World Music History

Dorita y Pepe sing the
Internationale

In what now seems a relatively short time there came King Sunny Ade, Youssou N'Dour and Thomas Mapfumo to play live before our very eyes, GLC shows, gigs in the park behind behind the Commonwealth Institute, Arts Worldwide events and Womad, Earthworks, GlobeStyle and Stern's. Alexis Korner, ever broadminded, would play Okinawan records on the radio, Charlie Gillett and Andy Kershaw soon became converts to international sounds, and the 3 Mustaphas 3 popped up on John Peel. Our magazine was able to review more and more records because they were now becoming available on local release or import, and artists came here so we could talk to them. My own little record label emerged at the beginning of the '80s with a minor hit by Bulgaria's Nadka Karadjova (entirely, it must be said, because of concentrated novelty airplay by Terry Wogan) and the far more hip indie label 4AD had a mammoth seller with Les Mysteres De Voix Bulgares. But where the hell did you look in your High Street record shop for all this varied music that now had a burgeoning would-be buyer base but no obvious rack to browse?

It was Roger Armstrong and Ben Mandelson from GlobeStyle who called the fateful meeting. For some reason I've kept all the minutes. At 7.00pm on Monday June 29th, 1987, what was initially described as an 'International Pop Label Meeting' was convened at the Empress Of Russia in St. John Street, Islington (then also the home of Islington Folk Club: recently closed to become a restaurant). "The main aim", began the suggested agenda, "is to broaden the appeal of our repertoire", and it listed various points for discussion such as identifying who the target audience were, how to reach them, how to deal with this at retail and, crucially, "Adoption of a campaign/media title".

The minutes record who was there: Chris Popham, Ben Mandelson, Roger Armstrong and Ted Carroll from GlobeStyle/ Ace; Jonathan Rudnick from Crammed US; Amanda Jones, Thos Brooman and Steve Hadrell from Womad; Charlie Gillett from Oval; Mark Kidel from Channel 4; Ian Anderson and Lisa Warburton from Folk Roots/Rogue Records; Anne Hunt, Mary Farquharson and Nick Gold from Arts Worldwide/World Circuit; Scott Lund and Iain Scott from Stern's/Triple Earth; Joe Boyd from Hannibal and writer Chris Stapleton -- virtually all still involved in this music today. Later meetings also saw participation from Robert Urbanus from Stern's, Mike Chadwick from Revolver distribution, Mark Stratford from New Routes distribution, John Martin from 11th Hour/Crossing The Border; Gordon Potts and Simon Coe from Virgin Retail; Andrea Lawrence from Cooking Vinyl; Jumbo Vanrenen and Trevor Herman from Earthworks, Nick Carnac from Carnacdisque; Doug Veitch, Owen & Phil from Disc'Afrique, Lucy Duran from the National Sound Archive, and writers Philip Sweeney, Chris Hawkins and Klaus Frederking. But it's the first night bunch who you can blame for 'World Music' as the genre that now exists.

It wasn't a new name, just one of many that had floated around in the preceding decades. But the logic set out by Roger Armstrong was that an established, unified generic name would give retailers a place where they could confidently rack otherwise unstockable releases, and where customers might both search out items they'd heard on the radio (not knowing how to spell a mis-pronounced or mis-remembered name or title) and browse through wider catalogue. Various titles were discussed including 'Worldbeat' (left out anything without drums), 'Tropical' (bye bye Bulgarians), 'Ethnic' (boring and academic), 'International Pop' (the death-by-Johnny-and-Nana syndrome) and 'Roots' (left out Johnny and Nana). 'World Music' seemed to include the most and omit the least, and got it on a show of hands. Nobody thought of defining it or pretending there was such a beast: it was just to be a box, like jazz, classical or rock...