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Planxty Reunion Whelan's Dublin, (l-R) Donal Lunny, Andy Irvine, Christy Moore
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I met Anne twice after that: in Edinburgh during the early spring of 1992, for the filming of a documentary sequence with Bert which I wouldn’t have missed for the world; and in 1997, on an island off Scotland, for a many-paged retrospective in Mojo. In between times Anne had helped me by phone and by letter with a Sweeney’s Men sleeve-note and with a Mojo feature on Led Zeppelin’s folk influences of which she, to her complete lack of interest, was one. David Suff’s Fledg’ling label had recently unearthed – if licensing something from Jo Lustig (Isle of Man) Ltd can ever be termed thus – Anne’s previously unissued third album, Sing A Song For You. Its lack of daylight had been entirely at her own insistence but, somehow, David had convinced the lost goddess of trad that what in 1973 may have seemed a travesty was, at this remove, a flawed-gem remnant of a better age.
Having allowed David to release the album it was largely for him and I believe at least partly for me that the request for a comprehensive interview on her own life, and the consequently unavoidable overnight stay on her own island, was granted. Mentioning that most musicians would probably sell their granny for a few thousand words in the magazine in question was greeted, over glasses of wine, with a mischievous grin and the raising of an eyebrow. Living on an island with no television, a rarely used mobile phone and unspoiled nature as far as the eye could see, the flimsy accolades of the music business were literally worthless to this born survivor. Personally, she really couldn’t care less, and probably never had.
For my own career, though, this was a big deal – my first major feature in Mojo, an upwardly mobile publication with class, cred and status – and I think Anne knew that. I remain grateful for her time, her friendship and her hospitality. Anne’s husband Pat – a retired forester dedicated to their shared pursuit of Tom & Barbara-like self-sufficiency on this barren edge of the British Isles – was far from keen, but put up pretty well with this rare intrusion from a past life. Taking two days to get there from Belfast by car, I stopped over in Glasgow with my friend Kate, a would-be actress and rather-not-be barmaid who would eventually give in to ‘the Man’ (aka the Edinburgh Civil Service), and went to a Martin Hayes concert. The inevitable review (reprinted below) kind of covered the travel.
I let Anne see and approve, by post, various drafts of the piece up to almost the final one. Alas, when it appeared, after sub-editing and with the admittedly over-zealous addendum that I was hoping to pursue a full-scale Briggs biography, she was not happy. It grieved me then, and still does, that something had happened to annul our association. Sadly, I have never heard from her again. It was some comfort to hear a little later from Ken Hunt, an enormously knowledgeable and dedicated polymath of non-mainstream music writing, that this kind of severing of ties was not unusual with Anne; something similar had happened after his own superb retrospective on the singer in Swing 51 a few years earlier. Trevor Hodgett’s experience with Ottilie Patterson, as we’ll see, is another case in point.
Mojo published the piece in March 1998, and I was delighted to find through correspondence from other writers and from readers, the like of which I have never since experienced with any journalistic work, that it had struck some kind of chord. (The version given here is, for what it’s worth, as close to the last Briggs-approved draft as I can recall, with a few corrections of detail in the light of subsequent work.) Later that year Sony reissued her impossibly rare second album, The Time Has Come. The following year Topic released Anne Briggs: A Collection, a beautifully remastered chronicle of all the Topic recordings plus two stray 1963 live tracks, licensed from Decca. Both releases included sleeve-notes from myself – Topic MD Tony Engle generously agreeing to push the physics of CD booklets to allow an 11,000-word history and appreciation, loosely based on the Mojo piece but rearranging its bones with the flesh of detail and wider quote-age. With all this activity, with glowing reviews and with Topic’s PR operator Harriet Sims treating her task as a labour of love, there were several significant interview requests, some at national newspaper level. As I understand it, all went unanswered. Likewise, extra-mile communiqués from Tony concerning the improvement of her royalty arrangements have yielded only silence.
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