Electric Eden: Unearthing Britain's Visionary Music

Product Information

And finally we get some really quite unconvincing attempts to trace the whole wyrd vision thing in the work of contemporaries such as Julian Cope, David Sylvian and Talk Talk. In a sweeping panorama of Albion’s soundscape that takes in the pioneer spirit of Cecil Sharp; the pastoral classicism of Ralph Vaughan Williams and Peter Warlock; the industrial folk revival of Ewan MacColl and A. Young gives ample details on all of these collector/musicians and many more of these early folk explorers. This story, one of many fascinating tales told by Rob Young in his epic study of the various transformations of British folk music in the 20th century, is illuminating on many levels. After initially modeling what’s at stake in the recovery of the Sixties generation in the person of Vashti Bunyan, a folksinger who worked with the crucial producer-arranger Joe Boyd during the late Sixties, Young’s six hundred page history opens on a one-hundred page survey of the British modernist composers in their treatment of “the folk” – a frequently rehearsed theme, after all, in modernist and cultural studies.

EDEN combines the unique sensation of driving a Méhari with the comfort of an electric motor, for exceptional driving enjoyment. Rob Young , who was the editor of The Wire , the leading British music magazine, is now an editor at large there.Electric Eden: Unearthing Britain’s Visionary Music is an ambitious survey of British folk music that is also, sad to say, indulgent.

Cecil Sharp, who subsequently travelled throughout Britain collecting old songs, is now regarded as the father of the English folk-song revival. In any case, Arcadian idealism, like John Barleycorn, dies only to be reborn, as Electric Eden, with its wide historical scope, attests.This is all familiar stuff too, although there are enough meaty quotes from RY’s own interviews to make it very worthwhile. Delius's Brigg Fair contains an English folk song he learned from his friend and fellow folk-song enthusiast, Percy Grainger.