Track Listing

1. Worcester City
2. Just As The Tide Was Flowing
3. Limbo
4. Little Gypsy Girl
5. No Man's Jig + Hanoverian Dance + Three Jolly Sheepskins
6. Pretty Plowboy
7. Bold Privateer
8. Dr MCMBE
9. In London So Fair
10. Willow Tree

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #107376 in Music
• Released on: 2003-02-04
• Number of discs: 1
• Original language: English
• Dimensions: .21 pounds

From Amazon.co.uk
Although academically rooted in the traditional music of the British Isles (Mum and Dad, need it be reiterated, are Norma Waterson and Martin Carthy) ace fiddler and folk starlet Eliza Carthy describes Anglicana as "an expression of Englishness as I feel it". This--given her one-girl quest to make archaic Yorkshire sword dances and songs about courting farm labourers acceptable to 21st century alternative-lifestyle persons with studs in their tongues--is a fairly candid admission that mild interpretative forces are at play.

Rummaging through Dad's old dusty song sheets and century-old Lincolnshire field recordings for inspirational sources, Anglicana is a country mile from the mainstream pop gloss of 2000's major-label release Angels and Cigarettes, offering a healthy contrast of the familiar and obscure, all of which is indubitably "traditional" bar the one self-penned instrumental, "Dr McMBE", a meditative little tribute and acknowledgement to her Father's scholarly acclaim and trip to see Liz at The Palace. Be it the well-worn "Just As The Tide Was Flowing"--a tune much-favoured by Vaughan Williams and 10,000 Maniacs--in which the sombre tone of a melodeon gives way to the sweetness and tragedy of Carthy's voice, or the shadowy, atmospheric versions of "Bold Privateer" and "Worcester City"--a poisonous, crime-of-passion tale rattling from the speakers with a muscular combination of Carthy's brusquely-scraped fiddle and Donald Hay's martial drumming--Anglicana is as faultless as these things come. The whole thing is aptly curtain-called by "Willow Tree", a swinging mélange of jazz violin, trumpets and saxes, resembling the late 1960s Kinks doing a sundown, cider-slurred cabaret slot at the village fete. --Kevin Maidment

Album Description
Anglicana is Eliza's first solo recording for several years and re-focuses on her love of traditional and acoustic music. Eliza is a major recording artist, recording and working with the likes of Joan Baez and picking up a Mercury Prize Nomination for her album Red Rice. One of folk's biggest stars! 10 tracks. Topic Records. 2002.