Quote from "Nerd"

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Ian Anderson of Froots says on his MySpace page that he:

"generally co-ordinated the careers of artists including Dembo Konte & Kausu Kuyateh in the '80s, Tarika in the '90s and UK-based Greek singer and songwriter Athena from 2005 to 2007."

Seems dodgy that he should give her high-profile articles in a magazine he edits, when he is her manager. But maybe he has mechanisms in place to ensure objectivity. In any case, it explains her becoming suddenly well-known on the folk scene.
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Just to put the record straight: I was never Athena's manager, she was self-managed until last year. What I did was help her as a friend and fan by booking her two tours and tour managing them (a different matter), co-ordinated her two independent record releases for her, and generally helped out, introduced her to people etc. fRoots acted as media sponsor for her first tour in 2006. I worked on that first tour without payment, and it was one of the most artistically fulfilling and successful things I've ever been involved in.

Athena has never had a main feature in fRoots, she's only been in our smaller Root Salad section of shorter pieces, and had the CD reviews to which any artist is entitled. The only thing I wrote myself was a live review well before I started working with her in summer 2005: since then what has appeared has been written by independent writers like Colin Irwin. Our readers also contributed some enthusiastic but unsolicited reviews of dates on her first tour on our message board.

Athena and I stopped working together at the end of her second tour over a year ago and I have had virtually no contact from her since then and had no involvement whatsover in her Channel 5 film, which I didn't see until after it was finished.

I think my "mechanisms to ensure objectivity" are pretty well tested. In the early days of the magazine I sent the debut album by my then partner Maggie Holland out to a reviewer and printed the bad review he bravely submitted. When I was looking after Madagascar's Tarika in the 90s, they'd had 2 or 3 No.1 albums on the world music charts in Europe and the USA before I felt comfortable with having them featured in fRoots (something any other band in that situation would have had before), and then I handed complete editorial control over the feature to my assistant.

It's quite difficult when you wear a number of hats, and everything you undertake is because you're a genuine enthusiast for it. I feel comfortable that on the whole I've generally got it right, as I know people would soon jump up and scream if I didn't.