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here’s an absurd plethora of big round- number anniversaries taking place in our
neck of not-the-music-business this year. Compared with Topic Records (75 years old) and Sid- mouth Folk Week (60), we’re mere youngsters at 35, even though that makes us the longest continually published folk and roots music maga- zine – every one on time, not a single break in publication – in the world. And yes, I really have been sitting here that long! If I’ve not been washed away by the Somerset Levels before June, we’ll be remark- ing on all those many and various longevities in our actual 35th anniversary July issue.
Meanwhile we start our 35th anniversary year celebra-
tions with our Bridges concert at London’s Queen Elizabeth Hall on Friday 14th March. Having had a bit of a moan last issue about event organisers playing safe, we’re sticking our necks out with an entire evening where all but one of the sets of participants have never played together before. But look at the line-up on page 9 and you’ll see we’ve assem- bled some of the best, most capable and imaginative musi- cians in our field. You may ask yourself what risk there real- ly is, other than of getting too much excitement!
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People keep saying, and we keep not arguing, that the folk scene has been going through a golden age lately. There are so many great new artists emerging all the time, and so many longer established ones in their prime, all aided by the easiest ever availability of better instruments, live sound, recording, tuition and ways to promote.
It can be a little tempting to look at the past through shit-tinted spectacles when carried away by the excitement of what’s going on now. So there was quite a flurry of excitement when the 1991 Channel 4 documentary Beyond The Maypole popped up on YouTube in January. It featured the late Biggie Tembo of the Bhundu Boys going around England wondering if we had any folk culture, and finding it through artists from a young Kathryn Tickell with Alistair Anderson, Willie Taylor and Will Atkinson to the whatever- became-of Heather Joyce visiting Kitty Jay’s grave a long time before young master Lakeman. Oysterband are seen in their attitudinous, leather-jacketed prime; Billy Bragg and Robb Johnson fly the flags of politics and multi-cultur- alism; and best of all there’s The Barely Works, as exciting, adventurous and mosh-pit creating as anything we’ve got now. Oh, so the late ’80s, early ’90s were a golden age too!
And then look at that gang of mostly under 30s busily inventing another era of music on page 17, at the same time as Davey Graham, Bert Jansch, the Watersons and others were rearranging the furniture left by the 1950s. Ah, so that’ll have been another golden age as well then…
Pete Seeger, who passed away just as this issue went to press, lived through so many golden ages that his memories must have been a shimmering, many-layered blur. But he remained optimistic to the end. We could do worse…
Ian Anderson
Photo: Judith Burrows
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