A talented artist for a mother and a theatre director for a step-father, it’s little surprise U.K.’s folk songstress Martha Tilston never stuck to her day job in the financial sector.
With an acclaimed singer-songwriter for a dad, a folk singer for a step-mother, a talented artist for a mother and a theatre director for a step-father, it’s little surprise U.K.’s folk songstress Martha Tilston never stuck to her day job in the financial sector. Growing up hearing luminaries like Bert Jansch, Ralph McTell and John Renbourn jamming in the kitchen with her dad, and forever playing dress-ups and reenacting theatre plays during her stays with her mum, it didn’t take long for Tilston to fully immerse herself in her creative side.
“To make it all even more schizophrenic, I actually had two different upbringings,” she laughs. “When I was staying with my mum and step-dad, it was this massive Victorian-style house in southwest London. It was always full of kids and actors and they always had a lot of friends staying there – it was basically like living in a mini-commune. If you ever needed a prop for a play or something, chances are that you would find it in our house. It just had that much crap in it and the craziest stuff hanging off the walls. It was also a very beautiful, artistic drama house but it wasn’t as musical as my dad’s house – apart from the out-of-tune piano that was kept downstairs. I was allowed to play that late at night, so that kept me off the naughty road as a kid.”
Meanwhile, during her stays with her famous singer-songwriter father Steve Tilston, the young Martha would often imagine being as talented a singer as her step-mother and London-Irish folk singer Maggie Boyle. As Tilston recalls, it was during her visits to her father’s house that she first began to pen her feelings and express herself through music.
“Dad lived in Bristol and there would be a lot of famous folk musicians hanging around the house all the time,” Tilston recalls. “I have memories of going to festivals and seeing my dad on stage and just feeling extremely proud to have such a talented dad. I also remember being in absolute awe of my step-mother Maggie’s voice – it really is something else.”
According to Tilston, in hindsight, it was a real luxury and a true privilege to have grown up in such artistically-creative households. Ironically, at the time, all Tilston could wish for was a small, tight-knit family of just a mum and a dad, but later on in life she came to realise what a blessing it was to grow up in such wonder and chaos.
“It was songwriting that felt like the most honest outlet for me,” she states. “As a kid, it got me through a lot of hard times, such as my parents’ divorce and all the difficult stuff that was going on in my life through my teenage years, like heartbreak. I’ve always seen it as something that was a form of release – you’d get all this pressure building up inside you and songwriting just took the steam out. When you feel that other people are relating to what you’re talking about and they empathise, it’s definitely encouragement. At one point I was working in an office for years while I was also a part of a duo [Mouse]. I was just meant to be a tempt but I ended up doing it for five years and I would be doing gigs every night then getting home at 2am then getting up and going to this financial company with knots in my hair from the gig the night before.”
It was somewhere around this point in time that Tilston realised she had to make a decision to put all her eggs in either one basket or the other. Music, of course, won out. Upon hearing her latest album, Lucy And The Wolves [2010], it becomes obvious Tilston was right. Having worked on the album during her pregnancy and just after delivering her baby girl, Tilston describes her third solo offering as the soundtrack to her first days of motherhood.
“You can hear all the wonderful moments as well as some of the baby blues you get when you have a baby,” explains Tilston. “Even though I loved being pregnant, it’s a time of big highs and lows – so you get a real mish-mash of an album! It was a very weird mood I was in and I am at a very different place now because my daughter is a toddler now. I feel much more like being a bit reckless and getting the electric guitar out and rocking out. I just feel so brave and strong and motherhood has done that to me.”
MARTHA TILSTON plays the Apollo Bay Music Festival this weekend, as well as the Northcote Social Club next Wednesday April 13. See apollobaymusicfestival.com for more festival information and northcotesocialclub.com for tickets to Wednesday’s show.
