This autumn, the world's oldest independent record label celebrates its 70th anniversary with a series of concerts on London's South Bank. The anniversary will also be marked by the release of Three Score And Ten, a set of seven CDs embedded in a richly illustrated hardback book telling the story of Topic Records, the English folk label that put out its first disc in 1939, just as Europe was sliding into war. The Man That Waters The Workers' Beer, backed by The Internationale became the first entry into what is perhaps the greatest recorded catalogue of traditional music in the world.
Those two songs, first released on thick, brittle shellac in 78rpm format, are included among 154 extraordinary performances spanning English, Irish, Scottish, American and world folk music. They date back to a recording of the then 75-year-old Joseph Taylor from Lincolnshire singing an unaccompanied country ballad, the haunting Creeping Jane, in 1908. The label's vast archive encompasses pioneering field recordings of music from around the world - from India, North Africa, South East Asia and Eastern Europe - alongside albums of Irish rebel songs, songs from the industrial cities of the North and Midlands of the UK, and the great singers and fiddle players of Camden's Irish bars. There are the great rural source singers and musicians of the British Isles - walnut-faced old men with brilliant names - Walter Pardon, Sam Larner, Harry Cox, Scan Tester - whose ancient repertoires still fuel the fire for this century's rising generation of folk musicians. Songs such as Sarah Makem's The Banks of Red Roses are once heard and never forgotten. As Bob Dylan once said: "All these songs about roses growing out of people's brains and lovers who are really geese and swans and turn into angels - they're never going to die."
It was the rediscovery of these old songs, given new life and a Topic catalogue number, that fuelled the folk revival of the 1950s and 1960s. Martin Carthy, Dave Swarbrick, The Watersons, Davey Graham, Anne Briggs and many more found their home, their knowledge and their philosophy in Topic's living library of traditional songs. The label's roots lie deep in the history of British socialism before and immediately after the Second World War, and in the Worker's Music Association, an offshoot of the British Marxist Party founded in 1936 by the composer Alan Bush. A good many of their early releases were sourced from the Eastern Bloc, alongside recordings by Paul Robeson, Pete Seeger, and other key figures from the international peace and anti-nuclear movement. "They put music out that nobody else would touch," the singer Norma Waterson remembers. "The early Party singers, Communist choirs, the Unity Theatre. It was the people's music, the people's fight."
The revival in traditional music, in which the label played an integral role, would also impact Sixties pop and rock culture. "Topic and the folk clubs were crucial to the rise of the singer songwriter in the 1960s," says the singer June Tabor, who joined the label with the first of a series of widely acclaimed albums at the end of the Seventies. "It didn't really exist before then, and the folk club was a place where someone could stand up and deliver their song, their path from the tradition."
At the same time, the label's championing of industrial song in landmark collections such as The Iron Muse and The Radio Ballads, which covered everything from the fishing industry to the making of the M1 motorway, paved the way to reorienting folk from the patriarchal, pastoral mores of the English Dance and Song Society and making it a music of the people, of the present, as relevant as your pay packet, as vigorous as a night on the town.
It is not too fanciful to compare the label's role in British culture to the griot tradition in Africa, whose singers and musicians are seen as living libraries of knowledge, lore and history. And the key figures behind the label - the likes of Bill Leader, AL Lloyd, Ewan MacColl, Reg Hall and current MD of Topic records, Tony Engle - were instrumental in sourcing and channelling this "mighty river of song" into a permanent record.
Engle took over the business in 1973 and has seen Topic through some turbulent times. The Eighties were not good for an independent folk label. Most fell by the wayside, but Topic has gone on to nurture the careers of major contemporary players such as Tabor, Eliza Carthy, Waterson: Carthy and Martin Simpson, while curating some of the most ambitious archive projects in its history. These include the 20-volume Voice of the People, comprising themed field recordings from across the British Isles. Further volumes from a newly acquired archive of recordings by Peter Kennedy including a triple album of great ballads and the only extant recordings of the great British gypsy singer Queen Caroline Hughes (made in a caravan near Blandford, Dorset and interrupted at one point by an angry farmer threatening eviction).
"You're dealing with two strands," says Engle. "Firstly, field recordings of traditional music, which is the stuff that excites me the most. But there you're not dealing with an artist who has a career. When you make a record like that, the making of it, the publishing of it and the maintenance of it really does the job. But when you're dealing with an artist like Eliza Carthy, you've got a lot of additional responsibilities."
Topic, and folk in general, has often operated on a shoestring - its early recordings were ad hoc affairs, with performers often bunched uncomfortably around a single microphone. "The company isn't driven by normal business concerns," Engle says. "But I have to make sure the bills are paid - which, if you look at the history of the independent record industry, isn't always the case - and to make the music the company was set up to do. It's a question of bringing those two together without losing balance. You can't go having mad dreams and thinking 'this one's gonna be a hit'. We've never looked for hits."
It wasn't until 1956 that the label had its first in-house studio, installed on the top floor of a building near the shunting yards of Paddington station. It may not have had the budget of EMI, but Topic attracted the best in the business - in this case, the recording engineer Dick Swettenham, who had cut his teeth at Abbey Road studios and would go on to make Britain's first four-track console for Olympic Studios where the likes of Hendrix, the Rolling Stones, and Led Zeppelin would lay down some of their greatest tracks. Paul Weller even named a recent album after the Heliocentric Studios in London that still uses Swettenham's Helios control desks.
From that upstairs room lined with panels of sand and egg boxes, and later at the label's current base in Finsbury Park, many classics of the folk revival were put down on tape. That the majority of those recordings are still in print is one of Topic's great achievements. There are treasures in this 70th-anniversary set that confirm the enduring power of the unaccompanied singer, of the Childe ballad, of folk as a living tradition, however far from the recognisable past we appear to be hurtling. Working your way through the seven discs of Three Score And Ten is a bit like slipping yourself into a submersible and plunging deeper and deeper into strange and uncharted waters, buffeted by tides of time and place. It takes you from big ballads such as Tam Lyn, via one of the Waterson's wassailing songs from 1965's Frost And Fire: A Calendar Of Ritual And Magical Songs, to stunning instrumentals recorded by AL Lloyd in Albania, or Louis Klegg's Blackleg Miners, a ferocious warning to strikebreakers.
Entirely different worlds jostle side by side, and the genius is in the sequencing. On the disc of Scottish songs, the extraordinary despair and passion of Jeannie Robertson's MacCrimmon's Lament finds an abrupt and contrasting release in the ragged martial cacophony of The Gallant Forty-Twa. The ghostly Twa Corbies follows, then the gusty accordion and voice of Davie Stewart, shouting across a parlour room in Dundee in 1954, before the highland pipes of John Burgess close the disc with the majestic Wandering Piper.
"It was Topic that first introduced me to folk music," says Tabor, echoing many others down through the decades. "It's an incredible living library of music that is always there. There's always going to be a new set of people listening to it and making their own music from it. Topic's biggest role is that it made it available." For Tabor, it was coming across a copy of Topic's EP by Anne Briggs, The Hazards Of Love, in a London record shop that shaped the future direction of her life. "I thought, that looks good, bought it, spent a month playing it over and over in the bathroom and taking it apart and learning to sing it. That's how I learnt to sing folk music."
Tabor will be singing again when she takes the stage for the Topic 70 concert series at the South Bank running that started on September 11 and will continue until Saturday, with a line-up including Martin Simpson and the Watersons alongside the acclaimed young singer Nancy Wallace of Owl Service, and Club Topicana, an evening hosted by Alasdair Roberts and featuring a roster of artists with new approaches to the tradition.
"The record industry is part of the fashion industry," says Engle. "You're making records for now. We're making records, if not for always, then at least for a very, very long time. That approach colours what you do. We're not interested in the next big thing, I'm not interested in being famous. I'm interested in doing the job, to serve the music. For me that is very challenging and enjoyable." Three Score And Ten is out now on Topic Records, topicrecords.co.uk. Topic 70 runs until Saturday at the South Bank and on September 23 at the Union Chapel.