Martin Carthy – Along the Road Forever: Live at the BBC 1965–2022 20CD Box Set Review
Madfish Records celebrates the extraordinary career of Martin Carthy with a monumental collection of BBC sessions and live performances. This is not simply a box of archive recordings; it is the story of a life in music.
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There are some box sets that gather together a run of albums, add a few bonus tracks and give you a useful overview of a particular period.
Then there are box sets that allow you to step inside an artist’s world.
Along the Road Forever: Live at the BBC 1965–2022 very definitely belongs in the second category.
This enormous 20CD collection from Madfish Records follows Martin Carthy across almost six decades of BBC broadcasts. It contains studio sessions, concerts, festival appearances and collaborations recorded between 1965 and 2022, together with bonus material from the regional broadcaster ABC TV dating back to 1963.
In total, we are looking at 22½ hours of music and 328 recordings, representing 237 distinct pieces of repertoire. Two-thirds of the material has been sourced from master recordings.
Those figures tell you how large the collection is, but they do not really explain what it feels like to spend time with it. For me, this is the sound of a life unfolding.
An Alternative History of Martin Carthy
Martin Carthy is one of the most important figures in English folk music.
As a singer, guitarist and interpreter of traditional song, his influence reaches far beyond the folk world. His distinctive guitar style and approach to old songs have inspired generations of musicians.
This collection presents Martin as a solo performer, but it also shows how frequently his musical path crossed and intertwined with those of other major artists.
Across the 20 discs we hear him with Dave Swarbrick, Norma Waterson, Eliza Carthy, Steeleye Span, the Albion Country Band, Brass Monkey, The Watersons, Waterson, Wood, Wilson, Carthy, Chris Wood, John Kirkpatrick, Martin Simpson, Jools Holland and many others.
That breadth is one of the set’s great strengths.
This is not a substitute for Martin Carthy’s official studio albums. In many ways, it offers something different and perhaps even more revealing: an alternative career history told through performances originally created for radio and television.
Some capture Martin alone with his guitar. Others place him within groups, family collaborations or large concert settings. Together, they show how his music developed while its roots remained firmly planted in the English folk tradition.
Opening the Box
Madfish has built a reputation for large, immersive career-spanning collections, and the presentation here is superb.
Lifting the lid has that familiar Madfish sense of theatre. Everything is carefully housed, beautifully printed and designed to make the owner want to start exploring immediately.
The 20 CDs are divided across four sections inside the box. Small cutaways in the foam make each group easy to remove, while the discs themselves are held in individual gatefold sleeves.
Inside every gatefold is information about the period and performances covered by that disc. This matters with a collection of this size because the context turns the recordings into chapters of a much larger story.
The box also contains a reproduction press folder featuring a period photograph, archive material and an interview from Sounds. It is the kind of memorabilia that helps transport you back to the time rather than merely telling you about it.
There is also a 1971 photograph by Keith Morris signed by Martin Carthy. With the box limited to 2,000 copies, this will be an especially treasured part of the collection for many fans.
The 80-Page Hardback Book
At the heart of the physical presentation is a large, lavishly illustrated 80-page hardback book.
It includes an essay by acclaimed biographer Clinton Heylin covering Martin’s life in music, together with detailed session information from Carthy chronicler Kevin Boyd.
There are also many rare and previously unseen photographs, including images from Martin’s personal archive.
What I particularly like about Madfish books is that they contain something substantial to read. This is not simply a gallery of photographs with a few captions scattered between them.
The book could almost stand as a release in its own right.
It places the recordings within Martin’s personal and musical journey. At the back, every disc is illustrated and fully listed, followed by information about the audio sources and the people responsible for bringing the archive together.
The collection was lovingly curated by Colin Harper, with the audio remastered by Pete Reynolds. You can sense the years of research, rights clearance and detective work required to locate and assemble so much material.
These projects do not happen quickly. They require people who care about the artist and who are prepared to keep searching until the best surviving sources have been found.
Twenty CDs Designed to Be Explored
The idea of listening to 20 CDs may initially sound daunting, especially if you approach the set as something that must be played from the beginning to the end.
That is not how I experienced it.
Sue and I dipped into the collection at different points, often choosing a disc at random to accompany our morning coffee. We would hear something that caught our attention, look at the sleeve to discover where and when it had been recorded, and then follow another path through the box.
That is part of the pleasure. You can move from solo BBC sessions for John Peel in the 1970s to Brass Monkey, Steeleye Span, The Watersons or Martin’s work with Dave Swarbrick. You can visit Sidmouth, Cambridge, Whitby and Glastonbury festivals, hear intimate radio sessions, and then move into larger celebratory concerts.
The BBC did not merely record performances. It captured Martin Carthy at different stages of his life, with different collaborators and in front of very different audiences.
The box therefore becomes something you live with rather than something you race through. It is the musical equivalent of spending a long weekend in the company of the artist.
The Sound Quality
Whenever I review a large archive box set, I want to spend proper time listening before offering a verdict.
Although Along the Road Forever is available through the Now Spinning Magazine online store, that does not change my responsibility to be honest about the contents and, crucially, the sound quality.
I am delighted to say that the audio across these discs is phenomenal.
The quality is remarkably consistent considering the recordings span nearly 60 years and come from radio, television, studio, concert and festival sources.
Even the material identified as off-air is far better than many listeners might expect. The earliest recordings create the feeling that you have descended the stairs into a small 1960s folk club. You can almost picture a few rows of chairs, a close and attentive audience, and a young musician bringing old songs into the modern age.
Two Personal Highlights
After listening across the collection, there were two discs that Sue and I kept returning to.
The first is Disc 18, covering the years 1963 to 1968.
It contains 33 tracks and includes extraordinarily early appearances from ABC TV, London Folk Song Cellar, Once More with Felix and Degrees of Folk.
Among the revelations are the 1966 recordings featuring Martin with singer and actress Isla Cameron, along with early performances with Dave Swarbrick.
This is exactly the kind of material that demonstrates why archive collections matter.
Without a project of this scale, many listeners might never know that some of these performances existed, let alone have the opportunity to hear them in such impressive quality.
The other disc we particularly loved is Disc 15, built around Martin Carthy’s 60th birthday concert at the Alhambra Theatre in Bradford in 2001. Featuring Norma Waterson and Eliza Carthy, it is a beautiful and deeply moving family celebration. Played alongside the earliest recordings, it also reveals how far the road had travelled.
A Whole Life in Music
The photographs in the hardback book give this set an emotional depth that goes beyond dates, venues and track listings.
We see Martin in the early 1960s among young musicians who have their entire futures ahead of them. They are driven by the music, but none of them can know where it will take them.
There are intimate family photographs, including Norma making Martin a boiled egg and Martin and Norma holding Eliza as a baby. These may seem like small moments, but within the context of this collection they become very important.
The music continues as Martin meets his partner, creates music with Norma, and later performs with their daughter Eliza. We follow the story through collaborations, friendships, festivals, radio studios and concert halls. Norma sadly died in 2022 at the age of 82, while Martin has since stepped back from performing for health reasons.
That knowledge makes the shape of the collection even more affecting. I described it in the video as being like the flight of an arrow. We witness the moment before it leaves the bow, its rise into the air and the great arc of music, family and creativity that follows.
Eventually, the arrow begins its descent. Within this box, however, the whole journey remains alive.
My Personal Connection
There is also a personal connection here for Sue and me.
Sue released her first solo album in 1999 and was invited to perform at Whitby Folk Week. She supported Martin Carthy and Dave Swarbrick, who were both extremely kind to us. It was a wonderful experience and one that has remained with us. Listening to this collection allowed us to hear what Martin and his fellow musicians had been doing on either side of that moment in our own lives. We could travel backwards into the earliest days of the folk revival, return to the period when our paths briefly crossed, and then continue into the more recent recordings.
That is what a great archive box can do. It does not simply preserve history. It helps us place our own memories within it.
Who Is This Box Set For?
At £199, this is clearly a significant purchase.
It is primarily aimed at committed Martin Carthy fans, collectors of English folk music and those with a deep interest in the British folk revival.
If you are a casual listener, the thought of 20 CDs may feel like too much.
If you are a fan, however, I do not believe you will ask whether you can listen to it all. You will simply keep returning to it, moving between periods and discovering performances you may never have heard before. It also offers remarkable value when compared with some super deluxe editions that cost nearly as much while concentrating on a single album.
Here, you are receiving 20 densely packed discs, a substantial hardback book, archive memorabilia and a signed photograph, all covering virtually an entire musical life through the BBC archives. For fans of Martin Carthy, Dave Swarbrick, Steeleye Span, the Albion Country Band, Brass Monkey, The Watersons and the wider English folk tradition, this is an extraordinary place to spend time.
Along the Road Forever: Live at the BBC 1965–2022 is one of the most moving and immersive Madfish box sets I have encountered.
The scale is impressive, but this set succeeds because it never feels like a pile of archive material assembled simply to make up the numbers.
The sound quality is excellent, the book is substantial, the presentation has been created with real care, and the music captures one of the defining figures in English folk across almost six decades. It celebrates Martin’s remarkable musicianship while also honouring the family, friends and collaborators who travelled portions of that road with him.
Thank you, Martin. Thank you, Eliza. And in memory of Norma, this is a beautiful collection.
Martin Carthy – Along the Road Forever: Live at the BBC 1965–2022 is available from the Now Spinning Magazine online store.
ORDER THE MARTIN CARTHY BBC BOX SET FROM THE NOW SPINNING MAGAZINE STORE
Music is the healer and the doctor.
Phil Aston | Now Spinning Magazine
