Book corner

Interest very much piqued by this review in last Saturday's Guardian. Alexandra Harris’s Romantic Moderns promises to be highly complementary to the themes in Electric Eden, focusing on the tensions between modernism, landscape and nostalgia in the English art and literature of the 20th century. I’m currently awaiting a copy and will review in more detail here once I’ve had a chance to read it.

Also deserving a mention is Mick Houghton’s Becoming Elektra, a thoroughly researched and beautifully illustrated tome covering the whole span of Jac Holzman’s wide ranging enterprise. I’m hoping there’ll be a bit more on Elektra’s UK interests – particularly The Incredible String Band – than appeared in Holzman’s own autobiography. Mick will in fact be participating in tonight’s Caught By The River Social Club event at the King & Queen pub, Fitzrovia (see below). Start time for the talk is 7:30pm.

September diary dates

A couple of upcoming events this month, which I’m taking part in, that might be of interest:

Ghosts from the Basement

Saturday 25 September

Launch event for new Village Thing label compilation, with a panel discussion featuring just about anyone who's written (or writing) a book on folk in the last few years: myself, Will Hodgkinson (The Ballad of Britain), Jeanette Leech (Seasons They Change), Mark Jones (Bristol Folk), Richard Morton Jack (Galactic Ramble) and Colin Irwin (In Search of Albion).

The live line-up of this all-dayer is really strong too: Wizz Jones, Steve Tilston, Tucker Zimmerman, Ian A. Anderson, Dave Evans, Ian Hunt, Maggie Holland, Keith Christmas, The Owl Service, Jason Steel, Straw Bear Band, Pamela Wyn Shannon, The A. Lords with Mark Fry and more...

Cecil Sharp House, Regent’s Park Road, NW1, 2–11pm, £20 all day (£25 on door), evening only £15 (£20 on door). Tickets from Cecil Sharp House, 020 7485 2206.

Caught By The River Social Club

Wednesday 29 September

Electric Eden readings and Q&A session with Rob Young, hosted by Richard King (co-editor, Loops journal). Plus The Memory Band play music from The Wicker Man. Presented by the estimable anglers of the Caught By The River collective.

King and Queen pub (upstairs room), 1 Foley Street, London W1, 7–11pm, £5.

Links in the chain

A short piece by me in Tate Etc., on a detail from a Paul Nash painting...

King Learie RIP

I was very sad to hear of the death of Roger Hutchinson on 3 September, after an illness. Roger’s photos of various free festivals of the 1970s, such as Windsor and Stonehenge, remain some of the most evocative and otherworldly of their kind. True to the spirit of these communal gatherings, he pointed his lens as much at the crowds as at the rock action on stage, and the exquisite misty colour lends the pictures a magical, idyllic, even timeless quality. The one above, for example, shot near the Stonehenge festival in 1976, recalls the tranquil Eloi of H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine, or a tribe of Celts relaxing after a feast. It’s an image that for me captures absolutely the essence of Electric Eden.

I never met Roger, but I was in touch with him over the past year as he graciously allowed me to use one of his Windsor 1974 shots on Electric Eden’s back cover, as well as another Stonehenge shot inside. In later life Roger was known as a local historian around Leicester, particularly its waterways and canals. He painted narrowboats and riverside life from his own photos, made videos (using the alias ‘King Learie’), and published The Mile Straight, a hymn to the city’s Soar River. Many of of his 1970s photos are displayed on the marvellous UK Rock Festivals site, which is where I first encountered his work.

Condolences to his wife Gill and daughters Beth and Meg.

Way of the Morris

Watched this new film, directed by Tim Plester and Rob Curry last night. It’s a beautifully made, often elegiac investigation of morris dancing, one that steadfastly refuses to trivialise or patronise its subject in that knee-jerk way most media do. The film is a personal journey for Plester, a thirtysomething who was born into a family of morris dancers in the village of Adderbury in Oxfordshire. That particular group was started in the mid-70s, reawakening a morris tradition in the village that died out after the First World War, when only one member of the original side returned from the trenches and couldn’t countenance the idea of dancing ever again. Plester, who never danced himself, gets drawn into the mystery, charm and camaraderie of the morris men (for men they are), and eventually steps, literally, into his father's old shoes.

The tone of the film has what you might call a 'hauntological' bent, with a voiceover edging on the rhapsodic and melancholic, visual allusions to films like The Wicker Man, and plenty of unearthed Super-8 footage and family Polaroids. The notion of morris as a ridiculous, embarrassing aspect of native English culture is dealt with and transcended within the first couple of minutes, and after that we're off on a serious, respectful, yet never sentimental exploration of the impulses behind the dance and the individuals who participate. Anyone who saw Gideon Koppel’s recent film Sleep Furiously, about a remote Welsh village, or older rural movies like Akenfield, will find much to enjoy here. At the same time it’s an interesting counterpoint to older folkloric films such as Peter Kennedy & Alan Lomax’s Oss Oss Wee Oss from the late 1950s, which treats the Padstow May celebrations as an utterly mysterious, alien ritual. Way of the Morris seems to me very much about coming to terms with and finding a place for the dance in a 21st century life.

There seems to be a small resurgence of interest in this baffling custom at the moment, from this comedic treatment to a BBC documentary which is currently in production. It's interesting to note in Plester’s film how many young people he encounters in the village seem to quite interested in the custom and express a willingness to get involved.

Way of the Morris is being screened this Saturday and Sunday as part of the Southbank Centre’s 5000 Morris Dancers weekend, based around David Owen’s extraordinary artwork (featured on an earlier post on this blog). I’ll be hosting a Q&A session with film makers Tim Plester and Rob Curry, and a couple of the Adderbury Morris Team, after Saturday’s screening – details here. It starts at 4pm and it’s FREE, with a small booking fee.

Folk-rock nation

Mark Sinclair on proposed changes to the design of the new UK passport – tapping yet again into the iconography of a rural, weatherbeaten, historic Britain. “The psychedelic village scene [on the opening page] might look more at home on the sleeve of a folk-rock album from the early 70s”...

Stravaig with gravitas

Reading and answering Qs at Green Man Festival this weekend, accompanied by Alasdair Roberts who seems to have worked up something special for the occasion. Literature Tent, Saturday 21 August, 2:30pm.

Psych Folk at Rough Trade

At Rough Trade East this evening to co-launch Electric Eden alongside Rough Trade Shops’ new compilation Psych Folk. The CD is a collection of tracks by current artists working in an acid/psychedelic/folk-rock vein, both in the UK and overseas.

Kicking off at 6:30pm with live sets from The Owl Service and Sleepy Sun, plus I’ll be spinning in some music between the acts. Full instore details here.

Bagpuss: some conclusions

My kids have suddenly become obsessed with the DVD of Bagpuss, which affords another chance to become immersed in this antiquey Smallfilms production from that interesting moment, 1974–75, when folk started to go all dusty and parochial. It's a series that's deeply saturated in ghostly echoes of the folk revival – full of songs, nursery rhymes and lyrics that are set to ballads and rustic old tunes. Each episode, in fact, turns on a story about an old item or fragmentary relic brought into Emily’s shop, at first unidentified, then gradually unravelled or mended by singing its history and identity into being – almost a metaphor for the whole process of folk revival itself.

Professor Yaffle, the ‘wise’ old woodpecker, purports to be the authority on all the antiques, but like many professional folk historians of yore, he often makes wrong assumptions about their provenance based on conjecture and his own self-importance. Bagpuss’s resident singer- storytellers, Madeleine the Rag Doll and Gabriel the Toad, are the ones who breathe life into all the broken fragments, and they were voiced by Sandra Kerr and John Faulkner, real life folkies who had been associated with Ewan MacColl and Peggy Seeger's hard-line Critics Group in the 1960s. The duo have recently acknowledged the enduring affection for this BBC series and 'reformed', playing at this year's Sidmouth Folk Week among other dates.

What I notice and marvel at now, re-watching the series with a critical eye, is how subtly subversive it is, and how truly it adheres to the spirit of folk as an alternative people's history and mildly anarchic force, upsetting the normal orders of power and reversing stereotypical tales. Take for instance the episode entitled “The Frog Princess”: at the end the princess kisses her frog, he doesn't change into a prince but instead she is recast as a frog herself, to live happily ever after as a lowly beast, in renunciation of her royal status. In “The Owls of Athens”, the titular birds were great singers but became greedy to be rewarded for their talents, and have their singing voices confiscated by the moon. A cautionary tale, perhaps, for anyone seeking to make excessive cash out of the people's music (Steeleye Span, for instance, were enjoying their commercial, glam-rock-inspired high watermark at exactly the same timeBagpuss was transmitted). The episode also includes “The Bony King of Nowhere”, which paints a bleak portrait of a king driven to mad, aimless distraction by his powerful office. “The Fiddle” draws on the common folk tale of a violin that drives its player and audience into uncontrollable fits of dancing - a story also invoked by Kate Bush on “Violin”, from 1980'sNever for Ever.

And of course being an Oliver Postgate production it has an endearingly homemade, craft-y feel – the hand-drawn illustrations for the songs, for instance, are kind of rubbish in some ways, swashed-out watercolours and scribbles. But what a world away from kids' TV today, with its garish colour schemes and its sense – pervasive across all TV broadcasting these days, not just for children – that it has to clamour to keep its audience’s attention span before it wanders off somewhere else. The thought of anything aimed at today’s children with similarly encoded mild subversion is a distant dream.

Bagpuss’s sepia-toned bookend sequences are bang in tune with the retroactive mood of those times, the power-cut years in the immediate pre-punk era. Emily’s chant, to wake the sleeping cat – wise, sleepy demiurge of the old curiosity shop – recalls enchantments of other children’s fables, such as "Oak and Ash and Thorn" from Kipling’s Puck of Pook’s Hill – a song arranged by that folky fan of all things Rudyard, Peter Bellamy. Bagpuss’s hermetic world of lost and unhoused objects speaks directly to that profoundly British obsession with the past and how to reconstruct it.

Hua Hsu in The Atlantic with a ruminative response to my Exotic Pylon chat with Jonny Mugwump and the wider idea of folk/authenticity.