Ah well, the connection is probably through Fairport Convention who are a little known band of very old people (chuckle) who are still, amazingly… still going. They've they’ve been going for about thirty five years now with various lineups but the connection with All About Eve is because I think Ric Sanders played on the album All About Eve which must have been their first album. He played fiddle which he doesn’t like it being called, he likes it called violin. Anyway, so that’s the kind of loose connection and then the connection with me is because they were booked at Cropredy this year (2000) and so I kind of got to meet them a little bit and then the manager of Fairport got them a few acoustic gigs on their tour and then just basically asked if I could come and do some stuff and they were very happy to have me, which I was fairly amazed at because a lot of people don’t like having supports that are just thrown onto them like that but I think they’ve quite enjoyed it.

Did you enjoy your time with the Eve’s traveling circus?

Certainly, yes. It’s very nice to knock around with some people who are roughly the same age as me (laughs) although being with the Fairports was fantastic fun and they really are…. they know how to have fun because they’ve been doing it for years but it was very nice to do this because it has opened up a different audience and the audience seem to like me. I was a bit worried about whether they might think I was not really…didn’t fit in with what the whole thing was about and that wearing things like pink dresses wouldn’t go down well but actually, they did warm to me really.

Well, y’know I’m very kind of experienced in trying to sort of get through to the audience because there are so many audiences out there who just sit with their arms folded and go (in grumpy voice) "what’s she gonna do now?", so actually you’ve got to get over to them in a very short time. It’s really weird but I enjoy it and it’s been really great fun doing these gigs....it’d be quite nice to carry on and do a couple more maybe at some point.

No, I didn’t. I had very vaguely heard snippets of Marthas Harbour ….I certainly hadn’t got a CD. A CD is different to the way you listen to something live and then when you hear it live and you see people performing you get to know that basically the live thing has got different rules so I’ve really got to like their stuff whereas if maybe I’d heard it on a CD I might have thought "I dunno, it’s not quite my thing" y’know but it’s just so nice to be able to hear it live, so I didn’t know really a thing, I don’t think I even knew their names or anything about them. I’d heard them at Cropredy and I’d really enjoyed it though I thought at Cropredy that you couldn’t quite hear Julianne’s voice enough where I was standing….up by the bar....quite often when you’re up by the bar, you can’t hear.

interview by John Lynch for the All About Eve magazine Ink & Second Sight. All About Eve are online at www.allabouteve.net

with Marty Willson-Piper, adding French Horn to All About Eve's Shelter From The Rain. Banbury, 30 September.
 

with Julianne Regan. Telford, 23 September.