Sam Carter
The songs seemed to belong to the audience as much as to the person on stage, but Carter still had enough command of them to make them feel freshly handled rather than preserved behind glass.
Nic Jones seems to contain an entire tradition in his voice: big and robust but intimate too, with a playfulness that can feel almost childlike, earthy and sensual one moment, mischievous or strange the next. At the Norwich Arts Centre, Sam Carter set out to recover something of that voice, drawing on the songs Jones recorded before a road accident in 1982 ended his performing career at 35. Carter was not simply an admirer working through a back catalogue: he knows Jones, has played with him, and spent enough time around his music to understand the peculiar combination of muscularity and delicacy in his playing. That gave the evening a strange closeness. Jones was absent, but he was constantly present in the way Carter approached the songs, in the details of Jones’ life and in the audience’s familiarity with the songs.
Tom Moore opened with “Orange in Bloom”, a Morris tune in B-flat, his guitar initially quick and percussive before the rhythm opened out into longer, ringing chords. He rocked the guitar as he played, shaking the sound out of it while a pedal allowed the chords to hang into a sustained wash. Later he moved into a modal Scandinavian tune and, with a characteristic lack of ceremony, asked: “Scandinavian okay? Not too purist?” Spacious and hypnotic, the guitar taking on a completely different character to Carter’s playing of Nic Jones.
Carter then took up the guitar and played substantially from Penguin Eggs, moving between traditional and Child ballads, shanties, courtship songs and instrumentals, with a few of his own songs too. His hands were almost as absorbing as the songs themselves, shifting across the fretboard, dropping to the lower strings and picking in a way that allowed melody and rhythm to occupy the same space. “Master Kilby” had a dry, banjo-like frailing attack, while “The Drowned Lovers” rolled beneath its tragic story with a steady, hypnotic pulse. Carter repeatedly stopped to re-tune, and those interruptions became part of the pleasure of watching him play.
Watching the audience, I noticed their feet began to move almost imperceptibly, heels and toes finding the rhythm before voices joined in with choruses they clearly knew by heart. The songs seemed to belong to the audience as much as to the person on stage, but Carter still had enough command of them to make them feel freshly handled rather than preserved behind glass.
“The Humpback Whale”, one of my least favourite songs on the record but considered a “classic” in Jones’ catalogue, brought one of the most immediate responses from the room. Its circling chorus about trawler men. The set kept shifting between these different corners of Jones’s repertoire - sea songs, courtship songs, darker ballads - without flattening them into one version of folk music.
It was “Canadee-I-O” that I had come to hear. Carter sang it with such directness that a song I had known and loved for years suddenly seemed to have more room inside it. The audience joined him on the chorus, their voices gathering around the melody, and for a moment the song felt less like something preserved on a record than something being made and passed around the room again.
That sense of passing-on became more tangible when Carter talked about Jones himself: living on Dartmoor, the Fylde guitar he played, the songs that remained favourites in his family. I had come for the music, but these small details brought me closer to the man behind it.
