Electric Eden: Unearthing Britain's Visionary Music

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A fearless, hugely ambitious, frankly imperfect book, Electric Eden covers a huge swath of ground, placing folk music and its culture, including offshoots like classical pastoralism, ethnomusicological preservationism, electric folk, psychedelic folk, and even fantasy fiction, in a huge, overlapping set of contexts: social, political, mystical, psychogeographical, iconographic, literary, and, yes, musical. We meet the composer Peter Warlock during the second world war, riding his motorcycle naked and drunk through a sleepy Kent village, "indulging in threesomes with local girls", and "singing raucous sea shanties . Threading from Vaughan Williams, William Morris, and Cecil Sharp to Ewan MacColl, Davey Graham, and Shirley Collins to Fairport Convention, the Incredible String Band, and Comus, and eventually getting to topics like the Glastonbury Fayre and Aphex Twin, this book gets around, and spins an beguiling web. In addition, there are superb accounts by foreign authors such as novelists Edith Wharton and Henri Barbusse, and flying ace Manfred von Richthofen. And this Saturday, I’ll be compering the Festival Hall’s commemoration of Lloyd’s Singing Englishmen event.

Better to regard Electric Eden as what it is, at heart: the best of the currently available books on the modern British folk phenomenon. Rob Young's Electric Eden: Unearthing Britain's Visionary Music is a seminal book on British music and cultural heritage, that spans the visionary classical and folk tradition from the nineteenth-century to the present day. The children’s novel “Black Beauty” was written by Anna Sewell in her fifties and she sold it outright for GBP20.

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. Young tries out quite a few, including quasi-fiction ("The battered Austin, its 50 years clearly legible in rust and mud flecks . He will make you think again about the still startling, if wilfully esoteric, songs of the Incredible String Band who, in their embrace of traditional folk, Indian and Balinese music, eastern and English mysticism and visionary nature poetry – all refracted though the prism of LSD – still sound like no one before or since. Nick Drake, desolated by his lack of commercial success and acutely depressed, took a fatal overdose of antidepressants in 1974.

To celebrate the BFI release of Ken Russell’s film The Devils – which I’ve reviewed at length in the current edition of Uncut – I'm posting up some photos from the Daily Telegraph Magazine (issue 350, 9 July 1971), which featured an interview and on-location report by Lee Langley.The book then takes you a chronological journey through the movements, and performers in those movements, from the rural based artists such as Vashti Bunyan and Shirley Collins, to the industrial based, like Ewan MacColl, to the mystical balladeers like Mr. 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. I ve already made several precious musical discoveries thanks to this book and I expect to make more.

Rob Young also includes pagan rites and rituals and how bands incorporated them into their image, with other references to films such as The Wicker Man and how that movie influenced a generation of magic seeking artists. Electric Eden helps me understand why I love so much of this music, and that, to me, is a great gift. What keeps it consistently readable is the happy marriage between Young's incisive observation and his talent for a vivid phrase. 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. Electric Eden is that rare book which has something truly new to say about popular music, and like Greil Marcus's Lipstick Traces , it uses music to connect the dots in a thrilling story of art and society, of tradition and wild, idiosyncratic creativity.

The chapter on Richard and Linda Thompson begins with a squib on Caedmon (England’s poet of legend), a squib on Milton, a squib on Teilhard de Chardin, a squib on the album cover of a band, Comus (after the Milton poem) that performed around the time the Thompsons were getting together.

I can just about accept that Kate Bush at her dippiest might be channelling the old weird Albion of early pagan folk songs, but the electronic soundscapes of Coil or Psychic TV are as far from folk music as it is possible to go. Young doesn't sneer, but allows the quixotic dignity of these doomed idealists to resonate in all its sadness. Beginning with a striking riff on how music and image open up wormholes into past times, Electric Eden joins a multiplicity of dots. Over the song's duration it splits into seven distinct segments and even ingests two other songs whole. 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.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. Where Young takes more esoteric flight is when he convincingly works such disparate concepts as the free festival scene, Bagpuss and The Wicker Man into his meditations on an agrarian past that survives in the imagination. 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. Electric Eden: Unearthing Britain’s Visionary Music is an ambitious survey of British folk music that is also, sad to say, indulgent.