Rob Young's Electric Eden: Unearthing Britain's Visionary Music is a seminal book on British music and cultural heritage, that spans the visionary classical and folk tradition from the nineteenth-century to the present day.
Rob Young graduated in 1989 and was the editor of The Wire for 4 years up to 2004. He has recently been series editor of Black Dog's stylish monographs of influential record labels - including books on Warp Records and Rough Trade. He is currently in the middle of a novel based on the life of 17th century Jesuit polymath, Athanasius Kircher.
In this massive, beguiling history of 20th-century British folk music and its legacy, music journalist Young surveys the scene from the Edwardian revival through its postwar coffee-house heyday to contemporary outcroppings. He probes its influences on other genres, from the classical music of Ralph Vaughan Williams to the plangent Renaissance-ish harmonies of Led Zeppelin's "Stairway to Heaven"; the book's headliners are folk-rock luminaries of the '60s and '70s: Fairport Convention, the Incredible String Band, Steeleye Span, and Nick Drake. Young roots his narrative in analyses of folk traditions and the eternal English nostalgia for a mythic rural past, but he also treats the folkie eruption as a very modern reaction to the discontents of industrial society. The folk culture he celebrates is really that of the musicians themselves: their gypsy wanderings, their clubs and festivals and country-house idylls, their debauches and overdoses, their fashion oscillations between hobbit outfits and pagan nudity. American readers' eyes may glaze at the endless litany of groups they have never heard of, but many will be inspired to rediscover these bands by Young's evocations of their music-and the romantic yearnings it expressed. Photos. (May) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
While rock 'n' roll and psychedelic rock dominated popular music in the late 1960s, several groups of British musicians were returning to nature in an effort to recover the roots of their culture's music. Young, editor at large of the UK music magazine The Wire, traces the idealistic endeavor that led numerous musicians back to the countryside in search of ballads, ditties, and mythical tales of an earlier Britain uncorrupted by modernity. Along the way, Young chronicles the stories of Fairport Convention, Steeleye Span, Pentangle, Nick Drake, Sandy Denny, and Vashti Bunyan. He introduces Cecil Sharp, who, much like Alan Lomax in the States, traveled around Britain seeking out the tunes and lyrics preserved over centuries by ordinary folk. -VERDICT Young's remarkable (though overly long) book brings to life a mostly forgotten group of musicians who were nevertheless quite influential in the 1960s and 1970s. It stands alone in providing in-depth sketches of seminal bands and, indeed, this entire generation of musicians. A lovely exploration of what has become known as British folk rock. For all libraries.-Henry L. Carrigan Jr., Evanston, IL (c) Copyright 2011. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
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