About the Bringing It All Back Home Team

Liz ThomsonBringing It All Back Home is the brainchild and passion of Liz Thomson, a London-based journalist, author and broadcaster and lover of the folk revival. She has written widely for newspapers and magazines, including, The Times, the Washington Post, Q and Mojo, for whom she reported on the Joan Baez sessions for Ring Them Bells at the Bottom Line. She has interviewed leading figures from the period, including Baez, Janis Ian, Judy Collins and Leonard Cohen.
No Direction Home: Bob Dylan biography coverAs Elizabeth Thomson, she was the co-author (with David Gutman) of The Dylan Companion,  and she was responsible for preparing “the author’s cut” of No Direction Home: The Life and Music of Bob Dylan by her friend and mentor Robert Shelton, the late New York Times critic who chronicled the Greenwich Village folk years and whose review of Bob Dylan playing at Gerdes Folk City is credited with launching his career. Originally published in 1986 and “abridged over troubled waters” according to its author, the 2011 revised edition restored much material about Dylan himself and the wider socio-political and musical milieu from which he sprang. The new edition was launched at the Washington Square Hotel on Dylan’s 70th birthday.

Mike Luba, founder of Madison House Inc, is a New York-based producer and promoter whose many credits include Pete Seeger’s 90th birthday party at Madison Square Garden, with Joan Baez, Steve Earle and Bruce Springsteen, as well as Seeger himself. His work on the tour and movie Big Easy Express with Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros, Mumford & Sons and Old Crow Medicine Show won him a Grammy. Last year he succeeded in reopening Forest Hills Tennis Stadium as a concert venue, raising $1m for the task.

Steve ColeOver the course of two decades, Detroit-born, London-based Steve Cole has amassed a wealth of directing and producing experience ranging through arts, music, history and biography. His subjects have included The Beatles; Stuart Sutcliffe, the Beatle who left to follow his calling as an artist only to die tragically young in Hamburg; Roy Orbison; ABBA; Maria Callas; Placido Domingo; Werner Herzog and Greta Garbo. The Beatles in ‘LOVE’ explored the collaboration between the band and Cirque du Soleil, leading to the creation of the hit Las Vegas show and album Love.

 

Anthony Keates, co-founder, is a marketing and business consultant working within the arts. He is unnaturally obsessed with British folk music and folklore and with vinyl LPs, of which he is an avid collector.