Electric Eden 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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“harmonium,”
― Rob Young, Electric Eden: Unearthing Britain's Visionary Music

“Heron (1970),”
― Rob Young, Electric Eden: Unearthing Britain's Visionary Music

“Although recordings were done in London, Winwood confessed he preferred the sound of the cottage: ‘Every room has its own character, and the room in the cottage where we do rough takes of the songs has its own special quality, because it is an old house and you can tell what kind of room the sound was recorded in when you listen to the tape.’4 Instead of the airless precision of modern multitrack studios, artificially aged acoustics were the way to go.”
― Rob Young, Electric Eden: Unearthing Britain's Visionary Music

“Breaking out beyond London’s green belt was, and remains, like crossing the border into another country altogether.”
― Rob Young, Electric Eden: Unearthing Britain's Visionary Music

“the landscape retains its grip on the collective imagination, offering the promise of tranquillity, open space, freedom from responsibility; a rustic souvenir of permanence and stability. Britons treasure their shrinking countryside like a family heirloom wrapped in silk, locked away in the secret compartment of a writing table, protected from foreign invasion for most of a millennium.”
― Rob Young, Electric Eden: Unearthing Britain's Visionary Music

“Old England to adorn, Greater is none beneath the sun, Than Oak, and Ash, and Thorn. Sing Oak, and Ash, and Thorn, good sirs, (All of a Midsummer morn!) Surely we sing of no little thing, In Oak, and Ash, and Thorn! Rudyard Kipling, ‘Oak, Ash, and Thorn’ (1906) In Rudyard Kipling’s classic Edwardian children’s book Puck of Pook’s Hill, a faery apparition casts a spell over two children by brushing a clump of oak, ash and thorn leaves across their faces. They enter a time-travelling trance in which historical figures – Romans, Domesday-era knights, feudal barons – manifest themselves and spin rambling yarns of their exploits, battles, treachery and derring-do, all of which have taken place across the very land that now forms the kids’ adventure playground. This vertical exploded view of England’s pastures is Edwardian psychogeography, designed to instil a sense of the heroic history that has cut its furrows deep in the soil, sowing the seeds of a national psyche. Ushered there by Puck’s cunning wood magic, the greenwood becomes the gateway to an idealised England where the imagination runs naked and free, until the time comes to swish the oak, ash and thorn twigs once more, awaken from the English dreaming and return to … well, in Kipling’s children’s case, no doubt a piping hot tea of crumpets and scones, lavished upon them by a servile nanny.”
― Rob Young, Electric Eden: Unearthing Britain's Visionary Music

“Morris On”
― Rob Young, Electric Eden: Unearthing Britain's Visionary Music

“concertina”
― 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

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

“hurdy-gurdy”
― Rob Young, Electric Eden: Unearthing Britain's Visionary Music

“Tim Hart and Maddy Prior, Folk Songs of Old England Vol. 1 (1968); Ashley Hutchings et al., Morris On (1972); Steeleye Span, Please to See the King (1971).”
― Rob Young, Electric Eden: Unearthing Britain's Visionary Music

“ophicleide.”
― 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

“Because of the subsequent commercial impact of Steeleye Span – sell-out American tours, their own TV series and two enormous hit singles – it’s easy to think of the group as representing all the crass aspects of British folk music. But the pizzazz of the 1970s has eclipsed the raw thrills of Hark! The Village Wait and Please to See the King, two hungry-sounding albums that held out a tantalising vision of a potential pan-British music that never materialised.”
― 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

“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

“There were certain people in the hardcore traditional or revivalist folk movement who saw us as perhaps encroaching on their territory and taking liberties with “their” music,’ says Simon Nicol. ‘It’s a preposterous attitude, because they’re just songs, they don’t exist under glass, they’re not exhibits in a museum that you have to preserve in amber.’ In any case, remembers Swarbrick, the English folk circuit was in a pretty stagnant state by the end of the decade. ‘I used to go out with Ian Campbell to pubs and all you could hear was the dominoes clinking. It was an effort to get things going.”
― Rob Young, Electric Eden: Unearthing Britain's Visionary Music

“Savage death and ritual resurrection: upon these lodestones was Liege and Lief erected.”
― Rob Young, Electric Eden: Unearthing Britain's Visionary Music

“Most remarkable of all, of the album’s eight tracks ‘Come All Ye’ is the only song that has a chorus that can easily be joined by an audience. The rest wander deeper into their respective narratives; unlike a pop song with refrains, hooks and totemic, easily assimilable recapitulations, these songs hold the attention with the persistence of a tale-spinner.”
― Rob Young, Electric Eden: Unearthing Britain's Visionary Music

“Mere and Mete was the alternative title considered, the significant factor being that both options were rooted in Saxon etymology. Embedded in the meaning of ‘liege’ is both the feudal lord and the vassal that owes him allegiance. Adjectivally, the word also refers to the relationship that binds them – the medieval contract in which the land was the mutual interest, with serfs and bondsmen farming the soil which made up the lord’s estate. The archaic adverb ‘lief’ stems from an old German word for ‘love’ and means ‘gladly’, ‘willingly’, as in the Shakespearean ‘I had as lief the town crier spoke my lines’. Liege and lief is a voluntary surrender to the spirit of old Britain.”
― Rob Young, Electric Eden: Unearthing Britain's Visionary Music

“Released in December 1969, Liege and Lief retains a coherence and integrity shared by very few British folk-rock records.”
― Rob Young, Electric Eden: Unearthing Britain's Visionary Music

“It was a magical time,’ confirms Hutchings. ‘And there’s a lot of magic on that album. There was a special feeling in the house, in the room, and also a lot of hidden magic and weirdness on that album. Well, the past is weird, you know, our ancestors did a lot of weird things.”
― Rob Young, Electric Eden: Unearthing Britain's Visionary Music

“It was purely a case of responding to the best of my abilities to what was going on around me,’ says Mattacks, who now lives in Boston, Massachusetts. ‘I didn’t really get it until I’d been in the band about a year. I didn’t really understand the aesthetics of what they were doing. And then when I did, it had quite an effect on how I then perceived music, and my approach to my instrument and the kind of music I wanted to play.’ Mattacks was sympathetic to the ‘four-squariness’ inherent in British folk tunes, but ‘the danger with the worst of folk-rock is that it can sound ploddy, no matter the tempo. So the thing is to have that four-square thing to it, but make it swing.”
― Rob Young, Electric Eden: Unearthing Britain's Visionary Music

“The first inkling comes four tracks into Unhalfbricking, with ‘A Sailor’s Life’. Recorded in the spring of 1969, the track features Dave Swarbrick on the fiddle, and over the course of the track’s eleven minutes – improvised on its first take – you can actually hear the group develop a new confidence, and something erupts into being that has never quite been heard in British music before. All the elements that we might associate with English electric folk are switched on.”
― Rob Young, Electric Eden: Unearthing Britain's Visionary Music