Ian A Anderson has, what he calls, a “wardrobe full of hats”. His career in the music industry has, so far, spanned musician, magazine editor, radio DJ, promoter, producer, photographer, artist manager, festival organiser, record label owner and numerous other music-adjacent activities that have arisen through his obsession with musicians and the need to give them the credence they deserve.

His book, Alien Water: Six Decades Paddling In Unpopular Music, released earlier this year, charts this varied and full – at times, overwhelming – career, and his fascination with blues, folk, world and other music firmly “off the mainstream”. The volume came into being for the same reason as much of Anderson’s work: the yearning for ignored, overlooked or ostensibly ‘specialist’ music to appear on a bigger stage, literally and figuratively.

“What I realised was that all the different scenes that I’ve been involved in, starting back in the mid-1960s, hadn’t been very well explored in print,” he explains. “People have written some amazingly misinformed stuff about the world music explosion in the 80s and the invention of the marketing term [‘world music’], but a whole load of the stuff that I do has not been recorded, so the idea slowly came up to use my story as a skeleton on which to hang all these other little bits of flesh.”

There was also a clamour of people – friends, musicians, former colleagues – asking that he put his life on the page, especially when the magazine he edited, fRoots, came to an end in 2019. “They assumed I had lots of spare time,” he says, “although, by then, I was heavily back into gigging again.’

Anderson would make notes about pertinent memories and then forget about ideas for a book. It was only when he read Happy Trails: Andrew Lauder’s Charmed Life and High Times in the Record Business (2023) – Lauder’s Liberty Records label had put out Anderson’s first album – that he developed a serious commitment to writing his life story. Then, he realised that 2025 would mark 60 years since his first paid gig. Though three music book publishers were interested in Alien Water, none could commit to publishing during this anniversary year and, like most occasions in his life and career, he decided to go it alone. A subsequent crowdfunder easily surpassed its target.

That first paid gig, 60 years ago, was the culmination of a period of intense musical discovery, which he terms in the book “reset day zero, where everything began again”. At his school record club, a fellow student played the Muddy Waters EP, Mississippi Blues. He was transformed. “It was raw, urgent, soulful,” he says. “It just grabbed me. It’s solo, pre-war country blues, but it’s played on electric guitar. It was just, ‘What is this? It’s utterly amazing’, and I wanted to hear more of it. That one Muddy Waters record took me to music from all over the world, British traditional music, jazz, God knows what else.”

He began to frequent the Swahili coffee bar in Weston-Super-Mare, where he heard more blues (“Muddy, Big Bill Broonzy, Sonny Terry & Brownie McGhee and Lightnin’ Hopkins among them”) but also jazz, folk and “even my first ever African music on a Miriam Makeba album.” He and his friends soon tried to learn this music for themselves, procuring guitars paid for by part-time jobs.

“I never wanted to do anything else,” he says. His parents were less enthusiastic. “My mother might occasionally come in and say ‘oh, that’s nice dear’, but my father hated music. I just played stuff in my bedroom with my door shut. My mother was interested in what I was doing but I gave her copies of my records as they came out, and when she had died, they still looked mint. I actually did a gig in the village hall at the bottom of their road for a local charity and they never even came to that.”

Anderson was not to be deterred. The following decades are brought to life, in colour and with precision, through the book. “I kept photo albums and scrapbooks. Being some kind of nerd, it was not intentional, but I never chucked out any paperwork for gigs so I have the contracts - or in the early days, the handwritten letters from folk club organisers - for every gig I’ve ever done”, Anderson explains.

His love of blues and folk led him to record and gig solo and in ensembles such as the Ian Anderson Country Blues Band, Hot Vultures and Tiger Moth. His frustration at the lack of recognition for his peers galvanised the decision in 1970 to develop The Village Thing, “the alternative folk label”, releasing records from Fred Wedlock, Pigsty Hill Light Orchestra, Wizz Jones, Steve Tilston and Dave Evans. A decade later, Anderson found himself at the helm of another label, Rogue, to capture the vibrancy of dance bands, including his own, Tiger Moth.

It was in the 1980s that world music – though it didn’t have that moniker at the beginning of the decade – grew in visibility and popularity, and Anderson hoovered up everything he could find, attending early WOMAD festivals, programming musicians such as Dembo Konte and Kausu Kuyateh, Ali Farka Touré and Jali Musa Jawara alongside English acts at the Farnham and Bracknell folk festivals he curated, and joining delegations to the Gambia. A love for the music of West Africa duly followed. Anderson later became deeply involved in the music, politics and people of Madagascar, taking an integral role in the development of the band Tarika. fRoots grew out of the regional folk magazine Southern Rag and was initially called Folk Roots. By 1985, it was an internationally distributed monthly magazine which profiled artists from across the globe –Flaco Jiménez and Thomas Mapfumo were both cover features.

Although Alien Water puts Anderson’s life at its centre, its contents demonstrate the collegiate nature of the music industry: the desperation to see an artist thrive and the collaborations that take place to make that happen. Anderson also shows that he’s unafraid of highlighting the darker side of the industry, naming and shaming the individuals with whom he clashed. “I’ve got a quote pinned up behind my desk by an American writer, Ann Lamott. It says ‘you own everything that happened to you. Tell your stories. If people wanted you to write warmly about them, they should have behaved better.’ That gave me permission,” he says. “I don’t give a shit anymore. I’ve entered the Shirley Collins ‘don’t give a shit anymore’ phase.”

I ask him what his role may have been, when he appraises his career. “Catalyst,” he responds without pause. “And that includes pointing people at stuff, for them to then go off and disappear down their own wormholes, whatever the word for that is. Wormhole-opener. Opposite to a gatekeeper, I never liked gatekeepers. I’m gate-holder-opener.

Ian A Anderson’s My World Playlist

Eleftheria Arvanitaki ‘Stis Akres Ap’ta Matia Sou’

Bembeya Jazz National ‘Moussogbe’

Bob & Ron Copper ‘The Sweet Primroses’

Spider John Koerner ‘Good Luck Child’

Orchestre Tout Puissant Marcel Duchamp ‘The Sheep That Said Moo’

Charlie Parker ‘Bird Of Paradise’

Miranda Rutter ‘Golden Blackbird Jig’

Frank Stokes ‘Downtown Blues’

Joe Strummer & The Mescaleros ‘Bhindi Bhagee’

Anna Cinzia Villani ‘Pizzica Pizzica Di Copertino’

+ Ian A Anderson performs at Bristol Folk House (Dec 7) before marking the 60th anniversary of his first paid gig – to the day! – with a gig at the Black Fen Folk Club, Cambridge (December 14)