For the last 10 days or so I’ve been deeply immersed in a project that’s excavating and organizing stuff from my [enormous] collection of “British Isles music” (mostly in and around the so-called ‘revival’ of the 60s and 70s). I’ve been listening to old records, reading books, hunting up lyrics and tablature of tunes, and generally rolling in it like a **spaniel in dead fish** to coin a trope. This process brought me to Anne Briggs, a truly singular singer who ignited a good bit of the tinder that was lying around in the early 1960s. I’ve been reading Dazzling Stranger: Bert Jansch and the British Folk and Blues Revival, and today I find, three Google pages deep in a search, Gone but not forgotten (“In a rare interview, Anne Briggs talks to Alexis Petridis about her ‘lost classic’ folk album – and why she has hardly sung a note for 34 years”), published

(wait for it… wait for it)

Friday August 3, 2007 in the Guardian

I am, as they say, gobsmacked.