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Nick Morgan and crew
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Concert
Review by Nick Morgan |
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MARTIN CARTHY
AND DAVE SWARBRICK
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Edward and his mother Jane Seymour |
The Half Moon, Putney, London, September 30th
2007
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| “Swarb
and I don’t really do fun” said Martin
Carthy, as he acknowledged the reception
to the opening song of the night (as I recall) ‘Death
and the lady’, a maudlin tale of a woman’s
unfortunate meeting with Death on the road (whilst
she walked out “one morn in May”). Needless
to say despite all her entreaties and best efforts
she was unable to escape his icy grasp. If you have
the 1971 reprint of the Penguin Book of English
Folk Songs, edited by Ralph Vaughan Williams and
A A Lloyd, you’ll find this tune on page 31.
On page 32 is the equally harrowing ‘The death
of Queen Jane’, based on the true history
of Queen Jane Seymour, wife of Henry VIII, who died
shortly after giving birth to her son Edward (who
at the age of 9 became King, but himself died only
six years later). The song recounts her agonising
confinement, and her pleas for a Tudor caesarean
section – “do open my right side and
find my baby”.It’s the second song of
the night, but the first on Martin Carthy and Dave
Swarbrick's 2006 album, Straws in the
Wind, which features nine songs from the Penguin
collection, along with a number of tunes old and
new. |
| It
is very, very, good, and probably one of the reasons
why they were voted ‘Best Folk Duo’
by the BBC earlier this year. The other reason for
such an accolade is the sort of performance they
turned in tonight, almost perfect, in a room as
silent as a Meeting House on a solemn Sunday night.
Actually it’s the back room of the Half Moon
– which post smoking ban has had something
of a face lift. You need sunglasses to go into the
urinals these days. |
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| Not
that there isn’t any fun – Carthy
has a dry understated humour, and Swarbrick,
survivor of a double lung transplant in 2004, is
at his impish best; literally a fiddler calling
the tunes. “I got this tune from the Customs
Officer at Unst” said Swarbrick, as he introduced
‘The Brides March from Unst’. “What
did he get from you?” asked a wag in the audience.
“I was hoping you wouldn’t ask that.
Anyway, he was a very nice Customs man, but I still
missed the whole gig. Those were the days…”
His playing is sensitive and restrained (it’s
nice to hear him when he’s not competing at
full volume with Richard Thompson), a perfect foil
to Carthy’s voice – no better than on
‘The treadmill song’ (‘The Gaol
Song’ in the Penguin collection) which opened
the second set and perfect captured the dull and
hopeless monotony of a repetitive prison life. |
 |
Carthy’s
voice is wonderfully expressive, without a hint
of exaggeration or contrivance, and his percussive
guitar playing almost hypnotic. His open string
tuning gives a sort of drone effect to most of the
songs (enhanced by Swarbrick’s fiddle) and
his simple but very concise finger-style picks out
melodies with precision. |
| “When
I'm playing a traditional song” he said in
an interview, “I love to keep it absolutely
bog-simple - simple as possible and just drive the
narrative on as hard as I can”. Quite right
too. And the narrative in many of these old songs
is timeless and compelling. Take Sir Patrick Spens,
for example, the fateful tale of the attempt to
bring Margaret, the Maid of Norway, to Scotland
in 1290, and Spen’s battle with the ocean
in the face of a deadly storm. Played to Nic
Jones’ famous arrangement it’s a
driving story of mariners in peril, as gripping
as any George Clooney film. |
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Martin
Carthy - Dave Swarbrick and friend (from Whiskyfun
crew) |
And
the sea provides some of the finest song of the
evening, and of the album. There’s ‘The
Ship in Distress’, a tale of attempted cannibalism
at sea, ‘Bold Benjamin’, recounting
a disastrous expedition to Spain, ‘The whalecatchers’
, which graphically captures the conditions endured
at sea by the Whale fleets in Greenland - “our
finger tips were frozen off, and likewise our toe-nails’
- and ‘The Royal Oak’, a stirring tale
of a lone English ship surrounded by ten hostile
vessels (“Pull down your colours you English
dogs, or else your precious life you’ll lose”)
and winning the subsequent encounter against all
odds. And that Serge, is where I’ll leave
this most excellent evening, with that thought of
a hapless and outnumbered group of English warriors
(“true Englishmen all-oh”), fighting
their way to a bold and bloody Victory against the
auld enemy, and against all the odds. Let’s
see shall we ….
- Nick Morgan (Concert photographs by Kate except
one. Err, two). |
Check
the index of all reviews:
Nick's Concert Reviews
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There's nothing more down there... |
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