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Arlo Guthrie
4
A long time ago Sandy Denny also wrote a song about Anne, ‘The Pond And The Stream’. And true to the lyric there’s something about the way she has lived, and still does, that’s enviable. Anne’s own song ‘Living By The Water’, both childlike and vaguely unsettling as the best of her writing, says it all: ‘Voices from the empty moor/ They call me past the stranger’s door/ Because I keep no company/ I’ll make no enemies’. It’s not some con, some ‘elusive artist’ hype, and yet neither is she unsociable nor especially eccentric – no more so than the rest of us. She doesn’t dislike people, but can live without them. And, likewise, without music. Her own children, Sarah and Colin, born in ’71 and ’73 respectively, only became aware in the late Eighties that their mother was some kind of legend. Eliza Carthy showed Colin an old photo in a magazine and he was stunned. As you would be. Even in her prime Anne Briggs recorded precious little: a handful of odd tracks in the early Sixties; two albums, Anne Briggs (Topic) and The Time Has Come (CBS), in 1971; an aborted third in 1973; and a lot of living in between.
‘If you want a reason why I stopped singing it’s ’cos I met my husband,’ she says, typically matter-of-fact, ‘which meant I got better feeding and I got a roof over my head. And I think that was responsible for me having kids, which stopped me singing. We moved up to a very remote area of Sutherland. You can’t just clear off and leave them. There were no babysitters, basically.’
Born in Toton on 29 September 1944, her mother (herself adopted) was from Northern Ireland, her father from Nottinghamshire. Both died when Anne was young and she was raised in Nottinghamshire by an elderly aunt old enough to be her grandmother, whose maiden name had been Briggs. Anne was a difficult child ‘but it was really awful for her when I suddenly went off with Centre 42. She had no concept of where I was at or what I was doing. But she came to terms with it eventually. Actually, there was one occasion when I was on television and somebody told her, “We saw your girl on the telly.” She was thrilled to bits, it was OK then – it was a level of achievement that was acceptable and understandable to her! But I’d really enjoyed my secondary education. I’d got a bunch of O levels and I was going to try and get into Durham University to do fine art but after a year in sixth form Centre 42 came along and I thought, Yeah, a bird in the hand’s worth two in the bush. Go for it.’
Centre 42 was an attempt by the Trades Union Congress to devolve culture and art from London to the provinces with a touring package show throughout 1962. It was a grand ideal, with the playwright Arnold Wesker at its helm and the two great ‘architects’ of the folk revival, Ewan MacColl and A.L. ‘Bert’ Lloyd, looking after the musical programme. Part of the brief was to involve singers from the areas the tour stopped in, and the second night was in Nottingham. Anne was among half a dozen locals auditioned for the concert by Ewan MacColl. He was suitably impressed and gave her a slot. She sang at least two songs, ‘Let No Man Steal Your Thyme’ and ‘She Moves Through The Fair’ – two songs that she would record live in Edinburgh later that year.
Her whole recording career, or perhaps more accurately ‘series of sporadic recording incidents’, and likewise the beatnik lifestyle, happened as a result of Centre 42 – not only playing that one festival, but joining up for the rest: ‘My family disowned me,’ she says. ‘I left home a runaway. They threatened to put a court order on me to keep me at home but, as I pointed out, it was only four weeks to my eighteenth birthday. But for a couple of years I was out on my own. After the festivals, the Centre 42 movement felt a bit guilty about all this and offered me a job in their offices in London and I had a very interesting six months as a “gofer”, nipping about all over London to theatres and galleries and suchlike. And I was getting gigs there on the back of it.’
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