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f46 The ’70s, Deleted


For the English folk scene and its myriad spin-offs, the 1970s are becoming the decade that history deleted. Ian Anderson has a go at correcting perspectives.


I


t’s a great time for books and maga- zine features celebrating the musical spin-offs from the early UK folk boom into what was then called ‘contempo- rary folk’ or folk/rock and nowadays gets labelled with all sorts of bonkers des- ignations like ‘psych folk’, ‘strange folk’, ‘acid folk’ and other sub-genres that never existed at the time the music was created. Wherever you look in magazines like Shindig, Mojo, Record Collector or The Wire there are constant references, and the bookshelves are rapidly filling – Rob Young’s excellent Electric Eden is just out and Jeanette Leech’s intriguing-looking Seasons They Change is due in November. Alongside this, reissues abound and vinyl that has rarity comparable to that of chicken molars sells for eye-watering prices on eBay, regardless of the reasons that caused the scarcity. A new history and set of legends have been created, par- ticularly over the past five years or so.


The ‘f word’ has been devalued as a term of reference for a long time, way past the point where there can be any meaningful or entertaining discussion about what it means. For 40 or more years now, the American-led music business has used it as shorthand for ‘acoustic’ or ‘sings own songs with acoustic guitar’ or, these days, sometimes with the prefix nu-, ‘has banjo or accordeon in line-up’. Fine, call it what you like, nobody dies, and there are plenty of other useful if slightly unwieldy terms like ‘traditionally-rooted music’ to describe what the little abbreviated ‘f’ in our title covers.


Approaching the new literature can’t, therefore, be done in a spirit of genre denial. “That’s not what I call folk” simply isn’t a valid remark, because everybody and their pawnbroker has their own dif-


Nick Drake


ferent idea of what the term means – let alone the sub-genres – and having -folk as a feral -ism running wild across the musical landscape does produce some startlingly interesting bedfellows and discoveries.


Moreover, just as young men in great- coats in the 1960s found their way from the Rolling Stones, Fleetwood Mac and even Jethro bloody Tull down tortuous paths to the likes of Charley Patton, because at some point the former had been on a bandwagon marked ‘blues’, how are we to know that a current pur- chaser of anything from Vashti Bunyan to Mumford & Sons might not end up five years later worshipping at the altar of Eliza Carthy or Harry Cox.


So terminology is not a problem and I’m as happy to participate in the ‘invent a sub-genre a day to keep boredom away’ game as anybody. Who and what’s includ- ed in the story of something-folk isn’t a problem either, the more the merrier. But what has begun to disturb me lately is what isn’t included. For history is being increasingly remoulded and its dusty files culled, along with a certain amount of over-mythologising and self-mythologis- ing along the way.


Thinking of those 1960s blues days again, things gained stature almost by luck. Unlike now, when just about every pre-war blues record of any worth has been reissued, we only heard what was given to us. Sometimes, artists who’d only cut a couple of obscure sides 35 years earli- er achieved surprising fame in the historic scheme of things simply because they found their way onto a reissue alongside contemporary giants. Because of their inclusion in compilations by the ultra-hip Origin label, William Harris with his Bull- frog Blues or Garfield Akers with Cotton-


Dr. Strangely Strange


field Blues were, in our eyes, just as impor- tant figures as hugely greater-selling and more influential artists of their era like Blind Lemon Jefferson or Blind Boy Fuller. To this day, ‘schools’ of artists like those around Dockery’s Plantation are much more revered in the scheme of things than their contemporary status probably justi- fied (which has nothing to do with how great their music genuinely was).


T


So, back to the folk history thing. I’ve greatly enjoyed reading Rob Young’s thought-provoking Electric Eden, for everything that was included. But as I pro- gressed through it, I started to have mis- givings that it wasn’t the whole story. This is nothing I blame Rob for: he was only being born when much of the core music in the book was being created, and by the time he became interested in it, the tec- tonic plates of history had already migrat- ed. It’s impossible for anybody coming later to hear the music in context, especial- ly in the context of records that weren’t made and records whose place in history has been concealed by the mists swirling around others’ legends.


he current received wisdom about the tail end of the 1960s into the first years of the ‘70s implies that most artists of importance recorded for majors like Island, CBS, EMI, Decca or Pye, imprints of independent rock labels or the folk ‘major’ of the day, Transatlantic. Many were produced by Joe Boyd for Witchseason or to a lesser extent by Sandy Roberton’s September Productions, or had a close con- nection with musicians who moved in those circles. A London base definitely helped, but you got bonus points for ‘getting it together in the country’ in accommodation funded by a record label advance.


Photo: Keith Morris


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