aaamusic | On 25, Jan 2011

A lot of people have been waiting a very long time for Marry Waterson and Oliver Knight to make music together. After all, they’ve been living, breathing and practising it all their lives, having inherited the famous musical legacy of one of Brit folk’s most revered families, the Watersons. A first single, ‘Windy Day’ now preceeds the album on 14th March, with the full-length, ‘The Days That Shaped Me’ following on 28th March.

Marry & Oliver have an intuitive partnership but it was a long time in gestation before the sudden explosion of beautiful, evocative, mysterious songs which have blossomed on their debut album together, hence The Days That Shaped Me is an album born of circumstance rather than design. Marry’s singing had been on the back burner since she left the family farmhouse in Flyingdales Moor near Robin Hoods Bay where the whole Waterson clan then lived to pursue a career in graphic design, which escalated into sculpture, renovating houses and raising a family. Oliver, meanwhile, had been working as a gardener, but his inventive input on the Once In A Blue Moon and A Bed Of Roses albums with his mother Lal alerted the wider world to his skills and many of folk’s leading figures started beating a path to his Panda Sound studios to engage him as arranger, producer and sound engineer.

Lal Waterson’s death in 1998 initially scuppered any thoughts Marry may have had of singing seriously again. “Mum always encouraged me to sing in the house, in the car or wherever we were and I always enjoyed the physical act of singing…in the first week after she died I could listen to her music, but after two weeks I couldn’t touch it. I couldn’t be around it and it took me nine years to be able to sing the music that had been the soundtrack to my life.”

The breakthrough came when the Waterson family were booked to appear at London’s Royal Albert Hall in 2007. When, accompanied by Olly, Marry stepped forward to sing one of her mum’s most celebrated songs, Fine Horseman, there wasn’t a dry eye in the house and a queue of people collared her afterwards to tell her she’d turned them into emotional wrecks (“how do you think I felt?” she muses). They all had a question too: when was she going to record an album? A Lal tribute show at London’s Cecil Sharp House later that year once more pitched Marry and Olly on stage together and the creative vein they’d both suppressed for so long was finally unlocked. New songs flooded out of them and they spent more and more time crafting them in Olly’s studio until one day, much to their own amazement, they realised they had an album.

Their mother’s influence is self-evident – one of the tracks Angels Sing is not only about Lal but includes some of her own lines, as does Rosy – yet it has a unique, genre-defying atmosphere entirely of its own. “Marry doesn’t have a musical training or any grounding in how things should be done so there are no rules and that creates its own quirkiness – something that was also there with mum,” says Olly. “I just sing whatever comes into my head and Olly helps me structure it,” agrees Marry. “Songs are about personal experience, about childhood memories, love, death, the various things we all experience…”

They include Curse The Day, which tackles the thorny subject of PMT, while the poetic vignettes of Secret Smile and The Gap encompass Perry Como, Doris Day and Jesus and the evocative imagery of Yolk Yellow Legged invokes a “buddleia day in the morning’s prime”, a “balletic Nureyev flair” and “beaded cobwebs on lollypop trees”. Magical stuff.

Yolk Yellow Legged was co-written by James Yorkston, who also duets with Marry on the track, while Kathryn Williams (who, like Yorkston, performed at the 2007 Lal tribute concert) co-wrote Father Us and Secret Smile, singing harmonies on both (repaying Marry’s favour of singing on the Lal-inspired Winter Is Sharp on Kathryn’s album The Quickening). Marry and Olly’s cousin Eliza Carthy is also prominent, playing fiddle on a couple of tracks and singing lead on The Loosened Arrow, while Reuben Taylor’s piano adds further textures, notably setting the winsome, McGarrigle-esque tone of Run To Catch A Kiss.

It took them forever to get it together but – organic, original, vivid and gloriously real – the Marry Waterson-Oliver Knight partnership is set to carve its own place in the family legend. http://www.myspace.com/watersonknight

Live dates:

11th Feb – Old St Pauls, Edinburgh (guests of James Yorkston)
16th Feb – The Deaf Institute, Manchester (guests of James Yorkston)
10th March – Green Note London

24th March  The Apex Bury St Edmunds
25th March  Cathedral Lodge Canterbury
26th March  EM Foster Theatre Tonbridge
9th April – The Coliseum Whitby
6th May – Folk House Bristol
13th May – Kings Place  London
14th May – Mellor Brook Community Centre Blackburn
19th May – The Forge At The Anvil Basingstoke
21st May – Platform Glasgow