MUSIC: Electric Eden: Unearthing Britain's Visionary MusicBy Rob Young, Faber, 664pp. £17.99
GETTING IT together in the country is a rock’n’roll dream that has become a moss-covered cliche. Since the ancient days of rock, bands have upped sticks and retreated to an idyllic bolt-hole in the woods to escape the rat race of fame and reconnect with their muse (usually helped along by some home-grown herb).
Led Zeppelin decamped to Bron-Yr-Aur, in Wales, to write songs for their acoustic-driven third album, and set up studios in Headley Grange in Hampshire to record their runic-titled fourth album, which featured the ultimate ode to pastoral paradise, Stairway to Heaven. Traffic holed up in a remote Berkshire cottage to work on their album Mr Fantasy. Both bands loudly voiced the primal desire to find a mystical Eden rustling in the hedgerows beyond the city, but while most bands returned to the comfort of their rock'n'roll lifestyles after the last track was laid down, a whole breed of British musicians was willing to dedicate their entire musical lives to the pursuit of this mystical Valhalla that vibrated inside their heads.
Electric Edenis the tale of British music's quest for its own heart and soul, a journey of Arthurian proportions that features a cast of weird, often beardy characters, all in search of a musical holy grail: a solid connection with the roots and soil of Albion's good earth. At more than 600 pages, and covering a vast swathe of British countryside, from Cornwall to Stonehenge and as far north as Mull of Kintyre, this is The Lord of the Ringsin reverse: a motley fellowship of folk fleeing the grey, industrialised wasteland of Mordor and setting out on a journey towards the simple, bucolic pleasures of the Shire.
While the folk pathways of the US have been meticulously mapped by a succession of intrepid explorers, few have travelled the byways of Britain and attempted to draw up a geographical guide to the snaking tendrils that have reached into every musical corner, from rock to metal to electronic and into the beat of British pop. Even Irish folk music has found its feet in the world, but British folk music remains a cultural wallflower, standing awkwardly to one side, shuffling its muddy boots and wondering if it will ever be taken seriously.
For years British folk music was mocked with a sneering “hey nonny nonny” and conjured up images of Morris dancers skipping round maypoles – rather unfair when you think of the rich legacy of recent British folk, from Ewan MacColl to Bert Jansch to the Waterson-Carthy dynasty and the collective influence of Fairport Convention and The Incredible String Band.
Folk revivals have sprouted up at various intervals in rock’s history – there’s one going on right now, with Mumford & Sons, Laura Marling, Johnny Flynn, Noah The Whale and Bat for Lashes all enjoying pop-chart success.
Rob Young is not satisfied with simply charting the landscape of British folk: he wants to get inside the heads of the musicians, writers and dreamers and build a detailed picture of the mythical Arcadia that lies deep in the collective consciousness.
If it all sounds like a bit of a hippy-dippy trip through the woodlands, don’t worry: Young’s narrative feet remain firmly on solid ground.
He traces Britain's 20th-century folk renaissance back to Kelmscott House, in southwest London, where the Victorian poet, artist, environmentalist and socialist William Morris wrote his novel News from Nowhere, a vision of a Britain thrown back into a pre-industrial state of countrified collectivism. The book became a Luddite staple, and was the first of many late 19th-century examples of speculative fiction – including HG Wells's The Time Machine– that posited an alternative world of pastoral simplicity. It wasn't just England dreaming: some people were actively working to restore a vision of Albion that had somehow become lost in the rush to modernity.
By the turn of the century British folk music had been all but lost to its ordinary people: the most popular tunes of the day were the ditties of Gilbert and Sullivan. So sublimated had its folk music become that German commentators were calling Britain das Land ohne Musik: the land without music.
A folklorist and musicologist named Cecil Sharp was unwilling to stand by and let his country’s indigenous music be lost to the world, so he set out, notebook in hand, to remote hamlets and villages, knocking on cottage doors and rapping on pub counters to persuade people to dig out tunes from their memories.
Composers took up the baton: at a Socialist Society meeting at Kelmscott House Gustav Holst and Ralph Vaughan Williams struck up a friendship and together began to rewrite the soundtrack of classical music, weaving into their compositions organic material drawn from the canon of British folk. Sharp believed that folk songs should be taught in schools, to inculcate a national pride in young children, but though many of the early folk revivalists were socialists at heart, they were leery of jingoism and nationalism: their dream was to restore Britain’s musical roots to health, and thus allow a better future to grow.
While folk music didn’t become a compulsory subject on the school curriculum, folk’s reawakening brought it back into the everyday lives of Britons and helped restore a sense of cultural identity that had almost been tossed on the scrapheap in the wake of industrial progress. Over the following 100 years a succession of musical visionaries, from Peggy Seeger to Nick Drake to John Martyn to Sandy Denny, would burnish the music and shape it into a thing of lasting beauty and brilliance. Arcadia is still there: you just have to listen for it.
Kevin Courtney is an
Irish Times
journalist
