SHIRLEY COLLINS
Back after decades, the folk godmother hails Richard And Linda Thompson’s Withered And Died.
I’d been ditched by my husband Ashley Hutchings, who’d started falling in love with actresses. Over the next few months my confidence just went away, and I sort of couldn’t sing sometimes. I was at the National Theatre, doing things in public, and it was so humiliating that I hardly dared to try. And this got deeper and deeper in my psyche, I suppose. We were friends with Richard and Linda Thompson, especially Linda, they used to visit us at our cottage, Red Rose, in Etchingham. When their album I Want To See The Bright Lights Tonight came out [in 1974], they gave it to me, and Withered And Died just sort of summed up everything I was thinking and feeling at the time. It’s such a beautiful song. I think it was Linda’s sorrowful, plangent singing and the words, ‘this cruel country has driven me down.’ It felt like that was my life then. I went with it all. In a way it plunged me deeper into my misery, but it sustained me. At that time Linda and Richard were about to split as well, and she’d just had a baby. And I thought, God, well, her situation was far worse than mine. But I appreciate it for being a beautiful song now, it doesn’t have a deep meaning for me – I’m past that now. In a way I feel a bit silly talking about it, because it was so long ago, and in many ways I wish I’d just felt angry instead of hurt. But, there. The songs that really mean the most to me are the songs I used to sing, and the songs that I’m singing now. The most beautiful English traditional songs are sort of imbued with the memories and the feelings of all those past generations. What they have for me is a complete truth, all the emotions in them have come down by heart. They represent the best of England, to me – the honest, decent working people. If I had to choose one song, I’d take Gilderoy, which I did on For As Many As Will [1978 LP with her sister Dolly]. The beauty of the melody and the words, and the fact it came from a shoemaker [Henry Burstow] in Horsham, who lived fairly local to me… it’s a source of pride for me that I came from the same class [as him]. When I listen to this music I just feel settled. Perhaps that’s another word for contentment. Ian Harrison
Shirley Collins’s Lodestar – her first album in 38 years! – is out now on Domino.