Faber and Faber, 4 August 2011

Pb, 672 pp

Rob Young investigates how the idea of folk has been handed down and transformed by successive generations - song collectors, composers, Marxist revivalists, folk-rockers, psychedelic voyagers, free festival-goers, experimental pop stars and electronic innovators. In a sweeping panorama of Albion's soundscape that takes in the pioneer spirit of Cecil Sharp; the pastoral classicism of Ralph Vaughan Williams and Peter Warlock; the industrial folk revival of Ewan MacColl and A. L. Lloyd; the folk-rock of Fairport Convention, Sandy Denny, Nick Drake, Shirley Collins, John Martyn and Pentangle; the bucolic psychedelia of The Incredible String Band, The Beatles and Pink Floyd; the acid folk of Comus, Forest, Mr Fox and Trees; The Wicker Man and occult folklore; the early Glastonbury and Stonehenge festivals; and the visionary pop of Kate Bush, Julian Cope and Talk Talk, Electric Eden maps out a native British musical voice that reflects the complex relationships between town and country, progress and nostalgia, radicalism and conservatism. An attempt to isolate the 'Britishness' of British music - a wild combination of pagan echoes, spiritual quest, imaginative time-travel, pastoral innocence and electrified creativity - Electric Eden will be treasured by anyone interested in the tangled story of Britain's folk music and Arcadian dreams.

"Electric Eden comes into its own as folk-rock capers over the horizon in the mid-1960s ... There are excellent accounts of the rise of bands such as Pentangle, The Incredible String Band and Fairport Convention, alongside pen-portraits of a stream of neglected figures ... Electric Eden makes a persuasive case for folk-rock s essentially liberating nature, and ingeniously links it with the utopian dreams of Britishness of earlier generations of 20th-century folk-revivalists." - Ludovic Hunter-Tilney, Financial Times

"In the face of British folk s sprawling diversity, Young s greatest achievement is to locate a real sense of continuity, a unifying flow that underpins decades, if not centuries, of artistry ... Prepare to wander down countless previously unpondered highways and byways. And prepare to consider Britain's satisfyingly strange and surprisingly hardy indigenous musical heritage afresh. A treat." - Phil Harrison, Time Out Book of the Week *****