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Staying On Topic
As Topic Records hit their 70th anniversary, Tony Engle
tells Ian Anderson about his 40 years at the helm, and
what’s coming soon.
W
hile fRoots potters along ing onto vinyl in 1956 and recording artists Topic now. He will become a director of
at a mere 30 years old, of the day like the City Ramblers Skiffle Topic and gradually we’ll have a shift of
Topic Records is about to Group and Ramblin’ Jack Elliott (clearly, responsibility as he takes it on. I’m not
celebrate its 70th anniver- rambling was seriously business). By then, leaving it, but it’s important to me that as
sary, the last 40 years of Bill Leader had become production man- the years go by there is a younger person,
those under the benign dictatorship of ager and was involved in the recordings, just as I was, who takes it over. Now you
Tony Engle. It’s not just 70: it’s also cer- something he would continue to do for could say in a perfect world it would be a
tainly Britain’s and maybe even the Transatlantic as well in the 1960s, and lot younger person, as I was when Gerry
world’s longest running independent eventually his own Leader/ Trailer labels. passed on, but it’s a question of finding
record label. To have achieved that status
WMA company secretary Gerry Sharp
somebody who I see as the right one.”
while maintaining traditional music as its
took over running the Topic label in 1957, “One of David’s jobs was to bring this
core output is pretty darned remarkable.
and for many years its office was in the together. The CDs were produced from
Topic’s 1939 first release was a 78 of basement of his house in Nassington Road,
him doing a crash two-and-a-half year
The Man Who Watered The Worker’s Beer Hampstead. Through the 1960s Topic doc-
course in listening to everything that
by Paddy Ryan, coupled with an arrange-
umented the growing UK folk club scene Topic have put out and then seeing how
ment of The Internationale. The new Topic
recording up-and-coming artists like Davey that fell. It seemed to be a good way to
Music Club imprint belonged to the Work-
Graham, Anne Briggs, the Watersons and approach it. We’ve got three regional
ers’ Music Association, formed three years
Shirley Collins who remain icons of British albums: England, Ireland and Scotland.
earlier by communist composer Alan Bush.
folk music to this day. There are many sto- We’ve got something which we’re calling
They continued to sporadically release
ries to be told and you can find over 100 The People’s Flag, which makes a lot of
records – mostly limited editions of 99
pages of them in the imminent large hard- sense when you think about Topic and its
copies because then (and for decades to
back book housing an extraordinary 7-CD political – with a small and large ‘p’ –
come) pressings of under 100 were not
set Three Score And Ten: A Voice To The associations. We’ve got The Singer And
liable to ‘purchase tax’, a forerunner of
People, curated, produced and researched The Song because although it wasn’t part
VAT. Early Topic stalwarts like Ewan Mac-
over the past few years by David Suff, of what Topic seemed to be doing 70
Coll and A.L. ‘Bert’ Lloyd published folk
Topic’s heir apparent. years ago, it is more and more what
music pamphlets through the WMA and “We’re going to go through a transi-
Topic’s doing now – new songs as
began recording for its label, in 1950 and tion process,” says Tony Engle, when I
opposed to traditional songs – and then
1954 respectively. Things accelerated quizz him about this 70th anniversary pro-
we’ve got two CDs which are in a sense a
through the skiffle era of the 1950s, mov- ject. “David is working as a consultant to
selection of treasures.”
“It mixes chronology. We deliberately
Tony Engle (left) inherits the Topic folk beard from Gerry Sharp, 1971… didn’t go for ’50s, ’60s, ’70s, ’80s. I don’t
think it would have made good listening.
It would have made it very imbalanced –
any number of reasons. It has been a bit
like working with Reg Hall on The Voice Of
The People. People with ideas – in this case
David was the one with most of them –
and how they’re going to work. If you can
arrive at a great conclusion from the
stream of ideas, without even a hint of
bloodshed, that’s got to be a good thing. It
augurs well for the future. I think we work
very well together.”
I wondered how it was at the other
end of Tony’s Topic tenure, when he
turned up for the job interview in the
dying days of 1969.
“I heard about it through Dave Bland
who was librarian at Cecil Sharp House. If
you were interested in traditional music
you were hanging out in the same places,
so probably that was at the King’s Head in
Islington – I was living down in Tooting
Photo: Geof
then so I’d come up and meet Rod and
Danny Stradling who were running it
then. I was a civil engineer of no standing,
working for a consulting firm, two years
f Howard out of college. And it is odd, looking back.
I don’t quite know why I thought this was
the thing I wanted to do, but I thought
‘OK, I’ll go along’.”
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