HE MAY not be a member of Gomez and he may not have tried to kill Princess Anne, but if there is one thing Ian F Ball has done over the years, it is give the people of Saddleworth a good tune.
Born in Stockport and now living in Lees, it has been more than 50 years since the folk musician picked up his first guitar from Boots aged 14.
In the decades since, Ian’s “off and on again” musical career has seen him go from stage to stage across the UK – while his songs have travelled across the world many times over.
On Friday, August 14, he once again found himself delighting Saddleworth’s friends and strangers with his latest concert ‘A Feast of Folk’, held at Uppermill Methodist Church.
Dozens of supporters sung along as Ian and friends gave a musical retelling of three centuries’ worth of industry and heritage, including new song ‘The Great Derbyshire Lead Rush’, inspired by the rise and fall of the region’s lead mining industry.
“I first did the performance in the Millgate Arts Centre, and we got about 60 people in the bar area,” he said. “So we said, ‘Alright, let’s put it on the main stage’. And we got it pretty full!
“Part of the performance is ‘The Great Derbyshire Lead Rush’, of course. In the 1970s, BBC North West did a series of six programmes called ‘Ballad of the North West’, and each one looked at a particular story.
“Some were about the coal mining industry, and one of them was a narrated piece called ‘The Great Letters’, but the band that did the music was the band that my dad was in. So I’ve got the original BBC scripts!
“I got a couple of pals I met at the Moorgate Theatre and said, ‘If I take a look at this and jiggle it about, would you like to be involved?’ And they just snapped my hands off! So, that’s what we’ve got.”
It’s been a long and “ping-ponging” career for Ian, who says his love of music had been sparked by his own father’s time on the stage.
“My first experience of music was probably roundabout when I was four-years-old,” he added.
“My dad played in a skiffle group, Bullock Smithy, and I used to sit on the stairs when I should have been in bed, listening as my dad played guitar and piano and accordion. Then he’d come out, and shout, ‘Get off to bed!’.
“I’d get told off, but having music around me was just like osmosis – it seeped into the skin. Eventually that skiffle group became a folk group and in the 1980s, I got to join the band that I’d grown up with.”
Ian would go on to play in a variety of groups, including for a women’s Morris team in Stockport, before later getting into barn dances and dance music. He also eventually got into theatre, including the Saddleworth Players in Delph.
Now splitting his time between various pursuits and becoming a multi-instrumentalist along the way, Ian – who would eventually pick up the guitar, melodeon, and harmonica alongside singing – would soon be jetting off to strum around the world.
‘Trip to Moscow’ was written after his first visit to the Russian capital in 1988, alongside his fellow Morris players, and later included in his first book of tunes ‘Better Late than Never’.
Another of his songs would later reach a festival in Hungary, only launching his music further.
Little did he know, these songs would also be picked up by a handful of bands in America – who were themselves equally overjoyed to meet Ian some time later.
“In 1988, we went to Moscow for a week-long international dance festival,” he said. “While playing there, I wrote up a tune called ‘Trip to Moscow’, and that got picked up by I think three American bands.
“A friend of mine in Greenfield went to a music festival in Hungary and was playing some of my tunes. There she discovered that an American band had recorded my tunes because they just picked it up out of the aether from somewhere, and it had just got passed by word of mouth. This is how cult music evolves!
“I contacted them, and they sent me the CD. They made sure that there was credit for it, because they didn’t know who written it. It all just grew from there.
“There’s a YouTube video somewhere of one of these bands playing a dance somewhere in America, playing my tune, and there’s a room of what must be 150 people dancing to a tune that came out of the nine inches between my ears.
“And it blows my mind that I’m some 6,0000 miles away, but these people are happy and smiling at something I’ve created.”
As for ‘Better Late than Never’, “that was all photocopied and stapled together, virtually.
Ian explained: “It was pre-Windows, so the first copies were handwritten and then photocopied. I must’ve sold about 20 or 30 copies, and though I don’t know if’s been catalogued yet, but there is a copy of my book in the Library of Congress in the United States.
“A friend of mine placed it there: he was on a trip and snuck it in. ‘I’ll just bang a copy in there for you!'”
And so Ian’s career continued, performing on stages as either a musician, an actor, or a close up magician for more than two decades.
That was until 2020, when the world’s venues would be suddenly shuttered overnight.
For many people, the Covid-19 pandemic put many things to an abrupt end – but not so for Ian. In fact, according to him: “It was fun, and I certainly honed my guitar skills.
“At the beginning of lockdown, I thought, ‘What should I do? I’m going to record live to camera every day on Facebook.’ I got a bit clever with the free editing software, but how naïve it was! I did 70 days and it was well received by people.
“One day I got sent a link to a poem written by Philippa Atkins, in the Halifax area, and when I read it I immediately had a tune in my head and recorded it. I thought it better to ask for forgiveness than permission.
“A day later I found Philippa and sent her the video, and thank goodness, she loved it. It touched a lot of people, and since then we’ve done a couple of other collaborations. It’s all grown since then.”
Now with his latest performance under his belt, Ian shows no signs of slowing down.
A songwriting competition in Mossley is Ian’s next port of call, while the ‘Feast of Folk’ tour continues to Stalybridge in September, and Glossop in October.
He is also working hard on his second “book of tunes”, this time called ‘Another One Too Many’. While currently in production, he hopes it may be available next year.
More information about Ian and the ‘Feast of Folk’ tour is available here.
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