Martin Carthy taught Bob Dylan — now he’s up for the Mercury prize at 84

The folk singer is the oldest person to be nominated. He talks about his spat with Paul Simon, and hanging out with Dylan in Sixties London

Martin Carthy: “I said: ‘You’re Bob Dylan. Fancy doing a couple of songs?’ He replied: ‘Ask me later’”

Will Hodgkinson
Friday October 03 2025, 11.00pm BST, The Times


As befits a man who has spent his life singing in folk clubs in the back rooms of pubs, Martin Carthy took the news of his Mercury prize nomination for album of the year with incredulity. “I told them to piss off. Twice,” he says. “But they insisted and I have to say, I was surprised. I think it’s a good record, but it’s 50 — or is it 60? — years since my first album came out. The new one begins with The Trees They Do Grow High. I first learnt that in 1957.”

At 84, Carthy is the oldest person to be nominated for a Mercury prize. Transform Me Then into a Fish is a reinterpretation of traditional ballads such as Scarborough Fair and Lovely Joan, many of which featured on his 1965 debut.

As the reincarnation-referencing title suggests, there is a sense of a circle being completed here, with Carthy’s weathered voice on the album forming a poignant contrast to the enthusiastic tones of the young man who sang them the first time round. Back then, he was reviving old ballads that had fallen out of view. Now he is bringing those same ballads to a new generation.

We’re in the garden of a rehearsal studio in New Cross in southeast London. Carthy has come down from his house in Robin Hood’s Bay in North Yorkshire with his daughter Eliza, who is also a folk singer, to perform at a concert celebrating his life and work alongside Billy Bragg, Graham Coxon and countless others.

And while not a starry figure, he does exude a certain senior style: a grey fedora matching a woollen jacket, a red scarf adding a dash of raffishness against a flowery blue shirt, a turquoise earring twinkling in the sun. You can see why Bob Dylan, Paul Simon and countless others have beaten a path to his door. It was either that or his deep knowledge of Irish and British folk song and groundbreaking acoustic guitar mastery.

“I met Dylan in 1962,” Carthy says of an encounter that led to the great enigma of modern song delving into the English folk tradition and using it for his own material. “He was here to do a television play called Madhouse on Castle Street and came to a folk club in the King and Queen pub in Fitzrovia where I was playing.

“It was exciting because he had been presented on the cover of Sing Out! magazine as the man to continue the work of Woody Guthrie, so I went up to him and said: ‘You’re Bob Dylan. Fancy doing a couple of songs?’ He replied: ‘Ask me later.’”

Carthy did indeed ask him later, leading to Dylan standing up at the back of the King and Queen with a harmonica and guitar and giving his first performance outside North America with a rendition of Talkin’ John Birch Paranoid Blues.

The pair hit it off and hung out for a few days, with Carthy introducing Dylan to Scarborough Fair, which Dylan then used as the foundation of Girl from the North Country. The winter of 1962 was one of the coldest on record and when Carthy found an abandoned piano outside Chalk Farm Tube, he smashed it up for firewood, much to Dylan’s dismay.

He recovered enough to accompany Carthy to gigs at the Troubadour in Earls Court and the Singers’ Club in King’s Cross, the latter a bastion of folk traditionalism run by the singer and activist Ewan MacColl and his wife, Peggy Seeger.

“Bob Dylan was bloody good, serious about what he was doing, but at the Singers’ Club he disappointed a lot of people,” Carthy remembers. “They didn’t like upstarts. It was the beginning of an exciting time.”

When Paul Simon passed through Britain in 1964, Carthy taught him Scarborough Fair as well. It led to bad blood between the two for years, with Carthy believing the New York songwriter had stolen his arrangement for the Simon & Garfunkel classic Scarborough Fair/Canticle. That’s all in the past now.

“He actually wrote a song in tribute to Scarborough Fair, he didn’t steal my arrangement, and if I had bothered to listen to his version for 30 seconds I would have realised,” Carthy says, sounding like he is still castigating himself for it. “Paul is an entirely honourable person.”

Carthy discovered folk music as a schoolboy in Hampstead, north London, from a book of English ballads owned by his mother. From then, his life’s course was set. “It brought a whole new way of thinking. I ditched Latin, Greek and ancient history A-levels and spent my entire time learning to sing and play these mysterious songs. They felt like another world.”

What did his parents think of it? “Mum was supportive but my dad, a politician working for the TUC, never got over it. Just before he died, he said, ‘Why don’t you come back to London and take up the classics again?’”

On top of this Carthy’s father, Albert, rarely discussed anything, leading to a tense atmosphere in the house. “If I asked him a political question it ended up with him grilling me,” he says. “He was left wing but he hated communists, and I was hanging around with a lot of commies because the folk scene was made up of them.

“He once asked me if [the influential journalist] Karl Dallas was a communist. Being called Carthy at the height of McCarthyism meant I had a miserable time at school, and now my father was trying to get me to denounce people! That would have been the end of me on the folk scene.”

Instead Carthy delved headfirst into London’s early 1960s acoustic circuit, with the Singers’ Club as his starting point. Didn’t MacColl impose a load of rules there, like performers only being allowed to sing folk songs from the places they came from, in corresponding regional accents?

“Yes, and it was all bollocks. You have to remember that Ewan was an actor so his dialects were theatrical anyway. And folk songs cannot be set in stone. They are in a continual process of change and that’s how they stay alive. The worst thing you can do to a folk song is not sing it.”

Inspiration came instead from Sam Larner, a Norfolk fisherman with a vast repertoire of ancient ballads, already in his eighties when Carthy saw him at the Singers’ Club in 1959. “He was clearly tired but he gave it all he’d got, and I was thunderstruck: this was it. I started discovering all these traditional singers around Britain that nobody knew about. I was 17.”

One of the remarkable aspects of Carthy’s career is how he has managed to keep it going for all these years from beyond the confines of the music industry.

He had spells in the folk rock groups Steeleye Span and the Albion Country Band, but for the most part has travelled from one folk club to another on his own or teamed up with his wife, Norma Waterson, and Eliza, self-releasing his albums or putting them out on small independent labels along the way.

It’s been a family affair, since Norma made her name in the Watersons, the singing group she formed with her sister Lal and brother Mike in early 1960s Hull.

“In 1961 I walked into a hall in Hull, where I had been booked by some people called the Watersons,” Carthy recalls. “I turned around and looked at this woman, she looked at me, and bang: we fell madly in love. It was extraordinary, an electric moment.”

Unfortunately, electric moments can happen when you’re married to other people, as Norma was back then. “Then we met again a few years later and now I was married and she wasn’t. Finally, 11 years after that time in Hull, we saw each other in Bristol. I launched into this huge speech, which she listened to patiently, and then I said, ‘I wonder what you’d say if I suggested we get married.’ She looked at me and replied, casually, ‘Oh, I’d say yes.’”

That was in 1971. Waterson and Carthy married two weeks later and stayed together until Norma died, aged 82, in 2022. You wonder how he has coped since. “There was work to be done,” he replies, by which I think he means he has simply kept going. Which makes me wonder. Given Carthy doesn’t seem to have much interest in fame or fortune, and can still be found most weeks playing little folk clubs up and down the country, what has been driving him for the past 60 years?

“To get better. And to keep adding to the repertoire, because these songs need singing.”

Now the Mercury prize nomination means a lot more people will be hearing The Famous Flower of Serving Men, The Handsome Cabin Boy and other ancient ballads Martin Carthy has been singing since the early 1960s. “It’s fabulous, isn’t it?” Then he’s off to rehearse with a handful of musicians much younger than himself, keeping Britain’s folk tradition alive, well into his ninth decade.

Transform Me Then into a Fish by Martin Carthy (HEM Records) is out now; the winner of the Mercury prize 2025 will be announced on Oct 16.