Music interview: Martin Carthy and The Imagined Village at the Colston Hall

Thursday 21st January 2010

Steve Harnell speaks to folk legend Martin Carthy about his key role in acclaimed collective The Imagined Village, collaborating with Paul Weller and playing a vital part in Paul Simon’s success 

Sometimes the best ideas are the most simple ones. The biggest surprise of all about folk collective The Imagined Village is that nobody thought of it 20 years ago.

In essence, The Imagined Village has been designed to celebrate the multi-cultural Britain of today. As well as recording original material, the 10-strong core members take traditional folk songs from these shores and add Afro-Caribbean and Asian instrumentation into the mix including sitars, tablas and citterns.

It’s a recipe which brought them immediate acclaim with the release of their debut album and UK tour back in 2007. Set up by Simon Emerson of the Afro Celt Soundsystem, the band includes folk legend Martin Carthy and his daughter Eliza.

For Martin, the offer to join The Imagined Village was just too good to pass up and saw him move into previously unexplored territory.

He explains: “At first, Simon talked very loosely about the concept behind the band. I knew he was involved in the Afrocelt Soundsystem which, funnily enough, I always thought was a really weird idea.

“I first met him many years ago when he was part of Scritti Politti. Then we met up again to talk about the idea for the band a couple of years back – I’d almost forgotten about it until he rang up and asked me to come into the studio to record a couple of songs including John Barleycorn.

“I was intrigued because I’d never done anything like this before, working with beats and suchlike. I’d been busting to do something like that for ages though.

“Added to that was the chance to work with people of the calibre of Sheema Mukherjee (sitar and vocals) and Johnny Kalsi (percussion, dhol and tabla). It was a very exciting proposition.”

The Imagined Village’s first record featured Billy Bragg and the Modfather himself, Paul Weller, who appeared on a version of the aforementioned John Barleycorn with Martin and Eliza.

Martin explains: “Paul knew the song from the version by Traffic back in the Seventies.

“He had their album and was learning the song from that, but my way of performing it was very different. I first recorded it back in 1966, in fact.

“It was in my setlist when I was playing with Dave Swarbick in the Sixties and I toyed with it again in the early Nineties but didn’t get anywhere. Then I just did it off the cuff at a club one night and it’s been regularly in my repertoire ever since. It’s a death and resurrection song linked to Russian folklore.”

You do wonder why adding influences from other cultures in modern Britain to our own traditional songs hasn’t been attempted before, right?

“Exactly. People have tried, but to make it into such a high-profile project you really need someone like Simon to be involved. He’s really like a dog with a bone. He gets an idea and just won’t let go.”

You must have been delighted that the project was so well received right from the start...

“It was lovely, but as soon as the band started to play on the road during that first tour we all realised that we wanted to leave the beats and programmed music behind. We all agreed ‘come on, let’s be a real band here’. Fortunately, Simon agreed to the changes we made.

“There’s still quite a lot of electronica involved now but on our first tour we were virtually playing to tapes. It was the same tempo every night. The idea was to play everything note for note. That’s a challenge, of course, but ultimately the word ‘sterile’ does rather come to mind.

“I personally didn’t find it too frustrating as I’d never played like that before. But I could sense it from some of the other musicians in the band. We knew we could be a proper band – after all, there are so many fabulous players in there.”

So who gets to choose the songs with so many big-hitters in the line-up?

“Well, Simon has a big say, but then we all come in with our own ideas. He likes to ferret around in my back catalogue a little, too.”

Kicking off the newly-released second album Empire & Love is a suggestion of Martin’s – My Son John – a Napoleonic war song updated to include references to Iraq and Afghanistan. Is the idea of protest still important in folk music nowadays?

“Oh God yeah,” adds Martin. “I wouldn’t call it ‘protest’ though – it’s more just a sense of being aware of what is around you in the world. I happen to think there’s no such thing as an apolitical song.”

Another of Martin’s contributions to the album is a remarkable reinvention of the old Slade rocker Cum On Feel The Noize as an introspective ballad. Who’d have thought it?

“That one came about through Simon again who is involved in the Forest School Camps project where kids camp out in the woods and learn to live in the great outdoors.

“He heard it being sung around the campfire and somebody suggested that I should do my own version. It wasn’t done tongue in cheek at all actually.

“A song of theirs like Coz I Luv You is actually quite a delicate little song. The power of Noddy Holder’s singing means that you tend not to think that it can be taken like that. It’s an odd one, but I really enjoyed singing it.”

Another stand-out on the new album is Scarborough Fair, a song which Martin taught to Paul Simon in the mid-Sixties when the legendary songwriter was living in the UK.

“Yes, he actually moved into my old flat. We were all rotten players back then, so if anyone had a really good idea we’d all seize upon it.

“All these little bits of expertise were passed around among us guitar players.

“You know, Paul and Art Garfunkel were on the point of giving up when a producer in New York stuck a rock‘n’roll rhythm section behind The Sound Of Silence and it catapulted them to No.1 worldwide.

“From that moment everything he touched turned to gold. It was all success, success, success.

“The last time I saw him was in 1998 when he toured here. He actually invited me to play Scarborough Fair with him at the Hammersmith Apollo. It was lovely and a great gesture on his part.

“The only shame is that neither of us made any money from Scarborough Fair because somebody came along and copywrited it first!”

The Imagined Village play the Colston Hall on Saturday, January 23. Tickets are priced £19-£21. For more details, ring the box office on 0117 922 3686.