If some of this looks familiar, it’s because Stepping Up is a greatly expanded version of a vinyl LP first assembled by fRoots magazine in 1988 under the title Tap Roots. This 2004 update neatly celebrates both a new burst of interest in English roots dance music and the 25th anniversary of the magazine that put the original compilation together.

If anybody had thought about country dancing at all back in those now distant, murky days of the 1960s, the term would probably have conjured up half-remembered images of embarrassing junior school sessions prannying about to twee gramophone records or wireless broadcasts of dull bands led by ghastly accordeon players. If anybody had suggested that traditional English folk music had much surviving other than unaccompanied ballads, the idea would largely have been mocked. And of course the general assumption was that all the dance and session tunes were Irish, Scottish or even American – any notion of something distinctively English hardly existed.

But something stirred. A small circle of enthusiasts discovered English village musicians previously unknown outside their communities like Scan Tester in Sussex and Walter Bulwer and Billy Cooper in Norfolk, rummaged through archive recordings made by the BBC and early collectors, even dug out the few commercially issued ‘78s’ of English tunes. Tagged ‘English Country Music’ (country as in ‘rural’, not ‘western’) by its proponents, the robust style became increasingly popular amongst musicians turned off by the uninspiring playing of the dance bands then favoured by the English Folk Dance & Song Society, the often navel-contemplating aspects of the folk club scene of the day, and later-on wanting an alternative to the strongly Celtic content of the repertoires of the early folk/rock bands.

Here was an exciting new repertoire of polkas, jigs, hornpipes, schottisches, step dance tunes and waltzes, and a different instrumentation – melodeons, hammered dulcimers, concertinas, tambourines instead of piano accordeons, pipes, bodhrans. Even the fiddles were played in a different way. The tunes had a special character, a different spin on rhythm and a generally slower speed, which made dancers lift up their feet and step. They also had an attractive, deceptive simplicity that made for quick assimilation, but as one grew more expert these tunes would take on a powerful life of their own.

In 1972, the Stradlings moved to Cricklade in Wiltshire and Oak ceased. Engle and Webb joined with Alan Ward (later to edit a fine magazine called Traditional Music which published a lot of field research on English musicians) and Ken Lees in the excellent Webb’s Wonders. Rod and Danny Stradling set out to inspire young Cotswold musicians with their vast tape collection of tunes by traditional players and moulded them into The Old Swan Band.

In other parts of the country, the idea was slowly catching on too, as witnessed by the track included here from The Leeds Band. By the mid ’70s, through sessions at festivals like Sidmouth and Loughborough, many others were being turned in the same direction. The Free Reed debut albums by The Old Swan Band and London’s Flowers & Frolics (it’s rhyming slang…) resulted in numerous other bands springing up country-wide, often copying the repertoires from the Old Swan and Flowers albums in their entirety. Suddenly, ceilidhs or barn dances – nobody ever came up with a satisfactory new and more English name for them – became all the rage as dancers discovered how the lift given to the music by these melodeon-led bands was so much more exciting than what they’d been used to hearing. There’s a simple technical reason for this – the melodeon has different notes on the push and pull and thus the changes of bellows direction by the players punctuate the rhythm far more than the chromatic piano accordeons.

From this point onwards, musicians began to be drawn into playing for dancing from all directions. When you’ve experienced the thrill of playing lengthy sets to a pounding mass of excited ceilidh dancers, it’s hard to go back to people sat earnestly in rows! In Kent, The Oyster Band (then the Oyster Ceilidh Band, and seeking refuge from the pressures of an accidental hit record by some of their members under another name) were plying the P.T.A. circuit. They more than anybody at the time were discovering the joys of using English dance tunes as an exciting basis for wilder and wilder improvisations during lengthy sets, often bringing in musical influences from other styles they were interested in. The cry of the day became “The last one still playing the tune is a cissy!” They also were leading the way towards electricity.

Others were heading in different directions. The Cock & Bull Band, a Milton Keynes-based outfit, got quite heavily into writing their own original material, unusually including bagpipes in their lineup. For a brief period, the Cock & Bull Band actually became the Albion Band as they were hired en-masse by Ashley Hutchings when his previous set of musicians went off to form The Home Service!

As with all musical movements, as things progressed more musicians got pulled in and many swapped around between bands. The Stradlings left The Old Swan Band in the early ‘80s, which continues to this day as an excellent if occasional group. John Kirkpatrick and Old Swan’s Martin Brinsford joined famed folk singer/guitarist Martin Carthy and the Home Service brass section in Brass Monkey, who eventually got to play for dancing at a Sidmouth Festival Late Night Extra in recent times. New Victory ceased in the early ’80s; Pete Coe and John Adams formed another good and determinedly Northern based band Red Shift whilst Roger Watson moved in new and rather more multi-cultural directions, most recently with the band Boka Halat. Flowers & Frolics called it a day; four of their later members then joined with Chris Taylor (who had left the Oyster Band when they decided to turn fully professional) in Gas Mark 5.

Rod Stradling, once christened “the guru of English Country Music” by a Melody Maker writer, didn’t rest. Ever pressing forwards, he joined myself, Maggie Holland and Umps & Dumps’ Sue Harris – later replaced by New Victory Band’s Chris Coe – as The English Country Blues Band. John Maxwell from Cock & Bull and Jon Moore from ‘rogue folk’ pioneers Jumpleads were later recruited as we turned into a world-influenced, heavily improvising dance band called Tiger Moth. Not content with playing in just one band, Rod Stradling and Jon Moore also founded Edward II & The Red Hot Polkas, which later evolved into EII and later E2K. Sadly, the Edward II track which was included on the original Tap Roots album wasn’t available for re-licensing this time.

When Stepping Up’s fore-runner Tap Roots was put together in the late ’80s, it was intended to be a snapshot on a rapidly changing route but as things turned out it pretty much documented a whole phase of evolution. Over the next dozen or so years, the existing generation of musicians continued happily exploring styles that were by now well established. In East Anglia, John & Katie Howson’s Old Hat Dance Band included ex-members of Old Swan and Oyster Band as well as hammered dulcimer player Reg Reader who’s straight out of the local tradition with his grandfather’s instrument. In the thriving Oxford area, another ex-occasional Oyster (Andy Turner) and ex-Jumplead (Caroline Ritson) were to be found in The Geckoes. The Posh Band, led by melodeon player Simon Ritchie, included banjoist Ken Lees who’d been in Webb’s Wonders and occasionally John Adams from the New Victory Band. Ceilidhs stayed popular at festivals and a staple of private events, PTA functions and the like, and English tune sessions thrived at certain festivals and in pockets around the country. Generally, though, the eyes of the world moved elsewhere.

Sidmouth Festival every August is one of the main places where the clans gather. Thriving English tune sessions involving many of the veterans and lots of new players happen all week in the pubs and bars, whilst the festival’s Dance House is where the new generation of teenage and twenty-something dancers hit the floor in their energetic hordes. Sidmouth 2003 was phenomenal proof that English country music and e-ceilidh (as it’s now known) are back with a bang, and among the most popular bands were two who demonstrate the breadth of what you’ll hear today. Grand Union, from English country music hotbed Stroud, are old school, straight out of the mould of early Old Swan Band and indeed including Old Swan’s Martin Brinsford on percussion.

Meanwhile, from the other end of the country and definitely state of the art, are Northumberland’s Whapweasel, the nearest thing the current wave has to superstars. They’re pushing onwards from where Oyster Band and Tiger Moth left off, writing all their own tunes, adding a touch of jazz, ska, African music and beyond, and attracting an army of devotees to every dance. But there are legions more young bands out there – the popular Hekety and Bedlam deserve mention, for example – and the whole movement is buzzing and finally evolving again.

If there ever really was something called English Country Music it was always multi-cultural. Go back to that quintessentially traditional 1962 track 2 on this CD: it’s a polka played on instruments including melodeon and hammered dulcimer, none of which started their life in the UK. A fair bit of the repertoire of turn-of-the-last-century country musicians came from mainland Europe, a legacy of the craze for ‘German bands’ in Queen Victoria’s days. When the New Wave Of English Country Music started, the most important thing to do seemed to be to get a grip on the style and so there was initially a craving for some kind of imagined pure ‘authenticity’.