‘Forget house music, the truly hip have moved on…to folk,” predicted the style magazines a year or so ago, probably as an excuse to run some shots of heroin-addled waifs dressed up as Morris dancers. The folk revival never happened, of course, but Eliza Carthy, at 22 the youngest recording artist of the venerable Waterson-Carthy clan, English folk’s royal family, has transcended the hype with a brilliant third solo album, the double set Red Rice (out now on Topic Records).

Martin Carthy has been the shire horse of the English folk scene since the 1960s (barring brief membership of Steeleye Span), nobly shouldering the burden of tradition while his contemporaries went electric. Norma Waterson sang with the Watersons, the vocal harmony quartet whose recordings of the likes of John Barleycorn and Here We Come A-Wassailing helped English folk to consolidate a sense of identity distinct from Celtic music, and provided the model for every sketch show parody of an English folk group ever since. She was a surprise nomination for the Mercury prize in 1996.

But their daughter, the fiddler and singer Eliza Carthy, has a pierced face and a love of the Orb as well as a natural feel for interpreting traditional music. “In the current musical climate
everybody is hearing everything,” she explains in a forthright Yorkshire burr. “People are so universal in their tastes, these days, I think it’s unrealistic to box them up.” Fair enough, but Eliza’s own press release proclaims her “the future of folk”. “Well, that’s what I am. I’m a folk singer. I’m not trying to hide that, but the folk scene is, in fact, very eclectic. The people in my band can turn their minds to anything.”

Carthy is caught between two worlds: the archival and valuable parochialism of her predecessors and the fact that, like anybody in their twenties today, she’s a global citizen, by default. Initially Red Rice appears to embody this dichotomy almost too literally. The first CD, Red, takes jazz inflections, occasional drum’n’bass beats and a full band to traditional tunes and Carthy’s original compositions. The second, Rice, leaves them more or less unmolested.

On the opening track of Carthy’s last album, the gauche dub reggae effects filtered into the fiddle tune Cuckold Came out of the Amery genuinely grated, but here the mixing of styles doesn’t seem forced in any way. “That’s ‘cos it wasn’t,” says Carthy. “I didn’t really set out to experiment or anything. What happened on the drum’n’bass tracks is that I’ve got some friends in Halifax, Paul and Shack, that do that, and put on raves and events, and we just got really drunk and went into their little studio and started messing around with loops while I just played.”

While it’s possible to trace the genesis of some of Carthy’s leaps into the unknown, others eem almost alchemical. There’s a version of the forgotten folk standard 10,000 Miles, on Red, that is without precedent. The adolescent Carthy approached the song in a predictably downbeat tone on her 1996 debut, Heat, Light and Sound. Nic Jones had already pulled off the definitive melancholy take on 1977’s The Noah’s Ark Trap. “That’s where I first heard it,” Carthy admits. “A very nice album. My dad gave me his copy of it about three years ago.
I expect he would like it back by now.” On Red’s version, the accordionist Martin Green establishes an upbeat, optimistic melody, utterly at odds with the sadness of the song, that breathes a whole new life into it and makes it all the more affecting.

Early reports compared the Rice CD unfavourably to Red, and it’s true that material such as The Miller and the Lass, and Tuesday Morning, and the fact that one Lucy Adams is credited with “singing, feet, and clogs” might make it too stereotypically “trad” for all but the most austere folk adept, but, in many ways, the thrills and spills of Red serve to soften up the suspicious listener for Rice. And, of course, it is easy to forget that a lot of unadulterated English folk music is just really, really weird, anyway. Blow the Winds and Benjamin Bowmaneer are stark, empty and quite disturbing, Carthy’s lone piano and vocal on the latter bowing to the influence of June Tabor, the Nico-like folk diva who first brought out the gothic Weltschmerz dormant in English folk. A sleeve note that reads, “The traditional material on this album is all English and out there. Not to exclude anyone or anything, but just because we can,” indicated that the role of an interpreter of English material is one close to Carthy’s heart.
Was this inevitable, growing up in the family she did?

“I’ve developed a real passion for it,” she says. “It started off as a nostalgia thing – I knew all the words to my parents’ songs, it was my childhood, but then I found myself thinking, ‘I would quite like to be involved. I would like to have that sort of thing for myself.'” And how does that square with being an innovator? “Traditions evolve, and then if they stop you can’t just latch onto the end of it and go, ‘Ah well, that’s it then.’ As soon as a tradition has faded a bit, you can pick and choose from the whole of it and start developing it again…which is what I’m doing.”

And what is life like in the Waterson-Carthy family? Are there ever musical differences? “Well, my dad fairly indoctrinated me with all his likes and dislikes before I ever got into choosing music, and so I would never play anything he’d hate anywhere near him. My mum really can’t hack ambient music at all. Especially the Orb. It sends her heart funny. It gets her scared and spooks her out a bit.” This news comes as a disappointment. An Orb remix of the Watersons’ For Pence and Spicy Ale album would have been a record worth hearing.

With a fluency in modern and traditional music, an accessible album reverent enough to placate purists and innovative enough to draw in outsiders, guest spots on Billy Bragg and American country rockers Wilco’s forthcoming LP of unreleased Woody Guthrie songs, and a possible role in the American all-women Lilith Fair tour, Eliza Carthy may yet be an international star of English folk in the next century. Topic Records clearly thinks so, and there’s obviously some thought and marketing budget behind the striking visual identity to the Red Rice package. Isn’t there?

“Yes and no,” Carthy concedes. “They think you won’t get anywhere unless you do a bit of marketing. It was received positively at first, but now people have started to get a bit fed up. People are going, ‘Oh she’s had another makeover!’ and ‘Oh, she’s had another face piercing.’ I’m not gonna take it out for the picture, am I? It’s like ‘Okay, folkie, get back in your box! You’re taking the piss!’ But you never know,” she concludes nobly, “people have to pick on you for something, don’t they?”