CELT IN A TWIST  INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT 

Jim Moray 

'Sweet  England' (Giraffe Records)   

I travelled among unknown men,/ In lands beyond the sea;/ Nor England! did I know till then/ What love I bore to thee.
William Wordsworth (1770 - 1850) English poet
I Travelled Among Unknown Men (written 1801, published 1807). 

JIM MORAY:  Hi, How are you doing? 

CIAT: Great. More about the production of the album in a minute.  But did you play all the instruments? 

JIM MORAY:  Yeah, pretty much.  I had some string players come in to play some strings on it.  And I had a friend of mine play some drums, and I played the rest of the drums on it.  But other than that, that’s pretty much all me on the record. 

CIAT: Very good. The album was produced at the Afro Celt’s studio, under the fine hand of Simon Emmerson and Mass.  How did you hook up with them? 

JIM MORAY:  Simon got in touch with me about another project he was doing.  That’s got lots of guest contributors on it, which is actually still ongoing.  I mean I basically produced the album on my own at home and then I needed help to mix it and to master it and get it all sorted.  And Simon very kindly stepped in to help out.  I think initially we were put in contact by Ian Anderson who is the editor of Folkroots magazine over here in Britain.  He came out to meet me at a pub gig I was doing in Camden in London, and we kind of struck it off and took it from there.  It was very exciting to work with him. 

CIAT:  The album is very highly produced, with strings and horns and lots of instrumental support.  But you perform a solo act.  How does that work? 

JIM MORAY:  What I do is I play a bit of piano and I play a bit of guitar and I take a lap top around with me and kind of build it up into something resembling the album.  It caused me a lot of sleepless nights, how to reproduce the album live, until I realized the answer is you don’t try to reproduce the album live, you just try and make the songs as good as they can sound.  Quite often I take them off in a completely different direction live, it’s the same songs but they might sound completely different or they might sound the same depending on how they turn out.  That’s one good thing about playing solo I think.  You can reinvent songs in the heat of the moment, you’re not tied down.  But now as well I’ve got a band with me in Britain and that helps.  So we’re able to present something a bit more like the album.

CIAT:  As a musician, you had your choice of every kind of music, from classical to rap.  But you’ve been drawn to very traditional songs like “Early One Morning” and “Gypsies”. I’m sure that’s an interesting story. 

JIM MORAY:  I grew up with folk music.  My dad was a Morris Dancer, and my mom and dad met at a folk club.  So me and my sister were kind of brought up on their record collection which was mainly folk and traditional music.  I grew up with that.  But my teenage rebellion kind of consisted of me going off to join a punk band.  I played drums in a punk band.  I didn’t really think about folk very much.  But then when I went off to university, I went to study classical composition.  Eventually it came to a point where I wanted to go out and play gigs on my own.  When I did that, the songs that came out of my mouth ended up being folk songs.  I kind of forgotten I knew.  The thing that makes me so enthusiastic about traditional  music is the fact that I’ve had that gap to go and re-evaluate it.  Being into folk as a child and coming back to it as a young adult you kind of re-evaluate it on your own terms a bit more.  So I kind of understand what the music’s all about in my own way. I try my best.  

CIAT:  Your website, Jim Moray dot co dot uk offers music and other merchandise, as well as information. I also read that the new album that you are currently working on will be darker than Sweet England.  Sweet England is already pretty gloomy.  How far over to the dark side do you want to go? 

JIM MORAY:  I think I feel naturally drawn to those kind of songs, the dark things, and the darkness in it.  I did say, after Sweet England was finished, one of the things I would leave out one or two of the tracks that are slightly more light-hearted.  The new album that’s nearly finished is a lot more dark and it’s a lot more intense in some ways.  But then again, listening to it in one go feels like a lot more of a release to me.  It feels like more of an event, you go on more of a journey.  It takes you right down into some kind of dark underbelly of the world and then back up the other side again.  If I continue to do this for as long as I want to continue to do it I’ll have my time to sing gentle older-person songs or slightly more light-hearted ones.   

CIAT: You’ve worked with long-time headlining artists like Oysterband and Richard Thomson, and you’ve picked up a couple of awards in the past few years.  It’s obvious that your music is, well, striking a chord with the establishment.  And it’s no exaggeration to say that you’ve taken the folk music world by storm. Why do you think that is? 

JIM MORAY:  I think , when I was making Sweet England, I just wanted to make music that appealed to me to see if anyone else would like it.  So it’s always a pleasant surprise to find that other people do appreciate what you do.  I mean, I’m loathe to say that there’s a niche in the market for what I do because that sounds like such a cynical way to put it.  But I think I do feel like I’m slightly out on my own.  That nobody else is playing this music like this at the moment.  Virtually all the folk music that I buy on CD and I go and see at concerts with other people playing, is for people who aren’t very much like me.  You know, it’s older audiences, or it’s people like Kate Rusby and Eliza Carthy and Cora Dylan, who are a little bit more gentle and a little bit more feminine, obviously.  There isn’t very much kind of visceral boys’ folk music out there.  So if nobody else is making it then I guess it’s my prerogative to go and make that music. 

CIAT:  You will be heading down to WOMAD soon, being held down under in Adelaide and Taranaki, New Zealand.  How did you become involved with that? 

JIM MORAY:  I got invited to play WOMAD Redding, which is the original WOMAD in Britain.  Last year.  It was a really good festival and it was really fun to do so I was really excited that I was asked back.  We played WOMAD Redding on the Village stage which is a kind of open-air stage that faces out onto a big field.  So just as the sun was setting we were going on.  I took my whole show and did it and it was really fun. 

CIAT:  Yeah, I love WOMAD.  We’ve only been once but it was such a total experience. 

JIM MORAY:  Do you have a WOMAD in Canada? CIAT:  No, this was in the northern United States, in Redmond Washington. 

JIM MORAY:  Right, yes. 

CIAT: We’re going out on The Suffolk Miracle, and I have to tell you, I’ve heard the song twice and it’s just stuck in my brain.  Tell us about that song. 

JIM MORAY:  It’s quite a common song in Britain.  It appears under various different titles, the Holland Handkerchief is the other main title it appears under.  And it’s been collected lots of time and there’s lots of different versions.  So this is my kind of edited version of it.  It’s basically a ghost story.  So if you can follow the plot, it’s a ghost story.  And I kind of wrote a bit of new tune for it.  I just thought it might be a nice idea to invite some of my friends to play horns over it.  So it’s got some jazz trumpeters over it.  So this is the Suffolk Miracle.  

Jim Moray was interviewed by Celt In A Twist host, Patricia Fraser, March 8th, 2005