Salut! Live

It was (Southern Rag’s) issue 14 that autumn of 1982 which I think was a gamechanger. The 1970s had shown the slow decline in quality, purpose, energy and creativity in the folk club world, but by late 1982 it was becoming apparent that this was changing, in the wider folk world if not in the folk clubs. We were several years into the Thatcher regime and political fires had begun to smoulder again as a result. The 1970s "new wave of English country dance bands" had captured festival dance floors. Imaginary musical borders were being breached. Questing youth from the mid-’70s punk generation, who had been firmly ostracised by the folk world at the time, were still seeking something interesting, off the mainstream and of substance as pop headed into ’80s synthesisers and haircuts: they were now finding their way in the back door. And actually, at this point even some mainstream music was showing hopeful signs – via Dexy’s rootsy Come On Eileen topping the charts and XTC making albums like Mummer and English Settlement, sleeved in folk iconography. 

It suddenly felt all rather exciting, so we tried – not very convincingly – in Southern Rag 14 to give a label to it. It didn’t stick, but it helped the conversation. And boy was there a lot of conversation: the letters pages of the day were packed and combustible. 

In this issue, Colin Irwin – whose folk page had been dropped by his daytime employer Melody Maker and was very happy to be offered another outlet for his main enthusiasm – celebrated something we invented (but didn’t actually exist, yet) called the “Rogue Folk movement”. He gathered together the diverse likes of Moving Hearts, Jumpleads, Andrew Cronshaw, Oyster Band, Dick Gaughan, De Danann, Home Service, The English Country Blues Band and more, to make a point. And we pulled a sub-headline quote out of Cronshaw’s cover interview: “If it’s not exciting, it’s not folk music, it’s chamber music – it should scream a bit at you. There’s no problem with what’s folk music and what isn’t – you can hear it, it’s got a vitality.” In the interview, he added that folk music “tends to be played by rather safe people these days. When I first encountered the folk scene... the people were alarming, a bit ‘other’... there was an energy in those days because they had to play, not because they thought they’d impress a folk club.” 

Beverly Hill (subscriptions & sales manager), Ian and Caroline Walker, co-founder & assistant editor, 1985

The 1980s would go on to give us – whether you liked them or not – important catalysts like the Pogues, Billy Bragg and the hugely enjoyable Boothill Foot-tappers, the whole "world music" explosion, the real growth of festivals, lots of frontline exposure on Radio 1 via John Peel and Andy Kershaw, and in young newcomers like Kathryn Tickell the first signs of a fresh generation of exceptionally high standard coming into traditional music. Importantly, too, we still had a fair number of the old traditional singers and musicians around to engage and inspire – Walter Pardon, Bob Cann, Gordon Hall, the Shepherds, the Coppers, Billy Bennington, Oscar Woods and lots more.

Billy Bragg was clearly a kindred spirit, even if he did say in his first interview with us in 1985 that “I never had any inclination to play folk clubs at all. Not in the slightest. Everyone used to say to me ‘solo performer – you should be playing folk clubs’. They didn’t understand that the only way I was gonna get what I wanted – which was scared and a lot of money – was by doing rock gigs. And standing down in a folk club playing to half a dozen people waiting to hear a 20-minute version of John Barleycorn wasn’t my idea of a Saturday night out.” 

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Billy Bragg in the wings at Trowbridge folk festival 

I nearly robbed the world of the Pogues’ Shane McGowan’s talent around that time. I was driving through Camden as he lurched drunkenly off the pavement right in front of me: luckily my braking reaction was good. I got a cheery wave of recognition as he staggered off. Strangely, later that day I was walking through Regents Park and was nearly run down myself by the legendary Ivor Cutler on his bicycle: my turn to leap out of the way. There must have been something in the air. 

Looking back, I think we were right with the main thrust of that particular issue. If pushed, having experienced all the decades from the 1960s to now, I’d say that the 1980s were the most exhilarating. I’m not (entirely) making any claims for Southern Rag 14 having had a particular effect, but I do think that it serves as a historical marker. From that viewpoint, you could justifiably say that the ’80s start right there... 

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The reception to it becoming Folk Roots was exceptional. With the extra monthly capacity we were able to widen the range of music we covered, locally and internationally, without cutting back on our core roots in the UK folk scene. 

…It was a portal for us and everybody else to dive down into new musical wormholes – Tex-Mex conjunto music, Greek rebetika, Hungarian dance houses, music from Okinawa, Madagascar, Guinea, Cuba, all of West Africa and much more. 

Not everybody was pleased of course, bearing in mind the tendency of folkies to whinge about anything which didn’t conform to their narrow taste range. The second monthly issue had Flaco Jimenez on the front which delighted many but produced a frankly racist letter from one of the English folk club scene’s "entertainers" complaining about “funny foreign-coloured people” on the cover when we ought to be supporting the people who were supposedly the backbone of the folk clubs. Like him. 

I’ve no recall what he made of it two issues further on when we celebrated our first African artist on the cover, Zimbabwe’s Thomas Mapfumo, (… I’d deliberately courted controversy by describing his band The Blacks Unlimited as the best folk rock band on the planet). His spleen probably exploded. But the description of their liberation songs from colonial rule clearly struck a chord with the great Pete Seeger who promptly sent us fan mail for introducing him to Thomas’ music. Mind you, just a few months later I got a postcard from Pete bollocking us for introducing a Folk Albums Chart which he thought anathema to the whole non-commercial principles of folk music. Good old Pete, bless him! 

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I now stare at my shelves bowing under the weight of bound copies of 40 years of the magazine, 425 issues in all, and do sometimes wonder whether, if I knew then what I know now about what I was letting myself in for, I’d do it all over again. Wouldn’t it have been easier to leave it as a quarterly and have a life? There were many times, slaving away beyond knackered at 2am after another in a series of 16-hour days and amidst one of its regular financial crises, when I would happily have walked away from it. 

But I didn’t, couldn’t: I knew how much the always-fragile roots music ecosystem benefitted from its existence and how many artists had gained a leg up when no other media outlets were biting. 

To do the story of Southern Rag / Folk Roots and later fRoots any kind of justice would take a whole book, which may indeed have to be the case. All I can do here is give you a smattering of such snapshots. 

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And then in 1986 we saw the launch of Q Magazine, later followed by Mojo, Uncut, The Word and the other glossy dadrock monthlies, many of which seemed to involve that fine fellow Mark Ellen in their early stages. It was immediately apparent to me that Folk Roots had to stand up on newsagents’ shelves alongside those, with their hugely greater resources, rather than compete with the other specialist folk and roots music magazines. 

It took quite a while to up our self-taught, permanently cash-strapped standards, but we did eventually get there – covermount CDs and all, after a couple of vinyl compilations we made for sale. 1987’s Square Roots was a general mixture from across our content with a good smattering of tracks specially recorded for it from the likes of Oysterband, 3 Mustaphas 3 and Billy Bragg, and 1988’s Tap Roots a survey of the "new wave of English country dance bands". We inaugurated our highly respected annual Critics Polls, got our own dedicated BIFF cartoons, and by the ’90s commissioned most of our own cover photo shoots …

When I later assembled two double CD compilations – Roots and Routes – to celebrate our 20th anniversary in the late ’90s, I was startled but secretly flattered when I heard that Q Magazine were refusing to review them as they couldn’t promote “a rival magazine”. Oh really?! 

The last post: the final fRoots issue and the little Salut! Live ad from its pages

** Ian Anderson: potted autobiography