fR314 PAGE 4 6/7/09 17:52 Page 1
f4
A
week before writing
this, an American pop
star who’d sold lots
of records twenty
years ago passed away, and for
Photo: Judith Burrows
the next 24 hours there was lit-
erally nothing else on the TV
news. OK, he was very famous,
but there were other things of
importance going on in the
world. Thankfully, there were
also newspapers, otherwise
we’d not have known.
The same weekend, there was a big music festival to
which the BBC apparently sent hundreds of staff. I watched
some of the ‘highlights’: mostly endless ‘heritage’ acts or
people aspiring to become them, not much else, even
though the festival books a wide range of music. Well, at
least there are magazines like fRoots to let you know about
some of the stuff you never hear. Just before we went to
press I did a quick survey around the handful of radio pre-
senters who do put our kind of music on the national air-
waves: at that point only six of the fifteen albums sampled
on this issue’s fRoots 33 CD had received any airplay.
You really shouldn’t believe anybody who tells you that
the CD is dead. Recently we’ve had so many good ones arriv-
ing that trying to decide what to leave out of this issue’s
fRoots Playlist chart made my head hurt! And then there’s
all the music that hasn’t even found its way onto record yet.
Some of the best gigs I’ve been to this year – the St George’s
Day concert at Cecil Sharp House and the amazing nights
staged by the tiny but marvellous Green Note café around
the corner as part of their annual Latin festival – involved
artists who don’t have records yet (Ian King, Olivia Chaney
on the former; Fuerza Vallenata and Los Chinches on the lat-
ter). What’s more they took place within a few hundred
yards of each other, only a couple of miles from where I live.
Just replicate that all over the country, and then tell me that
fRoots isn’t essential in keeping our disenfranchised musical
community up to speed in these amazing musical times!
0 0 0 0
Here are two pieces of news from your musical commu-
nity newspaper then. Firstly, by the time you read this the
digital edition of fRoots should be fully available on secure
subscription. Reaction to the sample version we have on
our web site has been great: we believe it’s a good alterna-
tive for people to whom overseas postage costs are pro-
hibitive (the digital subscription is only £36 a year instead
of £80 outside Europe) or who simply don’t like the notion
of flying chunks of processed rainforest around the planet.
Secondly, while the recession runs its course, this year
we will be making November and December’s (the latter
historically thin) fRoots a double issue, coinciding with
Womex and the AFO/FAE conferences. All existing subscrip-
tions will be extended by one month to take account of
this and, subject to confirmation of a funding application,
it’ll come with an extra special exclusive CD project too.
We’re looking forward to that one.
Meanwhile, have fun at all the summer festivals, and
enjoy fRoots 33: the next issue arrives mid-September.
Ian Anderson
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