Electric Eden: Unearthing Britain's Visionary Music

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In this elegantly-tooled volume, Adam Sweeting gets the lowdown on cover versions – the worst, the most popular, the most frequently recorded, the most successful, the stupidest, the most tasteless, the most influential, and the ones nobody got around to yet. American readers of Young’s book will perhaps have heard of the Beatles, and the “new waves” of recorded British performance that transformed American popular music more than once. His personal enthusiasms are all too clear: any folk afficianado will want more, or less, on certain artists: for me, there was more than I needed to know about the somewhat over-rated Heron, while a brave case is made for the relevance to the genre of the iconoclastic Bill Fay, but there's no detailed discussion of the extraordinary long-lost Shelagh Macdonald . I started with great enthusiasm, was delighted to find out more about the sometimes dubious activities of the Victorian and Edwardian folk song collectors, and then about the impact of traditional music on the likes of Vaughn Williams and Benjamin Brittain, before getting to the bit I really thought I was going to enjoy, the period from the late 50's through to the early '70's.

If you think this reads like someone trying too hard, then it might not be for you, but I just loved every page. 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.Clubland Confidential is the true story of the rise and fall of a decadent nocturnal empire that stretched over several American cities and spawned its own subculture of celebrities and wannabes. I also suggest seeking out Rough Trade's Psyche Folk compilation 9to see how folk has developed) and Island Records folk boxset (you get the roots: Traffic , which complement this book nicely. I wish too that Young had paid more attention to Richard Thompson's later output and not flattened Thompson's work to fit a certain thesis. And prepare to consider Britain's satisfyingly strange and surprisingly hardy indigenous musical heritage afresh. EDEN has an electric motor, and answers the contemporary challenges of sustainable mobility while celebrating the spirit of the original Méhari and its unique driving pleasure.

also appearing: The Man From Uranus, Bronnt Industries Kapital, films, body art, Dirty Talk Disco DJs and more. Young's] book throws plenty of lightning, and it will have you scrambling to download some of the music that's filling his head. The poet-printmaker William Blake, Wordsworth, Yeats, Aleister Crowley, the modernist composers of British orchestral music, like Ralph Vaughn Williams, the folk-jazz fusionist John Martyn – they’re all in on it. And then begins the parade of three to ten page potted histories of Rob’s favourite folkies of the golden age. Warlock was born 30 years too early and would have felt utterly at home in the company of some of the wilder personalities who emerged during the extravagant flowering of electrified folk-rock in the late 60s and early 70s.Brutally Honest is an exposé of the struggles and acute pain that lay behind the glamour and success.

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. During the years 2009 - 2011, I was heavily invested in modern folk music: bands or solo artists such as Devendra Banhart , Woods , Six Organs of Admittance , Current 93, Joanna Newsom, Espers etc fascinated me. Martyn, by contrast, emerges through the patronage of Chris Blackwell, the founder of Island Records, who dropped him from the label in 1988. Fox, Richard and Linda Thompson, and countless others, I read the book listening to the Bunyan, Martyn, Shirley Collins and the Watersons, Bert Jansch, and Bob and Carole Pegg for the first time – duly informed and pleased to so be.the centrality of the erotic (especially a concern with female sexuality), and, especially, what the book likes to refer to as 'the occult meaning of the countryside' (magic to you or I). You may begin to hear the clotted chords of the Spinal Tap song “Break Like the Wind” welling up in the background. That movement, though essentially backward-looking, would help beget the protest folk era of the mid-1960s and, by extension, the seismic moment in pop culture when Bob Dylan strapped on an electric guitar at the Newport folk festival in 1965.