Guitarist Martin Simpson picks up the beat at Pocklington Arts Centre

8:30am Thursday 12th March 2009

By Charles Hutchinson

AS he prepares to play solo at Pocklington Arts Centre tonight, Lincolnshire acoustic guitarist Martin Simpson is three-quarters of the way through making his next album.

“It’s a really interesting place to be because there’s some fantastic music down already,” says Martin, the winner of no fewer than five BBC Radio 2 Folk Awards, who has been recording with double bassist Danny Thompson, accordion player Andy Cutting and hurdy-gurdy maestro Nigel Eaton.

“Phil Selway, from Radiohead, is on a couple of tracks, Jon Boden has done a couple, and BJ Cole is coming in to play pedal steel in April, so now I’m in this phase where I’ve got this chunk of music done but I’m in limbo, where I can’t do anything.

“But the great thing is that while I can’t get into the studio, I’m out on the road playing 19 dates this month.”

He enjoys the freedom of the solo show. “You can do anything you want and you don’t have to worry about anyone else’s set lists,” says Martin. “I can play anything I wish, like I’ve been taking my banjo to gigs. I’ve been playing the guitar since I was 12, and the banjo since I was 13, and they inform each other as the banjo has open tuning.

“I started doing alterations to tunings on the banjo and that’s when I thought, ‘why can’t I do that on the guitar too?’…and I’ve ended up with 8,000 tunings.”

Eight thousand? “No, I exaggerate, which is part of my job!” says Martin. Nevertheless, he is as ever looking to take his guitar playing further. “I think you always seek to do your absolute best on each album, and in this case what I’ve tried to do is re-examine the same ground, which is analogous with being a naturalist.

“And if you really want to know how nature works, you don’t walk on the moors and look at the skies; you examine the same piece of ground that you’ve looked at for 50 years, and the closer you look, the more you see,” he says.

Witness his version of Stagolee, a song he knew from Lloyd Price’s New Orleans version. “I’ve got Phil Selway to play right across the beat, like a hip-hop approach, and I decided that it had this prototype gangster rap that would really, really suit the banjo. So now there’s banjo, double bass, hip-hop drums…it’s really funky!”

Martin notes how the likes of Jim Moray and Bellowhead are breaking barriers, but believes he can do so in a more subtle way while “still shifting the barriers a long way”. “If you think of the difference between boxing and martial arts, you may not see the hands of the martial arts fighter moving, but you still end up across the road,” he says, believing that his music can have a similar effect.

The new album will be released this summer, probably in July. “It’ll be called True Stories, because it mostly is true,” he says. “Even Stagolee, which I’ve been singing since I was 14, you always knew it was based on truth, so I’ve taken the song and at the same time as playing it in a different way, I’ve restored lots of correct facts and details.”

Martin Simpson plays Pocklington Arts Centre, March 12, 8pm. Box office: 01759 301547.