Edgelarks Interview and New Video

After launching their fifth studio album Feather (reviewed here) on West Town Farm near Exeter recently, Edgelarks are showing no sign of letting up their hold on being one the folk duos of the moment. But that’s not all they are up to, as Will Kemp finds out in this interview with singer, fiddler, banjo/guitar playing songwriter Hannah Martin – one half of Edgelarks…

Will Kemp: I really enjoyed the album launch party at the farm the other day – it was so great! Maybe let’s start there and then later move on to other things. So Feather… At the gig, you mentioned the interesting story behind the title track, how you got that name, but tell us about that in a bit more detail.

Hannah Martin: I wrote that song after a wild camping trip on Dartmoor last summer with a couple of friends. We found this feather in the middle of a stone circle up at the Scorhill, Gidliegh – it was a really beautiful quite colourful feather, and we had no idea what bird it was from. So I put a picture up online and asked if anyone knew and it sparked this big debate. No one could conclusively say. We had lots of people saying: “Well, how big is it?” and I was posting photos of my hand with the feather next to it for comparison and all that sort of thing. I was actually quite surprised that it wasn’t easy to answer the question. Yeah, so a few people were like “I’m so sorry” and seemed worried that I was disappointed. But actually, how great to think there is something wild and mysterious out there on the moors still – the world isn’t just totally dictated by humans!

Sure, yeah – so you wrote the song off the back of that.

Yes.

The other thing you mentioned at that gig which was really nice was this idea about lots of folk songs being quite sad and dour but that you decided to try to write an antidote to that in a way.

That was my attempt, yeah! And I think we’ve managed that actually. I think “hope” is the theme rather than just “happiness”, which was my original idea – that proved a bit difficult. But I’d kind of been collecting stories for a long time before we went away to write the album, so I just picked out the most hopeful ones and, yeah, that came together quite well in the end.

Why do you think so many folk songs are sad?

Good question. I suppose they’re mainly about the more significant events in life. Maybe sad things need more consolation with songs, if you see what I mean. Like, why do people sing songs? It’s to comfort themselves, to remember things, to memorialise things. Maybe things that need memorialising tend to be sadder. I mean there are happy folk songs, but most of them are kind of drinking songs [laughs]; occasionally a couple end up getting together and you don’t hear any the worse of it, but they end up being a bit kind of ribald and more of a comedy thing. I suppose it’s like all great stories really – Romeo and Juliet etc. – it’s so often the sad ones that people are drawn to.

Tragedy is so compelling, isn’t it?

Yeah, exactly. Maybe it consoles people more about their own lives and helps us explain our own lives in a stronger way. I think for many people happiness is quite hard to understand – it’s not something that most people experience in a non-stop way, do they? I suppose there’s an element of that. A happy story doesn’t tell you as much about life because maybe you’re thinking: yeah, but it didn’t work out quite like that for me.

Well, you definitely achieved what you set out to do with that idea of hope – that really worked. And I thought that positivity linked with your presence together as a duo on stage. Both of you in performance were so polished. Obviously, you’ve performed together for a while now but how did you get to this point with your sound and style…

Well, I think that’s almost two different things. I think, musically, our style of playing together… there’s a lot of practice involved. But doing it night after night you learn the other person very well in terms of OK this is going to be an improvised bit so I’d better hold it down and allow them to go off on one. We don’t do it the same every night – that’s kind of important to us and keeps it fresh. You have to be able to read the other person and know that one person has to keep it on course, to allow that other person the freedom. So that’s the musical aspect. Whereas the other bit, the stage presence bit, is a kind of a different thing really. I think stagecraft is something it’s easy not to pay attention to, but it’s so important. We did a lot of touring with Steve Knightly from Show Of Hands and he taught us a lot. He told us things that you wouldn’t think of unless someone pointed them out like, for instance, if an audience is clapping after a song don’t talk over the applause, they can’t hear what you’re saying. Sit back and wait, and just use that moment to tune or, you know, arrange things cleverly so that there isn’t a dead air moment for the audience or anything that makes them feel uncomfortable. You have to take charge and tell them what’s going to happen because otherwise, people end up feeling unsure. I’ve been to shows where I’ve absolutely loved the music but ended up feeling just a bit awkward for whatever reason, and that impressed upon me that it is important to try and refine the stage thing. I suppose we’ve been on this tour for a little while and we’ve got it all kind of woven in there so there aren’t any gaps.

You mentioned touring, and that leads on to my next question. You actually launched the album in Australia first and toured there in advance. Why did you decide to do that and how did it come about?

Well, a combination of things really. It’s a lovely thing touring around Australia. It’s great! But the way you end up doing it when you’re going that far is hanging it off festivals. The great thing is their festival season is at a slightly different time to ours, it falls earlier, kind of in their autumn time. So it seemed perfect to go there and do a warm-up and try out the new songs in a maybe slightly less pressurised environment. It was also because we got the offer from our agent, who said, “Yep, these festivals want you, do you want to come?” So it was a combination of things, and once we knew we were going we planned everything else around that. It’s a lovely place to go on tour!

You are going to continue touring this new material around the UK now. But what’s on the horizon for you? What are your future plans?

Well, as a duo we’ve got a few festival gigs but we’re also in another band called the Gigspanner Big Band, and we’re doing some work with them. So we go straight on to a few dates with them after this Edgelarks tour finishes. And over the summer we’re doing a couple of festivals with them. And then once that festival season’s over we’re going over to France, where a couple of them live, to do some writing and rehearsing to make a new album which is exciting.

Oh great!

Yeah, because with the Gigspanner Big Band we’ve done a live album but we’ve not made a studio album. So that’s what we’re talking about and hopefully, that will happen. Then we’re going straight on to a tour of Switzerland after that, so it’s all go!