When Ingrid, my wife who’s the Estate Buyer of everything from whiskies to low-head hydro, goes on a buying trip somewhere I’m interested, I take time off from managing the Pub here and go with her. Naturally I toss several books in my kit to read and Electric Eden which was in the Library here caught my interest.
Electric Eden is a massive tome at close to seven pages that tells the story of how such electrified folk bands such as Fairport Convention, Pentangle, Jetbro Tull, and Steeleye Span rediscovered the rich material that could be found in Britain’s folk music traction. (Though the book and critics use the phrase ‘English folk music tradition’ but that’s not quite right as many of these groups delved into the Scottish folk music tradition as well. And despite the recent rejection of independence by Scotland, it is is very much a separate tradition. And nation.) To research this thesis would be an odyssey involving travel, academic style research, and interviews with many of the people involved in this revival.
Like readers of this review, I have favourite artists, so I checked to see what he had written on Steeleye Span. (A fair disclaimer here: I rarely read non- fiction from the beginning to end, but rather skip around. The only piece of this nature I’ve read from the first page to very last in that order Iain Bank’s Raw Spirit: In Search of the Perfect Dram.) It’s not as good as Brian Hilton and Geoff Wall’s Ashley Hutchings: The Guv’nor & The Rise of Folk Rock but that was a full book and just ten pages, so it’s just a summation of the early history of that group.
He catches the flavour of a group of city folk having a lark in the countryside with folk music research such as Bert Lloyd’s Folk Music of Old England with experimenting with actual music. He touches upon the, errr, dynamic personal relationships within the group as well. Indeed the Irish couple, Gay and and Terry Woods would leave as soon as their first album was in the can. Gay would return much later which led Maddy to soon leave and only returning after Gay left again.
In the chapter prefaced by Kipling’s ‘Oak, Ash, and Thorn’, he looks at the deep rooted fondness of the now largely urbanised British for their rural past and how that effected these groups. Fairport for example took over a disused pub called The Angel for themselves and their family. Traffic ended on an Estate that was so isolated that they were left to to themselves for long stretches of time, something they relished. Traffic’s most obvious use of the British folk tradition is, of course, ‘John Barleycorn’.
Pick a group you know and you’ll find a story about it, be it the Incredible String Band, the Watersons, or individuals like Nick Drake and even an American muso like Woody Guthrie. Even such cultural artifacts like Wicker Man or the writings of William Blake get put in their proper context. Need I say that Tolkien, ironically enough as he was an urban creature toThe core, is a major influence?
Ok, overall it’s a brilliant book even if I quibble with some with some of what’s here such his snarky comment as the stability of Steeleye Span, or that he touches nought upon Oysterband who to this day draw upon these roots. Oh he’s got a weird dream sequence in which he notes Fiddler’s Dram, the second incarnation of what would become the present-day group released ‘Day Trip to. Bangor’ and yes I’m pissed that he thinks that band name was ‘irritatingly parochial’. You no doubt will have your own axes to grind but none the less you’ll find much worth reading here.
(Faber and Faber UK, 2010)
