Mad & Deranged

Initially the magazine was a part-time, kitchen table affair. "A whole month could go by without me even thinking about the magazine because it was quarterly. That changed within the first two years but until we went monthly I kidded myself that I was first and foremost a musician and ran a magazine on the side. But as it grew we were running to keep up. Other people dropped out so in those days before we had proper staff I had to learn how to do the design and the typesetting. I've always been self-taught at whatever I do. I'm reasonably good at a lot of things from playing slide guitar to photography to computer graphics to trying to turn bad English into readable copy. But I'm a jack of all trades and master of none, really."

Among other things his jack-of-all-trades job description turned him to over those years were founding and running a one day annual festival in Farnham that sold out for six straight years until he "quit while we were ahead", later putting in a stretch directing Bracknell Festival. He set up Rogue Records (along the way giving the first UK release to Tex-Mex wizard Flaco Jimenez and Senegal's Baaba Maal) and embarked on a number of field recording trips to West Africa. He served on the National Executive of the EFDSS ("about all I achieved was getting a Gold Badge given to Walter Pardon"), acted as tour agent for a disparate bunch from the Watersons to Dembo Konte, put in a lot of radio airtime as a presenter (his BBC World Service show ran for a decade), and occasionally slept. And later ran across Madagascar and a woman called Hanitra Rasoanaivo, but that's another story...

Editor and minders, 1999. Standing: Gina Jennings, Caroline Walker, Vanessa Lawley, Beverly Hill

But before he knew it, Ian was a full-time editor and the magazine, now renamed, went monthly in 1985. Covers ranged from Shane MacGowan to Salif Keita as the magazine deliberately set out to break down the boundaries. "We were certainly the only magazine drawing together these different strands and saying 'hey you guys, you've got some relatives over there'. We rattled the cages but it's not my place to say what effect we had because I was too close to it. The Pogues and Billy Bragg were going to be big whether we wrote about them or not. Magazines don't invent music. They report on what is already being made. But people are more open minded today and I think we may have had an effect on that."

Ian can also claim to have been in at the birth of World Music - literally - as one of those who gathered at the Empress Of Russia pub in Islington on June 29, 1987 to discuss mutual problems of marketing, retailing and distributing small ethnic music labels. By the end of the evening the 'world music' tag had been invented and - love it or hate it - no one has yet come up with a better term.

"Andy Kershaw and John Peel were playing the music on the radio. People wanted to buy the records but the record shops didn't have a box where they could put them so they were reluctant to stock them. People didn't know where to look and they couldn't pronounce the names. So really it was a simple idea as a marketing exercise to get more records into the shops. And it worked. World music is now a major business. Walk into the Virgin Megastore or HMV in Oxford Street and look at the amount of floorspace they give to this music. You know damn well that if it wasn't selling it would be out of there next week and replaced by computer games. It's a major minority sport. The only places that is not reflected are in the mainstream press and radio and television."

The state of radio is a particular Anderson complaint. "The cover-mount CD with the magazine twice a year is the radio show that you can't hear on the radio because radio is such crap. That distresses me. One constant thread throughout the whole life of this magazine is that radio is so bad. The folk programme on Radio 2 has usually been 20 years behind the time. They put Andy Kershaw on at the strangest times to try and force him out. Someone as good as Charlie Gillett is only on a local radio station. I hate now personally not having a radio show, having done it for almost 15 years. Every time I get a great record in the office, I think 'shit, I haven't got a show to let people hear this.' It's like having a limb cut off."