Electric Eden by Bob Young

Rob Young's Electric Eden is intended to provide a history of England's visionary music. More than a straight folk music primer, this book argues for the existence of a specifically English approach to alternative culture—an impulse rooted both in nostalgia and utopianism, identifiable in the works of Blake and Ruskin as much as in the music of the folk revivalists and the rock bands they influenced. It's an ambitious project, running to over 600 pages and blending social history with music biographies, album reviews and political ruminations. Young even indulges in one ill-advised foray into dream-like prose poetry, though quite why he was allowed to do so escapes me.

The early part of Electric Eden is fascinating, especially if you are not well versed in the history of English folk revivalism. After an introduction in which he sets out a theory of folk culture as a type of time travel or liminal space, Young tells the story of Vashti Bunyan, a young folk singer in the 60s who first lived in a forest with her boyfriend, and then, having been evicted by the bank who owned the land, walked most of the length of the British Isles with a horse and cart before disappearing from public view, leaving only one record behind her. That's until, in the early 2000s, she got an Internet connection and a letter from Devendra Banhart, leading her to discover that she was a cult favourite. She finally got the confidence to release a second record. Bunyan's story is an endearing one, but for Young it also exemplifies how folk music works. For him, folk music is a journey into one's self as much as it is a geographical or temporal journey. Learning about folk culture also the act of creating that culture.

 This concept of folk culture as both a personal journey and the on-going invention of an imaginary past is convincingly brought home again and again throughout the book. Because folk songs were transmitted in an oral tradition, each singer has always been free to alter and invent, meaning that the original version of any song represents a kind of unknowable platonic archetype. The people who travelled around putting together the first collections of folk songs adapted the lyrics to fit with their conservative tastes and entirely neglected to record the most obscene material. Composers, like Vaughn Williams and Holst, who did a lot to popularise and rehabilitate the common man's music in the early 20th century, did so in the framework of a new style of composition. Even the guitar, now such a ubiquitous symbol of folk song and protest, was practically unseen in the UK before the late 1950s.

 The early chapters on the British folk revival, both within classical music and within circles of folk historians and musicians, are where this book is strongest. Anyone wanting to investigate the subject could do worse than to start here. Reading this book with a laptop to hand makes for many evenings of interesting listening and provides a decent introduction to the people who invented English folk music as we now know it. Young is also convincing on the natural progression from the early English folk revival scene to the folk-rock fusion style of bands like Fairport Convention. The story of the making of their album Leif and Liege is a fascinating one, full of tragedy and inspiration. Later the book covers the ways tragedy and inspiration also marked the life of Sandy Denny, the singer who, on Leif and Liege, interpreted the old songs so well and provided her own haunting murder ballad towards the album's end. For me, having little knowledge of this material before hand, it was a pleasure to get to know the music and these small histories were fascinating.

 However, Rob Young also dedicates many, many pages of this book to a series of late 60s and early 70s bands and musicians whose stories are less interesting and whose music has not dated nearly so well. How much a reader enjoys many of the chapters towards the middle of this book will depend on how much one cares about people like The Extraordinary String Band. For me, there came a point when I grew sick of the period in question and felt a weary sense that Young was aiming to be exhaustive purely so as to avoid the criticism that he had left someone out. What's more, the bands and musicians I most would have enjoyed reading about—people like Pink Floyd and Kate Bush—figure more as supporting characters.

 Fortunately, as the book goes on, Young expands his focus. He writes a long section about the cult film The Wicker Man, and explores the mid-20th century development of witchcraft as a spiritual and cultural movement. A long section of the book also provides a discussion of the growth of the music festival, the origins of Glastonbury, the travellers movement, and the ultimate war Thatcher's government waged on freedom of assembly, culminating in the Battle of the Beanfield, at which a large number of travellers, revellers and crusties were given a serious beating on their way to their annual gathering at Stonehenge, around which the police had erected a barbed wire fence. Young frames all this as a kind of battle for the soul of the nation—a fight for the right to use certain sites. He argues that the free festival scene had its origins in an idea of a less technological, more cooperative and nomadic form of living that was as much a paranoid response to the idea of a post-nuclear world as it was an idealistic rejection of consumer society. As much as this vision was only ever really available to a marginal few, Young argues, it's indicative of the utopian power at the heart of what may at first seem to be the conservative impulses of folk culture. This plays to a well known narrative of the 1980s as the point in time when Great Britain lost its ability to dream, an ability Young would seem to like to see restored via a semi-spiritual engagement with an idea of Avalon.

 It's difficult to know, really, how honest this account of the free festival scene actually is, given that the whole thing was over by 1985. Was there ever a real possibility of social change? I knew a lot of people who went to free parties in the early 2000s, and I went to some of them too. People used to talk a lot of against-the-social-contract, smash-the-state talk, but the whole thing always seemed to be more about drugs and getting attention through terrible Drum & Bass "freestyling" on the topic of Iraq than being about any kind of plausible challenge to the status quo. Maybe that's because the people I knew were just folks who had read No Logo and started slumming it, while the crusties in the 80s really lived the life, dreamt the dreams and had real dogs on ropes. I don't know. What I do know is that as Electric Eden wears on, it becomes more and more difficult to trust Young.

 Rob Young's history of folk echoes his own insight into folk culture as an invented past. His aim is to create a reality, as much as to chronicle one. Electric Eden is all about presenting a dream of a better England. It is vitally important to Young's narrative that folk music and folk culture are seen to be progressive forces, not conservative ones. He puts it like this:

 "In the global history of class struggle, revolutions are typically assumed to bring about fundamental changes, recasting political and social paradigms and remaking the world anew for a permanently altered future. That was true of the Communist Manifesto... just as it was true of the Bolshevik revolution in Russia, the social engineering of Hitler's Nazis, Mao's Great Leap Forward, and the Pol Pot Khmer Rouge of 1970s Cambodia, to name a few. But revolutionaries are equally inclined to turn the wheel backwards, fighting to restore a perceived lost estate or denied birthright, than campaigning for a gleaming, high-technology future. From Winstanley and his Diggers ... to the Parisian Situationist sloganeers of the May 1968 disturbances, daubing walls with "Sous les paves, la plage!" (Beneath the paving stones, the beach!), there has always been this desire to prise open the veneer of modern industrial society and reconnect with a fundamental mode of existence. "

 The problem here is that in order to align folk music with the more acceptable face of revolution— the Diggers and the Situationists, as opposed to the Nazis and Khmer Rouge—Young has grossly distorted the truth. Despite what his cherry-picked quote might suggest, the Situationists were not a nostalgic, anti-modern movement. Amongst other things, members of the Situationist International wanted to use modern technology to redesign the city so that it was a constantly moving place of play. They were universalists who rejected tradition and aimed to use modern architecture as a liberating force. The Khmer Rouge, on the other hand, far from aiming to "remake the world for an altered future," wanted to turn the clock back to the Middle Ages. After year zero was declared, you could get your hand cut off for wearing a watch and get killed for wearing glasses, since both of these were perverse western innovations. If anyone ever wanted to "prise open the veneer of modern industrial society and reconnect with a fundamental mode of existence," it was Pol Pot.

 Likewise, when Young argues that the image of horses on the cover of Jethrow Tull's album Heavy Horses shows an unimaginative Luddism, it hard to see this as anything other than a convenient reading designed to support his narrative and play to his tastes. There is no reason this image is more conservative than the artwork for any of a million folk record sleeves, except that it was released in the year that Young wants us to believe marked the end of an era. This kind of opportunist reading of symbols will be familiar to anyone who has ever written an English literature essay in which they began with a theory about a book and then browsed the unread volume for quotes they could twist to support that theory. In other words, Young is writing a polemic, and the veracity of the details are less important to him than the overall arc of his argument.

 This is why, while towards the end of the book Young dedicates a lot of time to Julian Cope, a man who researches stone circles, makes rock and roll music influenced by pagan ideas and subscribes to a hippyish, liberal, left wing philosophy, he says very little about the neo-folk scene. Neo-folk is rife with bands suspected of holding far right, even fascist sympathies. Though Young alludes to the scene's existence, Death in June's use of Nazi uniforms and SS runes, and David Tibet's strange religious theories about Hitler would muddy the waters of Young's lake so badly that he ellects not to discuss these issues at all.

Electric Eden is a music book that doubles as a social history, but it is one with an unreliable narrator. Reading it is like spending a long night drinking in the company of a talkative man with a massive record collection, a good knowledge of English history, a personal politico-spiritual vision which he believes ties it all together, and a burning desire to share all of this with you. How much you enjoy the experience probably depends on the degree to which that kind of night appeals to you, and how far you think his enthusiasm compensates for his biases. As you wander home in the early light, your hangover already creeping in, you'll probably find yourself muttering, shaking your head—partly in wonder and partly in frustration—your mind full of new knowledge and snatches of old songs, but echoing too with all those counter-arguments he wouldn't let you finish.