Electric Eden: Unearthing Britain's Visionary Music

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The founders of Glastonbury festival wished to "stimulate the earth's nervous system with joy, appreciation and happiness so that our Mother planet would respond by breeding a happier, more balanced race of men".

Focusing on Bert Jansch, Shirley Collins, The Watersons, John and Beverly Martyn, Fairport Convention, Nick Drake, The Incredible String Band, Pentangle, Steeleye Span, Mr. He is less convincing when arguing for more recent performers, minor enthusiasms like Kate Bush, David Sylvian and the band Talk Talk. You can see English psychedelia steeped in this nostalgia -Penny Lane, Pink Floyd’s Syd songs, plus See Saw and Remember a Day – there are dozens of them. Over the song's duration it splits into seven distinct segments and even ingests two other songs whole. Electric Eden: Unearthing Britain's Visionary Music is a 2011 book by Rob Young about the history of British folk music in the 1960s and 1970s.This led to an exploration of past folk artists so Nick Drake, John Martyn and Vashti Bunyan came into my radar .

Rob Young investigates how the idea of folk has been handed down and transformed by successive generations - song collectors, composers, Marxist revivalists, folk-rockers, psychedelic voyagers, free festival-goers, experimental pop stars and electronic innovators. Young's background is editing the Wire, a magazine devoted to marginal music, so it's not surprising that he has scant regard for the more commercially successful folk-rock acts, such as Jethro Tull and the later incarnations of Steeleye Span. He praises the "arachnoid fingerwork" of Nick Drake's guitar technique, speaks of "a tidal spray of cymbals", drumming that "patters like butterflies trapped in a balsa wood box". When Vashti reached the Pied Piper's island, Donovan had fled for LA, but Bunyan's bittersweet tale – replete with the noble hopelessness of her determination to live as if the 20th century never happened – is emblematic of a whole generation of youth who seemed keen to drop out of industrialised society and "get back to the garden". The story gets especially rich when the sylvan nostalgia of British folkies blends into the worldwide hippy dream.

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Rob Young's theme--the visionary instinct--allows him to treat British music of the 20th Century as a continuous narrative rather than one that begins or ends with rock music.

A new edition as part of the Faber Greatest Hits – books that have taken writing about music in new and exciting directions for the twenty-first century. After a tour of the folk-influenced classical composers of the early 20th C – Vaughan Williams, Holst, Bax, Ireland, Warlock (unfamiliar territory to me) we then get the MacColl/Lloyd/Lomax years when folk becomes a hot political potato (a very familiar tale). 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). Rob Young's ambitious Electric Eden presents a flip side to the well-known story of the evolution of electric rock in Britain in the 1960s, a story of the rediscovery of England's native folk music in the early 20th century by the likes of William Morris and Cecil Sharp, who went from town to town recording and notating the music that would hold great sway with those musicians who became associated with England's less loud, more earthy music--the likes of Vashti Bunyan, Davy Graham, The Incredible String Band, Pentangle, Fairport Convention and Sandy Denny, Richard Thompson, John Martyn, John Renbourn, Bert Jansch, Nick Drake, and many others would each deploy traditional folk music to their own ends in various recombinant ways, writing new songs laced with the idealism of the exploding sixties youth culture, while paying homage to the spirit and traditions of old.