“Oh it was great, I’m going to do it again”: Folk guitar legend Martin Carthy reveals what happened the first time Davey Graham used heroin
Guitar legend Martin Carthy has revealed what his fellow folk guitarist and collaborator Davey Graham said the first time he tried heroin.
In a feature in the new issue of Record Collector, interviewer Rob Hughes points out a photo on the wall of Carthy’s house depicting him and Graham during a recording session in the ‘60s for Nadia Cattouse. Carthy recalls thinking the session went well during, but hearing his takes afterward and being less-than-impressed.
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“I’ve still got a copy of the recording that we made that day, a version of Port Mahon [1965], written by Sydney Carter,” he explains.
“I thought I’d done a really good job, but when I put the record on, I went: ‘What the fuck is that?!’ It was absolutely terrible. I was playing this solo that was nonsense.”
He goes on: “On the way home from that session, Davey told me that he’d had his first fix the night before: ‘Oh, it was great, I’m going to do it again.’
“A week or so later, I saw [blues musician] Alexis Korner at a party near Cecil Sharp House. He shouted across the room to me: You know what the stupid bastard’s gone and done now, don’t you? He’s gone and registered himself.’
“In those days, you could get heroin free from the NHS if you were a registered addict.”
Davey Graham’s addiction to heroin was partly the result of him imitating his jazz hero contemporaries, according to an 2008 obituary by The Telegraph. He once described himself as a “casualty of too much self-indulgence”.
Despite his addiction, Graham’s influence on the guitar world is far-reaching, with many crediting him with inventing DADGAD tuning. DADGAD is popular among folk and fingerstyle guitarists for its open-string harmony, and arguably allows for more successful experimentation the length of the neck.
“I used to play in this place called the Witch’s Cauldron, which was on [London’s] Belsize Lane,” Martin Carthy continues in the Record Collector interview.
“Davey just came down one night, took out his guitar and started to play. He had incredible presence. Then he started to talk about what he was into, the particular kind of chord sequences and substitutions. This was big news for me.
“And he proceeded to show me all this stuff. As I was playing it, he was correcting me and showing me everything he knew. He didn’t keep secrets, he just wanted to share the whole time. He played Anji and laughed about it.
“He was just incredibly adventurous for the time, always way ahead of anything I’d ever done, because he was that imaginative. I just kind of gobbled up all that he gave me. Everybody who played the guitar in that particular circle really looked up to Davey.”
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