The Imagined Village: Culture, Ideology & the English Folk Revival

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Simon Emmerson, who died in March a day after his 67th birthday, was a unique figure in world and roots music. A guitarist, Grammy-nominated producer, DJ and creative force behind both Afro Celt Sound System and The Imagined Village, above all he will be best remembered for his gift for fusing disparate musical styles and facilitating the diverse array of musicians his projects invariably required. Unexpected, surprising, innovative and often genre-defying though his ventures were, the end results went beyond mere novelty to produce something always coherent and invariably exciting. Engineer [Additional Recording Engineers] – Ali Friend, Geoff Webb, Lee Richardson, Simon Clarke (2), Simon Emmerson, Tim Saunders (2) SE ‘As a band we feel we’ve come through tough times but just through dogged perseverance and the simple joy of playing together we’ve achieved what we set out to do when we came off the Empire and Love Tour January 2010: make a recording that reflects both the fun and energy we generate as a live unit, plus our respective skills, eccentricities and unique identities as song writers, arrangers and musicians. We’ve never felt more united as a band and we hope this comes across on the album’

Members of the Saltlines collective will also be involved elsewhere at the festival – John Spiers will take up his regular seat on FolkEast’s Gardeners’ Cornered panel (FolkEast’s answer to Radio 4’s Gardeners’ Question Time), where audience members can discuss their plant issues (!) while BBC Radio 2 Folk Awards Best Duo winners Phillip Henry & Hannah Martin (Edgelarks) will be performing their own set. Across their nine albums, Emmerson sugared the ensemble’s core line-up with the likes of Iarla Ó Lionáird, Martin Hayes, Davey Spillane, Moussa Sissokho, Johnny Kalsi and Ayub Ogada. The result situated Irish traditional music within a wider, international context, one that deliriously embraced the old and the new. Their 2017 album, The Source, earned them recognition as Best Group in that year’s Songlines Music Awards. It’s a record that, in the time-honoured way of folk, is about sex and death,’ says Simon,’ but it’s also about honouring England’s own distinctive traditions.’ Engineer [Main Recording Engineers] – Mass, Oliver Knight, Paul Grady, Richard Evans (3), Simon Richmond It is in this context that Simon Emmerson’s The Imagined Village arrives, its name borrowed from Georgina Boyes’ book about the Edwardian folk boom. The project – for once that over-worked term is appropriate – reflects Simon’s passions as both musician and cultural activist. Gathering together an array of brilliant and challenging voices, and setting them in a musical framework that honours the past while updating it with breathtaking confidence, The Imagined Village is arguably the most ambitious re-invention of the English folk tradition since Fairport Convention’ Liege and Lief.But what is Englishness? That question has already provoked a swathe of books, mostly by Tory diehards – Roger Scruton’s England, An Elegy and Peter Hitchens’ The Abolition of Britain for example – though Billy Bragg’s The Progressive Patriot has recently joined the fray, arguing, like Orwell before him, that patriotism is not necessarily the refuge of rascals. Bragg’s point is that there is a distinctly English tradition that belongs not to royalists and imperialists, but to the people, a tradition that runs from The Diggers to The Clash. Simon Emmerson, the founder of Afro Celt Sound System, core founder of The Imagined Village, record producer, guitarist, bird watcher and Honorary Bard, passed away on Monday, 13th March. Produced by Simon ‘Palmskin’ Richmond and Simon Emmerson with band input. Apart from BTD, produced by Sheema Mukherjee. With few performances since 2012, a superb stroke of serendipity sees them returning to FolkEast for the festival’s milestone 10 th year – a real coup, with most of the original line-up intact.

Every age re-invents the past to its own fancy. When Edwardian song collector Cecil Sharp roamed England, he imagined the country’s history as a rural idyll, filled with flower meadows and genial shepherds, even though the songs he found were frequently about poverty, death and fornication with faeries. The Imagined Village have become a lot better by becoming more ­conventional. When they started out, playing in a large tent in the mudbath that was ­Womad 2007, they were ­almost ­frantically ­experimental in their ­attempts to ­reinterpret ­traditional songs for a ­multicultural, 21st-­century Britain. ­Under the ­guidance of ­Simon ­Emmerson, of Afro Celt Sound ­System fame, they mixed music with ­multimedia effects, telling the story of ­traditional Sussex singers the ­Copper Family through clips on a screen ­behind the stage, and making use of ­programmed beats and electric bass. Apart from work with his own bands, Simon’s many production credits included albums for Manu Dibango from Cameroon (Polysonic 1990), Tarika from Madagascar (Son Egal, 1997) and Baaba Maal – he was nominated for a Grammy for Maal’s Firin’ in Fouta (1995). His UK production work included albums for Show of Hands (Witness, 2006) and Spiro (Lightbox, 2009). Other artists from the region will include another great duo, Norwich-based Christina Alden and Alex Patterson, the Norfolk Broads, Essex-based King Driscolls and Suffolk’s John Ward Trio and Bushing Sharks band. Saturday night will bring a headline set to savour from “one of the premier English folk groups of the 21 st century “– the Mercury Prize-nominated The Unthanks, as they return to touring after two years with their bumper eleven-piece band and music from their first new album in six years, Sorrows.It’s with a heavy heart that we announce on Monday, 13th March, the peaceful passing of our dear Simon Emmerson, after a prolonged illness. A fine collection of East Anglian artists has also been announced, including Suffolk’s own husband-and-wife duo Honey & The Bear, whose recent album Journey Through The Roke won wide critical acclaim ( reviewed here). The song was originally a fairly full-on electronic arrangement with a Drum and Bass feel. AG insisted on trying out a lighter, gentler feel for the drums, and this approach of using the programmed beats to inspire and eventually be replaced by live performance became a kind of template for the album. One of the most unusual collaborations of the past decade, The Imagined Village made a significant impression with their critically acclaimed and commercially successful début album. They toured extensively, appeared on TV's Later…With Jools show and won out at the BBC Radio 2 Folk Awards. If the band had initially developed as a loose collective of singers and musicians, they have subsequently consolidated into a working, growing, organic aggregation. This stability in personnel is shiningly reflected in the brand new, follow-up album, which is also their first on the new record label ECC. Titled “Empire and Love”, it is released on 11 January 2010, a few days prior to a major UK tour that will include prestigious gigs at Scotland’s Celtic Connections Festival and London’s Queen Elizabeth Hall.

Charlie Moores and Magnus Robb– Red Deer Rutting (podcast extract – music Polar Drift, Simon Emmerson and Simon ‘Palmskin Richmond) Bending the Dark, as a title doesn’t refer to trendy new Physics, deviant sexual practices or even Lord of the Ring wizardry, it’s really very simple: It doesn’t matter how bad things are if you pull together you can turn the situation around and come out of the darkness stronger and more confident.” One of just two UK festival appearances this summer, the band will headline the opening night on Friday, August 19, in the grounds of glorious Glemham Hall. And the extraordinary lineup on the main Sunset stage will be nothing less than folk royalty. More personal were the keen twitcher’s mixes of music and field recordings of birdsong that he made for the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, and it’s perhaps his love of nature that provides a clue to his career-defining conviction that all music, whatever its origin and style, was interconnected and compatible. It explains, at least, the pan-global approach he took with Afro Celt Sound System, which he formed in 1995. He became fascinated by druidry after “an epiphany” while working in Senegal, and after studying under the writer Philip Carr-Gomm was made an honorary bard.The resurgence of folk in the new century, a hundred years after Cecil Sharp became riveted by the sight of Morris dancers, remains a work in progress. Already, though, new times are finding fresh resonance within folk’s age-old contours. The music’s darker strains, its murder ballads and pirate yarns, have been pulled to the fore – witness the recent Rogue’s Gallery project – while in an age of corporate governance, the fact that folk is not ‘owned’ by anybody is cheering. In 2009, the project moved to a new record label, ECC Records, and a second album, Empire & Love was released in January 2010, [4] followed by Bending the Dark in May 2012. [5] Discography [ edit ] The Imagined Village [ edit ] The Imagined Village When I spoke to Simon, he explained how, as a keen birder, the Big Garden Birdwatch was like bringing it all home to your yard, and he wanted to celebrate that with this long-overdue mix. Home is always a great place to start, so why not get involved if you are new to watching wildlife and birds? You can learn more here: https://www.rspb.org.uk/get-involved/activities/birdwatch/

There will also be The Vintage Mobile Cinema, a brand new stage in the woodland, and the dance tent will be in full swing all weekend with yoga sessions, dance workshops, Morris dancing and ceilidhs and music from Frog on a Bike, Stumpy Oak, Fiftygomash and Topette!! Simon touched the hearts of millions of people through his music and infinite wisdom. His legacy remains with the amazing people he bought together and they will continue to create the magic of his music with his guidance from above. There will be plans of a tribute memorial concert later in the year and the details will be released on all platforms.The most ambitious folk fusion band of the 21st century, The Imagined Village set out to match English traditional songs against the sounds of contemporary multi-cultural England, with influences from Asia, the Caribbean and elsewhere.