Eliza Carthy and Jon Boden go wassailing all the way

“I’m mulling it over,” says Boden, 46, best known as lead singer with the band Bellowhead. But he points out that they have already had Christmas trees on stage with them at shows they played in November. “They haven’t fallen over yet, so that’s all good,” he notes wryly.

The pair have been friends since Boden played fiddle on Carthy’s 2002 album Anglicana, which was nominated for the Mercury Prize. “Jon Spiers and I went up to Edinburgh and did two days’ recording,” he recalls. “Eliza introduced me to Angel – as in Buffy The Vampire Slayer – at the same time. Then Eliza asked us to join her band a year after. Martin Green had dropped out and Jon and I deputised for him because he needs two people to fill his enormous boots.”

Boden says that Carthy was a “very big influence” on him when he was getting into contemporary English folk music. “I was listening to a lot of Eliza’s recordings for four to five years prior to playing on her albums,” he explains.

“Fully indoctrinated, eh Jon? But then he started getting his own ideas – that’s when things got really interesting,” Carthy laughs. “I think we form part of a Venn diagram, Jon and I, we come from very different places but there are areas where we definitely intersect. It’s all part of the same argument, I think.

“Jon is very practical in terms of being out in the community, leading choirs and taking sessions – especially when Bellowhead go on tour, they have sessions after the show – whereas I play for my local dance team, but I’m not that hands-on with other community stuff. I tend to focus on research and bringing lesser-known material out on albums and then trying to get people to play them, and Jon is the next stage of that.”

“I think we’ve got similar boredom thresholds,” Boden adds. “We both like stuff to be happening musically.”

“But we have to make sure that doesn’t mean just adding more instruments,” Carthy says. “I was commissioned to write a load of stuff for the 2012 Olympics and I was touring at the time with Carthy, Hardy, Farrell & Young, which was a four-piece violin-based women’s group with Bella Hardy, Lucy Farrell and Kate Young, and when we did the Olympics I basically used them as a core and added a cellist, a double bass player and a drummer – all women apart from the drummer – and afterwards I was like, ‘Girls, can we just get Beth and Emma and Willy on the next album?’ and they were like, ‘No, more is not necessarily better. We can see you, you’re not doing that.’ It was for the best, I think.”

As far as Glad Christmas Comes, their new album, goes they have been “very restrained”, says Boden. “We’ve only got eight guests on there.” They recorded the album in June, and although it was “very hot”, Boden found himself feeling “surprisingly Christmasy – particularly when the brass came in.”

A couple of the carols on the album hail from Boden’s local pub, The Royal in Dungworth, near Sheffield. “Mount Zion is probably the most Sheffield-ish of the ones that we do, the only complication there being that we’re actually singing the wrong words as far as the Sheffield tradition goes. The Holly and The Ivy is also sung there, but it’s one of those songs that is sung in other places.”

Carthy’s late mother Norma Waterson suggested Winter Grace. “My mother met the author of the song, Jean Ritchie, in 1976 when the Watersons were invited over to Washington for the bicentennial celebrations by Richard Nixon,” she remembers. “The cultural celebrations were on the Mall in Washington and they wanted representatives of each of the cultures that made up the United States, so they invited several people over from England and Ireland – the great fiddle player Angus Grant Snr was there. They all made firm friends. There was the traditional singer Walter Parks and lots of traditional American singers. There was a fellow who built a drystone wall in the Mall and took it down the next day. Jean Ritchie was there and formed very firm friends with my mum and her sister Lal, they really bonded just talking about families and stuff.

“One of the things that my mum had brought over from our area was a Staithes bonnet. Staithes is a village about 15 miles from Robin Hoods Bay and the women of Staithes, like the women of Robin Hoods Bay, had very particular bonnets that they used to wear. Jean Ritchie also had a bonnet that belonged to a Pilgrim aunt of hers and they talked about these bonnets, showed them and finally exchanged them. They remained friends for many years and Jean had written this very beautiful song and my had recently rediscovered it and she suggested that we do it on the album, and it was the last song that she suggested I sing before she died.”

Their tour this month is named after the tradition of wassailing. “It’s a greeting,” Carthy explains. “It can also describe a drink, apparently,” says Boden, “or a wassailing tradition, which I guess is what we’re referencing primarily, it’s the house visiting aspect of Christmas customs, where you’re going around places and knocking people up for money.”

“It’s an early form of carol singing, to put it that way,” adds Carthy. “It takes lots of different forms. Some people have what’s called a Mummers play, some people just have songs, in West Yorkshire they have the tradition of wesselbobs – Bryony Griffith and Alice Jones are touring an album about that at the moment – where you make garlands and take them around the village and show them people.

“The ultimate goal of wassailing is to get beer out of your neighbours and/or money. In some cultures it’s blessing the land as well, everyone goes to one place and blesses the orchard or the fields, and in some communities when you go round the house they will knock on the door and tailor the song – you might be a dairy farmer so they will bless your cows or you might grow wheat so they go ‘have lots of wheat’.

“In some communities there are penalties for not answering the door and for not giving beer or food. In Goathland the penalty would be that they would take a replica plough and plough up your garden with it. So it’s not all fun and games – it’s the trick element of the trick or treat.”

Glad Christmas Comes is out now. Eliza Carthy and Jon Boden play at Whitby Pavilion Thetare on December 10 and Halifax Minster on December 11. https://eliza-carthy.com/