f32 A Very Good Year…

Our international panel pick the best of 2016 in the 31st annual fRoots Critics Poll for Albums Of The Year. Ian Anderson takes a look at the results.

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don’t know about you, but I reckon that’s a very well balanced selection which our expert panel has made, across genres, nationalities, ages and gender (there are six solo albums by women in the top twelve, three of them over 75!) There has been such a lot of good music released this year and whit- tling their choices down to the six new albums, four compilations/re-issues/his- torical sets and three ‘best packaged’ that we ask them to nominate must have been a particularly difficult task.

After 30 years of doing it the same way, we introduced a small tweak this year. As well as those straight nominations which got each one a point, we asked our panel- lists to mark just one per category as their overall favourite which gained it an extra point in the adding up. This was really just an experiment to try and separate out the close-calls we’ve had some years, but it was really successful and something we’ll keep doing. The winners and top few placings were all distinctly clear this time round: they would have been the same under the old system, just not by such wide margins, and lower down everything was clearer too.

We did some coppicing of the panellists this year as well, quietly dropping those who hadn’t bothered to vote for some years, and researching and adding a sizeable bunch of new ones – the result of which was that the ‘turnout’ was substantially higher. Basically,

Shirley Collins

the people who we ask to vote are writers, broadcasters, promoters, musicians, activists and people in the business. They have widely varying tastes and specialist expertise, but the important thing is that taken together they are certain to have heard far more of the year’s album releases than any member of the public. So whereas public votes tend to simply mirror what has sold the most (plus who has the best organised social media and mailing list!), this really is based on well- informed views and a lot of them. As well as being bigger than any other we know of, it’s also an international panel – 30 percent are from outside the UK, largely in mainland Europe and North America.

We give guidance as to what’s eligible

– basically, any music that falls into fRoots’ loose remit of “anything from anywhere with roots in a tradition” – that has been released since November the previous year. This process produces a shortlist of ‘nominees’ which we announce in early November to help them all get a bit of extra mileage. Over the next two pages, in detail, are the placed final results – the nearest thing to a definitive guide to the best folk, roots and world music releases that there is. I don’t know about you, but even I always spot something I missed when the results come in –money has already been spent. And that, dear read- ers, is the main point of the exercise – not just to hand out a few gongs but to get you enthused with more new discoveries.

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have to admit that until the votes start piling up, most years I simply don’t have a clue what’s going to win. But this year was different. When Colin Irwin began his review of Shirley Collins’ first album for 35 years with the words “So that’s the album of the year sorted then,” he was simply stat- ing what we already knew the moment the advance copies of this remarkable (and deserving) winner hit our players. Congratulations to Shirley and producer Ian Kearey. And I had a pretty good inkling when Stern’s fabulous East African compilation and Dust-To-Digital’s Morocco box turned up too. Both hard to beat!

And finally, my Editor’s Choice. Noting that a tendency of many other magazines and web sites was to have only one or two people making their picks, I didn’t see why I should be left out! But I also felt that there should be an award reserved for the smallest of independent imprints, often artist-run labels that many of our big panel simply won’t come across. And this year it goes to Alden, Patterson & Dash- wood, a great new trio from Norwich who Sarah Coxson already gave a rave review to and Tim Chipping is excited about in our Root Salad pages this issue (it’s not just me, see!). You can also hear them on this issue’s fRoots 62 compilation, and they’re one of the early names announced for next summer’s Sidmouth Folk Week.

Get those wallets out then! Album Of The Year – Shirley Collins’ Lodestar F

Photo: © Judith Burrows