Trailer - Biography

Biography - Trailer

UK

Leader was the creation of one man: Bill Leader.
Bill Leader had the genius idea of creating a double-faced label after both his name and the different elements of the recording process. The Leader part of the tape being the excess tape at the beginning of a recording and the Trailer being the run-off tape at the end. Thus, Leader was the label which issued the recordings of the most traditional and "old school", authentic traditional singers, rural, farm workers and people who played for their own and others' pleasure but not as "recording artists". These were field recordings and took the listener back to the 19th and early 20th century.

The Trailer recordings were to be made of the cream of the Traditional singers who sang in folk clubs and who performed either on a part-time or professional basis to keep the music alive.

Sadly with fluctuations in the popularity of the "folk music" genre, it was not always possible to make enough money to flourish in a popular market. It turned out to be impossible to sustain the essentially "niche" area of the market, despite these very high-quality and important recordings. The sad reality hit at the end of the 1970s. First the whole operation moved out of London up to Yorkshire, from where Bill Leader was brought up and then finally it became clear that the company was no longer a going concern. A receiver was appointed and the whole company was sold to Highway records who already had a stable of talented singers and musicians in the folk vein.

When the same thing happened to Highway Records (based in Redditch, Worcs.) both Highway and the Trailer / Leader back catalogue were bought by Celtic Music. This same company was very systematic in buying up all the folk labels they could find (Greenwich Village, Sweet Folk And Country, Rubber, Black Crow, Dambuster, amongst others) and making very little of it available to the general public. Not widening the debate any further about the rights and wrongs of this policy (it has been discussed at length in other forums), the music itself is still quite difficult to access and as anyone using the material was pursued swiftly through the courts, not much of it has surfaced in the last 20 years.

These recordings remain a testament to Bill Leader and his team; Janet Kerr, Dave Bland and Bill himself, and there is no doubt that they have stood the test of time. Prosperous, the first Planxty album with Christy Moore, the first 4 Nic Jones albums, Robin & Barry Dransfield, Boys of The Lough, Dick Gaughan, Alistair Anderson, Pete & Chris Coe, Cilla Fisher & Artie Tresize, Lea Nicholson, High Level Ranters, Barbara Dickson, John Kirkpatrick, Tony Rose, Leon Rosselson, Martin Carthy, Dave Burland, Vin Garbutt, Roy Bailey, Martin Simpson (as a teenager), and so on. The list would include virtually everyone who was around on the folk club scene in the early 1970s. They were the best of the crop and many, many of them are still going even in the 2010s, producing music of the highest quality.

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