Folk - Leon Rosselson

I first heard Leon Rosselson’s name when Billy Bragg did a cover of his ‘The World Turned Upside Down’, and this is the first thing I tell him on the phone after he’s kindly returned my call. “I suppose a lot of younger people came to me that way,” he says, perhaps slightly miffed. “But I have been singing since the end of the fifties and my show in Lewes will be a jog through what is now nearly 50 years of song writing.” Is it fair, I venture, to call him a protest singer? “No, I think that would be completely misleading. This is the problem with such terminology, which is usually pushed by the media. It is a restriction on one’s freedom. A political songwriter would be closer, but I don’t like that either. And even though I started off in the folk revival, my music doesn’t have much to do with traditional folk, either, so I’m definitely not a folk singer.”

He does, however, do the rounds of the folk clubs, despite parodying them in the seventies in ‘A View from the One-Night Stands’. “They were very insular in the seventies, but they’ve changed a bit since then. I play the folk clubs because I write songs with words I like to be listened to, and in folk clubs audiences actually listen to your songs. To me songs are as valid an art form as poetry. I’m interested in the way words work. Their sounds, their colour, the impact they can make.” AL