Electric Eden: Unearthing Britain's Visionary Music

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Nick Drake and Sandy Denny are voices from a séance; vintage album covers are tarot cards to be decoded.

Anyone in the Bristol area this weekend, I’m giving an introductory talk at Musick To Play In The Dark: A Wake for Peter ‘Sleazy’ Christopherson, a special event at the Cube Cinema. Brutally Honest is an exposé of the struggles and acute pain that lay behind the glamour and success. 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.After a tour of the folk-influenced classical composers of the early 20th C – Vaughan Williams, Holst, Bax, Ireland, Warlock (unfamiliar territory to me) we then get the MacColl/Lloyd/Lomax years when folk becomes a hot political potato (a very familiar tale).

He is less convincing when arguing for more recent performers, minor enthusiasms like Kate Bush, David Sylvian and the band Talk Talk. You can see English psychedelia steeped in this nostalgia -Penny Lane, Pink Floyd’s Syd songs, plus See Saw and Remember a Day – there are dozens of them.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. 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. Rob’s loose and baggy understanding of the remarkable tentacular reach of this English (mostly) visionary thing has him describing the details of Beatles’ Strawberry Fields promo film and the plot of The Wicker Man, Peter Dickinson’s obscure novel The Changes, the laments of Rambling Syd Rumpo, Kate Bush’s first – and second – and third – and fourth albums, how modal music affected bebop… is there anything which isn’t grist to this vast grinding mill?

Of course he picks examples to make his point and he does this with great skill, whether you agree with him or not. In a sweeping panorama of Albion's soundscape that takes in the pioneer spirit of Cecil Sharp; the pastoral classicism of Ralph Vaughan Williams and Peter Warlock; the industrial folk revival of Ewan MacColl and A. It can sit proudly on any bookshelf beside Alan Lomax s The Land Where Blues Began, Greil Marcus s Invisible Republic, Nick Tosches Where Dead Voices Gather or Jon Savage s England s Dreaming.He also takes an enormous gamble (in non-fiction terms) by slipping into allegorical fiction during the Rocket Cottage chapter, a stylistic quirk that is, if not a total success, extremely memorable. In any case, Arcadian idealism, like John Barleycorn, dies only to be reborn, as Electric Eden, with its wide historical scope, attests. After initially modeling what’s at stake in the recovery of the Sixties generation in the person of Vashti Bunyan, a folksinger who worked with the crucial producer-arranger Joe Boyd during the late Sixties, Young’s six hundred page history opens on a one-hundred page survey of the British modernist composers in their treatment of “the folk” – a frequently rehearsed theme, after all, in modernist and cultural studies. You may begin to hear the clotted chords of the Spinal Tap song “Break Like the Wind” welling up in the background.

Better to regard Electric Eden as what it is, at heart: the best of the currently available books on the modern British folk phenomenon. 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. 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. As one-fifth of the iconic Spice Girls and judge on X Factor and America’s Got Talent, Melanie Brown, a.In addition, there are superb accounts by foreign authors such as novelists Edith Wharton and Henri Barbusse, and flying ace Manfred von Richthofen.