Rob Young > Quotes

“What the songs do,’ Shirley confides, ‘is take me into that world [of the past]; they take you back centuries. In a twelve-verse song, you can be transported, and I think that’s such a strength in a song, that it can take you on a journey. Sometimes you don’t even know what sort of journey you’ve gone on, because a lot of the meanings have eroded over the years, and you just get glimpses of lives. Not through the words of a great playwright or poet or author, but just through the minds and mirrors of ordinary people. I think one of the reasons the country’s in such trouble is that nobody’s connected to it, to their ancestors or what’s gone before. And if other people’s lives aren’t important, I don’t know how your own can be.”
― Rob Young, Electric Eden: Unearthing Britain's Visionary Music

“Such unexpected details carried over onto the blues rocker ‘Mr Lacey’ on their second album, What We Did on Our Holidays. Dr Bruce Lacey was an inventor of robots and automata who lived next door to Hutchings in the mid-1960s, and the hoover-like whooshing noises that take a ‘solo’ in the song’s middle eight are made by three of Lacey’s robots, which he transported down to the studio in south London, their inventor gleefully prodding them into life while dressed in a space suit.”
― Rob Young, Electric Eden: Unearthing Britain's Visionary Music

“Softley’s first album, Songs for Swingin’ Survivors (Columbia), produced by Donovan’s management team of Peter Eden and Geoff Stephens, is one of the three great solo folk albums released in Britain in 1965, alongside Bert Jansch’s second, It Don’t Bother Me, and John Renbourn.”
― Rob Young, Electric Eden: Unearthing Britain's Visionary Music

“Inner Space: could any phrase be more appropriate, more suggestive of Can’s destination and destiny? The opposite direction from outer space, in contrast to the tendency towards ‘kosmische’, or cosmic, rock perpetrated by many German acts such as Tangerine Dream, Cluster and Ash Ra Tempel several years later. It suggested a retreat to a psychological state, a self-examination, a hermetic environment, a laboratory of the mind. It is possible that, while in New York, Irmin heard about or even saw Andy Warhol’s film Outer and Inner Space – premiered in January 1966 – and the phrase lodged in his mind.”
― Rob Young, All Gates Open: The Story of Can

“Armed with a hammer and sickle, singer and folklorist A. L. Lloyd hit the nail on the head and cut to the quick on page one of his monumental study of folk song: ‘The mother of folklore is poverty.’3”
― Rob Young, Electric Eden: Unearthing Britain's Visionary Music

“During a long heart-to-heart talk, as they ramble through the country lanes near Bredon Hill, his father muses upon the old meaning of ‘pagan’ – ‘belonging to the village’. ‘The village is sneered at as something petty. Petty it can be. Yet it works – the scale is human. People can relate there. Man may yet, in the nick of time, revolt, and save himself. Revolt from the monolith; come back to the village.’ He”
― Rob Young, Electric Eden: Unearthing Britain's Visionary Music

“More recent critics of the folk revival have suggested that the entire body of work considered ‘British folk’, from the Victorian age onwards, has been nothing more than carefully staged illusion, the product of a wholesale middle-class appropriation of working people’s culture.”
― Rob Young, Electric Eden: Unearthing Britain's Visionary Music

“Munrow hated hearing pre-Romantic music sung with operatic vibrato, for example, and pioneered the use of vocalists whose voices didn’t wobble.”
― Rob Young, Electric Eden: Unearthing Britain's Visionary Music

“Harry Cox of Great Yarmouth, who went on to become a celebrated face of the traditional folk revival, recording more than 200 songs and appearing frequently on television until his death in 1971.”
― Rob Young, Electric Eden: Unearthing Britain's Visionary Music

“These were songs from Merrie England’s springtime, and later, on Summer Solstice (1971), they would much better capture the mood of sun-kissed medieval Arcadia.”
― Rob Young, Electric Eden: Unearthing Britain's Visionary Music

“On 1970’s The Lady and the Unicorn he applied his filigree technique to a procession of courtly dance tunes from across medieval Europe, including an old English tune, ‘Trotto’, and an Italian one, ‘Saltarello’, given a folk-drone feel by Renbourn’s use of an unusual tuning and double-tracked with a sitar.”
― Rob Young, Electric Eden: Unearthing Britain's Visionary Music

“Kennedy’s policies were intended to answer the questions, increasingly asked in the immediate post-war years, of who are the ‘folk’ anyway, and who owns their music? When Cecil Sharp and the Edwardian revivalists rambled out on their collecting trips, they effectively treated their informants as journalists do their interviewees: as free information. Sharp was happy to profit from selling his own publications of music, lyrics and dances, but there was no mechanism in place to remunerate the country folk whose memories had furnished the source material.”
― Rob Young, Electric Eden: Unearthing Britain's Visionary Music

“For aspiring folk progressives of 1965 the essential record to spin on the Dansette was Folk Roots, New Routes.”
― Rob Young, Electric Eden: Unearthing Britain's Visionary Music

“Britain had become a kind of cargo cult, a jumble of disassociated local customs, rituals and superstitions: uncanny relics of the distant, unknowable Britain of ancient days. Why, for instance, do sword dancers lock weapons in magical shapes such as the pentagram or the six-pointed star, led by a man wearing a fox’s head? What is the straw bear plodding round the village of Whittlesey in Cambridgeshire every January? Why do a bunch of Nutters black up their faces and perform a coconut dance in several Lancashire villages? What possesses people to engage in the crazed ‘furry dance’, singing the ‘Hal-An-Tow’ song, on 6 May at Helston in Cornwall? Why do beribboned hobby horses canter round the streets of Padstow and Minehead every May Day, with attendant ‘Gullivers’ lunging at onlookers with a giant pair of pincers? The persistence of such rites, and the apparent presence of codes, occult symbolism and nature magic in the dances, mummers’ plays and balladry of yore, have provided a rich compost for some of the outgrowths of folk in the 1960s and afterwards. Even to dip a toe into the world of folklore is to unearth an Other Britain, one composed of mysterious fragments and survivals – a rickety bridge to the sweet grass of Albion. As Bert Lloyd mentioned, ‘To our toiling ancestors [these customs] meant everything, and in a queer irrational way they can still mean much to us.’1”
― Rob Young, Electric Eden: Unearthing Britain's Visionary Music

“Sarnia, completed after Ireland had spent a year living on Guernsey,14 is closely connected to the pagan origins of Guernsey’s store of prehistoric burial chambers and rock monuments, imagining the kind of rites and jamborees that might have occurred round the tumbled stones such as Le Trépied. The score for the first part, ‘Le Catioroc’, contains a passage from De Situ Orbis, a text by Roman writer Pomponius Mela dating from 50 BCE: ‘All day long, heavy silence broods, and a certain hidden terror lurks there. But at nightfall gleams the light of fires; the chorus of Ægipans [fauns] resounds on every side: the shrilling of flutes and the clash of cymbals re-echo the waste shores of the sea.’ That mini-narrative encapsulates the motion of many of Ireland’s pieces, as a calm surface is overrun by more mysterious elemental forces, beings or visions.”
― Rob Young, Electric Eden: Unearthing Britain's Visionary Music

“Please to See the King is a piercing, keen-edged record, perhaps the closest a British act has come to what Bob Dylan, speaking of his own recordings of 1965–6, called ‘that thin, that wild mercury sound … metallic and bright gold’. The title, taken from the song ‘The King’ that Carthy introduced to the album sessions, was spoken, according to custom, by ‘wren-hunters’ who went knocking on doors and requesting money in return for a peep at the slaughtered bird in a coffin, bound with a ribbon. And like the wren-hunters of yore, the early Steeleye found themselves in the midst of a difficult economy, hawking their wares around the country at a succession of student-union gigs, in the community which was most receptive to this new incarnation of folk music.”
― Rob Young, Electric Eden: Unearthing Britain's Visionary Music

“The Travelling People, the final radio ballad, broadcast in 1964, was the most ambitious of all, grappling with the vilified nomadic population of Britain. The programme did not flinch from including the negative sentiments of the ‘not in my backyard’ brigade: one gentleman is heard to call them ‘misfits … the maggots of society’. The soundworld is particularly rich and evocative of difference: the travellers’ words are surrounded by the outdoor ambience in which they dwell – birdsong, horses’ hooves, the rush of road traffic. The voices of ‘respectable’ society speak in the dead air of cushioned interiors. Parker’s editing skills reach a new level of finesse, so a succession of phrases like ‘They call us the wild ones/ The pilgrims of the mist/ Romanies, Gypsies, diddikais, mumpers, travellers/ Nomads of the road/Blackfaced diddies/ … In Carlisle, they call you porters, dirty porters this, dirty porters that …’ whizz past in a kaleidoscope of lexicographic plurality and regional accents. Its conclusion – comparing Britain’s treatment of its nomads to the Nazi pogroms – is shocking, but is borne out by the words of Labour councillor Harry Watton, who is heard to say, ‘One must exterminate the impossibles.’ It is a bitter, troubling conclusion to the radio ballads.”
― Rob Young, Electric Eden: Unearthing Britain's Visionary Music

“To those who actually practise it, morris dance has an elemental quality, an ancient ritual magic comparable to the whirling dervish dance of Sufism, the Native American ghost dance or the spiritual movements developed by G. I. Gurdjieff. Its gestures are designed to act as a lightning conductor for spiritual energies to unite the universe with the earth and replicate the seasonal cycles of growth, death and rebirth. Morris dancers’ tatter jackets act as symbolic antennae; clogs dash against the ground, awakening slumbering earth gods. The EFDSS had gentrified the dance in the 1930s and 40s, slowing the pace and draining its erotic vigour. More recently, morris has become the anvil round the revival’s neck, its boisterous moves, outlandish costumes and trite musical accompaniment treated as a national joke. To dive into the music of this much-ridiculed custom shows how giddily Ashley Hutchings had fallen under the spell of English traditional music. Morris was the last locked cupboard of the entire post-war folk revival. By unsealing it, he was prepared to stake a hard-won reputation and credibility on a music that appeared to be unredeemable.”
― Rob Young, Electric Eden: Unearthing Britain's Visionary Music

“Anne Briggs, The Hazards of Love EP (1964); John Renbourn, John Renbourn (1965); Mick Softley, Songs for Swingin’ Survivors (1965).”
― Rob Young, Electric Eden: Unearthing Britain's Visionary Music

“No Roses”
― Rob Young, Electric Eden: Unearthing Britain's Visionary Music

“Holst’s astringent orchestral piece Egdon Heath, completed shortly after visiting Hardy, captures the novelist’s eerie atmospheres and weight of foreclosing tragedy.”
― Rob Young, Electric Eden: Unearthing Britain's Visionary Music

“Such moments – the first glimmer of dawn sunbeams, lengthening shadows, star-glitter permeating the darkening sky, ‘a perilous pagan enchantment haunting the midsummer forest’3 – saturate the music of Arnold Bax, the principal figure in what is sometimes referred to as the Celtic Twilight movement in British music, when the land without music was transformed into a sonorous Neverland.”
― Rob Young, Electric Eden: Unearthing Britain's Visionary Music

“Five years after Affectionate Fink the musical landscape was vastly altered, and McNair could make an album like The Fence, featuring free pianist Keith Tippett, Tony Carr, Traffic’s Steve Winwood and Ric Grech, and Pentangle’s Terry Cox and Danny Thompson. The same year (1970) he also turned out the Ellingtonian cocktail jazz of Flute and Nut with John Cameron, and appeared in Ginger Baker’s hard-driving Air Force supergroup, featuring the same Traffic members plus Denny Laine of Wings and Graham Bond. On his final cue on Kes, a thirty-eight-second, rain-sodden lament as the bird is buried, he blows a murmuring, unresolved line loaded with trepidation. The cancer that had been killing him since the late 1960s finally finished its work on 7 March 1971.”
― Rob Young, Electric Eden: Unearthing Britain's Visionary Music

“The Watersons, Frost and Fire (1965); The Young Tradition, So Cheerfully Round (1967); Peter Bellamy, Merlin’s Isle of Gramarye (1972).”
― Rob Young, Electric Eden: Unearthing Britain's Visionary Music

“Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks”
― Rob Young, Electric Eden: Unearthing Britain's Visionary Music

“The mourning of late summer as it reaches its autumnal tipping point; the pining for faded youth or lost love; the elegy for the fallen in war; otherworldly dimensions glimpsed but not touched; and the yearning for a distant home: British music is uniquely attuned to these moments and sentiments, for it is finally this sense of loss, of achievement slipping away like sand in a glass, that is at the heart of the British experience over the course of the twentieth century.”
― Rob Young, Electric Eden: Unearthing Britain's Visionary Music

“Under the name The Waterson Family, they made their recording debut for Topic, one of four upcoming acts on the showcase compilation Folk-Sound of Britain (1965). Dispensing with guitars and banjos, they hollered unadorned close harmonies into a stark, chapel-like hush. The consensus was that they ‘sounded traditional’, but in a way no other folk singers did at the time. It was the result of pure intuition: there was no calculation in their art. When Bert Lloyd once commented joyfully on their mixolydian harmonies, they had to resort to a dictionary. Later in 1965 the quartet gathered around the microphone set up in the Camden Town flat of Topic producer Bill Leader and exhaled the extraordinary sequence of songs known as Frost and Fire. In his capacity as an artistic director of Topic, Lloyd curated the album’s contents. Focusing on the theme of death, ritual sacrifice and resurrection, he subtitled it A Calendar of Ritual and Magical Songs. The fourteen tracks are divided by calendrical seasons, and the four Watersons begin and end the album as midwinter wassailers, a custom popularised in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries as groups of singers – ‘waits’ – made the rounds of the towns and villages, proffering a decorated bowl of spiced ale or wine and asking – in the form of a song, or ‘wassail’ – for a charitable donation. Midwinter comes shortly before the time of the first ploughing in preparation for the sowing of that year’s new crop, and the waits’ money, or food and drink, can be considered a form of benign sacrifice against the success of the next growth and harvest. The wassail-bowl’s rounds were often associated with the singing of Christmas carols.”
― Rob Young, Electric Eden: Unearthing Britain's Visionary Music

“Ashley Hutchings has been beating the bounds of English traditional music ever since. When he first heard Shirley and Dolly Collins’s Anthems in Eden, just after quitting Fairport back in 1969, he broke down in body-shaking sobs; the suite finally unlocked and articulated all that he loved about English music. ‘It evokes the countryside and it evokes the healing … I imagine it defined the whole of the rest of my career.”
― Rob Young, Electric Eden: Unearthing Britain's Visionary Music

“The growing interest in medieval-period reconstruction is vividly legible in the music, cinema listings and television schedules of the late 1960s and early 70s. Besides the BBC Tudor series mentioned earlier – which led to a spin-off cinema version, Henry VIII and his Six Wives, in 1972 – there was Anne of the Thousand Days (1969), centred on Henry’s first wife Anne Boleyn, starring Richard Burton and Geneviève Bujold; the Thomas More biopic A Man for All Seasons (1966); Peter O’Toole as Henry II in Anthony Harvey’s The Lion in Winter (1968); David Hemmings as Alfred the Great (1969); the hysterical convent of Russell’s The Devils (1971); and future singer Murray Head in a melodramatic retelling of Gawain and the Green Knight (1973). In the same period HTV West made a series of often repeated mud-and-guts episodes of Arthur of the Britons (1972–3), and visionary Italian director Pier Paolo Pasolini unveiled his earthy adapations of the Decameron (1970) and The Canterbury Tales (1971). From the time of the English Civil War, Ken Hughes cast Richard Harris in his erratic portrait of Cromwell (1970); and the twenty-three-year-old doomed genius Michael Reeves made his Witchfinder General in 1968, in which the East Anglian farmland becomes a transfigured backdrop to a tale of superstition and violent religious persecution in 1645. Period reconstruction, whether in film, television or music, has been a staple of British culture, innate to a mindset that always finds its identity in the grain of the past.”
― Rob Young, Electric Eden: Unearthing Britain's Visionary Music

“Like Miles Davis, Graham often used to turn his back on his audiences. This was primarily between songs, while he was retuning his guitars. For Graham, in the early 1960s, was privy to a secret alternative tuning system known as DADGAD, which he was reluctant to share with any rival guitarists in the crowd. He began using it around 1962–3, on a trip to the bohemian Beat capital Tangier, where he spent six months and earned his keep by working in a snack booth selling hash cakes to locals. The raw Gnaoua trance music preserved in Morocco’s town squares and remote Rif mountain villages stretched back thousands of years, and Graham was hypnotised by the oud, a large Arabic lute which resembles a bisected pear (the word ‘lute’ itself derives from the Arabic ‘al-ud’) and has been identified in Mesopotamian wall paintings 5,000 years old. The paradigm of Eastern music, defining its difference from the West, is the maqam, which uses a microtonal system that blasts open the Western eight-note octave into fifty-three separate intervals. DADGAD is not one of the tunings commonly used on the eleven-string oud, but Graham found that tuning a Western guitar that way made it easier to slip into jam sessions with Moroccan players. The configuration allows scales and chords to be created without too much complicated fingering; its doubled Ds and As and open strings often lead to more of a harp-like, droning sonority than the conventional EADGBE.”
― Rob Young, Electric Eden: Unearthing Britain's Visionary Music