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Subject: RE: Topic Records 70th birthday From: Reinhard Date: 25 Sep 09 - 05:51 AM I've got a question about a cover picture in the Three Score and Ten book. On page 79 there is Lal Waterson and Oliver Knight's "Once in a Blue Moon" with a picture frieze of yellow figures on a black background. My two copies of the CD have black figures on a goldish resp. yellow background. Has the CD ever been released with the cover picture as in the Three Score and Ten book or is that just a design study? |
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Subject: RE: Topic Records 70th birthday From: Reinhard Date: 24 Sep 09 - 01:00 PM I've already mentioned this casually in another thread but it fits here better: I have tortured my scanner in the last weeks and there is now an Illustrated Topic Records discography on my website. As it is based on my collection, it's not as complete as the authoritative Brocken / Banfield / Stradling discography at Musical Traditions but with nearly 400 entries it might still be usable. |
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Subject: RE: Topic Records 70th birthday From: GUEST,Ian Anderson Date: 23 Sep 09 - 07:45 PM It is indeed a fabulous artefact, and since everybody is plugging reviews there's one from Colin Irwin on the fRoots Site while the current issue is current. |
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Subject: RE: Topic Records 70th birthday From: dick greenhaus Date: 23 Sep 09 - 06:39 PM It will be available from CAMSCO as soon as my order arrives. |
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Subject: RE: Topic Records 70th birthday From: MoorleyMan Date: 23 Sep 09 - 12:48 PM There's a comprehensive review of the set on www.netrhythms.co.uk - check it out! |
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Subject: RE: Topic Records 70th birthday From: Guy Wolff Date: 23 Sep 09 - 07:56 AM SO much great music . A very large thank you from Connecticut !!!! All the best , Guy |
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Subject: RE: Topic Records - 70th anniversary From: GUEST,Derek Schofield Date: 22 Sep 09 - 06:34 PM It was very favourably reviewed in the latest issue of English Dance & Song magazine. Highly recommended! www.efdss.org Derek |
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Subject: RE: Topic Records - 70th anniversary From: longboat (inactive) Date: 22 Sep 09 - 05:50 PM Have my copy already |
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Subject: RE: Topic Records - 70th anniversary From: Folkiedave Date: 22 Sep 09 - 05:41 PM I bought mine and it came immediately. |
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Subject: Topic Records - 70th anniversary From: Thomas Stern Date: 22 Sep 09 - 04:24 PM Just received: THREE SCORE & TEN - 70 Years of the oldest independent record label in Great Britain. 110 pp book and 7-CD retrospective of Workers Music Association/Topic Records 1939-2009. laid-in 8pp Complete Catalog 1939-2009. I hope many will want to know about this collection. The CD's contain too few of the WMA 78's, mostly great folk material from the 50's to present, however there are a few tracks from the early period, including TRC1 THE INTERNATIONALE / THE MAN WHO WATERS THE WORKERS BEER. The book devotes the first 20 pages to the WMA and early Topic, then follows the great period of the 1950's-1960's, up to the present. Some lovely early jackets, labels, and amazing photos of performers. Noticed early Ray Fisher. Lots of treasures here - will be a pleasure to read, view the many photos, and listen!! For complete details see Topics website: Topic Records website Best wishes, Thomas. |
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Subject: RE: Topic Records 70th birthday From: Rain Dog Date: 22 Sep 09 - 02:52 PM I have just got this boxset today. Very well put together. I am looking forward to listening to i. |
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Subject: 70 years of Topic Records From: GUEST,Jonny Sunshine Date: 11 Sep 09 - 03:47 PM On the Guardian website today: June Tabor and Tony Engle talk to Jon Dennis about 70 years of Topic Records (audio interview) |
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Subject: RE: Topic Records 70th birthday From: Jamming With Ollie Beak (inactive) Date: 26 Aug 09 - 01:34 PM The Waterson Family |
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Subject: RE: Topic Records 70th birthday From: greg stephens Date: 26 Aug 09 - 11:47 AM Congratulations to Topic. How many organisations have conspicuously got it right for seventy years? |
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Subject: RE: Topic Records 70th birthday From: Jamming With Ollie Beak (inactive) Date: 26 Aug 09 - 11:37 AM Now this is the concert that has me really excited. The Waterson Family and The Eliza Carthy Band Friday 11 September 2009, 7.30pm Prices: £22.50, £20.00 |
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Subject: RE: Topic Records 70th birthday From: Desert Dancer Date: 26 Aug 09 - 11:16 AM A nice article. For purposes of the archive... Topic records – 70 years of giving a voice to the people Topic is the oldest independent label in Britain, if not the world. Not bad for a Marxist party offshoot that was started in a basement Alexis Petridis guardian.co.uk, Sunday 23 August 2009 Tony Engle is not a man much given to hyperbole, which is unusual in a record label boss. In fact, after 36 years in the job, he's still not entirely sure that he should be running a record label at all: he worries that the whole business of recording the kind of music he does runs contrary to its very essence. "The thing about folk music is that it existed prior to microphones," he says. "The singers I really loved, when they were performing in their heyday, records had hardly been invented. The music existed to serve the community. In a way, recording almost undermines certain aspects of the music. It's a strange contradiction that exists within it." He sighs. "But if you love the music and you love records, like me, you're forced to get into this circular contradiction all the time." Even he is forced to concede that his label, Topic, is unlike any other. It's not just its advanced age, although that's certainly a factor. Topic is currently celebrating its 70th birthday. No one seems entirely sure whether this makes it the oldest independent record label in the world, but it's certainly the oldest indie label in Britain – a fact it is now celebrating with Three Score and Ten, a beautifully packaged book containing seven CDs, biographies of its most famous artists and as many photographs of men in caps playing accordions as a human being will ever need. Nor is it Topic's bizarre stable of artists, although, again, you would be hard-pushed to find a label with a roster remotely like it. As you might expect, given Topic's venerable age, virtually every major figure in the British folk revival has recorded for them, from Ewan MacColl to Eliza Carthy, by way of Anne Briggs, June Tabor, the Watersons, Martin Simpson and Davy Graham, as well as innumerable traditional singers captured in priceless, aged "field recordings". Topic is responsible for some legendary albums ofthe genre: the Watersons' Frost and Fire, Anne Briggs's self-titled debut, Nic Jones's Penguin Eggs, Eliza Carthy's Mercury-nominated Anglicana, and the remarkable 20-volume Voice of the People series. But, over the years, its release schedule has proved far weirder than that list suggests; it has to be the only record label in the world to have put out records by Paul Robeson, Vanessa Redgrave, the crisply named Massed Choirs of the Glasgow Socialist Singers and the Glasgow Young Communist League, and Harry H Corbett, of Steptoe and Son fame, who sang sea shanties with MacColl and AL Lloyd on an album called The Singing Sailor. (Frank Zappa, of all people, loved this record, until his copy was stolen by an equally enraptured Captain Beefheart). The eccentricity of the label's output, Engle explains, may well be a case of like attracting like. "I recognised Topic was going to be a strange environment when I first went to work there," he says, cheerfully. A folk fan from Portsmouth, he fetched up at the label in the late 60s, having heard the managers were looking for "young blood". "The thing is, if you're interested in traditional British music, you very quickly find out that you're not just the only one on your block, you're the only one in your town. By definition, you're a strange person." Still, it's more the label's prevailing ethos, that, as Engle delicately puts it, "set us at variance with the industry". Before the arrival of two figures most closely associated with its early years, Ewan MacColl and his musical partner, folk scholar and singer AL Lloyd, Topic was the recording wing of the Workers' Music Association, an educational offshoot of the British Marxist Party: its original 1939 brief was to release "gramophone records of historical and social interest". Its first release was a recording of The Internationale sung by a surprisingly plummy-sounding choir, rather like being lectured on the need to bloodily overthrow capitalism by Penelope Keith. Its records were sold by subscription, and the organisers eschewed the commercial marketplace, seeing publication as an end in itself. The communist affiliation is now long gone; Engle, who took over the label's running after the death of his staunch trade unionist predecessor Gerry Sharp in 1973, describes himself as "never party political". But something of that original spirit of rebellion and independence seems to have survived. "You never make vast sums of money. You're ploughing more money in and keeping things in catalogue. That's one of the big things about Topic. The idea is to make records that are, if not instant classics, then records that will be here for as long as we have the medium to make them available. The music industry, by and large, wants to make money. It's a business, and thinks relatively short term. I always think long term. Sometimes we will decline to record people because, well, I think you're great, mate, but I think you're a thing of now and I'm looking for something that has its feet in the great tradition." It is, Engle says, an attitude in keeping with that of the music itself. "Folk music doesn't set out to seduce you, or to make the performer a star, or to make money – it exists for its position within the culture." This is, nevertheless, a policy that continues to amaze even its stalwart supporters. Legendary singer and guitarist Martin Carthy began buying Topic records in the 50s. "They were like a gateway into another world then," he recalls. "Folk was this subject I was interested in, and they had the information at a time when it was hard to come by, when Cecil Sharp House [headquarters of the English Folk Dance and Song Society] used to keep you out with cannons and rake you with machine-gun fire." Carthy started recording for Topic in the mid-70s, an association that continues to this day. "They never delete records," he says, with a hint of wonder in his voice. "Some things they put out sell two copies a year, but they stick with it. And they always survive. They even thrived during the vinyl crisis in the 70s, when other labels went under. They survived the slump in interest in the folk scene in the early 80s. They didn't make a bundle of money, but they kept on going." Is folk recession-proof? "If you're a small business and you're doing most of it yourself, you're not taking much money out of it – almost nothing will change it," says Engle. "Our commercial expectations were so low, and we had designed our business model" – he uses the phrase with a mixture of disgust and bemusement — "to fit that. I'm not saying it was totally recession-proof, but it didn't really affect us. There's an awful lot of business naivety, but it served to get us through the hard times. A more business-oriented company would have probably decided it wasn't worth going ahead." Indeed, Topic's survival is a staggering, inspirational tale of resourcefulness and of blind, fervent belief in music surmounting any obstacle. In the label's early days, some of their albums were 8in across rather than the usual 12, because, Carthy claims: "They would get a job lot of 8in vinyl blanks and a machine that would do them for nothing." Even by the time of Engle's arrival at the label, at the height of the late 60s folk-rock boom, things were tight: "I thought a record company was a big operation with a neon sign. Topic was in the basement of someone's house." Recording sessions didn't involve a studio, he says, but "travelling around with the company Revox in the back of a Morris Traveller and setting it up in someone's house. It was a question of: this is a good thing, I want to do it, what's it cost? Can we afford it? What's the worst-case scenario? We weren't thinking, this will sell 5,000 or 10,000 copies. We used to think, well, it'll wash its face on 2,000, but that might take five, 10 years to achieve. OK, let's do it." And so, remarkable music poured out of Topic, music that you suspect no one else would have recorded. It continues to do so: the label's next major project is another series of Voice of the People. The days of it being run, as Carthy puts it, "truly, truly on a shoestring" are some way in the past, although its north London headquarters are still resolutely devoid of a neon sign. "Am I surprised it's survived? Oh no," laughs Carthy. "It's a label that's gone out of its way to explore, and explore, and explore, and then put out what it finds". Three Score and Ten is released on 14 September. The Topic 70 festival is at the Royal Festival Hall, London SE1, from 11-18 September. Details: southbankcentre.co.uk |
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Subject: RE: Topic Records 70th birthday From: Jamming With Ollie Beak (inactive) Date: 26 Aug 09 - 10:57 AM Happy 70th Topic Records!! You don't look a day over...ummmmmm...anyway, the world's oldest independent record company with a catalogue the majors would give their eye teeth for and still going from strength to strength Charlotte Olivia Robertson ( Ms) woman in a bowler hat |
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Subject: RE: Topic Records 70th birthday From: Newport Boy Date: 26 Aug 09 - 10:51 AM Yes, printed in G2 yesterday, with a few more photos. It was on my list to post. A good article, even if Alexis couldn't resist the stereotype of 'men in flat caps playing accordions'. Phil |
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Subject: Topic Records 70th birthday From: SteveMansfield Date: 26 Aug 09 - 08:39 AM There's an article on the Guardian website about the upcoming 70th anniversary of the founding of Topic Records: the article is dated Sunday 23rd, but I'd not seen it mentioned here ... http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2009/aug/23/topic-records-70th-anniversary |
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