Day Fifteen - Never Any Good

“You needed the light and the air”

You can hear an audio version of this post here.

Today’s song is Never Any Good by Martin Simpson (listen here). If you don’t know Martin it would take me all month (and then some) to tell you all about him as he’s had a lengthy and distinguished career but there are plenty of places online you can cram up. There’s an interview posted recently here (which was originally published here in 2017) and another one here from earlier this year where the interviewer is musician Jo Freya*. This post is particularly heavy on the asterisks and footnotes – sorry about that but there’s a lot to say and refer to.

Straight out of Scunthorpe (born there in 1953), Martin Simpson is an English musician, singer, songwriter and teacher and a key figure in late 20^th century folk (and blues). He’s been putting out albums since 1976, toured and recorded solo and accompanied other artists (in particular the brilliant June Tabor), he’s been away (to the USA) and come back home (to Northern England), and whilst quite the wandering star he’s still managed to make his way regularly to the smaller folk clubs. I saw him perform at Montrose Folk Club, for example, in 2005, 2008, 2009 and 2011 (and I think my partner Mark even went a couple of times after that). Martin is a lovely singer and a fine storyteller but a large part of the audience drawn to see him over and over, in my experience, are people who dream of being able to play guitar (and banjo) the way Martin does night after night. We are talking serious string king as Martin is a very skilled player, he runs workshops (currently online), he even has a book about guitar solos. Whilst he plays ordinary venues and many festivals he also, in 2008, played at the Folk Prom at the Albert Hall in London (it was on TV, we watched it). He played a storm that day, aired a few traditional songs and his own Never Any Good, but he finished with a song by another English musician/songwriter (Chris Wood**’s Come Down Jehovah). I always found it interesting that Martin finished this huge gig with someone else’s song. Not everyone would have done that.

Once again, the first time I saw Martin play I had no idea who he was (if you’ve been reading these posts you will know that’s no slur against him – I was a total folk newbie when I started attending our local club in 2004 and I didn’t know who anybody in the folk world was). This meant that seeing him in October 2005 was quite the WOW experience. First there’s the amazing playing. Then there’s the tales of New Orleans (my favourite US city) where he lived for some years. Then there’s his gentle touch with traditional songs (English, North American and others). As I’ve said in earlier posts, traditional songs (particularly English*** ones) have not yet made it to my list of favourite things but if anyone is ever going to win me over to them it’s Martin Simpson. Something about the way he interprets traditional songs is so engaging and timeless, especially when he gets his banjo out (plus he always has great sleeve notes – it’s definitely worth getting hard copies of his albums for those). Some years ago I wrote in a poem “joyous sounds, so hot they ignite/Disco or banjo or sweet harmony” and I’m pretty sure the banjo I had in mind when I wrote that was Martin’s. I’ve since fallen for a few other great banjo players (Rhiannon Giddens, coming up here on the 27^th, Abigail Washburn****) but Martin was probably my first banjo love (the Scunny effect perhaps). One of the first of his albums that we owned was the compilation The Definitive Martin Simpson (2005) and we played it pretty solidly. It includes some amazing instrumentals, his brilliant versions of I Can’t Keep from Crying Sometimes, Nobody’s Fault But Mine, Lakes of Ponchartrain and more recent songs like Yusuf Cat Stevens’s First Cut Is the Deepest*****, Richard Thompson’s Down Where the Drunkards Roll and as good a version of Dylan’s Boots of Spanish Leather as you will ever hear. He has lots and lots of albums (a few we have in our collection below - his shop is here).

Martin, obviously from today’s song choice, does write songs too and many of his albums include a couple of his own songs. Some original songs of his that you might hunt down are the ones on his 2009 album True Stories, also Fool Me Once (on 1999’s Bootleg USA and 2019’s Rooted) and Love Never Dies (on 2003’s Righteousness and Humidity). The song of his that has had the most attention is, however, undoubtedly today’s song of choice Never Any Good. This song about Martin’s father won Best Original Song at the 2008 BBC Radio 2 Folk Awards (and the album it’s from, 2007’s Prodigal Son, also won Album of the Year). The lyrics tell a whole life in a few verses and it’s an emotional business. The appeal of this particular song is wide – for those who love the natural world, for those who’ve had family issues, for those who’ve had trouble finding their place in the world (I think most of us are covered in there somewhere). For me, there is a lot in the lyrics that strikes chords. For a start I’ve never been very good at holding down a job (I had to leave an admin job once for just crying too much at my desk … ), also my Dad was uncomfortable in his place in life at times so that resonated too. Martin often writes about other places and other people but this song is so personal (to him and to us). You can’t write a song like this every week – it’s a big, one-off kind of a piece of work (and Kate Rusby joins in on vocals in the chorus). It’s a mighty achievement all round.

Because he is such an admired player and interpreter of traditional and more recent songs, Martin’s songwriting is perhaps not the best known feature of his work (despite that award for best song). In one of the interviews linked to earlier (this one with Jo Freya) he says “Writing is not the thing I do the most naturally. Occasionally things come easily, but a lot of the time you start with three or four lines and you’ve got to sit and look at it and wonder where it’s going and then you have to make it go there. That’s a challenge.” There’s another lovely quote in that same interview that I will end with here: “When people ask me what I do for a living, the proper answer, I hope, is ‘I open hearts’. That’s why I was attracted to music. Like at three or four years old hearing Sometimes I Feel Like A Motherless Child. I couldn’t believe that anyone could do that to me by singing a song. That’s my job.”

We’re about halfway through the month (and the project) now. But tomorrow back to Scotland! And it’s nearly supper time...

* I love Jo Freya’s 2007 album Lal (covering the songs of Lal Waterson). I think I first heard it on the Radio 2 Folk Show that I listened to pretty avidly from about 2004. In those days it was presented by Mike Harding (he presented it 1997-2012) and, along with the folk club trips, it introduced me to all sorts of music.

**Chris Wood has been mentioned already in this project (back on day 4 and day 7). He has written a lot of very, very good songs.

***I was born in England, lived there for most of 1967-2002 and have a complicated relationship with the place, particularly the southern section of the country. I don’t think I'm alone in this, lots of us have complicated relationships with our ‘home’ countries (don’t we?).  

****A very favourite album in this house is Abigail Washburn’s Song of the Traveling Daughter (2006) (pic below). I must have heard her music on the radio or TV at some point and bought the album a good few years after it came out. I very nearly picked one of its tracks for this month’s list but couldn’t quite fit it in. I particularly love the last track on the album, the song Momma (writing credits to A.Washburn, B.Fleck, B.Stapleton and T.Lauer). It would make a good pair with today’s chosen song too of course. 

*****This song haunts me a little. I know it’s probably about romantic love but as someone whose father died, as a folk song might have it, by his own hand, it’s always had another meaning for me. Also the first time I visited my father’s grave in 1997 (some 25 years after his death) this song was playing in the charity shop I went to immediately afterwards (charity shops are a comfort zone). It was Rod Stewart’s version I think and it was weird to hear it in that context. I’ve not felt quite the same about it since.

This post is part of my Songs That Stick project for 2022’s Fun A Day Dundee (a community arts project that takes place every January). Anyone can take part (you don’t even have to be local to Dundee) and much of the work can be found on Instagram during January (use #FADD2022). There is usually a real-life exhibition later in the year (though this has been online for the past 2 years). The full list of songs I am writing about this year is here. My first post about why I picked this project this time is here.

If you are interested in my Fun A Day Dundee projects for 2020 and 2021 you can start here and here. They are quite different to this one (a short poem and drawings in 2020 and lots of poems and writing in 2021).