*Somewhat astonishingly, the sixties trad folk revival centred around people like Shirley Collins, Bert Jansch, the Watersons and The Young Tradition saw an explosion in the number of folk clubs in the country from around 30-40 in 1964 to an estimated 400 by the end of the decade. The swinging sixties, indeed.
*The folk club boom evidently fed through to what Young calls an "unprecedented number" of singer-songwriters in the 1960s music scene - eg people like Ralph McTell, Anne Briggs, Roy Harper, Cat Stevens, Al Stewart, Kevin Ayers, Kevin Coyne, Linda Peters, Sandy Denny and ... about a thousand others. Young points out that this "significant fraction of pop music's core repertoire in the late twentieth century" mostly wasn't actually classic folk music (characterised by communal concerns), but personalised, introspective new-style stuff. Individualistic folk.
*Though the folkie stereotype quickly became one of a bearded man strumming a guitar, guitar as an accompaniment to folk songs was "virtually unknown" before the late-1950s. Before this it had apparently mostly been communal singing or piano accompaniment. To judge by what Nick Tosches says in his book on country music, this means the guitar came to UK folk music decades after it became a centrepiece of US country music.
*Ewan MacColl is acknowledged as a key figure (the key figure?) in the trad folk revival of the 1950s, and his achievements in doing the rounds of clubs and pubs across the country as well as creating highly innovative BBC radio features is given due weight. Equally, it seems that for some in the 1960s and beyond, MacColl came to represent all that was stifling and restrictive about folk. Trads v Rockers.
*A lot of Young's book is devoted to the period - starting sometime in the 1960s - when "the term 'folk music' slipped its moorings", becoming a "floating signifier". With Dylan and others setting sail for new waters, Electric Eden charts how folk music fused with rock, jazz, psych, Library Music exoticism, Early Music purism and much else to become ... well, all sorts of things. Folk music of this period was apparently the ultimate big tent music, taking in Pink Floyd, Nick Drake, Steeleye Span, bits of the Beatles (Electric Eden has a whole section on Strawberry Fields), Led Zeppelin, Van Morrison and much more.
*People like Danny Thompson and Harold McNair (flautist on the Kes soundtrack) are credited with giving 1960s folk-rock an important "looseness", with certain virtuoso musicians being able to jump between playing jazz, pop and almost any folkish fusion of the two.
*If MacColl was a pivotal figure for an earlier folk generation, it appears that the American producer/manager Joe Boyd was an absolutely key figure for the folk-rockers. There are parts of Young's book where his name seems to be cropping up on every other page. Meanwhile, to my slight surprise, it seems that Island Records were pretty big players in the folk-rock scene, not least with Boyd brokering deals with Island on behalf of his roster of artists. One detail that caught my eye: Fairport Convention's contract with Island obliged them to deliver two albums a year. Hmm, not exactly relaxed hippie stuff, man.
*Fairport Convention's Unhalfbricking (1969) was, says Young, quite possibly the first album cover of the 1960s to use an image only, ie no artist name or title. Yeah, Peter Saville and co, your ideas were ... old. Btw, this is yet another much-mentioned album from the period that washes over me to very little effect (oh dear).
*Another detail I clocked: the saxophonist Lol Coxhill gets a quick mention (p275) for playing on Shirley Collins And The Albion Country Band's No Roses (1971) album. Why is this notable? Er, well, having myself seen Coxhill a few times playing at jazz improv nights in London during the 2000s, I reckon he must be the one solitary person from Young's huge cast of musicians who I've actually seen perform live. There you go, the tenuous link between Niluccio and the 60s folk music explosion.
*And as an addendum to the above: Young says Collins' vocals on No Roses were the "finest" of her career, namechecking in particular the sinister-gloomy Poor Murdered Woman. Blow me down, readers, if I didn't (for the very first time) come across this track a few months ago. Another (even more) tenuous Niluccio-folk link for you there.
*Two bits of language Young uses in relation to the doomed Nick Drake caught my eye. He twice (I think) uses spider imagery to describe this haunted figure, including referring to Drake's "arachnoid fingerwork". Elsewhere Young mentions the "psychotic menace" of Drake's famous Black Eyed Dog. Young also follows the music journalist Nick Kent in casting doubt on the notion that Drake took his own life.
*Another minor surprise: in 1976 John Martyn spent time in Jamaica and hung out with Max Romeo, Lee Perry and Burning Spear. Blimey.
*Young spends a lot of time examining the self-conscious ruralism of folk-rock. This included bands decamping from the city to take up occupancy in mouldering country houses to take drugs, jam, argue, compose music and even take part in recording sessions outdoors among the twittering of birds. Album covers from this period are full of the dank greenery of the British countryside, and outfits like The Incredible String Band come across looking like the heirs to Gerrard Winstanley's seventeenth-century Diggers experiment. Meanwhile, Electric Eden also spends quite a bit of time delving into the latent paganism of British history, including famous cultural products like the Wicker Man and Penda's Fen (one of Young's other specialisms is British TV from the late 1950s to the late 1980s).
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| Which century? The Incredible String Band's The Hangman's Daughter |
*Other key elements of the folk-rock scene seem to have been a "warped Victoriana" (think Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band), and what Young calls "rebirth in the secret garden of childhood". Blake's Songs Of Innocence was apparently a touchstone for some of the drug-fuelled seekers of the sixties, and childhood, flowers, non-materialism and escape were all highly esteemed, as were druggy trips to Morocco or India to revel in the vitality of "primitive" life and discover non-Western music.
*Unsurprisingly, John Peel pops up a few times in Young's story (Peel's long DJing career obviously included a considerable pre-punk period). I thought two Peel mentions were quite interesting: one was that the late-60s acid-folk band Forest spent several weeks staying at Peel's London flat in 1969. And another: from around 1968 Peel evidently became a close friend of Marc Bolan's, going on record-buying trips together and days out to popular hippie locations like Stonehenge. Peel the Jeepster.
And, I suppose, I could go on. With more and more bullet points filleted out of Young's 600-page book, probably just confusing the reader, confusing myself, getting nowhere. No, this will have to do - a handful of (semi-) interesting factoids and regurgitations of half-understood themes. Electric Eden isn't, I must admit, the easiest book in the world for me to neatly summarise. There's just too much in it. And its central period, the 1960s and early 70s, is tantalisingly out of reach for (ahem) a youngster like me, one who grew up with Blondie records and the sugary thrills of late-70s poppy new wave. Nevertheless, I can still (sort of) dig it. For instance, how about this for an approach to putting on a gig during the 1960s and 70s?:
"I would do a morris jig in the first half, Toni would do a clog dance on the table in the pub, and we'd play a couple of instrumental tunes, we'd sing songs. We'd talk about magic, as we'd got into witchcraft and studying it, to find out how witchcraft was reflected in traditional song ..." (Dave Arthur on performances with then wife Toni).
Or how about this on the Glastonbury Fayre in 1971?:
"No alcohol was sold on the site, and the only food served was vegetarian. Leaflets passed around the site urged festivalgoers to break bread with strangers, share and conserve food and water, refrain from damaging local crops and clap more quietly to respect residents' desire for peace."
Yes, let's hear some quiet clapping please for Arthur Brown, Fairport Convention, Gong, Family and Traffic. From MacColl's pipe smoke-and-real ale basement folk clubs to the veggie-burger outdoor festivals of the 70s, folk music, as Young's books amply shows, was - and is? - an almost impossibly massive genre. At one point Young quotes the "sanguine" view of the folklorist Bob Pegg (of Mr. Fox), who said "folk music is an illusion, created unconsciously by the people who talk about it, go out looking for it, make collections of it, write books about it [as Pegg did], and announce to an audience that they are about to play it". Ewan MacColl once said the challenge he and his acolytes faced lay in "dissipating the aura of preciousness and sanctity with which the nineteenth-century folklorists shrouded popular music", yet he and later generations of "folkies" themselves became saddled with an image problem. They were all beards and heartiness. Over-sincere. Earnest. Too fond of viewing things with what Young calls a typically British "antiquarian eye". To my recollection, the un-coolness of folk in the punk and post-punk era was so taken for granted that the music was just ignored. Whiffs of folk music might reach us via something like Ralph McTell's played-to-death Streets Of London, but this only confirmed how deadly boring this stuff was. And this verdict extended to the "greats" like Dylan (in my case anyway). As I personally - and very fumblingly - became acquainted with music in the late 70s/early 80s (via Top Of The Pops or the NME), folk artists were just rather boring-sounding names to me. They weren't Simple Minds or the UK Subs or the Specials. Or Crass or the Dead Kennedys. They weren't exciting and they weren't relatable. In fact, I'm (almost) ashamed to say, not a tremendous amount has really changed since those formative days of listening to Bauhaus and the Stranglers. I might just have read a 600-page book about it, but, in truth, folk music still hardly figures. Except ... maybe it does, even if it's not - really - the folk that Young's book deals with. People like Woody Guthrie and Leadbelly have been staples of my own listening for decades, and more recently artists (some American) like Turner Cody, The Diamond Family Archive ("spectral folk with a distinctly British sound"), Frank Fairfield, The Rebel, Withered Hand, Sam Amidon, Benjamin Wetherill and David Thomas Broughton have also made an impact - not to mention indie-ish "anti-folk" artists like Jeffrey Lewis, Withered Hand, Herman Düne and King Creosote. Meanwhile also, thinking about it, what else was Robert Wyatt's brilliant anti-Falklands War song Shipbuilding (a song I bought when it came out) other than a folk recording; the same with his amazing Pigs, which I remember hearing - and marvelling at - on John Peel in 1986. Young has a fascinating couple of pages on some of the punk-folk overlaps of the 1970s, including how Crass bridged the free festival communism of the early-70s and the spiky militancy of anarcho-punk, which Penny Rimbaud and co pretty much invented at their anarchist commune at Dial House in Epping Forest. Another famous example is how in 1978 Alternative TV linked up with the very non-punk Gong offshoot band Here And Now, defying the year-zero strictures of early punk ideologues. In ATV's excellent How Much Longer, Mark Perry says "the punks don't know nothing", "thе straights don't know nothing", "the hippies don't know nothing", "the rockers don't know nothing" and "the posh don't know nothing". Did Perry think the folkies knew nothing as well? Yeah, probably so, I reckon. After reading Electric Eden do I now think I know what folk music actually is? Er no, man, I don't. I still don't know nothing ...
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