Vision & Revision: The First 80 Years of Topic Records

Topic Records grew out of the Workers' Music Association and over eight decades has consistently championed music made by working people. Almost all the stalwarts of the folk revival – June Tabor, Nic Jones, Martin Simpson – were nurtured (and still are) by Topic.

In celebration of its first 80 years Topic invited many of today's finest folk musicians to choose a song from the label's catalogue and reinterpret it. Vision & Revision is the result, 20 new tracks by senior figures including Richard Thompson, Peggy Seeger and the Oldham Tinkers, and younger ones, among them Sam Lee, Lisa Knapp, Emily Portman and Rob Harbron.

Their choices are revealing. Martin Simpson first saw the American singer Hedy West in a folk club in Scunthorpe and bought her album Ballads. His contribution, ‘Beaulampkin’, he learned from that record half a century ago. When he was 17, Martin Carthy heard Sam Larner, who was 80, singing and it shaped his life. Carthy, approaching Larner's age when he came across him, sings ‘Napoleon's Dream’. Sam Lee, fascinated by Gypsy singing, radically interprets ‘The Deserter’ as sung by Wiggy Smith.

For anyone who knows these songs, there is a deeper experience, a musical echoing through time.