Happy New
Year
Welcome to the first Topic Records Newsletter of 2017. We would
like to wish you all a happy and peaceful New Year.
Our exhibition at
the Barbican Music Library - ‘Topic Records & The Art of Folk
Music’ - will continue until February 7th, and is free to visit. During
this month we have two very special evening events planned:
Monday
January 16th - An Audience with Eliza Carthy
Eliza
will be in conversation with Colin Irwin (Mojo, fRoots, The Guardian) and David
Suff (Topic Records) + a very rare solo acoustic performance. Barbican Music
Library, 7pm – 9pm (refreshments available)
Monday
Jan 30th 2017 - An Audience with Martin Carthy and Martin Simpson
The
two Martins will be in conversation with Colin Irwin and David Suff, and
perform some songs in a unique unplugged acoustic performance. Barbican
Music Library, 7pm – 9pm (refreshments available)
The
Music Library is situated on the 2nd floor of the Barbican
Centre:
Barbican
Music Library, Barbican Centre, Silk Street, LONDON EC2Y
8DS Opening hours: Monday 9.30am - 5.30pm Tuesday 9.30am -
7.30pm Wednesday 9.30am - 5.30pm Thursday 9.30am - 7.30pm Friday
9.30am - 2pm Saturday 9.30am - 4pm The library is closed on bank
holidays.
BUTTON
BADGESFor the
splendid NORMAFEST in Whitby last weekend we produced some beautiful new button
badges - one set based upon icon photographs of the classic mid-'60s Watersons
and one set using images of Waterson:Carthy from 1994:
Pioneering English traditional folk
powerhouse, Eliza Carthy, first assembled the Wayward
Band in 2013 in order to explore and celebrate her long and varied
career in folk music, ‘the last truly underground music scene’. To do this Eliza
put together a team of hugely talented musicians from across the UK and together
they hit the road to promote her ‘Best Of’ compilation, Wayward Daughter, which coincided with a biography of
the same name. Eliza and the Wayward Band loved playing together so much – as
well as becoming a festival favourite – that it seemed natural and inevitable,
as well as characteristically ambitious, that this 12-piece would set about
recording an album. The result is ‘Big Machine’, recorded at the renowned Real
World and Rockfield Studios and produced by the multi-talented Jim Sutherland.
The Wayward Band line-up is a veritable dream team of musicians comprising
Sam Sweeney (Bellowhead), David Delarre
(Mawkin), Barn Stradling (Blowzabella), Saul
Rose, Beth Porter, Lucy Farrell
(Emily Portman Trio), Will Molleson, Andrew
Waite (Tyde), Laurence Hunt,
Nick Malcolm and Adrien ‘Yen-Yen’ Toulouse.
The material on Big Machine represents a healthy slice of
everything good that is happening in traditional music now, across a sparkling
spectrum of sound. The album features three contemporary songs; Eliza’s own “You
Know Me” about the refugee crisis and notions of hospitality (featuring MC
Dizraeli), a powerful cover of Ewan Maccoll’s Radio Ballad “The Fitter’s Song”
(at the behest of Peggy Seeger – and the song which inspired the album title)
and an affectionate reworking of Rory McLeod's “Hug You Like a Mountain”,
re-imagined here as a duet with Teddy Thompson.
There
are also several examples of the Broadside ballad collections housed in
Chetham’s Library in Manchester given a new twist with music by Eliza and the
band. This follows a programme Eliza presented for BBC Radio 4 about the
Manchester Ballads, covering everything from songs about and caused by domestic
abuse (“Devil in the Woman”, the sumptuous and searing “Fade and Fall (Love
Not)”, to the seafaring life in “The Sea”. Added to that a couple of brilliantly
constructed instrumentals, a song about dying from custard poisoning and a
heartbreaking traditional ballad “I Wish that the Wars were all Over” (performed
live with the band onstage in Real World Studios’ Studio One and featuring Irish
superstar Damien Dempsey), and you begin to get the picture. A very big picture,
a Big Machine firing on all cylinders.
Big Machine is certainly one of Eliza
Carthy’s most adventurous and accomplished works to date – and given that Eliza
is the most passionate and groundbreaking English traditional singer of her
generation, ‘Big Machine’ is an album you really won’t want to miss.
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