69 f


wild life of composer and critic Peter War- lock, who killed himself in 1930.


When he finally reaches the sixties and seventies, via A.L. Lloyd and Vaughan Williams, he provides a solid guide to the key figures, from the Watersons and Young Tradition through to Shirley Collins, John Martyn and Sandy Denny, with a diversion on the role of foxes in film, literature or song before discussing the history of that excellent band Mr Fox. Then he’s off into psychedelia and the Beatles, a history of land tenure and the 17th century Diggers, before reaching Steeleye Span.


Electric Eden: Unearthing Britain’s Visionary Music


Rob Young Faber ISBN 978-0-571-23752-4 £17.99 PB


What we have here is a sprawling, clever but frustrating curiosity. Rob Young is a fine writ- er who has become a victim of his own ambi- tions. His original aim, as he readily admits, was to “write a history of British folk-rock’s high water mark”, involving the likes of Fair- port Convention, Pentangle and the Incredi- ble String Band, but he has ended up by plac- ing that history within a far larger but some- times awkward framework, that of ‘Visionary Music’ …and those artists who “retreat to a secret garden, in order to draw strength and inspiration for facing the future”.


Which means, in effect, that he can examine the role that the countryside has played in the work of a variety of different musicians (along with writers or film-makers), and cover any pastoral, mystic, hippy, medievalist, or occult themes that take his interest, from the history of British witchcraft to the history of outdoor music festivals, while constantly swerving back to his central concern, a detailed account of the first great British folk scene, back in the sixties and the seventies. He starts with the now-fashionable Vashti Bunyan, a singer I always felt to be annoyingly twee back in the sixties, and far less important than many of her extraordi- nary contemporaries. But at least she fits into the thesis, and she has a colourful story, trudging around Britain in her cart, and she provides a launching pad for an epic 600- page book that swerves from his thoughts on British travel literature to William Morris, Cecil Sharp or Vaughan Williams, and then veers off to an intriguing section that deals with the influence of the occult on early 20th century Britain, from composer John Ireland, to the writing of Arthur Machem, and the


It’s all a good, if massively detailed read (and did we really need so much information about bands like Mellow Candle or Synanthe- sia?) and at least he acknowledges that oth- ers have covered this territory before. I was pleased to see that he mentions The Electric Muse, a book with a not dissimilar title that I wrote with the distinguished trio of Dave Laing, Karl Dallas and the late and much- missed Robert Shelton, back in 1975, which (in Mr Young’s words) “attempted to survey the panorama of the folk revival”.


His own attempt staggers to a halt after the Seventies, when he seems to lose confi- dence. He’s right that folk was in a bad state at the end of that decade, but is surely wrong in suggesting that British punk had not ‘spared some notion of folk’. What of Billy Bragg, whose heroes were both Joe Strummer and Woody Guthrie? Billy doesn’t even get a mention when Young is discussing the influ- ence of the Diggers. And what of The Pogues? The book ends with references to Kate Bush and Talk Talk, Alasdair Roberts and The Imag- ined Village, but there’s surprisingly little on the massively successful contemporary folk scene, nu-folkadelia or psych-folk. An inter- esting read, but the definitive work on the folk revival has still to be written.


www.faber.co.uk Robin Denselow


The Honey Gatherers


Mimlu Sen Rider Books ISBN 978-1-84- 604189-1


At one point in The Honey Gatherers, subti- tled Travels With The Bauls: The Wandering Minstrels Of Rural India, its author writes, “The Bauls believe in the power of speech; books for them are stale knowledge, cut off from the sources of language”. And there is much truth in that because ‘getting your let-


ters’ transforms your oralist outlook on the world. Mimlu Sen alludes to it here – or you can delve into Albert B. Lord’s The Singer Of Tales for further brain fodder on the subject. The Honey Gatherers – idiomatically it means ‘gathering alms’ – is an essential, repeat essential addition to the literature on the Bauls of Bengal. The specific tale hangs on the life and trajectory of Paban Das Baul.


Too much of the literature about the Bauls in English flaunts a curious distance from the subject with too many second-hand and third-rate ‘insights’. Too many books offer Bengali transliterated into Latin script but no translations. Too many are written in faulting English and published in poorly edit- ed, poorly bound and poorly designed books in India or Bangladesh. Mimlu Sen’s book is none of these things. There are a few glitches but no major skid patches. The Albert Gross- man deal for the Bauls Of Bengal led to an album on Elektra – detailed in the appendices – but given as EMI in the narrative while there is no cross-reference to that pivotal LP’s Luxman being Lakhon in Sen’s text. And since fish is so essential to Bengali cuisine, translat- ing carp as koi seems designed to upset those that rank nishikigoi fish fancying over scaling and cooking them.


The tale starts with her hearing Baul songs whilst in a Calcutta gaol before settling into an unconventional relationship in Paris where she encounters a character pivotal in her future growth, the “graceful, lithe and radiant” Baul singer-philosopher Paban Das Baul. It thus also plots the development of their personal and professional relationship. “Our love was subversive and endangered us and all those around us,” may read – out of, or even in, context – like the worst sort of Mills and Boon page-turner/ turn-off. Far bet- ter are Sen’s insights into Nabani Khepa – the inspiration for Tagore and father of Pur- nachandra Das Baul of John Wesley Harding front cover fame – and the Baul way of life in general, since she really gets under the Baul skin and into the Baul heart. She even opens the lid of the honey trap of diksha mantram, the guru-led ‘four moons’ practice of sexual enlightenment.


The Honey Gatherers is the book on the Bauls and Baul culture that many will have awaited for so long. It is told through the opening and open eyes of a woman with bohemian leanings discovering a world of electrifyingly otherness.


www.rbooks.co.uk Ken Hunt


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