Books composed of journalists’ scribblings rarely succeed or, indeed, find a welcoming publisher.
My own attempt to turn a number of newspaper column on uses and abuses of language was an abject failure. A former colleague who is now a highly successful author read my draft and said, essentially, “drop it – you’re not a name and it’s a crowded genre”.
There are always exceptions. The first book I read in French, En Ligne, a translation of Ernest Hemingway’s dispatches to North American newspapers and magazines, was unputdownable and did well enough to make The New York Times bestseller list.
And now we have Philip Ward’s collection of magazine pieces published over a 15-year period, about an impressive line-up of artists, mostly but not exclusively folk or folk-rock.
My copy has just arrived. I had already read large parts of it in pdf form – something I dislike intensely – but what a treat it is to be sent a real book, one I can hold in my hands.
Ward is not Hemingway any more than I. But the roll call in his welcome slim volume speaks for itself: reviews, interviews and analysis of, with or about a long procession of singers and musicians living or now deceased. Look at the contents pages reproduced below. It is a truly fascinating short history of the sort of music Salut! Folk readers enjoy, with more than a few deviations.
A short selection:
On Marianne Faithfull, interviewed in 2011 (she died in 2025).
Ward on Faithfull: ‘To a degree she’ll alwas be imprisoned by her own legend. But much as her backstory continues to overshadow her, she seems to have risen above it now, to have reached an Olympian calm.”
Faithfull on Faithfull: “I don’t feel my life is a drama any more. I’m on a good even keel and I’m fine. Everything’s going along exactly as I want it to.”
On Mick Houghton’s Sandy Denny biography, I’ve Always Kept a Unicorn (Ward is an acknowledged authority on Denny):
“Sandy Denny was a bundle of contradictions… clumsy in everyday life, apt to trip over microphone cables or spill a row of coffee cups, she was transformed in performance into a poised, time-shifting diva, able to sing of the past as if it were the present and the present as if it was age-old.”
On Kirsty MacColl:
“I value her songs for many things, not least for their surging, anthemic choruses. You’d have to be cloth-eared not to join in …”
That gives a flavour but there is so much more. Read it and you will meet John and Beverley Martyn, Anne Briggs, Richard and Linda Thompson, June Tabor and Martin Simpson but also Alan Price, Paul Simon and Kate Bush.
I commend this book, published by Troubador Publishing, to like-minded music-lovers with the same words of mine that appear on the back cover:
“Warm, knowledgeable and at times revealing, Philip Ward’s fascinating series of essays revisits his encounters with heroes and heroines from the folk revival (and some surprise inclusions).”
Buy the book at Amazon using this link: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Folk-Rock-Between-Interviews-Overviews/dp/1806343657
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