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being involved directly in distribution, we didn’t need all that
space. I was looking ahead and thinking ‘Well, at some point we’ll
really need to trade this in’. By good fortune I sold the property
before the prices dropped. I sold it to the man across the road, and
we’re now tenants. I knew it would give us an opportunity to get
some funds available for whatever projects might be, and secure
the future of Topic as best we could. So all this fell in very nicely.
We got involved talking with the British Library and with the fami-
ly, and struck a deal. We were the main provider of funds. So that
means we now have the right to make this material available.”
“Now we’ve got the opportunity we can’t toss it up in the air
and do it all over again, so we’ll do it on another route. They’ll still
be thematic because those rules, those ideas, I think still hold true.
But because we’re no longer setting out to be the definitive en-
bloc set we can do what we want. So they will be multi-CD pro-
jects, depending on whatever the project is, and it won’t necessari-
ly just be exclusively Peter Kennedy material. It will still draw on
other material. It will be whatever the editor of that project feels
is right and connects with my view.”
“So, for instance, Shirley Collins is producing singers from
South-East England as a single CD, and travellers from the South of
England as a 2-CD set. Then Steve Roud will be doing a 3-CD ballad
set… I believe he will also be presenting, in the text that will go
with it, his own cutting edge views on what ballads are, because
that’s part of what this project has been. Reg’s notes are only now
coming to be recognised for being as revolutionary as they were
because so much of the history of British folk music has been the
documentation of academics who wrote about the music year on,
decade on, century on century. Reg deals with it, as I prefer to deal
with it, as being about people as well, and about their lives. It isn’t
a museum piece to us.”
“Then we’re doing Peter Kennedy’s field trip to Northern Ire-
land. Anything from that era is very exciting to me. Reg is also
going to do a separate Irish music in London set including
Kennedy recordings. That could be even a 4-CD project. He needs
to get his running shoes on!”
“Prior to that, going alongside the big book, there will be
seven reissues from the back catalogue that had unfortunately
been held back because we didn’t feel they had a great deal of
commercial appeal, but as I’m old enough and I can do what I
bloody well want, I want them out there as milestones. So for
instance we’re doing Peter Bellamy’s Both Sides Then, Louis
Killen’s Ballads & Broadsides, Jackie Daly’s Music From Sliabh
Luachra, Alistair Anderson’s Steel Skies. Then the Scan Tester, and
because we have access to more Kennedy material we are going to
expand that to two CDs. There’s the McPeake family, which to our
ears now may sound a bit naïve, but it was very early Topic record-
ings, the EP and LP brought together. And then I’m also bringing
out a double CD of Ewan MacColl ballads which are actually drawn
from Riverside Recordings, which are in public domain in the UK.
All of these, I think, are landmarks in their own way. They’re not
going to appeal to everybody but you can put your hand on your
heart and say, ‘You may not like it, but it’s bloody good, and take
that from a bunch of people who know’.”
Topic Records: A Bunch Of People Who Know. There’s a good
motto with which to march on to the centenary…
www.topicrecords.co.uk F
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