Electric Eden
“All music is folk music; I ain't never heard no horse sing...” - Louis Armstrong
When talking of folk music in Britain, the image of the 'folkie' is never far from one's mind. We all know the stereotype, if not the people behind it; the curly hair and scraggly beard, the Aran sweater stained with the smell of sweat and ale, the sturdy boots that may never have seen a foothill in their life, the finger in the ear that accompanies the turgid tuneless renditions of such cultural treasures as 'English Country Garden' and 'Helston Floral Dance'. I don't think I've ever met anyone like that, but even so I can still picture him sat in the corner of a country inn with three or four of his fellows, interspersing their sing-a-longs with their desire to set the world to rights in their own amalgam of High Tory regression and ultra-green radicalism.
Getting past the 'folkie' image is relatively easy when talking about folk - more so since the runaway success of Laura Marling, Mumford & Sons and their ilk in the past few years, but it was never much of an issue anyway. The problem is, when we talk about 'folk music', what are we actually talking about? It can be the music of a place, rooted in the cultural landscape of the country where it appeared, a marker of location and of history; equally, it can be the music of a people, its rhythms intertwined with their tongue and its stories those of their past and their present.
Whichever opinion you hold, what is undeniable is that folk's strongest appeal today lies in its authenticity - by becoming a folk musician you seem to say, 'Look! I am an intelligent person, not taken in by the obvious manufacture of popular music. Yet, also! I am not a snob, seeking refuge in impenetrable high culture. I know, in this age of rootlessness, where I come from and how I came to be.' I play folk music, and I've felt those sentiments myself. Of course, that's not to say those sentiments are pleasant ones in themselves... but more on that later.
The reason I'm sitting here expounding at length about the nature of folk music is due to the book I've just finished reading - Rob Young's Electric Eden. A proper doorstop of a book (607 pages of book proper, plus an extra sixty-odd of notes, bibliographies and indexes), it seeks to serve as the definitive tome on what it terms 'Britain's Visionary Music' - and, arguably, it does so.
After an opening chapter detailing the journey Vashti Bunyan made in a horse-drawn caravan to the Hebrides in 1968, the book starts with the folk revival of the early 20th Century, spearheaded by Cecil Sharp, founder of the EFDSS and the person after who they named their North London headquarters, detailing his work to preserve the folk tradition of England (mostly through bowdlerising and gentrification, but his heart was in the right place), and covering the influence of folk upon such luminaries of British classical music as Ralph Vaughan-Williams, John Ireland, Gustav Holst and Peter Warlock (amongst others), William Morris' novel News From Nowhere, and the industrial folk music championed by Ewan MacColl in the 'radio ballads', wildly ambitious documentary projects interweaving new music composed as part of a living folk tradition with accounts of the people who worked in those environments. In each case, 'folk' is presented as a symbol of both land and people, a force for union as outlined in News From Nowhere with its vision of 'abolition of town and country' - which Young presents more as 'abolition of town by country', setting something of a precedent for later - in the name of the greater good.
The bulk of the book covers the development of English folk-rock in the 1960s and '70s. The broad theme of 'going forward by going back' continues, but within a few chapters Young has renounced the activist tradition of MacColl and his friends and successors in favour of more abstract, 'revolution in the head'-type troubadours and collectives. From here on in, the 'vision' is increasingly chemically enhanced - and, almost as if to recognise this, the focus starts to wander. It starts brightly enough - the accounts of the troubadours of Les Cousins and the exploits of Pentangle are electrifying in their clarity - yet the back-to-back depictions of Nick Drake, Sandy Denny and John Martyn that mark the centre of the book are notable for how they stand out from the more workmanlike prose around them. This section becomes less and less focussed as it approaches the end until, following several pages dedicated to the Wurzels and a brief cameo by Yes, it collapses in on itself with a brief rant against punk and a bizarre, yet enjoyable, sidestep into Steeleye Span's Rocket Cottage. It is, at this point in the narrative, 1976.
The final two chapters are a disappointment; running through the intervening 35 years at breakneck speed, detailing artists who, whilst undeniably British and certainly visionary, struggle to fit the musical narrative already established. There's a distinct sense of obligations being fulfilled, as though having taken us to the end of civilisation (heralded, ironically enough, by a distinctly Anglo-Saxon album title), Young had to guide us through the post-apocalypse post-punk landscape and back to now even though we were much better off staying in the sepia-toned past where Old King Prog reigned in somnolent splendour. Of Billy Bragg, the Pogues, the Levellers, Rachel Unthank & the Winterset, Laura Marling or Mumford & Sons there is not a word.
The flaws do not end with the pacing and the blatant authorial bias. Despite the claim of the subtitle to be “unearthing Britain's visionary music”, the book has a decidedly Anglocentric cant. Several Scottish musicians - Bert Jansch, the Incredible String Band, the aforementioned John Martyn - get prominent features, yet there is no real attempt to explore whether the vision changes either side of Hadrian's wall. Despite possessing the oldest living language in Europe, the Welsh barely get a look-in; if there is Cymraeg folk music out there, this book won't tell you a lot about it. In fact, regionalism as a whole seems absent from Electric Eden; it's (Anglo-)British or GTFO.
Young's decision to collate 'folk' and 'visionary' raises problems, too. 'Folk' is a term that relates to the collective and the common; yet the 'visionary' is almost always uncommon and singular in nature. Young equates the two, and does so in a narrative that traces an increasingly marginal course to the point of virtual extinction. In placing the folk tradition in the hands of unheralded visionaries, the implication is made that the people cannot be trusted with their own culture, and must instead be shepherded by their betters towards enlightenment. It's an attitude straight out of the English countryside - Orwell's Animal Farm, to be precise.
The most worrying implication, though, comes at the end of the main narrative. Railing against the big-city noise of punk destroying his bucolic prog Albion, Young hits out at those who reduce Britain's native music into the 'folkie' stereotype I outlined at the start of this article, railing against those who condemn folk as the preserve of the conservative white middle classes, huddling behind a forged national identity as a means of staving off the multicultural 20th century. He has every right to do so, defending the music he loves - yet the manner in which he does so, a sudden unheralded outburst at the flagging fag-end of an otherwise fine book, offers succour and credibility to those who are turning our common music into a weapon to be used against their pet 'undesirables'. The BNP have, for many years now, been using folk music as a propaganda tool for their agenda of an ethnically pure Britain, cleansed of the influence of immigration which has in fact been our lifeline for untold centuries.
I don't wish to accuse Rob Young of being an associate or supporter of such a vile organisation, but I do hope he chooses his words more carefully in future. It's an unfortunate (and, I'm guessing, unintentional) side-effect that his vision of Britain returned to its rural, pre-Christian state puts me in mind of the Fascist, Saxon-revivalist England from Jared's 'Decades of Darkness' saga.
To be fair to Young, his book does a fine job of exploring the development of the folk-revival through the 20th Century, and linking the classical music of pre-WWII England to the popular music that came after. I was surprised to find that the book's initial focus was solely on the '60s and '70s; the opening section is quite possibly the finest four chapters of music literature I've ever read (although the bias becomes clear with hindsight).
Despite its flaws, I would still recommend this book to anyone interested in English folk music; for all that the final third lets it down disastrously, there is enough in there to keep one such as I coming back for a while yet. As far as definitive works go, though, this isn't really any closer than Satchmo was all those years ago.
Unless any of you can show me a singing horse.