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‘Dylan said: teach me that!’ Martin Carthy on six decades of Scarborough Fair – and his new solo album

As the folk icon celebrates his 84th birthday, he looks back on falling out with Paul Simon, smashing up pianos with Dylan – and the classic song he’s still not got quite right

It’s been 60 years since he first recorded the song on his self-titled debut album, and famously taught it (or tried to teach it) to both Bob Dylan and Paul Simon, when they came to watch the young guitar hero playing in the London folk clubs. He remembers exactly where he first heard it – at the Troubadour folk club in Earl’s Court, in 1960, where it was sung by Jacqueline McDonald(of the Spinners fame) who told her audience that she had learned it from a new song book, The Singing Island, by Ewan MacColl and Peggy Seeger. Eliza’s fiddle also provides the new setting for Ye Mariners All, “one of those lovely nonsense songs.” The suitably surreal album cover for Transform Me Then into a Fish shows Martin at the breakfast table in the middle of the ocean, holding his fork like a crazed Neptune.

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