Rob Young’s Electric Eden: Unearthing Britain’s Visionary Music made me feel like a child again.
For the past few weeks it has been a constant treasure trove, in which I have discovered enchanted song after enchanted song. It felt like Christmas at the age of five.
As Young says in Electric Eden, “hack a path through the briars and push open the gate. The creak is a music that wakes the dead and gives them the permission to keep haunting us. Concealed behind these overgrown thickets of memory lies a patch of ground. Some call it Eden, others Arcadia.
“Even to dip a toe into the world of folklore is to unearth an Other Britain, one composed of mysterious fragments and survivals — a rickety bridge to the sweet grass of Albion.”
Initially intending to write his book about the “high-water mark” of folk rock in the late 1960s and early 1970s, including such bands as Pentangle, Fairport Convention, the Incredible String Band, the Albion Band and Steeleye Span and folk singers like Nick Drake, John Martyn and Vashti Bunyan, Young has instead broadened the scope, tracing a century of British folk music in magnificent detail.
Electric Eden opens with the tale of Bunyan’s 18-month trek north with her horse Bess and companion Robert Lewis to reach a remote Scottish island owned by folksinger Donovan, who had promised to set up a haven for artists, musicians and poets. However, when Bunyan arrived Donovan had fled to Los Angeles.
This is symptomatic of the quest of most of the musicians you meet in the pages of Electric Eden, looking to reimagine or rediscover the history of Britain’s rural hinterland.
Following the tale of Bunyan, Young uses the next 100 or so pages, in a section titled “Music from Neverland”, to introduce the characters who make up the early folk-music pioneers.
Although at times this section feels dense and difficult to read, it is essential to gain an understanding of characters such as Cecil Sharpe, William Morris, AL Lloyd, Vaughn Williams and left-wing balladeers Ewan MacColl and Peggy Seeger to understand the folk movement that the 1960s stars such as Richard Thompson, Bert Jansch and Sandy Denny operated in.
Their move into the world of folk rock was as much inspired by the age-old songs of Britain as by the work of Bob Dylan and The Band.
The core of the book remains rooted in the 1960s and 1970s folk revival led by pioneers such as Davy Graham, Shirley Collins, John Renbourne, Anne Briggs, Jansch, Thompson and Denny.
This section, which stretches over 12 chapters and 380 pages, is titled “Electric Eden” and is the core of the book.
Through the psychedelic era of Pink Floyd and the Beatles to the angry respite of punk, Young joyously maps out the histories of these men and women who drew influence from and gave life back to British folk music.
From the origins of the Glastonbury festival to the pagan rituals that are so much a part of British folk music, Electric Eden feels like a guide book more than anything else, mapping out the scenes, the folk clubs, the players, the texts, the films and the gatherings that place British folk music firmly in its context.
The section draws to a close with Steeleye Span’s ambitious yet flawed 1976 record, Rocket Cottage. As Young says, “however frantically it tried to modernise its creaky little cottage, the results looked increasingly out of joint”.
This was the time of punk and Young provides a great anecdote about the animosity between punk’s rising stars and those of the folk revival in the mid-1970s. He retells the story of the Sex Pistol’s Sid Vicious insulting folksinger John Martyn during a poker game and Martyn subsequently dragging Vicious outside and beating the crap out of him.
The book closes with Young’s attempts to trace the legacy of this folk-rock revival, looking at the careers of artists such as Kate Bush, Talk Talk and David Sylvian, Boards of Canada and Broadcast and the Focus Group. This section, titled “Poly-Albion”, is less convincing for its exclusion of artists such as Billy Bragg and The Pogues, but it is no less fascinating.
If you are looking for a Christmas present for a dedicated and adventurous music fan, then you won’t do much better than this. I am going to read it again over Christmas, a present to myself.