Mad & Deranged

Mid-singer/songwriter phase, 1971. Hah!

White middle class boys singing the blues soon fell foul of an early bout of misplaced political correctness (remember The Bonzo Dog Band's Can Blue Men Sing The Whites?) and Ian decided to test the fetid waters of singer-songwriterdom. As regular readers will know, singer-songwriters are not that popular at Anderson Towers and if you listen to the four early '70s albums he made in the genre (three of them for the second label he founded, The Village Thing) you will hear why. He has disowned them all and if you really want to wind him up, ask him to autograph your treasured copy of A Vulture Is Not A Bird You Can Trust or Singer Sleeps On As Blaze Rages. But don't blame me if he cracks it over your head.

"I suspect that is something everybody has to get out of their system," he says now. "My lyrics were dreadful, my singing was awful, my tunes were unoriginal. The sad thing is that the same syndrome goes on to this day. I defend to the death my right to slag off certain singer-songwriters because I've been there." And slag them off he does. Most years at the US Folk Alliance conference, the fRoots stand proudly sports a sign saying "It's much better if you don't give us any of that wifty-wafty new age celtic politically correct wrrrld beat singer/songwriter crap... please!" The interesting thing is just how many people sidle up and ask for a copy of the sign...

Thinks: why don't I start a roots music magazine

"Light bulb time" came one day in 1973 when, listening to one of his own records, he was struck by its sheer awfulness and realised that he no longer wanted to sing about the windmills of his mind. Instead he formed Hot Vultures with Maggie Holland to play "any music that we liked, with a philosophy which said songs were just songs, regardless of their roots, and the important thing was to sing them in your own voice and style." They worked extensively in Europe and even lived in Belgium for a time but made no impact in Britain. "What we were doing was very out of fashion because at the time the scene here went from hardline British trad revivalists who didn't even allow guitars in clubs to comedians like Jasper Carrot and Fred Wedlock, with not much in between."

The next venture took shape at a workshop at the Loughborough Festival in 1980 when Ian and Maggie were joined by the likes of Rod and Danny Stradling from the Old Swan Band, Pete and Chris Coe, John Kirkpatrick, Sue Harris and Nic Jones. It led to the English Country Blues Band, a splendid invention which married traditional English instrumentation and stylings with blues and much else besides, summed up in the title of the band's first album, No Rules. Later the band metamorphosed into Tiger Moth before culminating (on record) in the short-lived roots ensemble Orchestre Super Moth.

But by now, of course, Ian had fallen into another role - editing Southern Rag, eventually to become Folk Roots. His first published piece had been many years earlier in the Aero Modeler (which confirms all one's worst fears) but by the 1970s he had progressed to writing for Folk Review and even Melody Maker. By the end of the decade, however, Folk Review was on its last legs. "Fred Woods had run it throughout the seventies but he'd lost interest, knew he was getting out of touch and the magazine was going down hill. I'd written a fair bit for him and he offered it to me as a business. I got together a team of three - graphic designer Lawrence Heath, Caroline Walker who worked in a print unit and could do the typesetting, and me to do the writing. Then we looked at the accounts and realised we would be better to start a new magazine."

Thus was this magazine born, initially as a quarterly, but undeniably the spiritual predecessor of the magazine whose Web site you're reading now. It appeared to be the wrong time to be launching a folk magazine yet the opposite turned out to be the case. The magazine grew thicker with every issue and although the regional name was not dropped until 1985, within a couple of years Southern Rag was effectively a national publication and the leader in its admittedly small field.

"When we started it felt like the end of the folk scene. A lot of the clubs had run down. Folk rock had hit a brick wall. Every time you opened Melody Maker there was a headline about 'the death of folk'. I had got very disappointed in the folk scene because it seemed to have less and less to do with music rooted in a tradition and more to do with a lifestyle or attitude thing, all real ale and jolly choruses. But actually it led to a really good shake out. All those comedians went somewhere else and a lot of the people who had been monstrous traddies relaxed and took the corks out of their arses. Then it all seemed to open out."

Ironically, Ian thanks the dastardly Thatcher as something of an unwitting ally. "She was the best thing to happen to the music in the early 1980s because her actions repoliticised the folk scene and put some anger back into people's delivery. I'm thinking of singers like Dick Gaughan. Then you had people like the Pogues and Billy Bragg who weren't anything to do with the folk scene, but were clearly allies from somewhere. They were probably horrified to be adopted by all these embarrassing folkies but our policy was to cover whatever we could get our hands on."