Kev Boyd on the ‘new old’ Martin Carthy album.

Martin Carthy’s first entirely solo album in 21 years will be released this year on his 84th birthday. A key feature of Martin’s recent live shows has been his purposeful revisiting of several songs from his earliest recorded repertoire. I had speculated for some time that this might signal a desire to revisit some of those old songs on a new album. The announcement of TRANSFORM ME THEN INTO A FISH confirmed this. It consists of 11 songs, eight of which originally appeared on Martin’s eponymous debut album in 1965, with the remaining three having featured in his live and recorded repertoires to varying degrees in recent (and not-so-recent) years.

It’s not unusual for Martin to revisit songs from his past. He’s sung different versions of some of the songs from his debut album, and entirely rewritten and rethought others. Some have rarely left his live repertoire, while others have dipped in and out, occasionally vanishing as quickly as they seemed to have appeared. What follows is an attempt to catalogue the various versions, revisions and variations of the songs from his new album that he has been known to » Continue Reading.

Kev Boyd on A romantic take on one of London’s old school coffee bars

The Troubadour is an old school coffee house in London’s Earls Court. It’s been around for years and as well as serving coffee it also has a well-stocked bar, serves decent food, puts on small gigs and has a specialist wine shop located in the adjoining store. It’s probably best known by a lot of people for being the venue for a folk club back in the early sixties that was one of the small number of places Bob Dylan played on his first visit to England in the winter of 1962. One of the resident singers at ‘The Troub’ during that time was Martin Carthy. He and Dylan quickly became friends who spent a lot of time together during Bob’s first visit and continued to stay in contact for a number of years.

A young Paul Simon was also around the London folk club scene during that period and Carthy famously taught him his way of singing the English traditional song Scarborough Fair. Depending on whose version of events you believe, either Simon or an unscrupulous, unnamed music publisher immediately copyrighted the song and pocketed » Continue Reading.