Vaughan Williams's Norfolk Rhasody taps into melodies he wrote down while listening to a trawlerman from King's Lynn. 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. Folk music reconnects us with the past and inspires us to rethink our modern values and plugs us into the old weird England which comes percolating into your brain as soon as Pentangle begin lyke wake dirging or Forest begin their bluebell dance. He originally conceived “Electric Eden,” he says, as a group biography of artists including Nick Drake, Fairport Convention, Sandy Denny, Pentangle, Vashti Bunyan and the Incredible String Band. the centrality of the erotic (especially a concern with female sexuality), and, especially, what the book likes to refer to as 'the occult meaning of the countryside' (magic to you or I).

During the years 2009 - 2011, I was heavily invested in modern folk music: bands or solo artists such as Devendra Banhart , Woods , Six Organs of Admittance , Current 93, Joanna Newsom, Espers etc fascinated me. 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. Home to William Golding, Sylvia Plath, Kazuo Ishiguro, Sally Rooney, Tsitsi Dangarembga, Max Porter, Ingrid Persaud, Anna Burns and Rachel Cusk, among many others, Faber is proud to publish some of the greatest novelists from the early twentieth century to today. Rob Young has written such a richly detailed, evocative, and readable account of Britain's fascination with folk music that it's hard to believe it exists. Better to regard Electric Eden as what it is, at heart: the best of the currently available books on the modern British folk phenomenon.Nick Drake, desolated by his lack of commercial success and acutely depressed, took a fatal overdose of antidepressants in 1974.

Best of the lot is the Incredible String Band, whose outrageously original psychedelic folk is illuminating each walk to and from work. These lines about the early years of the British psychedelic movement are so terrific that they contain the seeds of a sour, funny, lovely Philip Larkin-ish poem: “When Joni Mitchell sang of getting back to the garden, you felt she pictured a host of naked longhairs disporting themselves in love games on the cliffs of Big Sur.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 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. And moreover that his refusal to sub-ordinate the detail to a 'bigger picture' is a deliberate strat Last Saturday I took my daughter up there and found the forecourt outside the Royal Festival Hall packed solid with people listening to Billy Bragg belting his song “A13 Trunk Road To The Sea” out towards the choppy Thames. That is one of many complex questions that resounds through Electric Eden, a book that, for the most part, is a surefooted guide to the various tangled paths the English folk song has since been taken down by classicists, collectors, revivalists, iconoclasts, pagans, psychedelic visionaries, punks and purists.

He wishes he had been old enough to see his favourite group, Can, when they played at the Victoria Rooms, Bristol – 500 metres away from his home – in 1975. and there is a very useful discography at the end of the book, which lists the key albums from the uk folk genre. His book throws plenty of lightning, and it will have you scrambling to download some of the music that’s filling his head. 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. 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 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. The brief period between 1969 and 1972 saw a flowering of British folk rock, mixing traditional songs with amplified guitars and rock’n’roll drums. John England, the gardener who set Sharp off on his journey of discovery, – and appropriation – has remained relatively unknown and unheralded, at least until now. 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. Cecil Sharp, a former bank clerk turned classical composer, was conversing with some friends when he heard a gardener singing to himself as he worked.

By rights, the book ought to tell us something about British folk music, and at times it does do just this. 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. 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? A couple of years ago, before the reissue of Just another Diamond Day and before the t-Mobile ad campaign, it’s possible that this book would not now have started off with a 30 page account of Vashti Bunyan’s rural gypsy hippy life, but this gives us a fair idea about what RY is getting at here and really, it’s not that profound.Until this year I’d only seen the film once - in the early 90s, Channel 4, on a tiny portable black and white TV. With this electric vehicle, you're no longer restricted to just the 6 colours of the original Méhari.