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Electric Eden: Unearthing Britain's Visionary Music

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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. 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). Add one star for getting off his arse and interviewing a lot of people and getting some great quotes. When Vashti reached the Pied Piper's island, Donovan had fled for LA, but Bunyan's bittersweet tale – replete with the noble hopelessness of her determination to live as if the 20th century never happened – is emblematic of a whole generation of youth who seemed keen to drop out of industrialised society and "get back to the garden".

Part of the Festival of Britain, it was held at St Pancras Church near Kings Cross, and involved a programme of folk songs sung by the Workers' Music Association Choir, with arrangements by the composer Alan Bush.That movement, though essentially backward-looking, would help beget the protest folk era of the mid-1960s and, by extension, the seismic moment in pop culture when Bob Dylan strapped on an electric guitar at the Newport folk festival in 1965.

The balance of power shifted when The Beatles and the Stones wrote all their own material, yet the great tradition of the cover version never died. and there is a very useful discography at the end of the book, which lists the key albums from the uk folk genre. Far from the stark and no doubt rather wholemealy songbook of 1951, these will be versions that draw on the more recent arrangements of the folk-rock era, by the likes of Pentangle, Shirley Collins, etc – illustrating how far folk music in the British Isles has moved since the war. Electric Eden is expansive, exhaustive, enlightening yet an eminently readable examination of English folk music: its origins and development. P. Thompson, or any of the cultural theorists of the pastoral, and popular culture, to whom Young might have looked to clarify his argument about why the one musician (Thompson) flourished while the other musician (Martyn) struggled – are not, finally, entertained.Or, as one Stonehenge camper put it: "We want to plant a garden of Eden where there will be guitars instead of guns and the sun will be our nuclear bomb. This favouring of the obscure over the bestselling lends somewhat dubious support to the argument that folk had a brief heyday which was brought to an end by glam, punk and/or Thatcherism. He edited the collections of Wire articles, 'Undercurrents: The Hidden Wiring of Modern Music' (Continuum 2002), 'The Wire Primers: A Guide to Modern Music' (Verso 2009), and a selection of commissioned pieces on a legendary musical genius, 'No Regrets: Writings On Scott Walker' (Orion 2012). 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.

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 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. EDEN can be customized with thousands of combinations of colours and materials, and with many add-on fittings and accessories. And moreover that his refusal to sub-ordinate the detail to a 'bigger picture' is a deliberate strat In a 664-page exploration with plentiful side trips, Young casts his net over just about everyone in this country who ever revived or preserved the past: William Morris, morris dancers, Vaughan Williams, David Munrow's Early Music project, the makers of the movie The Wicker Man, Cecil Sharp's English Folk Dance and Song Society, and so on.Donovan's "Gift from a Flower" LP has this song "And Clett Makes Three" when it doesn’t, and so forth.

Young, working his way through poets like Blake, Wordsworth and Shelley; through William Morris’s novel “News From Nowhere” (1890) and “Paradise Lost”; through films up to and including “Withnail and I,” among many other cultural artifacts, provides a sense of British music as “a primordial soup waiting for an electrical spark.

In equating folk music with leftwing politics, Boughton anticipated the traditional folk song revival of the 1950s and early 1960s, a more working-class, leftwing, rigorously purist affair whose leading lights were Ewan MacColl and Peggy Seeger. If you think this reads like someone trying too hard, then it might not be for you, but I just loved every page.

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