British Folk Music

In a rare and remarkable interview, the elusive folk singer talks frankly about her extraordinary life and her brief but indelible career

One of the wildest talents of her generation, ANNE BRIGGS retired from music in 1973, leaving only a handful of recordings behind her. Now, in a rare and remarkable interview, this most elusive of folk singers talks frankly with Jim Wirth about her extraordinary life, her brief but indelible career – and why it had to end so soon.

By Jim Wirth

Anne Briggs is reading the labels attached to the trees in Kew Gardens. Slight but steely, she veers off the path at every turn, silently trampling across lawns and occasionally clambering up raised beds. If she could drown out the noise of the aeroplanes coming in to land at Heathrow, she might almost be in her element. The most mythologised singer of the 1960s folk revival has lived in rural Argyll for the past few decades, and her animal instincts have been frazzled by a rare visit to London to attend Topic Records’ 80th-birthday celebrations at Cecil Sharp House. Dressed today in jeans, a red zip-up jumper and hiking shoes, she reluctantly comes out of the greenery and folds herself into a seat in Kew’s café. “I find being in the city totally devastating,” she tells Uncut, hands in constant motion. “Bad. I lose my sense of direction. I get lost. All the time, I get lost.”

Briggs was no less disoriented when she first moved to the capital aged 17, drawn south from nottinghamshire by the prospect of independence more than recognition. An instinctively brilliant interpreter of traditional song, Briggs became a subtle, elliptical writer on a par with her on-off boyfriend Bert Jansch, with a dangerous reputation to match. In a 1971 edition of Sounds, folk critic Jerry Gilbert summed the footloose Briggs up as “a female Kerouac”. However, the 74-year-old is adamant that her rambling role model was never On The Road’s Dean Moriarty, but instead the feral child of Rudyard Kipling’s Jungle Book. “I learned to read when I was about five years old and all I wanted to be was Mowgli,” she says. “Mowgli could do all of the things I wasn’t allowed to do.”

Briggs effectively retired from music in 1973, after deciding that a lone foray into folk rock – released decades later as Sing A Song For You – was not good enough to be released. Pregnant with the second of her two children, she abandoned what was left of her singing career to work in some of Britain’s remotest places with her partner, forester Pat Delap.

“I’ve always been an outside kind of person,” she says, struggling to be heard above the sound of the air conditioning. “I’ve been a professional gardener in one form and another. I’ve spent the past 20 years outdoors; I had a contract with the Forestry Commission and then with the Crown Prosecution Service, helping the guys who are doing community service – keeping their clients occupied.”

In 11 years as a singer, Briggs released an EP and two full-length albums, as well as recording tracks for two Topic Records compilation albums – 1963’s The Iron Muse and 1966’s saucy The Bird In The Bush – and 1963 and 1964’s Edinburgh Folk Festival LPs. Even factoring in Sing A Song For You and “Four Songs” – a more recent EP of pieces scavenged from old radio sessions and a live tape – her entire recorded output amounts to barely three hours of music. However, the extraordinary power of her voice, supernaturally clear and eternally distant, has given Briggs an abiding appeal like few of her contemporaries. “I love the almost dispassionate delivery of Annie, and the starkness,” modern folk polymath Eliza Carthy tells Uncut. “The directness of the delivery and the purity of her voice – it’s like a dagger. It cuts right through you.”

“It’s all there on the albums,” adds Steve Ashley, Briggs’ long-term friend and one-time collaborator. “You can still hear that magic. She was also completely unpredictable.”

On bad nights, Briggs dissolved on stage, forgetting lyrics and abandoning songs as she battled with her profoundly ambivalent attitude to performing. She always sang with her eyes tight shut, making no attempt to reach out to the crowd; her transcendent nights might be the ones when she managed to blank the audience out entirely. “I was always singing to myself,” she says, momentarily cheery. “I hated being in front of an audience. I was nervous. I was just so fucking nervous. I’m so fucking nervous being here with you. I didn’t like being watched. I didn’t like having my photograph taken. Perhaps I felt that I was never empowered to be important.”

Anne Briggs was born in Toton, Nottinghamshire, on September 29, 1944. Now one of Nottingham’s western suburbs, Briggs says it was “a little rural pocket” during her childhood. Her upbringing was no bucolic idyll, though. World War II cost Briggs both her parents; her father – a sapper – contracted tuberculosis while on active duty, and her mother – a nurse – was diagnosed with the same condition at the time that her only daughter was born, dying when Briggs was five.

“She never left hospital,” Briggs says. “I only have one memory of her, which is looking up at this lady who’d been painted. It was a big day for her and the nurses: her daughter’s coming to visit her, and they made her up, bright red. It frightened me. She was like a puppet.”

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