The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #146180   Message #3418558
Posted By: GUEST,raymond greenoaken
12-Oct-12 - 09:06 AM
Thread Name: Bill Leader/Dave Bulmer
Subject: RE: Bill Leader/Dave Bulmer
A dusty memory: more than twenty years a then-employee of Bulmer's smuggled me into CM HQ for a sniff around. Seeing the stockroom was an eye-opener. Not only did CM have the Leader/Trailer/Dambuster/Highway etc catalogues, they also had a whole load of stuff that would later come to be called World Music - I was particularly struck by a six-disc box set entitled The Griots. Pretty rare stock, I would imagine — and presumably it's all still sitting there in Fortress Harrogate, where the sun never shines.

At the time they were reprinting various items from the Leader catalogue on cassette — Seamus Ennis for example. One would hardly expect Seamus to be a mega-seller, but there it is: they really did seem to have a plan for reissuing important but not necessarily commercial stuff. And nowadays CD-Roms are cheaper than blank cassettes were then. At what point did Satan enter the body of Dave Bulmer and consign all his good intentions to the dustbin of history? And why would any sane man want to attract the rage and contempt of virtually the entire folk scene? What is the capital of Upper Volta? etc etc etc...