Photo: Judith Burrows

The Editor's Box Ian Anderson's comment column

Every now and then an issue of fRoots gains a sub-plot of its own, and this rather retro one – unashamedly looking back over its shoulders – is definitely one of those. We usually spend our time pretty much in the present, even peering quizzically at possible futures, but this, our 30th anniversary issue, seemed an appropriate one in which to delve into the past. For, to quote a favourite truth, you can’t know where you’re going if you don’t know where you come from.

I’ve been doing some thinking and file-rummaging about the years before and after our very first issue of Southern Rag (as we were called then) emerged, wet-inked and blinking, into the early summer of ‘79, only to find that a Thatcher monster had taken power while we were wangling our first words and pasting artwork.

Pondering on the late ‘70s and ‘80s as I was, I got distracted by thoughts catalysed by the Bad Shepherds album reviewed this issue. All the songs on it come from the years around our beginnings, but they had been created in another parallel universe. It got me considering that if the folk/roots scene of the day had been more attractive to outsiders, who knows what other, extraordinary talent could have been drawn into it at the time?

The UK folk scene of the 1960s had been, in many aspects, a youth movement, outward-looking, rebellious, questing. Sadly, within a decade it had closed ranks and turned its back on the real world. When punk and its aftermath hit in the late ‘70s, it provided a much more welcoming, energetic outlet for beginner musicians to hone their skills in public, while attaching them to causes and the non-commercial D.I.Y. aspect that had previously been part of folk’s appeal. Joe Strummer, Elvis Costello and others had tried the folk scene and found it wanting. I remember playing on a folk club stage circa 1977, pleased to spot a gaggle of teenagers in punk fashions coming into the room, only to see them rebuffed and shooed out by the organisers before we’d even finished the song we were on.

So the folk scene lost a generation. It took the likes of Billy Bragg, the Pogues and World Music to start bringing the curious back, to discover the riches that we’d had all along. And then we had to wait for another later generation to revitalise English folk and bring about the golden age we’re in right now.

Meanwhile, out there in the rest of the world, other musicians were doing exactly the same as the pioneer British folk rock bands: mixing up music and instruments from dominant external cultures with songs, stories and language from their own. Fairport Convention stopped being fake Americans and adapted our culture to the instruments of rock. Simultaneously, bands like Orchestra Baobab stopped being fake Cubans and started singing traditional themes from West Africa in Wolof and Manding. Same thing, just different. There must have been something in the air back then, just like there is again now. Glad to be here…