For 20 years I have done nothing but sing songs. In the songs I choose, I believe I am continuing the political work in which I have always been involved, either as a teacher, a lecturer, an academic or a folk singer.

In fact, sometimes the two worlds – of folk singing and social work – overlap. I was in Australia some years ago when a young woman came up and asked “are you the same Roy Bailey who produced the book entitled, Radical social work?” I said I was. She asked if I would be in town for the next couple of days. When I said I would, she replied “good, I’ll come with my book for you to sign tomorrow.” I was flattered and surprised!

This exchange leads me to ask, what was it about that book that made it so popular and left such an imprint?

Looking back, radical social work was formed out of events at the end of the 1960s. In 1968 I was invited to attend the initial conference known as The York Symposium. We were a group of criminologists and Social Theorists, critical of the positivistic approaches to the study of crime and delinquency that dominated such studies at the time. We eventually morphed into the National Deviancy Conference. We met regularly at York University hosted by Laurie Taylor and the Department of Sociology. We listened to many excellent presentations from sociologists and criminologists, including Stuart Hall, Laurie, Stan Cohen and others. These were exciting times.

After some time many of the participants argued that while listening to these albeit interesting contributions, we really were only talking to ourselves and not engaging with the world around us. Many responded by focusing their research agendas on problems and policies of the ‘real world’. Some, like Jock Young, became involved in the ‘new criminology’. Mike Brake and I turned our attention to social welfare and social work.

In 1967 I moved to Bradford University from Enfield College of Technology – which was, in many ways developing quite radical approaches to course development. At Bradford I was in a building shared by various departments of social science, including social work.