Seventy-year-old record label's haunting voices bring back ghosts of a vanished Britain

Published on Tuesday 15 September 2009 18:59

QUESTION: What record label birled into life 70 years ago this week with a back-to-back recording of The Internationale and The Man That Waters the Workers' Beer; has recorded such folk music luminaries as Ewan MacColl and Dick Gaughan, but also rather less predictable candidates such as Paul Robeson and Vanessa Redgrave? Oh, and Frank Zappa was a fan…

ANSWER: Many happy returns to Topic Records, the London-based label which has played a vital role in the folk revival of the British Isles and, though once dismissed as "that little red label" by a disdainful rival record company, now counts itself as "the oldest truly independent record company in the world".

The label yesterday issued a bumper 108-page, seven-CD book – called, naturally, Three Score and Ten, to mark the occasion. Compiled by David Suff in conjunction with Topic's managing director of 40 years, Tony Engle, this is a collector's item (retailing at 50, "or less"), and an engrossing one at that.

The lavishly illustrated volume provides an insight into the label's origins as an offshoot of the Workers Music Association, which had been formed in 1936 "to help in the struggle for world peace and against fascism".

The WMA's membership included "art" composers and performers such as Benjamin Britten, Peter Pears and John Ireland, and a driving force was one of its founders, composer Alan Bush. Thus Topic's first release, in September 1939, was a ten-inch, 78rpm record of Paddy Ryan's jaunty put-down of the bosses, The Man That Waters the Workers' Beer, twinned with Bush's arrangement of The Internationale sung by the Topic Singers.

The ethos of these wartime and post-war years was reflected by recordings of choirs from Russia as well as home, while early "folk" names included such movers and shakers as Pete Seeger and Ewan MacColl. Less well remembered ventures include the actress Vanessa Redgrave, who recorded a single, Where Have All the Flowers Gone, for the label in 1964, while an unlikely fan was the late Frank Zappa, who confessed to listening to MacColl and AL Lloyd's Singing Sailor album of sea shanties "when everyone else was listening to Cream… I loaned the LP to (Captain] Beefheart, and he probably still has it."

The CD compilation includes early recordings underpinning that founding ethos, such as Pete Seeger's Talking Union Blues, Paul Robeson's gloriously sonorous rendition of Joe Hill, and The Red Flag from Bob Smith's Ideal Band. One's response to such a disparate rattle bag of delights can only be personal – for me, delvings so far have come up with a clock-stopping rendition of Tam Lin by Mike Waterson, Anne Briggs's delicately poised Blackwaterside, from 1971, and, from recent years, Tim Van Eyken's peerless version of that age-old anthem of alcoholic resurrection, John Barleycorn.

Inevitably, there will be quibbles over tracks selected – I for one would have chosen very differently from Dick Gaughan's Handful of Earth and Jock Tamson's Bairns' The Lasses Fashion albums. While there is much Scottish and Irish material – early Fisher family, Jeannie Robertson, Battlefield Band and Boys of the Lough – the English scene, as you'd expect, is predominant, with the omniscient Carthy-Waterson clan and fiddler Dave Swarbrick, Shirley Collins, June Tabor and Davy Grahame, whose Anji, included here, was once a rite of passage for any aspiring acoustic guitarist.

Apart from an inevitable glow of nostalgia, what I found particularly moving were some of the oldest recordings, with shades of an England long vanished in Joseph Taylor's spirited rendition of Creeping Jane, recorded 101 years ago by Percy Grainger, or William Kimber, one-time concertina king, playing English Country Garden in 1948, or the redoubtable Irish street singer Margaret Barry, recorded in 1955 – eloquent musical ghosts, invoked in convivial sance using wax cylinders or big Ferrograph tape recorders.