it was just sitting in an archive somewhere it was heartbreaking. It’s a masterwork.
HUTCHINGS: I think this story is very much like Nick Drake’s – at the time, not really successful, but as the years go by just building and building, and now this album is a legend. They were ahead of their time. It’s very uneasy. Maybe it was just too difficult to get to grips with. It’s very much Mike and Lal. They were very different personalities, and it comes over on this album. But there’s something there for everyone.
“That’s what folk is. Everyone does it their own way… You just sing the fucking thing” MARTIN CARTHY