Book review: Electric Eden: Unearthing Britain's Visionary Music

A FEW minutes before I first opened Rob Young's hefty tome, in an oddly prescient flash of synchronicity, the pastoral idyll of Ralph Vaughan Williams's The Lark Ascending, as played by Nicola Benedetti, drifted from the radio. A quotation from George Meredith's poem of the same title opens the first chapter, while Vaughan Williams himself looms large in Young's chronicling of British folk and related music-making over the past century, with its recurring theme of a deep-seated desire to access a lost Arcadia, whether anarchic pagan paradise, idealised pre-First World War agrarian society or William Morris's post-industrial amalgam of socialist utopia and medieval courtliness.

According to Young, his initial plan was to chronicle the late 1960s and 1970s "high water mark" of folk-rock as delivered by the likes of Pentangle, Fairport Convention, the Albion Band, Nick Drake and Steeleye Span. Clearly things got well out of hand. The book opens with Vashti Bunyan, the fey young singer-songwriter who vanished from the scene after her first album, Just Another Diamond Day, in 1970, heading for the Hebrides on a horse and cart in fruitless search of a rural paradise, and draws towards its close with Julian Cope, post-punk iconoclast and author of The Modern Antiquarian, in pursuit of standing stones and mystical hokum.

The merry dance between English pastoral and English psychedelia is joined by myriad singers, musicians and others, from expected figures such as the great folk revivalist Cecil Sharp, Sandy Denny, AL Lloyd, the Carthys and Watersons, John Martyn, Ewan McColl - and, of course, Vaughan Williams - as well as more disparate elements as William Morris, Donovan, Kate Bush, Druids, ley-liners, The Wind in the Willows and film-makers Powell and Pressburger.

In its sprawling psychogeography, at times it's rather as if Peter Ackroyd has grabbed a hurdy gurdy, or for that matter a Stratocaster, to regale us with a broadside version of his monumental chartings of the English imagination. And English is the operative word here, for despite Young's use of "Albion", the ancient name for Britain, with its mythological overtones, this often intriguing dissertation is decidedly Anglo-centric.Scotland, for all the richness and muscularity of its own ongoing folk revival, comes over at times purely as a sort of desirably remote Ultima Thule to which disenchanted English seekers such as Vashti Bunyan beat a path, while Robin Hall and Jimmie McGregor head south to find fame on the BBC's Tonight programme.

However, one influential Scots outfit with whom he celebrates at length is the Incredible String Band, whose inimitable fusion of Celtic mysticism, blues and exotic instrumentation made them true "bards of the global campfire".

Young claims that the book is not so much about source singers as about "guardians of the well of folk tradition … the story of people who have slaked their thirsts at the well, treating it as an oasis from which to refresh their own art". Which may be fair enough, but reading the book from a Scottish viewpoint, there are inevitably reservations. Young persuasively draws together the strands of the early English folk revival and its cultural context, with Cecil Sharp, Holst, Vaughan Williams and their ilk debating William Morris's vision and the later revivalists of the 1960s and early 1970s inclining to the pastoral while Ewan MacColl rails against it, his championing of the industrial muse and the ground-breaking Radio Ballads giving a voice to previously unheard masses.

But you won't find the word "Gaelic" in this book's index, despite the American folk song collector Alan Lomax, whom Young rightly credits as a key player in that same postwar revival, describing the wealth of Gaelic song he recorded as "the flower of western Europe".

Young deals with the idealistic origins of festivals such as Glastonbury, and describes folk music being driven underground in the 1980s by both Thatcherism and the punk backlash, and focuses on other bands from other, more commercial genres taking up the runes of old Albion - Kate Bush, or Talk Talk's Mark Hollis, for instance, whom he likens to "a modern-day Blake, bearing witness to London's dismal streets".

But no mention of the "Gaelic rock" band Runrig who, with albums like The Cutter and the Clan during those same dismal 1980s, became a potent symbol of Scottish cultural resurgence - mind you, they'd be looking more to Tir na nOg, land of the ever-young, than to an English Arcadia.

I'm also surprised that in dealing with recent developments, such as the Imagined Village's effective amalgam of English tradition and new multiculturalism, Young doesn't mention the BNP's attempts to hijack English traditional music to promote its own, rather nasty, vision of Albion.

There are some self-indulgencies: an odd excursion conflating a surreal antiquarian England with Steeleye Span's album Rocket Cottage, and a fondness for sweeping statements, as when he describes the arrival of new "pied pipers" in the shape of Marc Bolan and David Bowie:

"With one crushing stomp of its platform soles, glam [rock] wiped out the market value of British rock's Arcadian dreams. From now on the direction of time travel would point relentlessly towards the future."

I also suspect that the protagonists of the film director Robert Flaherty's classic Man of Aran would be surprised to find themselves described here as "Scottish herring fishers", natives as they were of the Aran Islands off Ireland's west coast.

But enough of North-British sniping. Young's thesis is engrossing, observing how "in an age of rapid and unstoppable change, nostalgia and revivalism often flourish".

He writes engagingly on visiting William Morris's house at Hammersmith, for instance, or Farley House in Hampshire, where Fairport Convention worked on their landmark album Liege and Lief, or evoking the shadowlands or sunlit bucolic groves of the Arcadia for which so many of his subjects were questing, consciously or otherwise.

After all, who doesn't sometimes yearn after a prelapsarian retreat, even if accessible only through music?

Or as Joni Mitchell puts it in "Woodstock", don't we all, at some level, want to get back to the garden?