Writing

Editing fRoots magazine, 2010. Photo by Edd Westmacott for The Word

I’ve written about music since I was a young teenager, though oddly enough those very first ever paid published writings were about my glider designs in Aeromodeller, a hobby that got rapidly curtailed after I discovered folk, blues, jazz and beyond and became a weekend beatnik! My first regular writing gigs were columns for the Western Daily Press and Blues Unlimited in the 1960s, and then all sorts of publications through the 1970s including Bristol’s Dogpress, the national folk magazine of the day Folk Review, USA mag Folk Scene, the Farnham Herald, various album sleeve notes and one-off commissions for everything from guitar magazines to Melody Maker.

In 1979, the publisher of Folk Review had lost interest and offered it for take over, but having got excited about the idea of running a magazine and assembled a small team, it turned out that its financial position was so dire that we co-founded a regional mag called Southern Rag instead. By the mid-1980s it had grown into the international roots music title Folk Roots, shortened to fRoots in the late 1990s.

It eventually dragged me to London where I skulked in deepest Harringay from 1988 until I finally moved back to Bristol in summer 2011. It mainly occupied my days and nights for four decades until its its closure in July 2019, though oddly enough it didn’t allow me quite the time to do as much writing for its pages as you might imagine. I’m intending to make up for that in other pages or places in future

And at last, that book which I’ve often threatened (and people have insisted I write) is an actual thing. Title is ALIEN WATER: six decades paddling in unpopular music. I launched a Kickstarter crowdfunder in January 2025 in order to publish it independently, and to my astonishment it achieved 100% funding in 24 hours. The Kickstarter remains open for pre-orders until mid-February, and once it’s published it will be available via the Ghosts From The Basement Bandcamp shop and UK Amazon.

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Writing

 A selection of things what I writ in more recent years: all are copyright © Ian Anderson and may only be reproduced with specific permission (but don’t hesitate to ask!)
A little selection of fRoots editorials:

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