The Story Behind Songlines

In April 1996 Gramophone, the classical music magazine, offered a world music supplement with its latest issue. It included articles on music from across Asia and North Africa. Simon Broughton picked up a copy, and was appalled. “It was very old-fashioned in its approach,” he remembers. “It was calling Korean music timeless and meditative, when actually there’s so much else going on. I mean it was partly because it was really just looking at classical traditions, but there was nothing on African music or Latin music or any other territory. You can’t call something ‘world music’ and ignore all these other parts of the world and the popular traditions that are going on there.” At this point, Broughton had been working on various ‘world music’-related projects on radio and TV, including the BBC’s Rhythms of the World series, and was co-editor of Rough Guide to World Music. “As one of the editors on that I had an amazing overview of traditions all over the world, even places that I didn’t know much about or had never been to,” he recalls. Incensed by Gramophone’s treatment of a huge variety of music that was only just being discovered widely in the Anglophone world, he wrote them a letter. Not only did they respond, they invited Broughton to their office.

When they published their next ‘world music’ supplement in November 1997, Broughton was involved. Flicking through the pages now, he lists what’s in there: “there’s stuff on folk music in Romania, there’s Egyptian popular music, there’s an article on revival bands, on the Klezmer revival, on the Cuban revival, which obviously mentions Buena Vista. There’s an article on Bulgarian voices, there’s Ravi Shankar.” World music was seen as a serious area of growth in the music industry and Gramophone decided the supplement should become its own thing, a new quarterly magazine on world music, and they asked Broughton to be its editor.

From the start, he was clear about what the magazine should cover. “When people asked me ‘what is world music?’, I would always say that it was something that had some traditional element in it, never mind how far away it had got from that tradition.” He adds: “I was always very aware that there were parts of music around the world that I wasn’t particularly interested in or passionate about, but I knew should be there. And then I’d find people who could write interestingly and enthusiastically about it.” The hardest thing was going to be coming up with a name. “It really was months and months of discussions,” he recalls. “I remember a conversation saying that you can either describe what it is and call it the ‘World Music Magazine’ or you can come up with something which somehow gives a vibe to what it is. I really didn’t like the idea of ‘World Music Magazine’, partly because already then people didn’t like the term ‘world music’ anymore. I’d read Bruce Chatwin’s The Songlines, which was sort of about Aboriginal culture, how they have these sung creation myths, and so it’s about music linking you to your territory and your homeland. I thought, well, it’s not much of an extrapolation to take that idea and make it relevant globally. It’s music that somehow comes from some defined place, giving you a sense of identity… That’s the sort of feeling I wanted behind Songlines.”

Simon Broughton with Peter Gabriel at WOMAD 2000 (Photo by Alex Newby/Jon Lusk)

Songlines arrived in 1999, debuting at WOMAD that same year and establishing itself as the go-to magazine for global music, although even by 2001 it had to face one of its biggest challenges. Gramophone and all its sister titles had been bought by Haymarket and following 9/11 there were all-too-real discussions about whether Songlines should continue. “Don’t quote me on this,” says Simon, “but I remember a discussion with someone saying ‘we just feel that the interest in music around the world is not going to sustain after this event.’” He laughs: “Maybe there were too many axis-of-evil countries that we were featuring.” So, after just 12 issues, Songlines took a year off as those who were close to the magazine worked out a way of becoming independent, and it returned in a larger format – the original was A5 – in the summer of 2002.

Why does Simon think it’s lasted 25 years while other music magazines haven’t? “There is clearly a big enough interest in what we still have to call ‘world music’, it’s become a part of regular music life. There are people interested in what music is out there, why it sounds the way it does, what its history is and who are the interesting new personalities and names. For me it’s always been that it’s not just about music, it’s about culture, politics and current affairs. Music is a way of looking at the world. That’s what I’ve always hammered on about in Songlines.” 

The first issue of Songlines