55 f Thirty Years On
Way back in the pre-email, post-punk early 1980s, fRoots editor Ian Anderson wrote a letter defending folk to then NME editor Neil Spencer. Elizabeth Kinder eavesdrops as they finally finish the conversation.
finger in the ear, badly kempt unruly facial hair, pewter tankard to rolled-tobacco stained hand, and out in pub- lic in distressing coarse-wool clothes: we can only be talking about a fan of the ‘f’ word. Folk, the music of choice for the unwelcoming villager – with the guardian who polices the music for purity with a Taliban zeal.
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It’s an image that folk is still somewhat dogged by in certain quarters, despite much-trumpeted young musicians bursting the scene apart at the seams with their injection of vigour and modernity and the sparkle of sex-appeal. With the likes of the Unthanks and Laura Marling, Seth Lake- man and of course Eliza Carthy making it meaningful to their peers – with their bet- ter clothes, attractive faces, and drinking out of glasses, even if they’re pints.
So why does folk still swirl around in a
tributary off the mainstream, bashing against its banks, never to breach them? Why, when it’s got so much in common with say punk and rock’n’roll in its atti- tude and its potential as the music of rebellion? This was a connection our edi- tor Ian Anderson flagged-up during punk’s first flush, in a letter to Neil Spencer during Spencer’s tenure as Editor of the NME, in which he suggested that the NME stop whispering behind its hand at folk musicians and instead give them a hearty embrace.
Thirty years later, Ian Anderson is sit- ting opposite Neil Spencer at my kitchen table asking him “Do you remember that I wrote to you?”
“Oh, yes,” Spencer replies. “It gave me an idea for a piece on updating the music, Let’s Electro Morris Dance incorporating Lin Drums in Morris sticks, dum du dum…” He mimics that famous Lin Drum sound. “You know, Ring My Bell: bring it up to date!” (I’m not sure the article ever saw the light of day, for which perhaps, we might all be grateful).
Spencer and Anderson are eating toast and sausages and drinking coffee, to help them in their contemplation of the ‘f’ word, at this point inspired by Anderson’s ambition to finally get this folk /punk rock analogy off his chest.
“I said that you should stop taking the piss out of folkies: the music had a mean- ing, rebellion status, people doing it for themselves, starting their own labels, fanzines and clubs; they were actually kin- dred spirits to punk and had already been doing it for a long time.”
Taking a thoughtful bite of sausage, Spencer takes his time before replying. “Punk rock was ‘year zero’, wiping the slate clean; it was Pol Pot, Josef Stalin. No one starts from nothing, but with punk it was important to get back to basics. No guitar solos over 30 seconds, no song over three minutes, no set beyond 35 minutes. That was all good.”
So folk was weighed down by tradi- tional form, whereas punk blew it out of the water? Spencer’s not sure it’s that sim- ple. “Year zero always involves reclaiming a lost source. Punk was interested in reclaim- ing 1950s and early 1970s rock’n’roll. A big part of the punk world view was going back to a source – Iggy Pop, MC5, Gene Vin- cent – which had been forgotten or camped up by the ‘grand rockers’.”
But it was the politi- cal connection of innate rebellion that inspired Anderson’s thoughts three decades back. Punk and folk joined at the hip in anti-establishment ide- ology. But folk’s tradition of social comment, its radical exponents and as Spencer put it, its
“respository of crazy wis- dom” go far deeper into history and so perhaps lends it a more timeless relevance than punk could muster.
Spencer – who three decades on now reviews folk records in the Observ- er – points out that folk, industrial ballads aside, essentially comes from a rural tradition whereas punk was completely urban music. “You could say that folk became urbanised when Billy Bragg got involved. He showed a way that you could do it differently, he showed you could play guitar like Joe Strummer. Folk had a wonderful tra- dition of the people’s voice telling of terrible social conditions, which Billy brought up to date. Of course, the insistence that folk should be the people’s music and be political was pushed by Pete Seeger and Ewan
McColl, whose cultural outlook was condi- tioned by the Communist Party. Folk took a long time to get free from its Communist shackles and become more of a rainbow nation, and to let women have a much more prominent role. For example all female morris. That’s a big change.”
Folk has been opened up and is re- inventing itself, Spencer and Anderson agree, by the folk/rock generation having brought their kids up with it: kids who have come of age at a time when interest in the music is fuelled by the debate about what the nation is and what ‘Englishness’ has become. We’re talking about a resurging interest in predomi- nantly English folk, because in Ireland and Scotland, identity is more popularly linked with their traditional music so folk music
Billy Bragg: urbanised folk, post punk.
Photo: Doc Rowe
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