Topic Vinyl & CDs

Review: Martin Carthy's revolutionary trad-folk eponymous debut hears a repress via Topic, the label through which it was originally released. Truly, if it weren't for Carthy, both album and artist, there would be no Bob Dylan nor Paul Simon; having emerged in the early 1960s to a second English folk revival - which, while existing in the ferment of the sweats of one English folklorist Cecil Sharp, whose lifelong travail was to reinvigorate belief in an Englishness founded on myth, decades earlier - Carthy's music was wholly endemic to the latter-day revival of the 1960s, which was far less 'trad' than Sharp's in that it allowed more room for artists to experiment with the form. Though every lyric here is a folk transmission, it's as if Carthy's socialist upbringing (by trade unionist lightermen parents, no less) comes filtered through its every utterance; Carthy approaches every folk classic from Sharp's own invention 'High Germany' through to more indelible standards, such as 'The Wind That Shakes The Barley', 'Scarborough Fair' and 'Springhill Mine Disaster', all with equal legend Dave Swarbrick in tow for fiddle and mandolin duties.