My attention has been pretty single-mindedly on ‘traditional’ music for the last little while, but our friends at WFMU never let anybody sit still or get too comfy for long. A recent blog posting on Diamanda Galas led me into a half-hour detour on the farther edges… There’s so much astounding clear-the-room music out there, available via archived radio shows (like those at WFMU such as Strength through Failure with Fabio) in RealAudio, and via YouTube (e.g., Maja Ratkje) and in mp3 via archives like UbuWeb (e.g., Jaap Blonk –see also his Web site). Take a walk on the wild side, but keep dropping that trail of crumbs…

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.