Eliza Carthy, 25-year-old catalytic converter of English folk music, has been leading a double life. For the past three years, the fiddle player and singer has been writing a pop album on the quiet. In 1997, she was signed to Warner Bros as a singer-songwriter by the A&R guy who signed Joni Mitchell and Van Morrison. Since when Carthy has got on with ‘being a folkie’, in pubs, in Peru, at Glastonbury and Meltdown, as Joan Baez’s ‘co-mentor’ (Joan’s word) and on tour with her famous folk parents, Norma Waterson and Martin Carthy. Only now their Liza shares the same PR woman as Madonna.
‘It’s been a secret, my little thing,’ Carthy says, brushing crumbs off the table after late Sunday breakfast. Today, her hair, usually blue, is green. On the windowsill, Buffy the goldfish is circling to the sound of US popster Pink. The neon purveyor of old English songs lives in Scotland, in a converted stable south of Edinburgh, nothing but sheep for miles, Scottish boyfriend playing English pipes outside the front door.
Angels and Cigarettes, the new album in question, is, like Carthy on stage, seductively raw. Aside from a cover of Paul Weller’s Wildwood, partly chosen so she could ‘really belt on it’ (she has a fabulous voice), this is Carthy laid bare: the wrong blokes, the inadequacies, jealousies and, now she’s found the right bloke, the fantasies. Her first songs were, she admits, ‘completely unselfconscious’. One of them, Whole - as in ‘swallow you whole’ - was inspired by ‘a really nice thing’ someone said to her in bed. On The Company of Men, a butter-wouldn’t-melt harp intro gives way to: ‘I’ve given blow jobs on couches/ To men who didn’t want me any more.’ Her dad wrote the tune to this one.
Warners, to their credit, appear to have left the feisty former Mercury Prize nominee more or less to her own devices, their main proviso: no traditional music. There are Latin grooves, a 25-piece string section, but Carthy plays fiddle on most tracks, the Yorkshire vowels are intact, and the odd folkism still slips out - the demon lover with ‘a flush in his cheek’; a ‘lass’ on the Tube. ‘I was really quite paranoid when we started,’ Carthy recalls. ‘I was like, D’ya want me to go on a diet and learn how to formation dance? They were just looking at me totally bemused, “Er, no and no”.’ The major label signed an elfin folk babe; now, voluptuous would be more accurate. In the CD notes she describes ‘a period of not wanting to see skinny people doing anything’. She tells me she tries to imagine being on Top of the Pops ‘then I get embarrassed’. (I prefer the Liza who signs off her album credits ‘Grrrr!! Aaaargh!!!’) Has anyone asked her to lose weight? ‘No.’
She seems too happy to really care. Carthy and boyfriend Ben Ivitsky, fiddle player with the Peatbog Faeries, are learning to play the pipes together (brand new ones made of cherry wood: ‘D’ya wanna sniff?’). Ivitsky, also a guitarist, ‘wrote most of the album’ with her. He gave her a pep talk about The Blow Job Song (its working title): ‘You’re saying things other women wouldn’t say,’ he told her. ‘You’re gonna scare the shit out of loads of blokes.’ When I leave the room they start singing together.
Carthy belongs to a musical dynasty. She’s sitting beneath a photo of her auntie, Lal Waterson, who wrote two acclaimed albums before her death two years ago. There’s a pin-up of her 60s folk star dad in the loo. And yet the prodigal daughter is about to abandon the family business?
‘But I’m not,’ she hits back. ‘My physical output will just totally refute that.’ She has just produced her mum’s first solo traditional album (‘I’m all over that’). She’ll still gig with her parents. She plans to set up a production company putting out traditional music and tune books for schools (at this point, Vera Lynn is sailing out of the house speakers) and wants to get traditional instruments into the classroom: ‘Kids should be learning to play the bagpipes and the hurdy-gurdy,’ Carthy proclaims, brown eyes wide, ‘they should be freaking out and clog dancing!’
Warners may have signed themselves a Trojan horse with bells on. ‘Well, what am I gonna do? Am I gonna languish in obscurity going, “I’m bringing folk music to a wider audience”? Or am I actually gonna do something about it, use this fortunate signing to satisfy my need for new things, and also my need to get traditional music out into the world?’ She’s been working the folk circuit since she was 17. ‘I’d like to prove to myself that I can do an entirely different job.’
Carthy will tour later this year purely as a singer-songwriter. As a consumer, she is ‘uncomfortable’ listening to them. Flicking through her CDs she picks out Ben Harper, Ani Di Franco and Beth Orton as exceptions. She ‘gets off on’ bands: G Love and Special Sauce, the Prodigy, Little Feat, the Meters, Beck. In alphabetical order, though. ‘I don’t know what Shaggy’s doing in the bloody Bs...’ Carthy has a soft spot for Catatonia – and the Corrs. Maybe she’s learned from their fiddle-lite appeal: she says she wants to make folk her ‘gimmick’ rather than her ‘hindrance’.
You can see her dilemma. A twentysomething folk singer in the 21st century does not compute with most people. Female singer-songwriters who talk dirty (PJ Harvey, Alanis Morissette, Tori Amos) do. There follows a major rant against one-dimensional Britain – ‘Ibiza and Radio 1 and finding out what the fuckin’ celebs are up to’ – and the fact that if traditional music, ‘something I love’, goes any more underground it’ll be dead.
‘We should be getting grants off the government!’ she rails. ‘I’ve been all over the world talking about England and what a fucking great place it is, and people have to keep leaving the folk scene.’ Her brother-in-law Saul Rose has just hung up his melodeon. He is now a pharmacist. ‘Or you can do what I did,’ she says, increasingly anguished, ‘work your arse off driving yourself around, getting yourself a record deal, making yourself ill. Unless you do this, you haven’t a hope in hell. It’s so sad.’ Top of the Pops is the least of her worries.
Still, a girl’s got to get her merchandise right. She wants a ‘skate’ look, she tells her manager, and shows him her new logo - Liza as an angel with a jaunty halo. So there is life after folk.
· Angels and Cigarettes is out on WEA on 18 September
