RALPH, ALBERT & SYDNEY
 Interview with Ralph McTell
2002
For Acoustic Promotions Web Site
 by Steve Nunn

The prestigious 2002 BBC Radio Two Folk Awards acknowledged one of the acoustic world’s finest and most respected singer-songwriters, when Ralph McTell was presented with the Lifetime Achievement Award for Contribution to Songwriting.  
Ralph has embarked on a major tour showcasing material from a new album “National Treasure”, featuring classic and original songs played on authentic instruments, including the distinctive steel-bodied resonator guitar favoured by many of the revered blues players of the 1920’s and ‘30’s.
The following is part of an interview in which Ralph talks to Steve Nunn about aspects of the new album, the guitars, the tour and artistic motivation. 

1.The appearance of the National guitar shows yet another side to your musical skills and influences.   Tell us something about the place of these stylish instruments in the history of acoustic music. 

They arrived around the 20’s and 30’s in what I’ve always assumed was a desperate effort to replace the jokiness of the banjo in an orchestra.  You can never do a serious piece of work on a banjo because it always makes you smile. I think that the original composers for banjos thought it was such a wonderful amplified sound that it could replace the harpsichord, and indeed there are serious bits of music written for banjo. The banjo was a rhythm instrument in the orchestra but its kind of “plunky-plunk” sound was a bit too comedic so the Dobro Brothers and the National Guitar Company invented this resonator system in a guitar.

The strings run over a bridge just like on an ordinary guitar but instead of vibrating the wooden table they vibrate against a spun aluminium cone inside the guitar that the bridge rests on. This is then reflected off the back of the metal body and through the grid, the grilles and the f-holes to produce a sound which is something like a banjo but without that harsh edge to it - and a little bit warmer because of the two bass strings. It was picked up by Hawaiian players and slide players and the blues men loved it because you could make enough noise with one instrument to get something happening, people dancing.

My principal influence on this instrument would be Blind Boy Fuller who played one all the time.  All his recordings I think were made on a National.  Reverend Gary Davis, another guitar hero of mine, apparently used to play a National. I came across a resonator guitar from a friend of mine - we thought it was a National. It’s not actually but it sounds like one and so it’s been an absolute joy making a record with it.

2. Does this kind of instrument call for a different playing technique with a higher action and will you be playing any slide guitar?

Yes, it does, it requires a heavier string, tighter action. It doesn’t sound so attractive when you get the rattle and slap that is perhaps my trademark  (laughs).  I’m not a very clean player but the National is rather unforgiving and to get the real sound you need fairly dead strings and high tension. Apart from Blind Boy Fuller’s style, basically that Piedmont style of ragtime blues picking, they sound fantastic to slide so I’ve recorded two slide numbers by Robert Johnson on the album. I might do the more raggy things on the wooden guitar and just the open tuning bottleneck numbers on the National-type resonator.  I might just do that on the shows if my confidence is up because they are right up the top of my range - I’m a baritone, probably nearer a bass baritone and Robert Johnson was a tenor so I’m having to wind the strings up as high as I dare to get myself to be able to sing in the right pitch but I really enjoyed recording them.

3. There are all kinds of resonator guitars out there and there’s this debate about whether you have the National for blues, and the Dobro for country.  I guess in the end it’s about what feels right for what you want to play.

Well, I think that the Dobro does suit country music better.  I don’t know that if you just heard it in the context of a live band you’d notice the difference but there is something more kind of woody, less clanky about the Dobro and of course it has a wooden body and a slightly mellower sound.  The National is a bit more piercing and clean and metallic and seems to suit the blues style better but it’s really up to the individual.  The necks are big and hefty on them and the action pretty high so if you are playing finger style and playing chords you have to have a fairly strong hand.  Slide is easy because you’re just running a blade or bottleneck over it.  Easier, but I notice a lot of the guys used to use finger picks and a slide so it is a much more physically demanding “implement”.

4. You recorded the new album at home.  Does that give a kind of natural, more relaxed feel; is it quite different from the studio?

I think that will have to be judged by those who hear it.  My son Sam is technically much more adept than me; I’m a Victorian compared to him when it comes to technical things! He’s a fine musician, he knows what I can do and he very kindly came down and worked this new digital 16-track recording machine that I’ve got. I avoided the temptation of playing everything on every track but I accompanied myself on many of the tracks with more than just one guitar, using a 1934 L1 model similar to what Robert Johnson used - a small bodied Gibson which has a sweet, sweet tone - I used it a lot on “Blue Skies Black Heroes” - but the majority of the titles are on the National and we recorded probably twenty different pieces. In the end it came down to fourteen titles that make an album.  I think it’s critical how long an album is. Nobody wants to listen to a Londoner pretending to come from the Mississippi Delta for a whole album, so I think we’ve shown what the instrument can do from playing Woody Guthrie to Robert Johnson, to a self-composed slow instrumental to a version of The Trout by Mendelssohn, to a new song by Eric Bibb. So there is a variety but principally played on the National type resonator guitar, augmented with a guitar from a similar period and songs from a similar background.  

5. There’s quite a selection there! Given that you are known equally as a songwriter and a guitarist, have you ever considered making a guitar/ songwriting masterclass video?  There seems to be a trend for them these days and I bet there would be a few takers.

I don’t read music so if anyone wants to learn to play the way I do, all I could do is point them in the direction I came from, which is really these records that I’ve been making like “Blue Skies Black Heroes”, “Stealing Back” and now this one, “National Treasure”. There is so much to be learnt from those old blues men about how to get the most out of six strings. I’ve also got the big white American influence through the country players, Appalachian guitar pickers, Doc Watson, Woody Guthrie strumming and all that stuff and especially Rambling Jack Elliott who has a wonderful flat-picking style and my own way of playing has evolved through that. We did try a couple of pilot episodes but the project has gone cold. I think you’d at least have to be able to get your fingers round a few chords before we could start and then I could just show possibly how certain songs work but it is something that, on the list of things I’d like to do, is probably about number 53!

6. You often seem to be bristling with ideas and it’s a question of prioritising them I suppose?

It is really. I’d love to just say “do it in an hour, let’s do it live and see what happens” but thankfully Roger Brown is completing the book of my songs and he is very nearly there. There are going to be forty tunes and I think possibly if that book does well or if there is sufficient interest we could pick some songs from the book, having got the tablature already written out, and maybe just film me doing them. That’s how we had to do them for Roger to transcribe each note and so it’s pretty much how I play.

7. The pressures on the road must be fairly intense given that the focus on stage is on one man and his guitar. I recall you once said you have a road show that comes to a theatre, you take over for the evening and then depart afterwards.  You have a good team, Donard, Harry and yourself.  Given that most of the pressure is on you in the public eye, how do you prepare for a tour?

Donard, my tour manager and Harry, who’s now doing my agency, are the two young, keen, enthusiastic guys who want this aspect of the work to be as smooth running and professional as it possibly can be. 

I learnt very early on that you cannot be half-hearted or do it in half measures when it comes to stage shows. Being on stage is an incredibly demanding and intense hour and a half if you care about what you do. You should come off and you should feel good, elated and completely drained. You run on adrenaline for several hours afterwards, you can’t sleep and then you kind of crash out - but you should be emotionally drained, not physically drained.

I’m a static performer but you should have given every bit you possibly can, to do less is wasting your own and the audience’s time. It sounds crazy because I like a beer and used to smoke and all the rest of it but you’ve got be fit for the job, you need stamina.  You can’t hide when you’re on your own, you cannot have a bad night, a loose night. If you’re in a band and your rhythm guitar player is tired, the bass and the snare drummer will cover for you but say “here, you were a bit loose tonight, get it together tomorrow, yeah, sure, I’ll be alright tomorrow”.  You can’t do that on a solo tour, you’ve got to be fit, excited to go out there, you’ve got to feel privileged to be walking on that stage and you have to have the right measure of humility and pride in what you do.  You’ve got to have a great team around you because you are only as good as they can make you feel.

You get a little ritual going - I want certain things backstage, whether I use them or not is another thing. I want a clean towel every day, I want to be able to make a cup of tea if I want to. I want to have peace, I don’t want anyone backstage except my tour manager. I don’t have comings and goings in the dressing room. I set my papers out, work out the set list, and every night change my guitar strings. Then I have my tune up ritual and then get my fifteen-minute call, then ten and five and I go and stand near the back stage area ready for the call and everything is in place. Donard and I do our final checklist, you know, what’s on the stage and we go through it and make sure that we’ve done everything, that the switches are on and off. I walk out on stage and plug in with a trembling hand, I often find it difficult to get my jacks plugged into my guitar (laughs) and then settle down and go for it.  After two numbers I know if it’s going to be a good night and away we go. 

I know that superstition is only superstition, it makes no difference at all, but I would be foolish not to have every bit of help I can so if I find myself beginning to whistle in the dressing room I have to go outside and whistle a bit because I shouldn’t have whistled in the dressing room, its bad luck!  I’m not obsessive but when you look at my table out there you will see that things are put out a certain way. When you’re nervous and you put your arm out, you can knock things over, you must have seen people doing it on stage and other guys seem to manage okay whereas I need to have everything absolutely right. Otherwise, one thing goes wrong, everything starts to fall apart and there is nowhere to hide and you just lose your dignity. Then you lose your cool and your grip. 

8. All that preparation is really about being professional. 

It is. It’s supposed to look relaxed but its like Humphrey Lyttleton said “You cannot beat a well rehearsed ad lib!”

9. In terms of the songs themselves, you’ve written some really powerful issue songs like Bentley & Craig, Peppers & Tomatoes and a couple of dozen others at least that have highlighted injustices as you see it in the world.  Have you ever thought about collecting these on one album, similar to the Affairs of the Heart thing, because that is a side of you that people don’t often see, the troubadour who has something to say?

Well, I would agree with you, I did think about it and in fact I feel so deeply about some things, that I have deliberately written dark thoughts with sweet tunes. Until people like Morrissey came along, who can’t write tunes but just moans to a rhythm, I thought that people wouldn’t be interested in the dark side of human nature and creativity. Friends of mine assure me that Morrissey has a really deep sense of humour. It’s beyond me if he has, but I just don’t get it. If you are going to write a song about, say, an infidelity or a pain or hurting someone, with a sweet tune it kind of softens the blow but it still resonates with people. 

I’ve always tried to be subtle and I realise at times that people mistake that for a lack of intensity so - take an issue song like Bentley & Craig, I thought a long time about it and my inspiration for that was Woody Guthrie. How would Woody have tackled this? He would have found an excuse, a reason to exonerate them both from blame so although the two boys are involved in a murder their intention was not murder, but to rob a store. We know now that Christopher Craig’s intention probably was to kill somebody because he carried a gun - but he wasn’t the one that got hung so I spent ages thinking about this, how can you set up the tune? I know, I’ll use a bluesy fingerstyle riff and I’ll tell it like Woody would have told it, with extenuation and try and build a picture of the time, set the scene, the year when it took place, what was going to happen and then the tragic events and the denouement. 

I found that that was a good piece for me to do but at the time my manager was really worried that that song and also Water of Dreams were too much to put in one show because most managers would have thought I have had the potential to play to a much more middle of the road audience.  I’ve fought that all my life. I’m not like that. Just because my songs have got melody and they sound sweet, they have depth and I want to be on the uncomfortable side of the middle of the road, somewhere to the left, near the kerb, you know, but not in the ****** bushes and away with the fairies! (laughs).  I want to be a little bit difficult to listen to but I’ve discovered that people very seldom listen.  They hear, but they don’t listen.  If they listened they would see that the impression they may have of Ralph McTell songs is a lot different.  The reason that they’ve not all been assembled on one album - I don’t know why we haven’t done it actually.  It might be something to think about. I’m sure that people make their own compilations. Perhaps there will be a response to this question and we might take it further.  

10. That was very profound. Because a lot of your songs are written from personal observation, experience or memory they have a certain depth to them, but you also have songs that are based in literature - Herman Hesse, Sylvia Plath, Dylan Thomas.  Are there any other writers you go back to and that fascinate you?

I’m very seldom far from a book of poetry.  I think that’s a refined art, and one that I don’t fully understand but I love poetry very much; Dylan because of his tragedy and also Sylvia because of her tragedy although Dylan Thomas is forever, for me.  Bewildering, strange, of its time and yet it’s modern poetry. I can’t really put my finger on what it is about Dylan that is so magical for me. They say those that the   gods love die young. I like to believe that if there was a god-like plan for Dylan, he ****ed it up.  He shouldn’t have died, it wasn’t ordained, it was something else that screwed that up. The gods didn’t want him, they wanted him to survive and live to be ninety years old and be forgotten, be a miserable old git but he was taken through a set of circumstances that were beyond the gods’ control.  Now with Jimi Hendrix I can say no, they wanted him; James Dean, they wanted him but they didn’t want Dylan and he just went anyway, because he didn’t fit the bill. He wasn’t pretty, he wasn’t enough of a rebel.  He was a coward, a cheat, a sneak, he was just all the wrong things and he wasn’t god-like.  He had feet of clay in every single respect.  A coughing, wheezing hypochondriac, a cheat, a miserable double-crosser.  And yet this art, this work is of such immensity to me.  I was reading him last night just before I went to sleep.  I don’t want you to think that I do this every night, I don’t!

Seamus Heaney is another great poet who conveys the day-to-day little tragedies and moments in life, the real humanity that I love.  Sylvia Plath you mentioned, I read her book, Arial once from front to back like a novel.  Hardly ever have I read Ted Hughes’ stuff and I didn’t read the poems that appeared after his death but there is something about literature, isn’t there?  There is something about having more words to use.  A song is halfway towards a poem and half way towards a book, halfway towards just music to convey the emotion.  It is a very condensed form.  Poetry is somehow bigger, more profound and not guided or restricted by metre and scansion so the song itself has a lot of fences enclosing it, keeping it in, keeping it tight which makes your job quite hard to convey it - so you’re saying right, the music should carry this sentiment so it’s up to you now to ponder on what was meant by it.

11. That too is very profound, I keep using the word but it is.  It is interesting that many of our narrative style guitarist songwriters have found an inspiration in literature and poetry and well as personal observation and that leads to a question about many of our own song writers in this country, yourself included, have seldom been accorded the profile they deserve.  I’m thinking of Steve Tilston, Mike Silver, many others, they don’t get the attention compared with the revered status of their counterparts in the US.  I guess you’d have some views on this?

I feel it’s about facility. Steve (Tilston), Mike (Silver), myself all benefited through a progression, through clubs that provided acoustic music, principally for the preservation of folk song. Young men, perhaps through Dylan or just through the joy of trying to write poems, or finding that with a little accompaniment you could begin to write songs were given the opportunity through these circumstances to write and perform in front of a fairly receptive bunch of people.  That culture seems to have gone into decline in favour of the young traditional players, which is fantastic for traditional folk music. There was very seldom a PA system so we had to learn to project and play our guitars without the assistance of microphones.  

A lot of young guitar players now are not just thrashers, but they strum and bash the guitar with picks and repeat phrases, adapting themselves to rock bands.  The troubadorial approach to fingerstyle guitar, leaning towards classical and blues, just doesn’t have a voice at the moment and it has got to come from the young players.  I don’t think the facility is there and I don’t think that people on their feet in a club with beer and drinks in their hand is necessarily the right way.  It was a seated audience in a back room of a pub, quite intense, quite small. You would chat away to bring people into your world and then you’d sing the song.  Now you’ve just got to get up there and hit them, have impact within a few seconds and I think that must be very hard for youngsters to do.  We just don’t have the tradition that James Taylor has in America and people like that have crossed over into a kind of middle area. We don’t have the facility here for them to play and there doesn’t seem to be the market for it. You mentioned, incidentally, two of my favorites there, Mike Silver and Steve Tilston.  I think they’re both great writers.

12. Like yourself, they’ve got their own tradition of writing good material and being good guitarists as well.  That leads to the next question which you’ve almost answered already.  We’ve heard much about the acoustic revival in the last five or ten years.  It’s not the same, perhaps, as the revival through the Sixties.  It’s not discovering the guitar in quite the same way, maybe?

I think it’s partly because everybody wants everything now. To be able to play a bit of clawhammer, finger style or ragtime does take a while. You’ve got to sit and you’ve got to soak it up. Some people actually say to me  “I based my guitar style on the way you play”. I think, if you do then you’ll come in half way through the book, you know, what about chapter 1, chapter 2, chapter 3, chapter 4, what about those old guys, you haven’t listened to them.  For me it was just part of my growing up. I heard some music, skiffle originally and then I didn’t much bother again until I heard Jack Elliott, Woody Guthrie and then Blind Boy Fuller and Blind Blake.  Each one filled me with awe and wonder and I’d just sit at home and figure out what the hell was going on, picking and practising and breaking strings and then maybe seeing a chord or a little run here and now.  

Now it’s all out there, it must be really hard, I don’t know that it can happen again. I think that’s possibly why the young musicians - who are playing fantastically well - have got this huge source material which is exciting and accessible and it’s on film and on record.  I was talking to Wizz Jones, one of my big British guitar heroes – Wizz went to the American embassy to get recordings to listen to people! It was so hard to find source material and that’s why you have so many great individual guitar players from that period. You would recognise Bert Jansch after three notes, Wizz Jones after a couple of chords, Davy Graham after a few bars.  They all came to it through their different ways but it’s very hard to identify the new guitar players, isn’t it?

13.  It’s almost as if they are just seeing it as a gimmicky alternative to the rock approach, just doing something unplugged and not discovering acoustic music or historical music.

I see kids with vintage Gibsons on stage bashing the **** out of them and I’m thinking I wonder if those guys have ever sat down and played on the fifth string for a little while, just to hear the special sound of the Gibson fifth or sixth string - and the letters I get about my old guitar and the sound that it used to make (my Gibson, which I've still got safe but I don’t use on stage at the moment) - but you know they are missing out on the nuance of the guitar. You should be able to tell by listening if it’s a Martin or a Gibson or whatever and those guitars have a voice which suits certain types of songs. James Taylor – all his early recordings were on a Gibson, the Everly Brothers used to play Gibsons, Buddy Holly played a Gibson, Woody Guthrie played a Gibson and you get Doc Watson playing a Martin. Reverend Davis played a J200.  You could hear that’s a J200 or that’s a J45 and now its just wham bam thank you ma’am!

14. Going on to your Radio 2  Folk on Two stint a couple of years ago…  It was an entertaining journey of discovery for many listeners, and I suspect for yourself in terms of some of the new acoustic musicians that have come through, people that you met and profiled. I think it was Eric Bibb’s first look in in the UK.

There's a man of extraordinary depth and talent.  I am so thrilled to have discovered Eric’s work.  I enjoyed talking to and interviewing him and I’ve recorded one of his songs on my new album.  He’s got a quality and a commitment to the music - even us old guys get refreshed when we hear someone like that!  He is a good guitar player, he’s got a lovely voice, he writes very interesting songs and has come from the tradition of great American music. He’s embraced it all, he’s a young black man and I think it’s wonderful that there's a few now like Keb Mo’ and one or two others that have found the tradition that for years was neglected. It’s so rich and vibrant and they give it an immediate stamp of authenticity by showing it the respect that has been lacking from a lot of young performers who have taken music onto different places through blues, pop and soul. There is just such great quality of source material and Eric seems to have relished every second. I don’t have to wish him success, he’s already successful but I’m very, very happy for him and I hope people will check him out.

15. Yes, I think they already have. Is there any more radio presenting in the offing, a continuation of this journey of discovery?

I do have to say it is incredibly demanding, the amount of work that we did for those shows. I used to get between ten and twenty CDs to listen to a week, and I had to listen to every track, make notes and then go back and look through again. The producer would say Ralph, we do need a bit more traditional on this one or it’d be nice to have a bit of this kind of singing and I’d say well I didn’t think they were right up to the quality but he’d say we still need balance. So we would have a production meeting to balance the programs and then they would say, do you want to write this? At first I would and then I’d say, no I’ll just wing it and respond to the music. Then it was two days up to Birmingham for a pre-production meeting and then the recording the following day and then down again.  So it was hard work, it’s not just sitting in the studio winging it. 

I felt that our music has so little outlet apart from one show a week that anyone who sends a CD deserved to be listened to, right the way through.  At the end I was knackered. I loved doing it but I was glad when it was over, to be honest with you.  Mike Harding has a slightly different system and it works for him but I found it very exhausting and time consuming and I wanted to do it right.  I think there's a case to have a programme of traditional music and a programme for some of the American and English writers, people like Mary Chapin Carpenter.  I think that modern acoustic music deserves its own show. I think a lot of people would love it.

16. Contemporary acoustic music is actually quite distinct from traditional folk. Maybe many people don’t understand that.

Well, we’re grateful for those who play the modern music with a great nod towards tradition but there’s just so much of it. The tradition deserves its airing and so do the other writers but that means the most you can expect is half an hour from either source and when you think of all the hours of music broadcast and that is all you are going to get, it’s not enough it is?  It’s a wonder there's a scene at all.

17. Yes, it flourishes in spite of rather than because of.  Looking at the world view again, there seem to be constant requests for you to go to the States. People like you over there but I guess it is difficult to set up the structures, the arrangements. Are there any visits to the States planned?

I wish I could.  We haven't been able to find an agent who would take it on in a way that it we want to do it. My standards would be exactly the same but, no offence, I’ve been on the road for thirty six years and it gets harder, the travelling gets harder and there’s no such thing as an easy American tour.  It’s planes or trains or cars and its very, very, very demanding.  Sad to say, I don’t know when I’ll be going over again.  I would love to go back and do Chicago, Philadelphia, Boston, Los Angeles, New York, the eastern seaboard particularly and also a couple of gigs in San Francisco but I don’t know where its going to come from. To be honest with you, it’s the biggest regret I have in my whole career, that I missed America.

18. But as you say, it doesn’t just happen, it’s a gruelling schedule and not easy to organise because it’s the other side of the world.  

Deciding which songs finally appear on an album must be a difficult process.  Is there a definitive point at which a song is complete, or do they continue to change and refine through performance?

Yes, they never stay the same.  There's one lovely lady who comes to see me, she says, you’ve changed it again, you’ve changed that song, that’s not how you do it on the record and I say well the songs are new when you record them and then in singing them you find … and she says you don’t even get close to the melody line now.  She’s talking about a song called After Rain. I remember years ago a girl came to me and she was in tears because the songs, the tunes had changed.  I said, well they haven’t actually, they all still sit on the same chord deck but she said no, you’ve changed them and I thought, well, I’m really sorry because I honestly think after two years you are doing the songs better than you ever did on the album when you put them down.  Of course that’s what people hear over and over again whereas you might play them once or twice and then you get onto the next thing. So you do change and refine them. In terms of what goes on an album, I am such a slow writer I barely just about get enough to get them on (an album). I would never put anything on to fill up space, I don’t like waffling ****** endless solos from anybody. I want a solo to be there as a proper breath between verses, if it’s needed, if not, there won’t be one.  I had a particularly creative period prior to Red Sky and I actually took one song off there or it would have been a twenty song album instead of a nineteen.  I now realise that that was about six too many songs for an album and I think you need to breathe and you don’t need all that amount of time on an album, it’s too much, especially if the songs dart between emotions and you are required to make too many switches.  I don’t want to make it easy for people but I don’t want to make it difficult either. I want an emotional involvement with people when they listen to the songs, I want them to be moved. If they jerk from one emotion to another too quickly every three or four minutes it’s not going to be a successful album so I took the one song off,  re-recorded it for National Treasure and found that I’ve left it off again!   I don’t think it’s a bad song but it hasn’t fitted twice. It’s going to get out there because almost everything that I’ve ever written has made it to a record eventually so, it’s there, they’ll all get out there one of these days. 

19. Thinking of individual songs - there are hundreds of individual songs we could talk about - are you aware that a recent article in the Daily Telegraph listed Summer Lightening as one of the five greatest love songs ever written?

I didn’t know that.  How lovely, I’m thrilled to bits.  I shall have to get a copy of that and find out who wrote it.  

20. This is a difficult question I guess.  How do you rate your own songs?  Do you find that a song that you weren’t sure about suddenly goes very big and the audiences love it over the years, or vice versa?

When you’ve written something that’s right, you know it.  I don’t know how to explain it.  Now, sometimes the audience don’t know it at first, sometimes the listener doesn’t know but in nearly all the cases where I've put the pen down and gone “that’s okay, that one’s a good one”, eventually it will come through.  The longest period I had to wait for recognition for a song in terms of articulated response was for “The Setting” which I think is one of my best songs ever.  A lot went into that, a lot of thought, a lot of care, the tune was right. The tune revealed itself to me, as Reverend Davis says, it just sort of fell out from under my hands, I didn’t have to push and prod and poke and construct, it just revealed itself.  The sentiment of the song, which is quite a complicated one, came to me quite easily and then the construction. If I'd been able to maintain the intricate rhyme structure of the first verse throughout the song it would have been the best song I have ever written, I think.  You kind of know when something is right, I don’t know how to explain it other than that. I’ll just say that you put the pen down and you know, and then you wait and it was two or three years before the first letters started to come in about The Setting and now it’s there all the time, people write about it all the time.  It’s taken time to penetrate. You know the only reason why I had a hit with Streets of London, there's no-one that hears that that doesn’t get it the first time.  It’s got impact.  For a gentle song it’s got impact, it still works.  The others take a little time to soak in and I prefer the ones that take a little time to soak in and I've learnt to be patient and wait.

21. The Setting is much loved and much covered isn’t it? 

I think it is beginning to be covered.  I don’t know, it’s quite tricky.  So far, I've not met anyone who’s got the second or third chord right so the voicing of the thing goes off.  That’s the other weird thing, very few people get the chords right to the songs, they think they’ve got them, I mean, Streets of London with a D7th chord instead of an F6 which voices it completely differently.  The D7th chord is so much more brash than the F6th chord which has some similar notes and The Setting has a minor influence chord.  I don’t know what it is because I’m not a musician in that sense but they play it flat and it doesn’t work. It doesn’t matter - you can’t, pardon my crudeness, but you can’t **** up a good song, it’ll come through. Of the two hundred versions of Streets of London, probably 190 of them have put a D7th chord in there, you know what I mean, it hasn’t affected the song but its not the way I wrote it.  And it’s like, “hand held loosely at his side” when its supposed to be “and held loosely at his side, yesterday’s paper”. It’s not affected the song, you can’t screw up a good song.  It will come through.

22. That’s a very gracious thing to say because I guess sometimes you hear someone doing the song and you almost know, you think, no they are not going to do that bit, or they’re going to get that bit wrong and maybe it’s just a different way of doing it but you can always return to the source which is your own version of your own song.

Nancy Griffith changed From Clare To Here.  So did another woman that recorded it in Scotland - because she didn’t want to alienate the Protestants she cut out the word “mass” and said “church”. And the Irish will play it five times faster than I wrote it.  It doesn’t matter, it still seems to work, it’s really extraordinary. 

When it works on the guitar and the voice together, that’s how I conceive it.  My songs are meant to be played and sung at the same time on a guitar.  The guitar is as much about the song as the words are, they live together, they are created together, the words spring from chords from the guitar or from the tune and they belong together so that’s why it works with just me on my own, I guess.

23. Being foremost an acoustic guitarist, how much does working with piano or even electric guitar influence the mood of a new song?

It’s not a short answer, I’m afraid, but the piano a supreme instrument, it’s percussive, it’s symphonic, it has a huge range of sound.  I work on about an eighth of it I suppose but it’s the way you can voice a chord under a vocal with a piano or you can put your hands on a piano anytime. I can begin writing a tune and they very seldom sustain after the first two or three changes but that’s how rich the machine is.  If I had another regret it would be that I don’t play the piano better and I should have studied and practiced and tried harder because, you know, whenever I hear Randy Newman I am so full of respect and admiration and regret. I think that the hugeness of what Randy does is - I could write a book about him.  The comparison on the guitar would be how James Taylor voices his guitar patterns underneath his vocals, its just fantastic because he still plays finger style. 

The electric guitar is another babe although. The only way that really works for me is when I've got effects on the guitar that will sustain or distort or put repeat echo on.  One of the songs on Red Sky I began twenty years ago and it finally saw the light, after many changes and a little bit of chord maneuvering on that album.  One of the songs on there I wrote the day before I recorded it and that’s never happened to me before but somebody gave me one of those things called a pod which is a guitar that synthesizes various guitars, amps, speaker cabinets, choruses and fuzz tones. I plugged the guitar in, tuned it down and lost myself for an hour in the sound of the guitar and wrote the song “Red Sky” that night and recorded it the following day. Once I picked up a mandolin and wrote “Cold On The Stones” because it’s the voicing, the way the chords rearrange themselves.  Sometimes you can get really stuck on a guitar so hitting something you don’t know will produce what I call the happy accident and the happy accident can often result in a song.

24. After demonstrating such diversity with sort of music, literary and broadcasting projects - and we’re all awaiting the second volume of the autobiography - are there any unfulfilled ambitions you would like to pursue in the future?

Well, no I’m determined to try not to have any unfulfilled ambitions!  As you know Steve, I’m a granddad now, a grandfather with three beautiful little grandsons and I was told just a week ago that I've got another one on the way through my youngest son’s efforts and I’m very excited.  When you get things like this happening to you, it’s a tap on the shoulder, it says, when you feel good you think you are going to live forever.  I wrote that in a song once and you know, time is finite and being productive and having facility to share that productivity and creativity with people is a finite thing.  I’m extremely aware of the passing of time.  I’m down in Cornwall today, I arrived today and I was saying to my wife “what am I going to do, what am I going to do?”  I’m doing stuff all the time but right now, I've had a mandolin for some time and I've just arranged a little short accompaniment for a song on the album and I've enjoyed it so much I’m going to learn to play a few Irish tunes on the mandolin. I’m going to practice more on the piano, I’m going to do some re-recording of some of my older songs, in a much simpler way, but in a studio rather than live - some of the songs on “Sand In Your Shoes” and going back a little way to do a sort of a lighter, less orchestrated approach.  I want to be writing again.  Book Two comes out in September.  I still feel as long as I've got a contribution to make, I’ve got to keep going.  I don’t want to have any unfulfilled ambitions.

25. That again is profound. We’re all looking forward to the next volume of the autobiography.  The first one was a revelation, it just shows that a good songwriter can also make a good writer.

Well now, that’s kind of you Steve.  It’s gone very well, they’re very pleased with it.  We think its going to be called “Road Song” because we can’t find a couplet in one of my lyrics that would actually fit the mood but I think there's more depth to this one.  There's depth to the last one, but a different kind because that’s the depth of memory but this is about when you are able to start to make decisions yourself that affect your life and how you deal with the pressures that growing up places upon you. The chronology of this has been very intense and a lot of hard work on all our parts - we just put it to bed about three days ago so it hopefully will be out for September.

Thank you Ralph - and best wishes for the National tour and the album.

I’m going to have a 12-string on stage, a six string and the National so it’s going to be a bit of a guitar fest.  I’m going to have to play a little less in terms of time because the shows have been getting too long and I've got to curtail that.  Everyone has been leaning on me! Not the fans but the management and poor Donard as well, so it’s going to be quite intense - but we are going to get a lot of stuff in, hopefully.

back to top