Electric Eden: Unearthing Britain’s Visionary Music, by Rob Young

Be not afeard. The Isle is full of noises,
Sounds, and sweet airs, that give delight, and hurt not.
Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments
Will hum about mine ears, and sometimes voices,
That, if I then had wak’d from a deep sleep
Will make me sleep again, and then, in dreaming,
The clouds methought would open and show riches
Ready to drop on me, that, when I wak’d,
I cried to dream again.

What a lovely and apt epigraph from The Tempest for this book, which is possibly one for the enthusiast more than the general reader. However, any reader keen to find out more about a vivid phase of popular culture in our lifetime will find their curiosity rewarded. Electric Eden chronicles Folk Rock, at the height of its popularity in the late 60s and 70s, tailing off in the 80s, and rediscovered (if indeed for some people it ever went away) in the 00s. The book traces the inspiration for this particular mood and style of rock music back through the folk music revivals of the 50s, early 20th and late 19th centuries to its roots. In this sense, its introductory chapters overlap with the beginning of The Ballad of Britain, by Will Hodgkinson, also read and enjoyed by me this year though very different – and in the end, with a bit of shoe-horning, the two books are complementary.

The author has a thesis to propound, identifying in the period of intense archaeological interest in folk music in the early 20th century an irresistible instinct to stretch back to an idealised rural and quasi-magical past: Albion, or Cockayne. Rob Young isolates this strand and follows it through the pastoral- inspired composers of the early 20th century – Holst, RVW, Ireland, Moeran, Warlock (some of whom were collectors themselves), notes it by-passing the 50s revival led by Ewan McColl, flags the meeting of traditional music with electric instruments, and then really gets down to business with it in the riotous flowering of folk and psychedelic rock music of Fairport Convention, Pentangle, The Incredible String Band, and many, many more individual performers, groups and off-shoots. I was in my teens and 20s then, and this was, most definitely, the soundtrack to my life. So I fell on this book with anticipation, which was – mostly – rewarded.

He starts the book with an extended anecdote, which seems to be going nowhere – Vashti Bunyan’s ride from a woodland squat in Kent to an artists’ colony on Skye. She is a waif-like folk singer, who cut a few simple, evanescent tracks in 1970 when she was young, failing to capitalise on them to make a musical career. After her ride, she disappeared from the scene, but her album became the stuff of legend, and now she is rediscovered, and claimed as a muse by current singer-songwriters. The epic journey was completely improvised, hand-to-mouth, and took her and her landscape artist partner across the country over several months. This seemingly aimless passage turns out to pick up the themes of Rob Young’s thesis – the pull of traditional music; the motivation of travelling people who want to live a free life; the lure of the earth and the ideal of a rural, pastoral lost Eden.

But the key word in the title is Electric, and this book tells us what happens when you plug all those elements into the grid. The author’s grasp on the interconnected world these musicians inhabited is secure. He charts their meeting, work together, splits acrimonious or harmonious, and re-formings. He chronicles the influence of mind-altering substances, and altered states of mind. He honours musicians who survived, and who succumbed (Nick Drake and Sandy Denny among the latter). He identifies the colourful Svengali – music producer, mover and shaker Joe Boyd, who almost single-handedly created this music as a commercial product. The text here is a rich mixture of sure-footed music criticism, describing the style and reception of iconic albums (because this was a music laid down on disc – my musical memories of that time are always illustrated by album art), with ‘Rock Family Trees’ style biographical record and gossip. There are personal testimonies from musicians to underscore the history. He recounts the performance of the music – the locations from small, eclectic clubs to massive festival sites. He maps the music onto the land, in London and most of all, in the country, which is appropriate, as this was the culmination of mainstream music colonising the countryside and not just the towns and cities.

At this particular period of popular music, a niche musical form went mainstream and inspired some of our most powerful musical forces as well as producing its own icons (the Beatles are name-checked in this, as are Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin and other seminal groups). Rob Young knows his stuff, and is not afraid to let his opinions show. His years of cutting-edge music journalism for The Wire have given him an exuberant way with words and a fierce courage to tell it as he sees it – which is exhilarating, as it is not, always, the way this reader sees it. The book abounds in what I came to call ‘Shall we go and settle this outside?’ moments – I have a feeling they will be different for each individual reader. One of mine is a mini-rant contrasting the purity of the emerging English musical tradition of the late 19th c with the European mainstream:

And yet, at the century’s close, the great powers of Middle European music had become faisandés – a French word meaning overripe, corrupt, decadent – blooming into their late autumn sunset, with the atonal winter heralding the blizzard of Viennese serialism in the early 1920s. The influential, radical chromaticism and total art of Wagner had bloated into the massive, opulent symphonies of Brahms, Bruckner and Mahler, and the decadent operatics of Strauss and Verdi. (p58)

Well – given that, when Fairport Convention and Pentangle disappeared from the scene, these bloated symphonies and decadent operas are what seduced me away, I’m not in much of a mood to agree with that. However, the other reason for quoting it is to give a flavour of Young’s prose when he’s on a roll. It’s extravagant, confident, opulent. You might or might not like it. I really enjoyed plunging into it.

Another slight annoyance lies in the debatable facts that find their way into the book. I’m not the only one to have spotted some, and we’ve all got a different list, I think. The first that pulled me up short was his assertion that Vaughan Williams died ‘a Knight of the Realm’ – when one of the better known facts of his life is that he conscientiously and repeatedly turned down all honours apart from the Order of Merit. Well: obviously, I know more about RVW than he does – but he knows infinitely more about The Incredible String Band than I do, and it shows. At first, I wondered if these instances where he couldn’t quite summon the impetus to go look something up were enough to cast doubt on the soundness of the whole – however the core of the book is obviously researched with love and dedication, reasonably well referenced (and the author’s blog supplies some of the answers to ‘Where did you get that from?’ moments). We’ll each have our own particular ‘Yes! You’ve got it!’ passages as well.

This is absolutely not a definitive history of the English folk tradition post-Cecil Sharp. It does just what it says on the (utterly brilliant) cover – the author defines, and then goes in search of Britain’s visionary music. The size and heft of this substantial tome might lead the reader to think that this is exhaustive even of its chosen theme, but what he includes and what he leaves out of that definition is personal and eclectic. That leaves a huge gap through which a pretty large part of the enduring folk music tradition passes without registering in this work. Those of us who listen to folk music, buy albums, go to performances today, have to put up with the notion that somehow we are following the fall-out from some glory days that are 30 to 40 years in the past. Many of the people I listen to now are just not mentioned here. Their preoccupations are not necessarily the visionary ones that Rob Young recruits to his thesis. When I look at the folk music landscape today, I realise that much of its continuity has bypassed this book. This is where The Ballad of Britain is such an intriguing companion piece – it describes the here and now.

And yet, reading Electric Eden made me remember what it felt like to be young at the turn of the 70s and listening to this particular music that so vividly conjures up the era now. So as long as the reader takes on board the boundaries of this work, it is a remarkable achievement. It’s rather like the debate that is going on at the moment around what we have gained and lost in adopting Satnav. We take a predetermined route to our destination, and the spidery side roads are greyed out. Rob Young has set his Satnav for Albion, fastest route, arrived there, described it with passion and knowledge, and discounted other destinations beyond and to the side. But if you spread out a map, you can see all the B-roads and byways, and have the potential to arrive at a whole other set of places, where the music harks back to the same past, has been transmitted and enjoyed, and has survived this visionary era.

Rob Young: Electric Eden: Unearthing Britain’s Visionary Music. Faber, 2010. 664pp
ISBN-13: 9780571237524
Rob Young’s blog: http://www.electriceden.net/

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