By rights, the book ought to tell us something about British folk music, and at times it does do just this. In fact author Rob Young (who also wrote two fantastic books on the Warp and Rough Trade labels) documents folk artists trying their hardest to recreate the more nature based aspects of British society.

Folk music takes away the jazz cigarettes and granny glasses and substitutes the cruel sister, the hanged man, the demon lover, the unquiet grave, the foggy dew, yes, but it’s still a dream world fitting closely on the cultural shelf next to Lord of the Rings, Gormenghast and HP Lovecraft. Rob Young , who was the editor of The Wire , the leading British music magazine, is now an editor at large there.Last Saturday I took my daughter up there and found the forecourt outside the Royal Festival Hall packed solid with people listening to Billy Bragg belting his song “A13 Trunk Road To The Sea” out towards the choppy Thames. And moreover that his refusal to sub-ordinate the detail to a 'bigger picture' is a deliberate strat Far from the stark and no doubt rather wholemealy songbook of 1951, these will be versions that draw on the more recent arrangements of the folk-rock era, by the likes of Pentangle, Shirley Collins, etc – illustrating how far folk music in the British Isles has moved since the war. Collectively, this music means a lot to him; it represents, he argues, “British folk-rock’s high-water mark.

The late-60s blossoming of Glastonbury was a revival of a Utopian project by Rutland Boughton, "communist, vegetarian and suffragette sympathiser", whose 1916 Glastonbury festival, supported by George Bernard Shaw, staged an Arthurian opera on a shoestring budget.Rob Young’s Electric Eden: Unearthing Britain’s Visionary Music is a seminal book on British music and cultural heritage, that spans the visionary classical and folk tradition from the nineteenth-century to the present day.