One of the wildest talents of her generation, Anne Briggs retired from music in 1973, leaving only a handful of recordings behind her.

In a rare and remarkable interview in the latest issue of Uncut – in shops now and available to order online here – this most elusive of folk singers talks frankly with Jim Wirth about her extraordinary life, her brief but indelible career, and why it had to end so soon.

Order the latest issue of Uncut online and have it sent to your home!

“I’ve always been an outside kind of person,” says Briggs. “I’ve been a professional gardener in one form and another. I’ve spent the past 20 years outdoors; 
I had a contract with the Forestry Commission and then with the Crown Prosecution Service, helping the guys who are doing community service – keeping their 
clients occupied.”

In 11 years as a singer, Briggs released an EP and two full-length albums, as well as recording tracks for two Topic Records compilation albums – 1963’s The Iron Muse and 1966’s saucy The Bird In The Bush – and 1963 and 1964’s Edinburgh Folk Festival LPs. Even factoring in Sing A Song For You and “Four Songs” – a more recent EP of pieces scavenged from old radio sessions and a live tape – her entire recorded output amounts to barely three hours of music. However, the extraordinary power of her voice, supernaturally clear and eternally distant, has given Briggs an abiding appeal like few of her contemporaries.

“I love the almost dispassionate delivery of Annie, and the starkness,” modern folk polymath Eliza Carthy tells Uncut. “The directness of the delivery and the purity of her voice – it’s like 
a dagger. It cuts right through you.”

“It’s all there on the albums,” adds Steve Ashley, Briggs’ long-term friend and one-time collaborator. “You can still hear that magic. She was also completely unpredictable.”

On bad nights, Briggs dissolved on stage, forgetting lyrics and abandoning songs as she battled with her profoundly ambivalent attitude to performing. She always sang with her eyes tight shut, making no attempt to reach out to the crowd; her transcendent nights might be the ones when she managed to blank the audience out entirely. “I was always singing to myself,” she says, momentarily cheery. “I hated being in front of an audience. I was nervous. I was just so fucking nervous. I’m so fucking nervous being here with you. 
I didn’t like being watched. I didn’t like having my photograph taken. Perhaps I felt that I was never empowered to be important.”

“I resented hugely, from the age of about 11, the way that girls were treated. I wasn’t allowed to wear trousers! I was a real outdoor girl, out in the woods all the time, and if you haven’t got trousers you just end up with scratched legs.

“In the village I came from I was known as ‘the Bohemian’,” she says, rolling her eyes. “I was quite hard work for my uncle and aunt, because we were in this little 
village community and I wasn’t behaving in the right way. I didn’t 
see it that way. I just saw there was an inevitability that I had to pursue all possibilities, and I was particularly pissed off with the 
role in life for working-class girls. So pissed off. It was awful.” She twists her fingers. “That I would be a hairdresser. I was a clever girl! 
A hairdresser! That was the aspiration: your own little salon.”

Such was her unworldliness that she spent part of the summer of 1967 living alone on a beach in the west of Ireland, an experience she recounted on her stark signature tune “Living By The Water” – key line: “Because I need no company, I make no enemies.”

“I did live on a beach,” she says. “Alone. For several weeks. I was totally happy with that. I didn’t want 
to be tied down; anybody putting pressure on me, 
I didn’t want it.”

You can read much more from this extraordinary encounter with Anne Briggs in the current issue of Uncut, in shops now with John Lennon on the cover.

The April 2019 issue of Uncut is now on sale in the UK – with John Lennon on the cover. Inside, you’ll find Keith Richards, Anne Briggs, Edwyn Collins, Lou Reed, Humble Pie, Robert Forster, Jenny Lewis, James Brown and much more. Our 15-track CD also showcases the best of the month’s new music, including Pond, Ex Hex, Hand Habits, Lambchop, Stephen Malkmus, Kel Assouf and Patty Griffin.

A quick one from me this week, as I’m running between meetings, an album playback and writing, but just to remind you that the current issue of Uncut is on sale – you can read more about it here.

Also in the shops this week is our latest Ultimate Genre Guide. This is dedicated to Electronic Pop, and very fine it is too. It’s in shops now – or you can order it from our online store by clicking here. Here’s John Robinson, our one shots editor, to tell you more about it…

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So why electronic pop, and not just “synth pop”? For this latest edition of the Ultimate Genre Guide, it’s mainly a question of not wanting to narrow unduly the broad and interconnected world of music made with electronic instruments.

Certainly, an important part of this magazine reflects the triumphs and the personalities of that vivid period in UK pop which Neil Tennant (himself one half of “the last of the 1980s synth duos”) remembered as being a time when “art students were in charge”.

He’s talking Human League, Soft Cell, Heaven 17, Art Of Noise and many of the bands that you can find written about in this magazine. No-one ever called New Order or Depeche Mode students, but in a time when a population was still getting its head around the concept of the video recorder, they too were in the vanguard of bands presenting startlingly modern pop.

But inside, you’ll also find coverage of events either side of this tuneful explosion. You’ll hear from Brian Eno and Tony Visconti, who have just spent a productive time with a rejuvenated David Bowie, fresh from making (i)Low(i) in Berlin and discernibly under the influence of the music made by Cluster at Forst and by Kraftwerk in Dusseldorf.

Kraftwerk’s influence, getting stuck into the wires of electronic music before it even had a circuit diagram, is a key feature of the magazine. At this early stage, experimentation feels a bit more a matter of actual electronics, hands-on and slightly untidy – more to do with cables and soldering irons than simply slickly selecting an attractive sound and writing a song. As Giorgio Moroder describes it, it can be a pretty basic business.

At one end of this, this means Bernard Sumner as he describes himself in his autobiography: late at night in his parents’ home, assembling the synthesizer kit which will help plot Joy Division’s journey into New Order. Emerging at the other end of the 1980s, it will come to mean the fragmenting of Kraftwerk’s initial electronic template into new and unexpected shapes. Following the trail will lead in one direction to electro and hip hop, in another to techno and all points north. As you will read, electronic pop’s beat moves between continents and can still be heard loudly today.

Inside this magazine you will be able to read deep and insightful new writing about the key players from within this movement, and entertaining archive features about them. As much as these groups might have effected a technological/artistic revolution within mainstream pop, it’s refreshing to see that some fundamental features of the engagement still apply: it’s all about the music, but “larks on tour” remains a trope of rock writing that remains intact from earlier times. As much as the players in this magazine embrace technology, these are still vibrant and driven personalities much as we ever knew them.

As you would maybe hope in a musical form, in its first decade or so electronic pop evolved and became more widely appreciated – a development you might see embodied perfectly by the Human League’s evolution from college project to chart success – but never quite became domesticated. Things certainly became tidier, less prone to blow a fuse, but the music could still unsettle the order of things. For some the polished productions of the Pet Shop Boys exemplified the flashiness of the mid 1980s. A rather more attentive listen, however, revealed that the band were coldly evaluating their times – and, as you might hope, keenly pushing on into the future. See you there!

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The April 2019 issue of Uncut is now on sale in the UK – with John Lennon on the cover. Inside, you’ll find Keith Richards, Anne Briggs, Edwyn Collins, Lou Reed, Humble Pie, Robert Forster, Jenny Lewis, James Brown and much more. Our 15-track CD also showcases the best of the month’s new music, including Pond, Ex Hex, Hand Habits, Lambchop, Stephen Malkmus, Kel Assouf and Patty Griffin.