KLOF
Eliza & Martin Carthy have announced the release of a live album on CD and DVD recorded live in February 2018 at Hailsham Pavilion, East Sussex. The release is available via Pledge Music along with a host of other goodies including limited T-shirts, signed handwritten lyrics sheets, test pressings & more!
Order here: https://www.pledgemusic.com/projects/eliza-martin-carthy
Eliza’s last studio album with Martin was in 2014 with The Moral of the Elephant, released on Topic Records who were then celebrating their 75th year. The timing had other significance coming almost 50 years after Martin made his solo debut and 21 years since Eliza’s name first appeared as a headline on a record alongside Nancy Kerr.
The album was regarded as a companion piece to Gift, the album that Eliza Recorded with her mother Norma Waterson in 2010 which she recently followed up on with Anchor, released in June this year on Topic (read our interview and review).
In his review of The Moral of the Elephant Simon summed up their histories so well it’s worth repeating here…
Martin was born in 1941 and had his first musical experience in his childhood as a chorister, but like many of his age fell under the spell of Lonnie Donegan in his teens. Picking up his father’s guitar and the influences of Big Bill Broonzy and the unique playing style of Elizabeth Cotton, Martin worked his first professional gig while still in his teens. By the early 60s he’d already established himself on the London folk scene, becoming a regular at the Troubadour. He famously influenced both the young Bob Dylan and Paul Simon, although the latter’s wholesale, unaccredited lift of Martin’s arrangement of Scarborough Fair was the source of rancour for many years.
Martin’s self-titled, debut, headline recording, was released in 1965 and featured Dave Swarbrick, whose name was kept off the credits because of other contractual arrangements. By then he had already developed a well-regarded signature guitar style as the original sleeve notes, written by Ian Campbell make clear. Campbell also makes the distinction of calling Martin a folksong singer rather than just a folk singer. Whilst that might be playing with semantics it does make the point that Martin’s repertoire has never strayed too far from the English, or perhaps more accurately British tradition. Campbell also calls Martin a foundation member of the contemporary folksong revival.
It was 25 years later that Eliza, still in her teens, joined her father and made her first appearance as a singer on Oranges And Lemmings, a collection of songs written by Les Barker and credited to the Mrs Ackroyd Band. Her more serious co-headliner with Nancy Kerr followed 3 years later and the first Waterson:Carthy album a year after that. Eliza has paid tribute to Nancy for encouragement and also leading the charge of their early collaboration, but her accomplishments since have eclipsed all of her contemporaries by some distance, twice being nominated for the prestigious Mercury Prize and in her turn, fostering and supporting fresh young talent with a massively busy live schedule and through her many groundbreaking releases.
Find out more here: https://www.pledgemusic.com/projects/eliza-martin-carthy