Electric Eden: Unearthing Britain's Visionary Music

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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. If many of the acts that "flourished" during folk's glory years sold zilch, while other acts enjoyed brisk business after the genre was supposedly in terminal decline, does this mean that Young's generalisations are based purely on aesthetics?

you're a long-term lover of the music, and an incurable collector of the records where it lives, then Young is just another one of us . The interview was conducted over a couple of days and Roy was kind enough to host it at his home in West Cork. In 2010 he published his 650-page history of folk music and the British imagination, from the late 19th century to the present, 'Electric Eden: Unearthing Britain's Visionary Music' (Faber and Faber). His book throws plenty of lightning, and it will have you scrambling to download some of the music that’s filling his head. As clubland decadence turned to darkness, its self-publicised king, Michael Alig, committed one of the most notorious crimes of New York’s recent history – the violent murder of Angel Melendez.In the face of British folk s sprawling diversity, Young s greatest achievement is to locate a real sense of continuity, a unifying flow that underpins decades, if not centuries, of artistry . I started with great enthusiasm, was delighted to find out more about the sometimes dubious activities of the Victorian and Edwardian folk song collectors, and then about the impact of traditional music on the likes of Vaughn Williams and Benjamin Brittain, before getting to the bit I really thought I was going to enjoy, the period from the late 50's through to the early '70's. Well I guess this builder’s hodsworth of paper will do for the definitive history of visionary folk and folk-inspired English and a little bit Scottish music until the real one comes along. That is one of many complex questions that resounds through Electric Eden, a book that, for the most part, is a surefooted guide to the various tangled paths the English folk song has since been taken down by classicists, collectors, revivalists, iconoclasts, pagans, psychedelic visionaries, punks and purists.

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. Krim’s ecstatic catalog suggested a sense of the “old, weird America” that fed Greil Marcus’s essential 1997 book about American folk culture and music, “Invisible Republic: Bob Dylan’s Basement Tapes. Cecil Sharp, who subsequently travelled throughout Britain collecting old songs, is now regarded as the father of the English folk-song revival. Marcus examined, through Dylan and the Band, as if in Imax wide-angle, “how old stories turn into new stories.

The songs were, in fact, the transmitters of those myths, evoking an older, predominantly agrarian England that increasingly existed only in memory. In some periods there was overlap between the two, however, as Rob Young shows in this chronicle of mainly British 1970s music. This led to an exploration of past folk artists so Nick Drake, John Martyn and Vashti Bunyan came into my radar . An attempt to isolate the 'Britishness' of British music - a wild combination of pagan echoes, spiritual quest, imaginative time-travel, pastoral innocence and electrified creativity - Electric Eden will be treasured by anyone interested in the tangled story of Britain's folk music and Arcadian dreams. 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.

it's worth remembering that for all the intellectual skill that Rob Young deploys in the construction of his thesis, if (like me! Rob Young really has gone the extra mile in putting together a book that is very high on detail whilst retaining a very readable style.William Morris, David Munrow, Nick Drake, Robin Williamson, Maiden Castle, Stonehenge, Tinhenge, Woodhenge, Woolhenge, David Sylvian and Julian Cope right back to the very first druid who drugged himself into the very fist blissful stupor and then got eaten by something unspeakable. And the BFI have excelled themselves with the extras disc, too – behind the scenes footage, film of Peter Maxwell Davies conducting his harrowing score, some rarely seen Ken shorts, etc etc. Cult figure Bill Fay, whose achingly compassionate social commentaries achieved sales so meagre that he was reduced to packing fish in Selfridges, is allotted several pages, while Ralph McTell's "Streets of London" – one of the most popular English folk records ever – is not even mentioned. Here is an exclusive virtual tour of the amazing landscape he has planted and built with his own hands in the grounds of his house.