Sunday 8 August 2010
in the garden
Today brings this excellent interview with Ali Roberts in the Observer. His new album is superb: I haven’t mentioned this before, as I feel like I need to listen to it a lot more to digest it properly first.
I’ve been reading Rob Young’s Electric Eden book, which has been really enjoyable: as good books on music should, it’s sent me repeatedly scurrying to the CD and record shelves (or more often, to Spotify) to hear things for the first time, or to discover them anew with fresh ears. It shines light on lots of dusky musical avenues that deserve to be well-lit, but (and this, as they say, is a big but) there’s a problem with the book which I can’t quite ignore. The Anglocentricity I noticed in his Grauniad article last week is writ large all over it, and by the end he’s swapping ‘English’ and ‘British’ with no distinction in meaning at all. In any piece of journalism this is lazy and irritating – sometimes in the Guardian you get halfway through an article before being told that the awful piece of legislation it’s telling you about only applies in England - but in a book that's about folk music and national cultural identity, this is a major problem. Ironically enough, in 18th-century London British culture was seen to be embodied not in English traditional music but in Scottish, as the upper classes had been too busy with Empire to notice what was on their doorstep.
Young also seems to use the term 'British Isles' (which is problematic at the best of times) to refer to the islands of Britain - ouch. And although he describes the 1960s determination to sing with English rather than Americanised voices, he doesn’t notice that most of the Scots he’s writing about felt unable (or unwilling) to sing in recognisably Scots accents: John Martyn, Donovan, and to a lesser extent Bert Jansch and Robin Williamson, never really sounded Scottish. Why was that? Billy Connolly who did (unlike his musical partner in the Humblebums, Gerry Rafferty), doesn’t get a mention. Nor, as Jim Gilchrist pointed out in his review, does the Gaelic language, other than as an influence on Vashti Bunyan when staying on Berneray Harris. And it does seem odd to dwell on Talk Talk but not mention XTC. But (another but) this aside, if you read it as a book about England's visionary music as viewed from London, it’s great. Get a copy: just approach it with caution.
To counteract its tales of pastoral idealism I’ve been listening to the Art Bears oeuvre, most of it for the first time. The agit-prop in Hopes and Fears is bit too abrasive for me but the other two albums are very beautiful (and more convincing, I think).
And I’ve been nesting behind this door.
