Martin Carthy: Out of the Cut

Sometime around the end of my schooldays I started getting this highfalutin and too-serious idea that the music that really mattered wasn't pop-froth and whatever passed for entertainment in the 1980s, but music that had some deeper connection to lived experience and, you know, "indigenous culture" etc. As well as Gregorian chants and Balinese gamelan music (always fashionable), I had in my mind this idea of what proper English folk music might sound like. Not gassy folk rock, but the authentic real ale stuff. Trouble was, I had no idea where to find it. Then, one night in 1983 or '84, in amidst the early Smiths' session tracks, Cocteau Twins album previews, and Ivor Cutler skits, John Peel played a long song by Martin Carthy. I knew this was what I'd been looking for.

At the time, Out of the Cut was Carthy's most recent album, and the only one I could find in the shops. It didn't have the song that Peel had played (that was almost certainly The Famous Flower of Serving-Men), but in Jack Rowland, it has another long tale, featuring children that go missing, a supernatural horse, and a tour-de-force finale with lots of shape-shifting.

I've just noticed that Martin Carthy was born just three days before his old friend, Bob Dylan.

MusicBrainz entry for this album