Eliza Carthy: ‘I just don’t get why guitars are revered in the way they are’

Our esteemed Ed this month has asked me to write about guitars. Me. Guitars…

Those who know me know that I grew up with a guitar hero for a father, surrounded by people asking me about guitars. I have learned the things I need to know: CGCDGA, zero frets, brass string pins but only on half the strings, D’Addario Heavy Gauge… but I don’t play, and no, there are no tabs for what he does, you just have to work it out for yourself. If you discern a note of weariness in my tone, it’s because I don’t get it! I love music, I love instruments, I love the dedication and love that goes into being a virtuoso of your own vision… I just don’t get why guitars are revered in the way they are. So, I asked a couple of my favourites…

You may have seen David Delarre around. Up until recently, he was Steve Harley’s deputy guitarist in the acoustic Cockney Rebel (RIP Steve). Since he was a teenager, David helmed ‘Essex boy band’ Mawkin with his brother James Delarre, was in The Gift Band with my mother and subsequently all my projects, and most recently can be seen doing eight shows a week at the Lyric Theatre in Shaftesbury Avenue for Anaïs Mitchell’s award-winning Hadestown. If you are a fan of a world cruise you may even have caught him on board, playing everything from classical guitar to jazz standards. He is one of the most accomplished and knowledgeable polymaths on the instrument that I know, and quietly, one of the best guitarists in the country. His brother James made his guitar, so there is love in the very grain of the damn thing. Let’s talk to him.

So, Dave, indoctrinate me! Or at least tell me how your love affair with the guitar began. “It’s a little sad. When I was eight, my rock-star uncle Ricky Delarre, electric amateur and jack-the-lad software developer who robbed a bank over the internet in the 90s then phoned them up to ask for a job in internet security, died in a motorbike crash. He once recorded a whole album pretending to be Pink Floyd just to prank my dad… he was an amazing musician, covered in leathers, big Marshall amps… and when he died, I inherited his first guitar, which was a 1975 Suzuki acoustic. When that happened, my dad handed it to me and said, ‘Look, this is the last of him, he loved music and if you want this, you have to do it properly.’ At the time, my family had a ceilidh band and everyone played an instrument [and] I played the washboard. I found that strumming rhythm had actually prepared me for the guitar, and I set about it, and then I was playing in the band.”

All Dave’s childhood heroes are larger-than-life ordinary men who, he reckons, could put on the persona of the rock star and pretend to be someone else. As a shy young person in the 90s, he found he could likewise, through the guitar, make friends with different groups of people: for the rockers smoking weed in the bike sheds he would play Blur or Oasis, for the lads playing basketball it would be Timberlake’s ‘Rock Your Body’, for the girls on the stairs at school it would be the soundtrack from Romeo and Juliet.

Then his nan gave him tapes filled with Johnny Cash, Dolly Parton, The Carter Family, Hank Williams. His dad showed him Hendrix at Woodstock. His babysitter’s partner Simon Ritchie, famed Essex step and Morris dancer, gave him a cassette tape and told him, “If you want to be a folkie you have to listen to this.” Thence came Nic Jones playing ‘Planxty Davis’ (“Didn’t know you could do that on a guitar!”), The Isley Brothers with the classic banjo tuning peg trick, and Martin Carthy playing ‘Famous Flower of Serving Men’. “It’s an orchestra in a box, isn’t it?” Then came Django, D’Gary, and a million inspirational virtuosos that you can find him transcribing on his YouTube channel. He also teaches, you must check him out.

“D’Gary plays this shitty acoustic guitar and makes it sound like an ethnic Malagasy instrument. Six strings and a box; some little dude on a council estate in the UK will make a comparable instrument sound like punk rock. The guitar is relatively cheap, universal. It’s the true folk instrument of the last 100 years because it’s accessible to everybody.”

Now, my friend Jon Wilks, currently touring with Jackie Oates and interviewing my dad across the land on the Remember Me to One Who Lives There tour, knows that I think guitars are daft so when he sent this message the other day, it came to the right person: ‘I’m thinking of buying a 1952 Martin. Talk me out of it.’

But then he expanded his thinking: “The ceiling is collapsing in my bedroom but I’d sooner buy a new guitar than fix it. Why am I so besotted? It’s such a versatile instrument, but more than anything it’s what it represents. For me, that’s freedom. I always loved the romance of the guitar troubadour – people like your dad, Martin Simpson, Bert Jansch – just hitting the road with everything they need in that case. Have guitar, will travel. I played electrics when I was younger, but the acoustic guitar is the complete instrument. And when people like Roger Bucknall [Fylde] are making them, they’re an absolute work of art, too. It’s all I want. No tricks, no gadgets. If I spend the rest of my life trying to master the acoustic guitar, it will have been a life well spent.”

Damnit. Sitting here writing this after the beloved Rory Gallagher’s guitar sold at auction for £9k, I’m wondering if I picked the wrong axe to wield.

And yes, I didn’t interview my dad out of sheer badness. Go see him with Jon on the road before Christmas!