Electric Eden: Unearthing Britain's Visionary Music

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Rob Young investigates how the idea of folk has been handed down and transformed by successive generations - song collectors, composers, Marxist revivalists, folk-rockers, psychedelic voyagers, free festival-goers, experimental pop stars and electronic innovators. 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. 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. You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice. Electric Eden: Unearthing Britain's Visionary Music is a 2011 book by Rob Young about the history of British folk music in the 1960s and 1970s.

After a tour of the folk-influenced classical composers of the early 20th C – Vaughan Williams, Holst, Bax, Ireland, Warlock (unfamiliar territory to me) we then get the MacColl/Lloyd/Lomax years when folk becomes a hot political potato (a very familiar tale).

I was thrilled by the way he analyses the cover photo of Fairport's Unhalfbricking, and explains the crucial role of Winston Churchill's grand-daughter in the creation of the Glastonbury Festival and its attendant mythology. But this part of the story is perhaps too tangled to turn into anything except a series of individual studies. Like an elephant in a hot air balloon Rob Young’s gargantuan Observer’s Book of Folk comes wafting towards us on a breeze of critical hot air.

Just as there are unspoilt bits of British countryside hidden in the spaces between the motorways, there are musical pleasures hidden in the overgrown woods of an enchanted past. About an early record by the band Steeleye Span, he observes the way acoustic and amplified instruments “rub up against each other like a shedload of rusted, notched and pitted farm implements.

But exactly how the mod group The Action morphed into Mighty Baby and became folk sessioners and two of them were “instrumental” in the conversion to Sufiism of Richard Thompson is the kind of thing some may find fascinating but others… really won’t. Delius's Brigg Fair contains an English folk song he learned from his friend and fellow folk-song enthusiast, Percy Grainger.

The songs were, in fact, the transmitters of those myths, evoking an older, predominantly agrarian England that increasingly existed only in memory.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. Young wants us to accept that his theme is not a specific genre but visionary musical landscapes in general.

Electric Eden is expansive, exhaustive, enlightening yet an eminently readable examination of English folk music: its origins and development. A fearless, hugely ambitious, frankly imperfect book, Electric Eden covers a huge swath of ground, placing folk music and its culture, including offshoots like classical pastoralism, ethnomusicological preservationism, electric folk, psychedelic folk, and even fantasy fiction, in a huge, overlapping set of contexts: social, political, mystical, psychogeographical, iconographic, literary, and, yes, musical. I’ve got a piece on English Music in this week’s New Statesman , which devotes a large section to the question of ‘Who Are the English? On the whole the book deals with music which is normally described as 'folk', but Rob Yoing does cast the net more broadly than that and discusses things like 'Strawberry Fields Forever' and Led Zepplin IV which aren't normally regarded as part of the folk cannon. 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.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. I ve already made several precious musical discoveries thanks to this book and I expect to make more.