Mad & Deranged

Note: there's more in I.A.'s own words, with music samples even, on his MySpace page.

Anderson and posing accessories, 1999

Our esteemed editor, dear reader, reckons that in many pieces I write for this magazine I manage to insert some cheap jibe or snide joke at his expense. To his credit he never cuts them out and now, recklessly, he has against what he considers his better judgement (hah!) been bullied into entrusting me with an entire feature about him and his 20 year stewardship of fRoots. What folly!

So let me begin by telling you that Ian Anderson is a mad and deranged fanatic who has never really done a proper job in his life but has eccentrically dedicated the best part of the last two decades to editing, producing, promoting and selling this wilfully unfashionable but much-loved magazine.

You don't have to take my word for it, either, for he hasn't yet reached such out-there insanity that he can't recognise the symptoms of his own craziness. Ask him if he ever feels like a strange and unhinged obsessive. "Of course," he says. "You can't possibly do this and be normal." And he smiles that familiar and apparently ageless grin that makes him look like a Boy Scout who has just discovered that girls are actually far more interesting than reef knots.

Ian wasn't exactly enthusiastic about this piece but everybody else associated with fRoots told him that we could not possibly bring you a 20th anniversary issue without an interview with the man whose fault it is. So kicking and screaming all the way to the tape recorder, Ian finally agreed that it was time to address the question readers of his self-opinionated ramblings have been demanding for years: "Just who the f*** does he think he is?"

Unlike many of us who became music journalists because our guitar playing was execrable ("those who can do, those who can't write"), Ian knows slightly more than three chords and for years enjoyed a career stringing them together in a reasonably pleasing way. His entry in the Macmillan Encyclopaedia Of Popular Music is longer than those afforded Jon Anderson, Laurie Anderson, Moira Anderson or Stig Anderson (manager of Abba). This is a source of deep embarrassment to him, which, of course, is the only reason I mention it. "They asked for my CV and I sent it in and they just printed the whole bloody lot," he explains improbably, but his entry maps a long and winding road of a career that began more than 30 years ago. Even today he can't quite let go and still likes to describe himself as a "semi-retired" musician.

So does he ever listen to his old records? "No, but I think some of them hold up. I wouldn't say 'like' is the right word but I can accept the early blues stuff I did. I think that, taken for what we were and of our time, some of the English country blues players like Mike Cooper and Jo Ann Kelly and me weren't bad." In fact, tracks such as Cottonfield Blues and Rowdy Blues, (available on the compilation Matchbox Days - Really! The English Country Blues 1967-69 on Ace) sound remarkably fine for a boy from the Weston-super-Mare delta who discovered Muddy Waters at the tender of age of 15 and never looked back.

Before he was 21, Ian had run a country blues club in Bristol ("very hardline - we only booked people who were pretending to be Mississippi sharecroppers"), organised a national tour for blues legend Mississippi Fred McDowell, flirted briefly with a major label when he recorded for Liberty as Ian Anderson's County Blues Band, and launched the Matchbox label. It is easily forgotten in these CD-saturated days just how difficult it was to get hold of decent recordings back then. "There was the Robert Johnson album, a Blind Boy Fuller LP on Phillips, a few things like Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee, Big Bill Broonzy and Jesse Fuller who had been over here on tour. But you had to go to Dobell's in London or Pete Russell's Hot Record Store in Plymouth to get that stuff. We all played the same numbers because that's all there was."