In the early 80s the English folk scene was well covered in a magazine called The Southern Rag. That magazine, under the editorial guidance of Ian A. Anderson (the "A" added to differentiate him from the flute-twirling one), became Folk Roots, the leading folk and world music magazine in England. The success of that magazine has overshadowed Anderson's involvement in the early English country blues scene of the late 60s and 70s and the important part he and his band Tiger Moth played in the English country dance revival in the mid-80s. At the Folk Alliance Conference in Portland, Oregon last February, Anderson talked about his earliest musical influences and how they affected the way he approached the coverage of music in Folk Roots.

"If you want the exact moment all of this started, at the age of 14, people used to bring records every Friday to the chemistry lab at school. One Friday someone brought in an EP by Muddy Waters. At that point I had been interested in pop music. I heard Muddy Waters and was completely blown away. I found a bunch of people in town who had eclectic tastes and hung out at this coffee bar. I went there and behind the bar there were things like the first Bob Dylan album, Big Joe Williams, jazz things like Mose Allison, a whole real diversity of stuff. It knocked me off the mainstream and onto the possibility that there was a whole bunch of stuff which wasn't pop music but was really interesting....

"Tiger Moth never did rehearse once in its entire career. What we did was send each other tapes of different sorts of music. Rod would send us tapes and we would work out the shape of the tune at home. At a Tiger Moth gig we'd start the tune and go a few times through playing it straight and then someone would get an idea. John Maxwell would start a soukous style drumming and Jon Moore would get an idea for a guitar thing and I'd get another from that and Rod would probably be the last one anchoring the tune on melodeon. It would never go off rhythm, you always kept to the 32 bar polka. You could see the dancers knew it was right and held on to that.

"But when you made records you couldn't do that so the principle to the two Tiger Moth records were those instrumental hits that were three minutes long by people like Duane Eddy and the Ventures. They'd repeat the tune four or five times over, so we'd pick out the instrumental parts of the tunes we liked and recorded those. We still didn't rehearse, we played as live as possible and then overdubbed a few things. But it was always the three-minute approach.

"Finally after having done that, we thought wouldn't it be fun to play with other people, so we got Abdul Tee-Jay to play and one massive thing with Dembo Konte. The last thing was Orchestre Super Moth and we stopped for no other reason than lack of time. In my case Folk Roots was an impossible work load, Jon Moore and Rod had this parallel thing going with Edward II, and so on and so on. It was quit while you're ahead and we stopped because it seemed like the right thing to do. I still go to festivals and hear people playing like Tiger Moth and it's very gratifying. And that's that, I'm not a musician anymore. I do it for fun and no money now."

By the time Tiger Moth stopped, Folk Roots had become the voice of the English roots scene. "I always had the curse of the organizational flare. I've run festivals, I've run clubs, I've done agency work. In 1979 what folk press there was in England died. There were a bunch of regional magazines which were okay, but nothing special, and we thought, 'We could do that.' These regional magazines, even in their humble way, were a good thing for their local scene, they were a focal point and could make things happen. We thought the south of England could do one so we started this thing called The Southern Rag. It was myself, Lawrence Heath and Caroline Walker and we probably did it too well, it became the national magazine.

"At the end of the 70s, the first folk rock thing, the Fairports and Steeleye Spans hit a wall stylistically. The folk clubs ran themselves into the ground by being totally non- appealing to anybody. Then in the early 80s, the country dance thing evolved with a new form of electric band like the Oyster Band and Jumpleads. Then world music took off because of organizations like Arts World Wide and WOMAD, and then record labels putting out new stuff and the world getting smaller. From outside the folk scene appeared people like Billy Bragg and the Pogues and it all seemed to happen at once. We were a magazine that was suddenly at the center of all of this because we were the only ones who wanted to report on everything that was happening, that was interested in everything that was happening, and didn't fight it off but embraced it as an ally. So in 1985 we took a deep breath, went monthly, and went on the newsstand. And that was the end of my life as I know it!" As the roots music boom of the 80s continued, Folk Roots' coverage of it expanded, often, certain readers felt, at the expense of "English" folk music. Anderson dismisses the argument that he jumped on any bandwagon.

"Folk Roots has always reflected what is available. The second issue of The Southern Rag had a report on a Chinese concert, but there weren't many Chinese concerts you could report on. And there were no records coming out for review. The moment they did come out we reviewed them. The moment people like Thomas Mapfumo started coming to England, they were on the cover of Folk Roots. And the folkies complained.

"There was a posting on the folk news group on the Internet a couple of weeks ago where someone said, 'I hate Folk Roots. I used to subscribe, Ian Anderson has totally changed it from the magazine it was when I first subscribed in 1986.' I answered back, 'Yes, there is one single reason for this: It's not 1986.'

"We have always reported what is going on and there is this misconception that we somehow create what is going on. We don't; we report on it. You can't make musicians make music, you can only report on what they do. Yes, you can encourage people to listen to those musicians, but you can't make Ali Farka Toure and Ry Cooder make a record together.

"As the world shrinks, it's made a whole load of possibilities come along that were never there before. If I'm proud of anything for Folk Roots, it's that we may have created a situation where things can occur. We never made it occur, but maybe we set the stage for a few things to happen.

"I just want to do to people what happened to me when I first heard that record in the chemistry lab in 1964. And you don't have to be 14 for that to happen, you can be 50."

When asked if it's like hearing something for the first time and having a light bulb appear over your head when you make the connection, he was quick to agree.

"Yes, Folk Roots is not for people who don't have the light bulb. If you ain't got the light bulb, don't bother to read the magazine!"

Check the Folk Roots web page.