IAN A ANDERSON – Alien Water (Ghosts From The Basement)

Alien WaterIan A Anderson: musician, record label boss, publisher, promoter, broadcaster, festival director and author. And, if I’m any judge, a man who knows where the bodies are buried. Alien Water isn’t an adventure in yellow journalism, however; it’s part autobiography, part memoir and part personal overview of the musical scene in which he’s been involved for sixty years. There are some fascinating facts, too. In the very first paragraph Ian tells us that Ralph Vaughan Williams noted down a song from his great-grandmother; the song that gave rise to the book’s title.

Ian claims hazy memories of his childhood (don’t we all?) so the first chapter is largely taken up with the results of his mother’s genealogical research. A family tree might be helpful but it would probably need to be in three dimensions. As for his adolescence, he had the grounding that any teenager would die for. In Ian’s case it coincided with an influx of touring American artists, primarily blues artists, and as the saying goes, first love stays with you forever and so we have his two musical roots in traditional British folk and blues. His coming of age chapter sees expanding horizons and lists of artists, albums and tracks. Imagine, if you can, being a young musician in the early sixties, able to hear some of the greats in their prime as well as being surrounded by emerging young talent.

Next, Ian takes a small detour into the world of folk clubs which were the bread and butter for any touring folk musicians in the UK although mainland Europe was a lucrative market, too. I’d expected Ian to be more…er…forthright on the subject but he’s remarkably even-handed and there is a plethora of fascinating detail – booking Al Stewart for £3 and Paul Simon for a fiver plus expenses, for example. There may be bodies but he’s not revealing their locations. From then on he was a professional musician, although he needed a succession of “real” jobs to keep body and soul together, so not much has changed as far as financial security in the music business is concerned. Such names as The Watersons, Anne Briggs and The Young Tradition were dropped into the mix.

Then came the blues boom with the likes of Fleetwood Mac and Jethro Tull at one end of the spectrum and lesser known names at the other. Ian recounts the story of the £5 Dobro – actually it was a National – discovered by Mike Cooper and acquired by Ian himself. I’m still not sure if the story is true or another embellishment of an urban myth which had even reached our ears up north. In this section, Ian also tells the full story of You Can All Join In or, at least, its cover, something I’d puzzled over for many years.

From 1969 onwards the story is very complicated but lays the groundwork for the future. Ian started writing songs with science fiction themes, married Maggie Holland, played the first Glastonbury festival and, with a number of Bristol contemporaries, founded the short-lived but successful Village Thing agency and record label, signing Wizz Jones, Steve Tilston, Fred Wedlock and The Pigsty Hill Light Orchestra and releasing his own albums which, no doubt, helped promote his gigs throughout the 1970s which also saw the formation of Hot Vultures. All the while the “scene” was expanding and much of the next chapter is taken up with the inevitable cross-fertilization between musicians, the formation of The English Country Blues Band and the foundation of Southern Rag, later fRoots. You must realise that I’m just picking out a few highlights here. There is so much more to read about when you buy the book.

The folk music landscape morphed from being centred on folk clubs to festivals including the innovative Farnham Folk Day and Ian explains something that I never understood at the time although I was on the periphery of it (actually, I think I was lied to but not by someone whose name is mentioned in the book). From then on Ian largely gave up being a full-time professional musician and became a full-time just about everything else in the business, mostly publishing a successful magazine. And by now World Music was on the rise with Ian’s involvement beginning in West Africa.

Ian’s repeated insistence that World Music was never a genre, more a convenient marketing device, will continue to fall on deaf ears, I’m afraid. Once a catchy label has been coined, there is no stopping it. This is a fascinating couple of chapters and it set me off on a pointless internal debate about what constitutes World Music now, outside of the South America-Africa-Asia axis. Scandinavian? Québécois? Welsh? They all seem to fit the bill – unfamiliar instruments and languages spoken by only a small number of people. If you doubt that, let me assure you that Québécois is very different from European French and remind you that most people in this country will never have even seen a nyckelharpa.

The 21st century saw enormous changes although, as Ian reports, it began with such optimism and a raft of new performers coming to prominence. But 9/11, the financial crash of 2008, the rise of streaming, Brexit and Covid took their toll on everything and everybody including, of course, all aspects of the music business. The buzz-word now is “risk-averse”, clubs and even festivals are closing, fRoots has gone and it’s not the only magazine to disappear. For Ian, it has meant a return to gigging and the formation of a third record label (damn, I failed to mention Rogue Records, which was the second).

For the folk music veteran much of Alien Water will be nostalgia and for the newcomer, if such a creature still exists, it will be an invaluable historical text. Inevitably, I’ve been obliged to concentrate on the high points but Ian is brutally honest about the personal and professional troughs he endured. If you are at all involved in folk music, you really should read this book.

Dai Jeffries

Publisher’s website: www.ghostsfromthebasement,com

Softback 320 pp ISBN: 978-1-0685882-0-4

A touch of nostalgia – ‘The Worm’:

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