INTERVIEW WITH DAVY GRAHAM AND MARK PAVEY

How is the songwriting going?

DG : I like to arrange a tune as well, but I always find that I try to compose something I’ve already heard! I like to arrange a tune, like setting a jewel in a ring.

Shall we talk about the new album?

DG: Yes.

It’s a beautiful album to listen to, and it feels to me like it’s a new beginning, like you’ve put the past behind you and you’re saying, “This is Davy Graham, 2008”. Is that what you were hoping for?

DG: Do you mean Broken Biscuits?

Yes.

DG: Well, it’s an amalgam of all sorts of things that I’ve learned, having a memory fo those sorts of things. I haven’t a memory for some other things. I’m not sure.

It’s an interesting mix of songs and instrumentals that seem to have come from all corners of your past, and these are all your influences on one album. Do you feel that either the songs or the instrumentals show more of ‘the real" you’?

DG: I don’t know. (Laughs) Forgive me if I’m not very forthright with my replies.

I wanted a well-rounded album, you see. I wanted something with instrumentals and sometimes tongue-twisters. These days, children watch so much television they don’t converse. They don’t read Mark Twain, they don’t read Dickens. Some of them don’t even know that chips are made from potatoes. It seems pretty awful. In my father’s day he had to be a storyteller; before radio. When his family grew up they went to school in bare feet for six months of the year. They were wild, you know?

With the album we’re getting a peep into your personality.

I don’t know if you can dig too far into it. I just got used to being reasonably presentable about my person, and let the music take care of itself. Some people like blues and some people don’t like it so much.

With every album it’s take it or leave it. Your fans have always stuck by you. You’ve struck a chord with them. Does that make you feel strange that somebody in their 20s should latch onto something which is quite personal to you?

I don’t know. It’s just the breathing in and the breathing out. Mark and I have a good relationship. I show him the guitar. He’s studying piano as well and he does the business side. It’s a symbiosis of like-minded people, I suppose. Before, I had to do it all myself. I was rather =ambitious. I’m not quite so ambitious. It’s nice to be working again. I’m doing a tour soon.

Did you ever =want to become more of a band member, because apart from Shirley Collins…?

I have thought about forming a band, but I’m just not the type. Mayall’s the type.He has a new band every year, as you probably know. As soon as I think of a band idea, it occurs to me that making a programme with a band would entail them having the same parameters of association that I do. I have played in jazz bands, particularly when I began. When I was young we used to sit and listen to Banjo George. He would call out the chords while he was playing, you know. People like Diz Disley, Steve Benbow and like-minded people, and we’d listen till three or four in the morning. I didn’t do any homework because I was always walking through the West End.

You must have had offers.

Paul Simon asked me to join him, but by that time I’d crystallised onto a solo career, following my own path. It’s hard for people to relate to. I only hope that the tunes that I choose to play for them are something they like. But to try and avoid a cliché is impossible, because every style has clichés.

Do you feel that you have an image?

I don’t know. You never know that, do you? I once read a book by Budd Schulberg called

A Face In The Crowd, about the victimisation of a performer by his public.

One of the things you’re obviously best known for is DADGAD.

Yes, but it occurred over in the States as well at about the same time. At the beginning I had to study different kinds of music. Now my hobby is Spanish classics and European classics. I spend a lot of time thinking about how to flesh out the actual substance of my concerts. The thing is, my guitar teacher told me that =ou’ll always have trouble playing fingerstyle steel if you play classical guitar as well, which is quite true actually.

How has your relationship with the guitar changed over the years?

It’s rounded to include some classical things. I’m working on some Italian =stuff at the moment as well. The great Ray Davies passed me a compliment in his book, X-Ray. I always liked jazz blues.

Oh yes, the Spanish pieces. The tunings I use. One of them is the dropped G to F#, which approximates the five-string guitar style of the 16th Century. There’s a couple of Greek tunings that I use, with a bass D and a top G. And there’s one with a top D and a bass E. I use half-a-dozen tunings depending on what I’m going to play. It goes into the melting pot of myself and comes out in other ways. It’s not a question of following strange gods. I was a churchgoer for many years.

Did you find it helped?

When I was living alone, yes.

When you’re playing the guitar, does it lead the way?

A bit of both, really. The Martin Carthy tuning in 5ths – because the guitar’s usually tuned in 4ths, isn’t it? If you tune it in 5ths, a lot of the Gaelic tunes play themselves, I find. But guitar music has arrived at probably all the best tunings that you can find. It’s a bit way out to invent your own tunings because you find that when you’re writing a book of tablature for some publishing firm that you come a cropper.

Did you hear Whippersnapper by Swarbrick? I saw him last week.

There must be a strong bond between all the musicians who have at one time or another been described as a ‘godfather’.

Oh, that’s just a label.

I’ve always tried not to pigeonhole people.

I think the harder you try the harder it is. Music isn’t as important as architecture. If you haven’t got a nice play to play, music is awful. Imagine; out on a cold windy night, outside on a moor somewhere!

My hobby’s the mandolin, classical playing. I’m interested in languages and the transformation of one word into another over the centuries, including the geographical element.

As the Russians used to say, all prayers may be reduced to one. “Oh Lord, please 0make it that two plus two do not equal four.”

INTERVIEW WITH MARK

There are a lot of specific details which are quite illuminating really, but Davy is quite modest. I’ve been talking to Davy for three years, so there’s not many things which we haven’t discussed. Davy’s been teaching me for the ast three years. There are a few breakthrough pieces which Davy isn’t particularly interested in talking about. The main thing is…when one talks about the different guitar tunings, the DADGAD and EADGAE, which was Davy’s invention, he’s doing it from the point of view of retaining an impression of the standard tuning. He’s not just tuning the guitar so it sounds sympathetic. In the documentary, Martin Simpson seemed to be under the impression that Davy tuned his guitar to DADGAD so that it was a nice sound if you filled in the odd notes. It was something to facilitate playing melody lines that otherwise wouldn’t be practical for the guitar. He was never one to tune the guitar and then make up a song from the guitar tuning.

 

He was working from sources that he internalises completely to a level that would be far beyond any other musician, in order to arrange the actual theme. So when he talks about cliché, I think he’s really saying that he doesn’t believe in extemporising something without having the original theme at the foremost. So if Davy is approaching a tune, the first thing he’ll do is to make sure he’s got a tune completely clear in his mind, and then arrange it in the way that a composer would do, because when he’s taking a piece of Bach, say, or one of the Spanish pieces, he’s making the same calculations that a composer would make, in a very short space of time, and when he plays a piece he doesn’t premeditate, he’ll know the theme intimately and he’ll draw it out and play along with it and those calculations will be done in real time.

I said to Davy that Acoustic has a sympathy towards composers, and he said he doesn’t consider himself a composer as much as an arranger.

Yes, but if he comes up with a composition, he will arrange it to the highest possible level, which takes a lot more time. To write a song is fairly easy. Davy could sit with a guitar and he could come up with something. It’s inimicable to his instinct. So when he does compose a tune, it will be a significant movement. For example,on the new album I’ve tried to capture the songs that Davy has written over the last three years.

‘Rooty’which is the third track, is one that is a completely unique piece of jazz blues. It’s not a discursion on some other thing, it’s a proper composition. If you compose a piece of music, you might forget to arrange it properly, or you might be incapable of arranging it because you need that separation.

There’s something about every single cut of Davy’s that been recorded over many. They’re all completely distinct. Imagine a visual artist. When they get older they have a resistance to fixed form. Now recording and playing music is all about creating fixed forms for people to understand and enjoy, but in concentrating on that, the actual creative spark is in peril. It’s why Davy is remaining so vital. It’s because he’s unwilling to give himself a label or actually complete something. By completing something, the tune loses something. In terms of a definitive version, because Davy’s had an aversion to creating a definitive version, over the passage of time you’ll go back and listen to those recordings and they become definitive, but he =didn’t create them that way.

How does he feel about Broken Biscuits?

We called it Broken Biscuits because the biscuits are there. The themes are there. The healthy thing for any guitar player to do, listening to Broken Biscuits, would be to internalise the pieces and the themes, and play them. Around the ’60s and 70s, Jackson C Frank wrote ‘Blues Run The Game’, Davy wrote ‘Angi’, Paul Simon wrote ‘Homeward Bound’… Those were pieces that any guitar player could learn, present themselves, smile, be polite with the audience, play as well as they could, and they would give something to the audience. That was the great quality of that material. It wasn’t the definitive version on the record where you sit in your living room.

It was the standard for others to aspire towards. If you take the material on Broken Biscuits and learn to play it yourself, it would be a wonderful thing for any guitar player because it would require great patience and a combination of instinct, intuition and technical knowledge. If you could play the piece that he composed when Nelson Mandela was released from prison, called ‘Africa’, with the 3rds going up from E, it would be a passport to paid engagement. There has been a great movement in acoustic music for people to impose themselves on an audience and not engage themselves visually, stare down at the guitar and sing about their feelings. It’s been allowed to persist like that.

Davy would always play something he’s worked on ahead of time and has a flourish and panache. It’s for others to take that body of music and apply the techniques and arrangements to their own songs or other songs. That’s what the Broken Biscuits idea is all about. You could make a cake out of Broken Biscuits! This album was a vehicle for Davy coming back to the stage, not without ambition, but a willingness to play. This album is a stepping stone to more recording and more performances and it’s really something he’s happy with but making Broken Biscuits has allowed us to get a recording system at home. We’ve got a new Martin guitar which is very different and is the perfect instrument for him, and Davy has realised with his new younger audience that there is a lot he can give. There is a lot of give and take. It depends on the audience. There will be some people who’ve seen the poster and come in expecting to see the man who invented Jimmy Page. Three quarters of the audience will be Davy’s ideal listener and will have internalised all the concepts that Davy has given them over the years and will be there for what happens on that evening. When we first started doing these concerts again, we drove up to the Edinburgh Folk Club from London, and the young people in the audience will not be the people who have gone to the Edinburgh Folk Club. We had a whole set of young people who had managed to find out about Davy, probably through the internet.

Our concerts are work in progress.

We need to generate as much income as we can in order to spread our wings. To make music at present has become a little difficult, because the companies have no interest, so we’re organically developing. It was recorded when Davy was feeling good and not under pressure. He’s manifesting his feelings. He’s got full support from me. Part of the concert is our journey together. You have to be serious about the guitar without being gloomy about it. Davy’s listened incredibly widely, and due to being partially-sighted, the impetus has been to internalise things accurately rather than going from score. He’s unique in that. He’ll commit it all to memory. He’s 67 and I’m in my twenties. He’s worked in order to further his understanding of music without trying to refine it out of existence.