MARTIN CARTHY has featured on dozens of albums. Maybe 50 in total. He has done solo, duet and group work. He has nurtured and encouraged two complete generations of folk music performers and he has kept a tradition alive in real places among real people.
It comes as a shock to realise that Shearwater, one of my all-time best-loved vinyl albums, hasn’t been available on CD before. I assumed that things as culturally rich as Martin Carthy's complete works would be piled high in every Borders and HMV.
It seems not. This reissue, dating from the immediate aftermath of CARTHY's contribution to the peak of STEELEYE SPAN's creativity adds three tracks to the already wonderful Shearwater (then on leading edge folk label Pegasus) and will be a first chance for some people to have these songs together on one CD.
At heart, Carthy is a story teller. His memory (and his invention when the past has been erased) is a phenomenal thing. He not only recalls all the songs – he also knows all the versions, all the tune variants, who sang them, and where. A short reminiscence with him can have your head reeling and things you had forgotten about your own life recalled in amazing detail.
This all feeds into the performance of the songs. The astonishing complexity of the album's highlight "The Famous Flower of Serving Men" is effortlessly summoned from verses remembered, verses invented and verses from the depths of a forgotten world. At nearly nine and a half minutes, its spellbinding guitar/voice/story universe is over far too quickly, like a book that you don’t want to end. Its stark brutality, the heroine's courage, the closeness of death and birth have more than a hint of His Dark Materials about them. In this song you get the fully distilled Carthy spirit: a melody that takes it’s own languid time and course; a guitar part of shimmering rhythmic intricacy; enunciation of a dazzling tale that would take a three part Jackson film to capture; great depths of empathy; and a deadly, haunting precision.
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Here too we have performances and songs that Bob Dylan absorbed and cherished in his earliest days before the first album: "Handsome Polly-O", "Banks of Green Willow", "Outlandish Knight", "Lord Randall". These songs are the great oaks of British song. By 1972 Carthy was an absolute master of his trade and where others might stumble and succumb to material like this, Carthy has the strength to hold them up and make them live again – to the extent that among living singers he is the one who could claim them as his own (if he weren’t so modestly in awe of his own sources).
The album has the novelty of CARTHY duetting with himself on "I was a Young Man" (excellent) and some double tracked instrumentation (subtly done – but CARTHY'S lovely musicianship is always so sparingly rationed that it is good to hear him extend a bit) It also has a duet with MADDY PRIOR on "Betsy Bell and Mary Grey" which recalls PRIOR's collaboration with TIM HART on the gorgeous "Summer Solstice" from the same era (Also on Pegasus I seem to remember).
As an encouragement to buy it again if you've already digitised the original vinyl, there are remastered and previously unreleased Peel Session recordings of "The False Lover Won Back", "King Henry" and "Trimdon Grange" from 1972. These are very welcome – but I have to report that relative to the other tracks the recording quality is on the muddy side. After the warm clarity of the album proper, his voice is noticeably less well mic'ed. He's still bloody good though.
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