Friends for almost 20 years, the comic observer and columnist and the first girl in folk talk about blocked life, the long history of the arts and what their children think of their musical taste. Jude Rogers joins them

“I’m fine until this week, but now I’ve begun to swear against inanimate objects.” Stewart Lee, a blocked comedian and a very bearded columnist in this parish, is in his north London studio in Zoom, with one of his musical heroes. He’s not the declaimer, though. This is Shirley Collins, the first girl in English folk music.

Collins has been home since early March, which is “a little lame,” she says. after all, he had a busy summer to come. His new album, Heart’s Ease, will be released next week, had planned some dates for the festival, and also turned 85 two days after our interview. However, some Morris dancers will dance in her way, she says. “Well, muscular!”

Collins and Lee have known each other since 2003, when she interviewed her about her first box box, Within Sound (which covered an ordinary career that began in 1959 with her debut album, Sweet England, made before the revival of the early 1960s). His love of people began at the age of 14, after hearing some led by a “clumsy guy at Birmingham’s Virgin Megastore,” who had no compatibility with post-punk, 2 tone and synth-pop 1982. He heard it the first time. Collins in the mid-1990s. “It was fantastic.”

Collins stopped making a live song the same year as Lee’s first folk epiphany, suffering from vocal cord sickness, dysphonia, after a traumatic divorce with her husband, musician Ashley Hutchings. She did not sing live until 2014; an acclaimed return album, Lodestar, followed in 2016. Lee wrote the notes on the cover. He also pitched a single crusade to the crowdfunding crusade for the 2017 film The Ballad of Shirley Collins, and wrote the advent to Collins’ 2018 memoir, All in the Downs, which beat the Beastie Boys to win the Penderyn Music Book Award. “He’s an expensive friend, ” said Collins.

Lee’s lockdown wasn’t without disorder, there were fewer Morris dancers involved. He had to postpone the last 50 dates of his Snowflake/Tornado (Collins controlled to catch him in Brighton), and the proposed screenings of the film he wrote about Birmingham post-punk musician Robert Lloyd, King Rocker, were postponed.

A few hours on the screen with Collins are a welcome break from the new abnormal. On an unusually bloody July morning, the two men talk about music, key creativity, civil rights, government for the arts and the importance of having the right spoons.

Percentage the love of folk music, and that includes you being a fan that Stewart is doing a song, rarely is Shirley Shirley Collins: Yes! Years ago I was at St Edmund Hall at Oxford University to help liberate their folk club. Stewart [an alumnus] was there, making a song one of sussex’s favorite songs, Polly on the Shore, in the level aspect [the song was despite everything that was released as a crowdfunding single]. I was awake! I’ve got goose bumps now just talking about it. It made me feel right there in a song, aboard a shipment in the Napoleonic Wars!

Stewart Lee [seems embarrassed]: Well, Shirley, it’s very kind of you to say that, but it was the only song I knew the chords on. I had nothing prepared and didn’t know anything about music. I said to the concertina, “Is your concertina in re?”, not really knowing what it meant [laughs]. Maybe you liked it so much because I didn’t have time to think about it, and I was able to do it in a very unforeseen and subconscious way, which characterizes the music you love. His music feels like it came straight from the heart, yet it’s a very difficult thing to reproduce. I speak as someone who has to make the same joke 250 times in a row and take a look to give the impression that I only have one idea about it.

SC: Thank you! I guess I wouldn’t need to be one of the singers waving their hands with their mouths open anyway. Every time I see this, I think, “For God’s sake, avoid it!” You know, one thing I can’t stand those days, unfortunately, is singing gospel. When I first heard it in the United States, it was glorious: soft, rocky, all in harmony. Now it’s about showing what you can do with your voice. I’m not inspired by that.

Heart’s Ease’s first single, Wondrous Love, arrived here in the United States in 1959, at the time of segregation in the South, when you traveled alone to record black musicians and others with the famous folklorist Alan Lomax. The same goes for the opening of the album, The Merry Golden Tree. How does it feel not to forget this since 2020, with the chances of Black Lives Matter taking a stand around the world? When we were there, America was at dawn in the civil rights movement. I was very young, 24 years old, who was like a teenager at the time, and I was very embarrassed that there were separate restaurants. It was just awful. But we had to do what we had to do. I’ve been joking before: if we’d been more particular about the cause of our condolences for some of the whites we met, it could be a bunch of bones under the dust of Mississippi now.

SL: Presumably, has your mild, mild technique allowed you to meet other people you wouldn’t otherwise have done?

SC: Yes We didn’t need to put anyone in danger. We were there to record the music of the other people who represented the motion and whose lives they sought to improve. I Alan saying that the most productive way to honor those other talented people was to let the music they were still playing open.

You intended to sell Heart’s Ease with festival appearances, Shirley. And Stewart, your last interrupted excursion. What’s it like not being on the road? SL: I haven’t stopped betting that long on 15, 16 years. The concept of cold hitting him in March next year, or every time I do it again, makes me feel like I’m jumping off a plane.

SC: I can do that. My next concert will be in August – August 2021!

SL: But when you play live again, Shirley, other people will be pleased to see you. I in Canterbury the night they closed the theatres, knowing it would be the last exhibition in a long time. The audience knew that too. The theater was only partially full, because the other part had moved away from the worry and the atmosphere in the room was hysterical, which had nothing to do with me. But I thought, Shirley, that a lot of your songs are stories that go many years ago, and that suggests there’s continuity in life, which means we don’t have to worry. I mean, I saw Barbara Allen, you sing on the new album, and Samuel Pepys wrote it in 1666! A “Mrs. Knipp” sang it! He liked Mrs. Knipp’s singing.

SC: It’s hard not to be able to do concerts to announce the album, but the other people I care about most are other young women, like my grandson. He just graduated and hoped to become a sound engineer, now he has very little chance of doing so. It’s beyond disappointment. I don’t know how young people will get away with it. They don’t even delight in life.

Did the music help you? SC: I went back to Italian Renaissance music, which comforts me. I think it’s sexy Modern music for someone my age doesn’t have anything sexy!

SL: I’m going to this time as the moment I heard so many things. Between 11 p.m. and at 2 a.m. every night, when everyone is in bed, I went through Bob Dylan’s clips from 1965 to 1967, listening to him compile songs, and the same with Miles Davis’ electrical stuff. I heard music I enjoyed when I was younger, they called the Paisley Underground – The Dream Syndicate, Rain Parade, Green On Red – and all I can find that had any of the Byrds. I went back to the kind of music dates I had as a teenager, when I just had to stay and no one was talking to you. Shirley’s album was a component of all of this, as was Dylan’s new album. He came to this moment of crisis with this glorious sense of calm.

How do you locate folk music in 2020? SC: I just hate the misuse of the word “folk.” Someone said on Facebook, “Oh, I sat in my room and wrote a popular song last night.” Oh no, you didn’t! That’s not how it works! A popular song will have to pass through time, generations and Americans singing it to win its title of popular song.

However, I think I’m lucky, having my age, to have grown up at a time when the old voices were very familiar, which they are not now. My grandfather sang for me and my sister at the shelter the bombardments, undeniable, ordinary songs that really penetrated. The so-called popular singers deserve to pass and pay attention to the recordings on the floor of the origin of the songs, so that they do not stand in the way of the songs. It’s the functionality first, then the song with so many other people those days. However, there are some very intelligent singers, such as Radie Peat [of Lankum] and Alasdair Roberts.

SL: I don’t know enough about folk music now, to be honest. I have 4 shelves of old stuff, but Shirley’s music is a little beyond the genre for me. I mean, things from your new album, Shirley, like the last song, which doesn’t sound like folk at all…

You mean Crowlink, a piece of a solitary shipment at sea, accompanied by recordings of typhoons and seagulls [recorded through Shirley’s son]. SL: Yes, it sounds like a Norwegian heavy steel disc or something! It has an intensity that reminds me of that organization of wolves in the throne room of America: it’s like a big steamroller passing over me!

SC: I think it’s my son who wants to send me to the century we are now.

SL: When I still have my little cabin in Dean Forest and summarize all my dead possessions, I only take the complete works of 10 artists, adding Miles Davis and John Coltrane and The Fall and you, Shirley. People who have the same kind of truthfulness in their approach.

What do your children, and your grandchildren, Shirley, think of the music you gravitate to? SL: They hate her. My daughter says I pay attention to the kind of music that other older people who fart in public pay attention [laugh].

SC: Oh, Stewart! My grandchildren have copies of my albums, but I don’t think they’ve ever heard them, and I don’t expect them either. At the moment, we’re talking about other things, like burgers and the ones we’re going to have. That said, I now have a slightly more youthful live audience, which is good. The girls in their twenties find themselves in the audience shouting, “Shirley! Shirley!”

What do you think of the lack of government for the arts so far in the pandemic? [We’re talking just a few hours before the 1.57 billion pound rescue announcement.] SL: Since the maximum of this government’s decisions appear to be economic, I’m surprised you’ve left it so late. The arts generate countless times more effective for this country than fishing, for example. I know we are attached to fishing for reasons of other people’s lives and traditions, but wouldn’t it make more sense to rescue the Nuffield Theatre in Southampton? Your paranoid component wonders if it’s ideological. Many other people interested in the arts tend to be liberal or left-wing, but not exclusively.

SC: I wonder if anyone in the company has any kind of cultural life.

SL: He doesn’t look like him, does he? I mean, when Sajid Javid’s culture secretary, in particular, blocked attempts to prevent price ticket resellers from operating because he said they were entrepreneurs. Many other people will have to give up because they paint week after week, in rooms on pubs. This total scenario reminds me of what you’re doing, Shirley: bringing old songs to life because they keep other vision problems and feelings from other people in the past. At this point, on some level, the building blocks of our country’s collective imaginative identity may become extinct.

Is it the same scenario with popular music? SC: Traditional music has never had much of the establishments anyway. This includes the BBC. They’re quite used to overcoming themselves, and they probably will after all this horror.

Did the Internet help you block? Shirley, you were saying on Facebook how the delay at Dominic Cummings’ now-infamous press convention led to the cancellation of Paddington 2 on the festive Monday… SC: I was furious! As if I hadn’t done enough!

SL: I think Shirley’s popularity has skyrocketed due to online interest in the 1990s. One of the benefits of the Internet is that interests can take their own momentum in a positive way, without resorting to the press.

SC: It is also convenient to have those connections available. The downside, of course, is that other people can contact you and say things like “She looks like Tom Waits” or “She can’t sing!” [laughs]

SL: That’s why I’ve never had a Twitter, Facebook or Instagram account. In fact, I tried to have an Instagram for about a month. I’m looking to lose weight and I think I’d photograph everything I ate and put it online, which is pretty fun, because I just have the same thing. Then other people started looking for the reflected image of the jars, looking to locate where IArray and I thought, “It’s so strange,” so I just closed it. Maybe it’s still up there, somewhere …

SC: The challenge with social media is that it takes too long. It’s great to be in touch with people, however, every love and tic is a little shallow. I have a tendency not to go to make derogatory comments about things on Facebook, even though I would love (laughs). The only place I stay is Wildflowers of Great Britain because you can’t have any challenges with that. Unless it misnames a flower.

Have you been able to do other artistic things in lockdown? SL [looks out of the plane and returns with a folder]: a kimono drawing. A domesday ebook page. An autobiography of my daughter’s grandfather. A comic e-book about some invertebrates. I haven’t done anything here myself. It’s a homeschooling I haven’t overseen much.

SC: I enjoyed living in a cul-de-sac, putting outdoor tables on the way on hot nights, where we walked away from each other and had wine.

SL: Oh, my God, that sounds great. We do that here.

SC: We like to smile if a car falls, move the table a little so they can pass and then look back at them [laughs]. Other than that, I sing in my head, but out loud for some reason. I no longer dare to sing aloud in case it is sautéed and avoids again.

SL: Don’t worry. This is going to be very welcome. It’s going to be great!

Final questions? SL: Yes, actually. What kind of spoons does Dave Arthur play in Rolling in the Dew, Shirley?

SC: I are stainless metal Viners.

SL: Is this a computer spoon pattern? Are those spoons genuine?

SC: He played on his knee. Yes, genuine original spoons!

SL: Then there will be more that will scream at your concerts in the future!

Shirley Collins’ Heart’s Ease will be released at Domino on July 24. For news on Stewart Lee and King Rocker’s postponed dates, stewartlee.co.uk

This article was amended on July 20, 2020 to remove a reference to Shirley Collins performing at the Troubadour Club in the 1950s (he wasn’t playing there).