Put Your Money In Your Shoes : The English Country Blues Band (single from 1983): I.A. (guitar, vocal); Maggie Holland (bass guitar, vocal); Rod Stradling (melodeon, vocal); Sue Harris (oboe); John Maxwell (drums & percussion)
The Italian Job/ Lodge Road : The English Country Blues Band (originally from Home & Deranged 1983): Rod Stradling (melodeon); I.A. (slide guitar); Maggie Holland (bass guitar, banjo); Chris Coe (hammered dulcimer); John Maxwell (drums & percussion)
The Spring Of '65 : Hot Vultures (originally from Up The Line 1979): I.A. (guitar, vocal); Maggie Holland (bass guitar, vocal); Martin Simpson (banjo)
Get In That Swing : Ian Anderson's Country Blues Band (from Stereo Death Breakdown 1969, reissued 2009): I.A. (National guitar, vocal); Bob Rowe (bass guitar); Chris Turner (harmonica); Bob Hall a.k.a. The Big Sunflower (piano)
Way Up On Your Tree : Ian Anderson's Country Blues Band (from Stereo Death Breakdown 1969, reissued 2009): I.A. (National guitar, vocal); Chris Turner (harmonica); Pete Hossell (jug, shouts); Ron Needes (mandolin); Brian Claxton (washboard).
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An incomplete CV . . .
My first light bulb moment came at the age of around 14 or 15 when I wandered into a school classroom in my home town of Weston-super-Mare to discover a Muddy Waters EP being played. I pestered its owner, so discovering a town coffee bar full of people who enjoyed a wide range of diverse non-pop artists like Big Joe Williams, Bob Dylan, Mose Allison, Miriam Makeba, Charlie Parker, Jesse Fuller, Jelly Roll Morton, Lord Buckley, Davey Graham and Spider John Koerner. So I became a weekend beatnik, bought a guitar and taught myself to play.
As soon as I left school I moved to Bristol, started playing in folk and blues clubs and metamorphosised into a 65 year old Mississippi bluesperson (I've been getting younger and more English ever since - it was only a few years ago that I discovered my great grandmother had traditional songs collected from her in 1904 by Ralph Vaughan-Williams!). I made my first EP record as part of the trio Anderson, Jones, Jackson - Bristol's answer to Koerner, Ray & Glover.
Still full of teenage folly, I somehow managed to become a full-time musician and promptly got caught up in the tail end of the late '60s blues boom. With the help and encouragement of people like the late great Alexis Korner and an early session for the BBC's John Peel, I moved briefly to London: an exhausting year followed during which I did hundreds of gigs all over the UK including a tour with Mississippi Fred McDowell and recorded the LP Stereo Death Breakdown which came out on Liberty/UA as Ian Anderson's Country Blues Band.
Back to Bristol, I took a musical left swerve (possibly due to reading way too many sci-fi and fantasy novels!) and released 4 subsequent solo albums in quick succession of mostly my own songs and guitar instrumentals, three for the Village Thing label (Royal York Crescent, A Vulture Is Not A Bird You Can Trust and Singer Sleeps On As Blaze Rages), before having another lightbulb moment and deciding it held no more appeal. Nowadays, this stuff seems to be called 'psych folk' or 'acid folk'. So I locked the master tapes of those albums away: in spite of occasional extraordinary EBay prices and regular offers to re-issue them from East and West, I've resisted their re-issue since then. Finally, with the 40th anniversary of Village Thing approaching, and increasing interest in the era including several books, I've relented and a 'best of' CD will emerge in 2010. During that period I played at the very first Glastonbury festival in 1970.
In the mid '70s, by then relocated to Farnham in Surrey, I formed the duo Hot Vultures with Maggie Holland, getting back to roots music. We split our time throughout much of the mid-late 1970s between college gigs in the UK and touring extensively in Europe, particularly Belgium, where we lived for a while. We couldn't get arrested on the UK folk club scene for some years (possibly because we played everything rather fast and loud, though certain stars of the later punk era used to come to our gigs!) We released 3 albums, Carrion On, The East Street Shakes and Up The Line with lots of interesting guests - the latter was one of the few 1970s albums by UK folk performers to get released in the USA. There's a best of CD Vulturama on Weekend Beatnik.
Somewhere around 1978 the folk police decided that fast and loud was just what the British folk clubs needed after all. Doing the rounds of even the most traditional clubs and festivals, we soon teamed up with English melodeon guru Rod Stradling and others to mix English & US-derived traditional musics as The English Country Blues Band, releasing two highly regarded (we're told) albums, No Rules and Home & Deranged, now compiled on a best of CD Unruly. See some grainy video of the English Country Blues Band on YouTube! Around then I also made a duet album with my old 1960s blues pal Mike Cooper for the Italian label Appaloosa, titled The Continuous Preaching Blues.
Eventually the English Country Blues Band evolved into the noisy English/world roots dance band Tiger Moth, making another two albums Tiger Moth and Howling Moth, now on a best of CD Mothballs Plus before culminating in the late '80s world roots ensemble Orchestre Super Moth. Music samples and lots more about TM and OSM at Tiger Moth's MySpace. And see some dodgy video of Tiger Moth in 1989 on YouTube - and in 2004 here.
Tiger Moth re-formed in summer 2004 to celebrate our 20th anniversary - gigs included the first ever ceilidh at WOMAD, and the 50th anniversary Sidmouth Festival - and are probably ongoing, doing WOMAD again in 2006 plus The Big Chill, Towersey and more.
Most recently, I played a small role in the Imagined Village project including the debut gig at Womad 2007, resurfaced with Maggie Holland & Ben Mandelson as the Hot Vultures 3 as part of Shirley Collins' Folk Roots New Routes season at the Queen Elizabeth Hall in Feb 2008 and am occasionally involved in some twanging & banging (CD, festivals, tour, no less!) with old pals Ben Mandelson & Lu Edmonds as the Blue Blokes 3. Hear some more tracks at that MySpace page. After many years during which the master tapes of my first album Stereo Death Breakdown were missing, they were unearthed in EMI's vaults and the album was re-issued by Fledg'ling in January 2009 to mark its 40th anniversary, and in 2010 a 'best of' the Village Thing years will appear to mark that label's 40th anniversary. Next . . .
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Trouble is, I never can stop following enthusiasms into other music-connected areas. I've always written about music, starting with local newspapers and Blues Unlimited in the '60s, running through Folk Review and eventually co-founding a regional mag called Southern Rag in 1979 which rapidly grew into the international roots music title fRoots and dragged me back to London where I've been skulking in deepest Harringay ever since. It's what has mainly occupied my days, nights & weekends for the past two decades.
I've done a lot of radio work over the years, starting on local radio in Surrey, various series for BBC Radio 2, Capital Radio and the original World Routes on Jazz FM, a 10 year stint on the BBC World Service and now fRoots Radio on the web.
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I've run several record labels including Village Thing in the early '70s (producing artists including American folk legend Derroll Adams and English singer/songwriter/guitarists like Dave Evans and Wizz Jones) and Rogue Records in the 1980s/'90s which released the first albums in the UK by artists like Senegal's Baaba Maal, Madagascar's Tarika, Gambian kora duo Dembo Konte & Kausu Kuyateh, and Tex-Mex accordeon giant Flaco Jimenez. I've done a fair bit of compiling work for other labels too (several Rough Guide CDs for example), and the occasional productions for others like the Copper Family.
I've also run clubs (I started the UK's first specialised country blues club Folk Blues Bristol & West as a teenager!), festivals (notably Farnham Folk Day and Bracknell Folk & Roots Festival in the '80s), concert series (including the Europe In Union series with BBC Radio 3 and the first Half The World season at Pizza On The Park) and ceilidhs (2005's big Ceilidh Aid among the more thrilling). I've booked tours for other artists ranging from Mississippi Fred McDowell to the Watersons, and generally co-ordinated the careers of artists including Dembo Konte & Kausu Kuyateh in the '80s, Tarika in the '90s and others.
What else? I've taken a lot of photos. I was among the infamous gang of 19 who invented world music back in 1987, and devised the BBC Radio 3 Awards For World Music. I've served my debt to society on Arts Council panels and the National Executive of the EFDSS (committees? - never again!). And loads of other things I've temporarily or maybe permanently - for good reason - forgotten. Mostly done out of a philosophy that if nobody else is doing it (or doing it well) and I reckon it's worth a go, a bit of a creative challenge and an interesting learning curve, then why not? As the song goes, "It's what you can do with what you've got." So in the end a classic Jack of all trades, master of none. I really should have learned to concentrate . . .
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