Electric Eden: Unearthing Britain’s Visionary Music by Rob Young is the best music book we’ve read in years. Here’s our review, a slightly shorter version of which appeared in yesterday’s Sunday Business Post:
The term ‘pyschogeography’ was coined by French Situationist Guy Debord, defined as “the study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behaviour of individuals.” Largely pertaining to urban spaces, the word has in recent times become commonly associated with the work of English poet, novelist and historian Iain Sinclair.
A juicy phrase, it suggests the occult pull of terrestrial pressure points, places invested with primal energies, charged with the personalities of the individuals who have lived there and the events enacted within their provenance. The concept has been customised and expanded upon by such unlikely bedmates as Alan Moore, Will Self, Bruce Chatwin and Julian Cope, incorporating Celtic and Arthurian mythology, race memory, earth mysteries, Aboriginal and Hopi Dreamtime lore.
Rob Young’s Electric Eden, a sprawling and often awe-inspiring 664-page book, might best be described as a pysychogeographical history of British folk music. Young, an editor with highbrow music monthly The Wire, and the author of previous studies of the Rough Trade and Warp labels, has produced a passionately researched, carefully written and compulsively readable map of the leys and songlines of an oral culture with its roots in pre-Roman times and its branches in the charts. This is no musty, dusty academic study. One can hear echoes of Young’s avatars — Ralph Vaughan Williams, Peter Warlock, Shirley Collins, Bert Jansch, Fairport Convention, Richard Thompson, the Watersons — in present day acts like Florence and the Machine, Midlake, Sufjan Stephens and Mumford & Sons.
Young begins this odyssey with a sort of hippy nativity tale: that of the amazingly named Vashti Bunyan, a former Andrew Loog Oldham protege who in 1969 embarked on a horse-drawn pilgrimage the length and breadth of Britain in search of an Outer Hebridean shangri-la, finding instead the hardbitten stone-and-oats existence that lies beneath the topsoil of any back-to-the-garden agrarian ideal.
From there it’s a stately walk through a gallery illuminated by portraits of pastoral composers, song collectors, Marxist folkies, madcap yarnspinners like Lewis and Tolkien, psychedelic psychonauts and 70s innovators such as John Martyn (who mated folk with free jazz and technological innovations like the echoplex pedal). Along the way he casts new light on Sandy Denny and Nick Drake — the Orpheus and Eurydice of the ’70s folk wave — and ’80s mavericks such as Talk Talk, David Sylvian and Kate Bush (the true life story behind Bush’s ‘Cloudbusting’ song and video has the makings of a novel in itself).
But Electric Eden does far more than venerate its personal saints. Young’s remit covers the supernatural and the speculative, the social and the folkloric, adopting a hyper-imaginative approach that extends into the work of documentarians, filmmakers and photographers like Marcus Keef. Young’s grasp of context is enviable, his knowledge encyclopedic. Consider how he connects the themes of Robin Hardy’s 1973 cult classic film The Wicker Man to its pagan roots:
“Like the ‘forward into the past’ utopia of William Morris’s News From Nowhere, Summerisle is a speculative Other Britain: a meticulously researched, exquisitely designed micorocosm of what sacred and profane life in a village might be like if Christianity had never been imported to the Isles… The islanders teach sex magic on the school curriculum, practise folk remedies, believe in reincarnation and make sacrificial offerings to the nature gods to ensure their crops’ increase.”
He also unearths lesser known curios, such as the BBC film Penda’s Fen, aired the same year:
“The vision of Albion in Penda’s Fen ends far from the comfortable Middle England complacency of its beginning: the country is embraced, by its oldest pagan spirit as well as by its younger radicals, as a chaotic, revolutionary, mongrel nation. The pattern under the plough, the occult history of Albion – the British Dreamtime – lies waiting to be discovered by anyone with the right mental equipment.”
Lest this review be mistaken for a fan letter, it should be noted that Young’s book is not without the odd flaw. There are occasional lapses into music journalese punnery, plus some curious omissions: The Waterboys’ splicing of Blake and Yeatsian mysticism with trad; folk-rock stars like Horslips, Planxty and The Pogues; We Free Kings’ scrum of Rimbaudian punk, eco-politics and turbo-ceilidh.
But these are very minor sins. Electric Eden constructs a new mythography out of old threads, making antiquity glow with an eerie hue. It can sit proudly on any bookshelf beside Alan Lomax’s The Land Where Blues Began, Greil Marcus’s Invisible Republic, Nick Tosches’ Where Dead Voices Gather or Jon Savage’s England’s Dreaming. If Mr Young never writes another word, he can count this epic book as the fruit of a beautiful labour.
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