49 f


early ‘70s who didn’t record for Topic were on Bill Leader’s Trailer label. It operated on pretty much the same shoestring and with similar basic equipment as we did with Village Thing, and was also distributed by Transatlantic. Beginning in 1969, by 1973 his cata- logue included wonderful albums by Nic Jones, Pete & Chris Coe, Tony Rose, Dave Burland, Bob & Carole Pegg, Robin & Barry Drans- field (who made Melody Maker folk album of the year and reput- edly massive sales for a folk album), Dave & Toni Arthur, Roy Bai- ley, Martyn Wyndham-Read, Swan Arcade, John Kirkpatrick, Alis- tair Anderson, Vin Garbutt and many more, alongside some fabu- lous traditional recordings on the sister Leader imprint. This was the era when things had moved on from the stern folk revival of the Ewan MacColl days and to a great extent set the stylistic foun- dations for the younger folk performers of today – particularly in the case of the Nic Jones albums.


So why have most of these artists been almost entirely written


out of history, hardly appearing in any current literature, neglect- ed by trend-defining journalists, their reputations only living on in the memories of older folkies and, increasingly their musical off- spring (like Kate Rusby or Nancy Wallace) who grew up with their parents’ record collections?


everybody who has ever heard the story, the famously litigious Bulmer has sat on his treasure hoard ever since, hardly re-issuing anything other than on badly packaged CDRs. Here you have a decade of such great importance in the evolution of modern British folk music, already being sidelined by the historians because it doesn’t tick the right London/ major label/ name pro- ducer/ intriguing back story boxes, and modern audiences sim- ply have no access to it at all.


W


Add to the equation the lost royalties to some great and deserving artists, then this ought to be classed as criminal behaviour, wouldn’t you say, or at very least evidence of insanity? If a luxurious 19-CD Sandy Denny box set – as described elsewhere this issue – is commercially viable, then a well-remastered, beauti- fully packaged, well annotated and memorabilia-filled box of the four Trailer label Nic Jones works, plus his Bandoggs album with Pete & Chris Coe and Tony Rose, ought to be what our colonial cousins would call a ‘no-brainer’.


Electric Eden does of course include loads of people who do deserve being written back into history – for example characters around the Donovan/ St Albans scene like the nigh-forgotten Mick Softley (who, nevertheless, did have the advantage of recording for CBS). And whatever you might think of Vashti Bunyan’s music, that’s a great story of her epic horse-drawn journey away from fame and fortune: few can match that other than the disappear- ing act done by the vastly under-rated Shelagh McDonald who some rank up there with or above Sandy Denny. And the mouth- watering advance sections I’ve seen of Jeanette Leech’s book indi- cate that it’s jam-packed with stuff about people I’m only dimly aware of, especially from more recent times.


The 1970s are, however, in great danger of becoming the decade that time deleted as far as histories of the English folk scene go. Its image may be warped by coinciding with the era in which some folk clubs, especially those in colleges, became hugely suc- cessful breeding grounds for the new stand-up comedy, but it was also the decade in which the Free Reed label began, bringing us the first flowerings of The New Wave Of English Country Dance Bands like The Old Swan Band and Flowers & Frolics, a hugely important and influential movement reshaping instrumental music and the ceilidh revival since, but which has been ignored by nearly every history. I tried really hard to get the producers of the Folk Britannia TV series to include such things, but they weren’t part of their pre- set, already rewritten history agenda.


Instead, we still get endless repackaging of the 1960s Transat- lantic catalogue, the 1970s Island store, and a yawning time gap between Ewan MacColl and Billy Bragg, Pentangle and The Pogues, as if little happened for nigh on 15 years apart from the bouzouki turning into an Irish traditional instrument.


So I’ve started in my own small way by getting some of the Vil- lage Thing catalogue back out there. Short of a commando raid on Dave Bulmer’s warehouse to liberate the Trailer masters or the invention of a working Tardis to take writers and musicians under 50 back to experience the 1970s folk scene for themselves as it real- ly was, though, I’m really not sure how this sad state of affairs can now be remedied. But if I’ve piqued your curiosity, it’s a start. F


ell, in the late ‘70s Bill Leader sold his label, all the masters, to another company and later still – with no reference to Bill – it was all sold on to Celtic Music in Harrogate, run by one Dave Bul- mer. For reasons that seem totally inexplicable to


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