William Leader, 1929 –
Born in New Jersey, his parents Bill and Lou were Londoners and the family returned to the UK in 1931. Ten years later the engineering firm for whom his father worked moved to Keighley in West Yorkshire, and it was here that Bill spent his teens and early twenties. Inheriting his father’s left wing political outlook, in the 1950s Bill sang with the Workers’ Music Association in Bradford, and sold WMA records sent up from London. In 1955 he moved to London to work for Films of Poland, part of the Polish Cultural Institute:
It was part of the cultural exchange. If you let us have a cultural institute in London, so that our folks can come and spy on you, we’ll let you have a British Council in Warsaw, so your folks can come in and spy on us, in a gentlemanly sort of way.1
Having volunteered for the Workers’ Music Association, towards the end of 1956 Bill was appointed to a new post: production manager for Topic Records. Topic had begun life as the Topic Record Club, where WMA members would receive a monthly 78rpm disc through the post – these included music recordings of ‘The Internationale’, satirical songs (often from Unity Theatre productions) such as Paddy Ryan’s ‘The Man Who Put The Water In The Workers’ Beer’, Soviet songs performed by Russian choirs and balalaika ensembles, and both Russian and British folk songs performed by The Topic Singers. Resuming operations after the war, the WMA / Topic output featured compositions by Shostakovich, numerous recordings of choirs from Eastern Europe and China, several discs of songs performed by Paul Robeson and, from 1953 onwards, performers from the post-war British folk revival, notably Ewan MacColl. Bill Leader’s first assignment as a recording engineer was to record the singer A.L. (Bert) Lloyd, and the concertina player Alf Edwards. From the late 1950s to the early 1970s Bill was responsible for recording a great number of 10 inch and 7 inch records – and eventually 12 inch LPs – for Topic Records. Early recordings featured leading artists of the time, such as Ewan MacColl, Dominic Behan, A.L. Lloyd, Louis Killen and the Ian Campbell Folk Group. At the same time Bill Leader was recording engineer on some of the first releases on Nat Joseph’s Transatlantic label, including the LPs Songs Of Love, Lust And Loose Living and Putting Out The Dustbin, both of which featured Stephen Sedley as a performer and/or arranger.
He was actually only a paid employee of Topic for a few years, as the company discovered that they could not afford to pay both Gerry Sharp, the general secretary, and Bill Leader. So Leader took a job at Collett’s record shop (a massively important part of the contemporary folk and blues scene, both as a source of records, and a meeting place for those involved in the scene), but carried on working as a sound engineer for Topic and Transatlantic on a casual, voluntary basis. This does not appear to have diminished the number of recording projects on which he worked, nor the importance of some of the records with which his name is linked. Not that these recordings were necessarily made in sophisticated surroundings – for instance The Watersons’ hugely influential Topic LP Frost And Fire was, like numerous others at this period, recorded in Bill Leader’s bedroom, while John Renbourn’s recollections of early recordings for Transatlantic had Bill “coming over to a pad I shared with Bert Jansch, setting up the tape machine in the sink and having us play in the broom cupboard”.2
He also went out with portable (or at least, transportable) recording equipment to make field recordings. These included the songs issued by Topic as The Roving Journeymen (12T84, 1962), featuring recordings of traveller Tom Willett and his sons Chris and Ben. The songs were recorded by Bill Leader and Paul Carter at Tom Willett’s home on a caravan site near Ashford, Middlesex in 1962.
In 1966 he helped the prolific collector Mike Yates make his first recordings of an English traditional singer:
Bill Leader, Topic’s recording engineer (and a man who taught me a lot about recording techniques), collected Fred en-route to my parent’s pub in Altringham. We recorded the album -‘Songs of a Shropshire Farm Worker’, Topic 12T150 – in my bedroom over a couple of days.3
In 1969 Bill set up his own record company, and over the coming decade he released many records which have come to be recognised as classics. The Trailer label featured some of the cream of the 1970s folk revival – John Kirkpatrick, Nic Jones, Dick Gaughan, Mike and Lal Waterson, Christy Moore and Swan Arcade, to name just a few. The Leader label, meanwhile was dedicated to recordings of traditional singers and musicians. Many of these recordings were made by Bill himself. For instance: the first two LPs by Norfolk singer Walter Pardon; A Song for Every Season, the 4 disc box set presenting the songs of the Copper family of Rottingdean in Sussex; and an LP by London Irish fiddle player Martin Byrnes, which was recorded by Bill at Reg Hall’s mum’s house in Croydon. Leader also put out LPs of other collectors’ recordings – for example, A People’s Carol, featuring Ian Russell’s recordings of carol singing in South Yorkshire pubs, and Percy Grainger’s 1908 phonograph recordings of Lincolnshire singers on the LP Unto Brigg Fair. Sadly, Bill Leader sold the labels to a company which then ran into financial difficulties and sold the business on once more. The result being that these classic LPs have been unavailable since the early 1980s; inexplicably none has ever been properly released on CD by the current owners.
Bill Leader’s life and times (and those of contemporaries with whom he came into contact) are being documented in fascinating detail by Mike Butler, in a projected 10-volume biography, Sounding the Century4. Of the volumes so far published, Volume 3 The Poor Man’s Only Music has proved particularly useful when writing articles for the Kent Trad website, covering as it does the activities of folk song collectors such as Reg Hall, Peter Kennedy and Paul Carter, and the background to the recording of LPs by the Willet family and Phoebe Smith.
- Bill Leader, quoted in Mike Butler, Sounding the Century, Volume 1, Glimpses of far off things: 1855-1956, pp180-181 ↩︎
- John Renbourn, quoted on the Folk Blues and Beyond website, http://www.folkblues.co.uk/artistsrenbourn.htm ↩︎
- Mike Yates, Time Has Made a Change – some reflections, Musical Traditions, 2021, https://www.mustrad.org.uk/articles/time-change.htm ↩︎
- See https://www.soundingthecentury.com/ ↩︎
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