Vin Garbutt ranked among the most esteemed “non-stars” in English folk music from the closing decades of the twentieth century through the opening years of the twenty-first. Vincent Paul Garbutt entered the world in Southbank, Middlesbrough, to parents of mixed Anglo-Irish descent. While still in his early teens he developed a passion for folk music and began visiting clubs even before he left school in the early 1960s. He continued to treat performing as a part-time pursuit, devoting particular attention to the musical traditions linked to his Irish heritage. At twenty-one he turned professional, and within two years he had prepared his debut recording, issuing The Valley of Tees in 1972 on Bill Leader’s Trailer imprint.
Throughout the 1970s he emerged as one of England’s leading writers of topical songs, giving special weight to environmental themes well before such issues commanded significant attention in European political debate. His material ranged across an unusually broad spectrum—workers’ rights, fetal experimentation, a firm anti-abortion position, and other topics ordinarily confined to news columns—yet his effectiveness stemmed in part from his knack for balancing these weighty themes with a conspicuous measure of lighthearted pieces. Refusing to temper either his convictions or his compositions, he found himself excluded from major-label interest, an outcome that caused him no evident regret. By forgoing conventional media visibility, the usual accoutrements of celebrity, and even a basic public persona, he attained “star” status on his own terms while producing recordings that remained artistically strong despite modest budgets.
Although the major companies barely registered his existence and his catalog stayed relatively compact, it contained notable entries such as the stridently anti-abortion Little Innocents (1983), which featured his memorable reading of Rudyard Kipling’s “If.” For more than two decades and well into the new millennium Garbutt drew large crowds of young listeners throughout Europe and stood among England’s foremost folk performers. His admirers included several of England’s most prominent veteran rock musicians as well as American singer-songwriter Loudon Wainwright III. At the BBC 2 folk awards in 2001 he was named Best Live Act and simultaneously received a nomination for Folk Singer of the Year. Vin Garbutt passed away in June 2017 at the age of sixty-nine.
