Is there any new British folk music?

4ZZZ · 11-17-2008, 06:26 AM

I have over the last few year been enjoying the genre that has been called Americana. This is a fairly broad folkish/Alt country genre and there are artists as diverse as Calixico to Giant Sand through to the likes of Willard Grant Conspiracy and many more. After hearing The Mountain Ash Band's wonderful 1975 release The Hermit it dawned on me that it was the first British folk music that I had listened to in who knows how long that excited me. But it was from 1975 and all my other British folk albums were from the 60's and also the 70's, Lindisfarne, Fairport Convention, etc etc. I was then intrigued to read this item in the Guardian today.

Quote:

Why is our radical folk heritage ignored?
Modern British music is so in thrall to Americana that our own treasure trove of radical traditional folk is in danger of being forgotten

Rachel Unthank

The future of folk? Rachel Unthank. Photograph: Karen Melvin

Why is the radical music of old England ignored by modern artists?

This weekend, the luminaries of the British folk revival will gather at Cecil Sharpe House, to pay tribute to AL "Bert" Lloyd, who travelled the length and breadth of the land collecting traditional ditties before they died along with their singers.

This treasure trove in our back yard is largely ignored by a contemporary, mainstream British scene in thrall to American roots music. The record-buying public would rather cough up for Fleet Foxes and Bon Iver than for the likes of Mary Hampton or Lucky Luke. Even the Mercury-nominated Rachel Unthank remains a fringe concern compared to her fellow Mercury nominee Laura Marling, who is more influenced by Americana.

The beards-and-ale stereotype of British folk has long been derided as twee, but that label hardly applies to a song like Reynardine, one of Lloyd's discoveries. The song tells the tale of a man-fox who abducts maidens and hauls them off to his castle: the kind of thing that would surely enrich the hit parade. Other songs gathered by Lloyd include ballads sung by soldiers and farmers during the Napoleonic wars, communicating a sense of war-weariness, or complaining about high grain prices, which surely resonate and provide inspiration in our own troubled times.

In his brilliant cultural history The Village That Died for England, Patrick Wright points out that many of the back-to-basics movements of the early-20th century acquired a touch of the far right. English roots music has met with the same fate, in spite of its inherent socialism, and the fact that Lloyd himself was a Marxist. Somehow, pinning a ribbon to the maypole has become akin to taking out a subscription to This England, that terrifyingly white and right-wing magazine full of pictures of thatched cottages, stirringly patriotic poems and reactionary letters.

British folk also suffers from that post-rock'n'roll paradigm which assumes that American outsider music stands for rebellion - even if, in the case of Bon Iver, it amounts to a check-shirted bloke moaning about girl trouble from the comfort of his shed.

In Eastern Europe, the political power of traditional songs was recognised and appropriated by the Communist regimes, which is perhaps why their influence can still be heard in contemporary continental music - from pop to metal to those pan-national titans of industrial sternness, Laibach.

It's a mistake to consider Britain's own ancient folk songs lifeless artefacts not worthy of contemporary reappraisal. Isn't it about time we heard a week of music from the Bert Lloyd songbook on the X Factor?

So I ask. What is going on? Are the questions this item asks correct? Also 3 things that I have thought of. Is there just a dearth of worthy artists? Has the Rock sensibilities killed the public at large of any interest? Is there a cult of personalty with celebrity that kills this genre? These 3 questions are just of the top of my head and are ideas that I have thought of quickly. There may be more or I am missing the point? The item I have posted seems to have a few names but in general they are off the music listeners page but there has to be more. Any interest or am I wrong to consider this an issue?