Electric Eden: Unearthing Britain's Visionary Music

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and there is a very useful discography at the end of the book, which lists the key albums from the uk folk genre. From Nobel Laureates Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter to theatre greats Tom Stoppard and Alan Bennett to rising stars Polly Stenham and Florian Zeller, Faber Drama presents the very best theatre has to offer. Michael Brocken's The British Folk Revival 1944–2002, which focuses more on the mainstream and politics than Young's tome, would suit readers who wish to study the "movement" rather than have their tastes expanded.

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.The chapter closes with a squib on Raymond Williams, the Marxist literary critic who wrote a book, The Country and City, all about “the Matter of Britain,” though Williams’ ideas – to say nothing of William Empson, or E. 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. 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.

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. With deep personal insight, remarkable frankness and trademark Yorkshire humour, the book removes the mask of fame and reveals the true story behind the Spice Girls, as well as the horror of her most recent marriage and her 10 year struggle to be free. The English Folk Dance and Song Society will work with five other nationally important English folk music and dance archive collections to tell the story of traditional, rural and working class culture in 20th-century England.

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. Martyn, by contrast, emerges through the patronage of Chris Blackwell, the founder of Island Records, who dropped him from the label in 1988. Rob Young's theme--the visionary instinct--allows him to treat British music of the 20th Century as a continuous narrative rather than one that begins or ends with rock music. 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.

Just as there are unspoilt bits of British countryside hidden in the spaces between the motorways, there are musical pleasures hidden in the overgrown woods of an enchanted past. My eight page feature on Roy Harper is the cover story on this month’s Wire magazine (issue 329, July 2011).I've already made several precious musical discoveries thanks to this book and I expect to make more. Beginning with the early song collectors and post-war revivalists, such as Ewan MacColl, the author traces how folk music has inspired some of the 20th century's most important artists from Fairport Convention and Nick Drake to Pink Floyd and Kate Bush. Rob thinks (and I don’t disagree) that the great era of visionary wyrd folk stuff was 68 to 72 and the throbbing heart of it all was an intensely nostalgic yearning for a time you never lived in, for a time that never existed – the Land of Cockayne, the Big Rock Candy Mountain, the misty coast of Albany, Middle Earth with better hi fi equipment, and no Disney in the enchanted forest.

Young tries out quite a few, including quasi-fiction ("The battered Austin, its 50 years clearly legible in rust and mud flecks . In fact author Rob Young (who also wrote two fantastic books on the Warp and Rough Trade labels) documents folk artists trying their hardest to recreate the more nature based aspects of British society.

This book was made for me: a grand, sprawling history of English folk music revivalism, Rob Young's Electric Eden answers something in me that dates back to my high school days and first tentative forays into British folk rock. You may begin to hear the clotted chords of the Spinal Tap song “Break Like the Wind” welling up in the background.