Electric Eden: Unearthing Britain's Visionary Music

Product Information

Rob Young , who was the editor of The Wire , the leading British music magazine, is now an editor at large there. So the same eldritch eyesockets, green man grimaces and thrawn buttocks connect Steeleye Span back to Arnold Bax, Ralph Vaughan Williams, ley lines, Alisteir Crowley, Grimes Dyke, Gustav Holst, Kate Bush ( what was that again?

Contemplating the bucolic cover image of an album by Heron, he sums it up perfectly: "John Constable has become court photographer to the counterculture. The meat of the book, though, is a conversational, amusing and astute evocation of the British folk boom of 1965-74, with vivid, condensed portraits of the likes of Pentangle, Fairport Convention, John Martyn and the Incredible String Band, their origins, obsessions and place in the canon impeccably but accessibly explained and elucidated, alongside that of an abundance of odd, often forgotten contemporaries, from the bleak and furious art rock of Comus to, erm, a moonlighting Playaway presenter involved in naked pagan rituals (these sequences are occasionally laborious or tenuously linked, but far more often utterly fascinating). I also suggest seeking out Rough Trade's Psyche Folk compilation 9to see how folk has developed) and Island Records folk boxset (you get the roots: Traffic , which complement this book nicely.

By using the Web site, you confirm that you have read, understood, and agreed to be bound by the Terms and Conditions. Lord Darnell is not in Fairport’s Tam Lin but Matty Groves; there’s mention of a `twelfth Century Saxon' church (p. also appearing: The Man From Uranus, Bronnt Industries Kapital, films, body art, Dirty Talk Disco DJs and more.

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. 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. The electric EDEN pays tribute to the original Citroën Méhari while perfectly meeting today's constraints in terms of equipment and safety certification. Sure there was good stuff here - on The Incredible String Band, for instance, or on Nick Drake, on whom Young is particularly perceptive, making it clear that Drake is both the high point of the folk revival but also unique and standing apart from any movement. Delius's Brigg Fair contains an English folk song he learned from his friend and fellow folk-song enthusiast, Percy Grainger.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 . Vaughan Williams's Norfolk Rhasody taps into melodies he wrote down while listening to a trawlerman from King's Lynn. The historical sweep that Young weaves is staggering; his enthusiasm bubbles over into frequent diversions, some of them seemingly unrelated, but all of which are soon revealed as relevant to the author's explanatory textual pattern.

The story gets especially rich when the sylvan nostalgia of British folkies blends into the worldwide hippy dream. We encounter William Morris's hatred of industrial society, Cecil Sharp bowdlerising the songs he collected, Ewan MacColl's earnest, communist critics' group, the "getting it together in the country" of Traffic, Incredible String Band, Fairport Convention and Led Zeppelin.This is a brilliant book which occasionally is overwhelmed by the plethora of material and the subtlety of the theme.

He describes the first Glastonbury festival, which was held in 1914, an awkward merging of folk song, classical music and theatre. This title surveys the visionary, topographic and esoteric impulses that have driven the margins of British visionary folk music from Vaughan Williams and Holst to The Incredible String Band, Nick Drake, John Martyn and Aphex Twin. The children’s novel “Black Beauty” was written by Anna Sewell in her fifties and she sold it outright for GBP20.The Incredible String Band fled from psychedelia into Scientology, never to recover the childlike joy of their early albums such as The 5000 Spirits or The Layers of the Onion. What, after all, have Britain’s fondness for its pagan (or pre-Roman) landscape, psychedelia, the occult, and folk music to do with one another? 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. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average.