Electric Eden: Unearthing Britain's Visionary Music

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After 664 pages, I’m thinking that the next wassailer, mummer or hobbyhorse at my door is going to get a bucket of molten death metal all over their jingly particoloured heads. An oversimplification of 60s/70s counterculture, but a crucial aspect of it, and Young explores it in juicy detail.

Rob Young's ambitious Electric Eden presents a flip side to the well-known story of the evolution of electric rock in Britain in the 1960s, a story of the rediscovery of England's native folk music in the early 20th century by the likes of William Morris and Cecil Sharp, who went from town to town recording and notating the music that would hold great sway with those musicians who became associated with England's less loud, more earthy music--the likes of Vashti Bunyan, Davy Graham, The Incredible String Band, Pentangle, Fairport Convention and Sandy Denny, Richard Thompson, John Martyn, John Renbourn, Bert Jansch, Nick Drake, and many others would each deploy traditional folk music to their own ends in various recombinant ways, writing new songs laced with the idealism of the exploding sixties youth culture, while paying homage to the spirit and traditions of old. There are a few too many 'tendril's and 'brew's, but his ingenious use of the pastoral vernacular, and his creating of neologisms and metaphors by riffing on album titles, is a joy to read: colourful and ambitious but precise, without the meaningless pretension of, say, '80s NME, or the drab, dryly factual contextualisation which seems to serve as music journalism today. As one-fifth of the iconic Spice Girls and judge on X Factor and America’s Got Talent, Melanie Brown, a.

At its frequent best, though, “Electric Eden” is a lucid and patriotic guided tour, as vigorous as one of Heathcliff’s strolls across the moors. unfortunately, i found parts of the book to be downright tedious, and at over 600 pages, it was just too long. In this groundbreaking survey of more than a century of music making in the British Isles, Rob Young investigates how the idea of folk has been handed down and transformed by successive generations – song collectors, composers, Marxist revivalists, folk-rockers, psychedelic voyagers, free festival-goers, experimental pop stars and electronic innovators. Rob Young has written such a richly detailed, evocative, and readable account of Britain's fascination with folk music that it's hard to believe it exists.

Delius's Brigg Fair contains an English folk song he learned from his friend and fellow folk-song enthusiast, Percy Grainger. A comprehensive and absorbing exploration of Britain's folk music, which serves, too, as a robust defence of the genre . Coulson was one of the hundreds of thousands who did not come home – but because of his poetry we glimpse something of his thoughts and experiences. His personal enthusiasms are all too clear: any folk afficianado will want more, or less, on certain artists: for me, there was more than I needed to know about the somewhat over-rated Heron, while a brave case is made for the relevance to the genre of the iconoclastic Bill Fay, but there's no detailed discussion of the extraordinary long-lost Shelagh Macdonald .Like an elephant in a hot air balloon Rob Young’s gargantuan Observer’s Book of Folk comes wafting towards us on a breeze of critical hot air. An educational programme will be run in 21 different locations in England with volunteers given training so they can help care for the collection and support the accompanying activity programme.

The poet-printmaker William Blake, Wordsworth, Yeats, Aleister Crowley, the modernist composers of British orchestral music, like Ralph Vaughn Williams, the folk-jazz fusionist John Martyn – they’re all in on it. They include the insecure but extrovert singer Sandy Denny, who fronted an early version of arguably the most important British folk-rock group ever, Fairport Convention, and the volatile jazz-folk bandleader Graham Bond who, as Young puts it, created "steamy, rhythmic workouts heavily infused with ritual magic chants and mantric voodoo". Both Bush and the WMA had strong connections to Topic Records, going back to the label's formation in 1939, and stem from an era before any of the major post-war folk revivals, as we know them, had actually taken place (Ewan MacColl and his gang didn't really get going until several years later). The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products.

Being an American, my exposure was based on what has been available to us, particularly during the time this book covers, that being from the 1950's through the 1980's. Folk music takes away the jazz cigarettes and granny glasses and substitutes the cruel sister, the hanged man, the demon lover, the unquiet grave, the foggy dew, yes, but it’s still a dream world fitting closely on the cultural shelf next to Lord of the Rings, Gormenghast and HP Lovecraft. There is sufficient space given to the major artists of this genre, particularly The Watersons, Pentangle, Ashley Hutchings many projects, The Incredible String Band Etc. The late-60s blossoming of Glastonbury was a revival of a Utopian project by Rutland Boughton, "communist, vegetarian and suffragette sympathiser", whose 1916 Glastonbury festival, supported by George Bernard Shaw, staged an Arthurian opera on a shoestring budget. But no one should assume that British folk music is as “up from the soil” as all that, and Young doesn’t make his case.