Download or read book I ve Always Kept a Unicorn written by Mick Houghton and published by Faber & Faber. This book was released on 2015-03-03 with total page 387 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: I've Always Kept a Unicorn tells the story of Sandy Denny, one of the greatest British singers of her time and the first female singer-songwriter to produce a substantial and enduring body of original songs. Sandy Denny laid down the marker for folk-rock when she joined Fairport Convention in 1968, but her music went far beyond this during the seventies. After leaving Fairport she formed Fotheringay, whose influential eponymous album was released in 1970, before collaborating on a historic one-off recording with Led Zeppelin - the only other vocalist to record with Zeppelin in their entire career - and releasing four solo albums across the course of the decade. Her tragic and untimely death came in 1978. Sandy emerged from the folk scene of the sixties - a world of larger-than-life characters such as Alex Campbell, Jackson C. Frank, Anne Briggs and Australian singer Trevor Lucas, whom she married in 1973. Their story is at the core of Sandy's later life and work, and is told with the assistance of more than sixty of her friends, fellow musicians and contemporaries, one of whom, to paraphrase McCartney on Lennon, observed that she sang like an angel but was no angel.

Download or read book Singing from the Floor written by JP Bean and published by Faber & Faber. This book was released on 2014-03-04 with total page 335 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In smoky rooms above pubs, bare rooms with battered stools and beer-stained tables, where the stage was little more than a scrap of carpet and sound systems were unheard of, an acoustic revolution took place in Britain in the 1950s and '60s. This was the folk revival, where a generation of musicians, among much drink and raucous cheer, would rediscover the native songs of their own tradition, as well as the folk and blues coming from across the Atlantic by artists such as Leadbelly, Woody Guthrie and Big Bill Broonzy. Singing from the Floor is the story of this remarkable movement, faithfully captured in the voices of those who formed it by JP Bean. We hear from luminaries such as Shirley Collins, Martin Carthy, Peggy Seeger and Ralph McTell, alongside figures such as Billy Connolly, Jasper Carrott and Mike Harding, who all started their careers on the folk circuit. The book charts the revival's improvised beginnings and its ties to the CND movement, through the heyday of the '60s and '70s, when every university, town and many villages across the country boasted a folk club, to the fallow years of the '80s and '90s. The book finishes on a high note, with the recent resurgence of interest in folk, through such artists as the Lakemans, Sam Lee and Eliza Carthy. It is a joyous, boisterous and hugely entertaining book, and an essential document of our recent history stretching into the past.

Download or read book Electric Folk written by Britta Sweers and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2005-01-13 with total page 350 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Britta Sweers chronicles the history of the genre and explores its cultural implications. She characterizes electric folk as both a result of the American folk revival of the early 1960s and a reaction against the dominance of American pop music abroad.

Download or read book Folk written by Richard Carlin and published by Infobase Publishing. This book was released on 2005 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Presents brief entries covering the history, significant artists, styles and influence of folk music.

Download or read book Ashley Hutchings written by Brian Hinton and published by Helter Skelter Publishing. This book was released on 2001-09-10 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Authorised biography of Fairport Convention-founder Ashley Hutchins that is also the story of folk-rock.

Download or read book The Mojo Collection written by Various Mojo Magazine and published by Canongate Books. This book was released on 2007-11-01 with total page 881 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The greatest albums of all time . . . and how they happened. Organised chronologically and spanning seven decades, The MOJO Collection presents an authoritative and engaging guide to the history of the pop album via hundreds of long-playing masterpieces, from the much-loved to the little known. From The Beatles to The Verve, from Duke Ellington to King Tubby and from Peggy Lee to Sly Stone, hundreds of albums are covered in detail with chart histories, full track and personnel listings and further listening suggestions. There's also exhaustive coverage of the soundtrack and hit collections that every home should have. Like all collections, there are records you listen to constantly, albums you've forgotten, albums you hardly play, albums you love guiltily and albums you thought you were alone in treasuring, proving The MOJO Collection to be an essential purchase for those who love and live music.

Download or read book The Encyclopedia of Popular Music written by Colin Larkin and published by Omnibus Press. This book was released on 2011-05-27 with total page 4183 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This text presents a comprehensive and up-to-date reference work on popular music, from the early 20th century to the present day.

Download or read book An Evolving Tradition written by Dave Thompson and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2023-07-15 with total page 545 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Child Ballads are a series of over 300 traditional ballads from England and Scotland that, along with their American variants, were anthologized by folklorist Francis James Child in the nineteenth century. An Evolving Tradition is the story of the Child Ballads—the world’s best-known and most highly regarded repository of traditional English folk songs, and the wellspring for approximately 10,000 recordings over the last century, from obscure musicological archives to classic releases from Bob Dylan, Simon & Garfunkel, and Led Zeppelin. Drawing on interviews with numerous scholars and musicians, author Dave Thompson explains what a ballad is, outlines their dominant themes, and recounts how these ballads survived to become a mainstay of field recordings made by Cecil Sharp, Alan Lomax, and others as they traveled the English and American countryside in search of old songs. Thompson traverses the entire spectrum of rock, pop, folk, roots, experimental music, industrial, and goth to reveal the remarkable legacy and incalculable influence of the Child Ballads on all manner of modern music.

Download or read book Eight Miles High written by Richie Unterberger and published by Hal Leonard Corporation. This book was released on 2003 with total page 372 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Eight Miles High documents the evolution of the folk-rock movement from mid-1966 through the end of the decade. This much-anticipated sequel to Turn! Turn! Turn!(00330946) - the acclaimed history of folk-rock's early years - portrays the mutation of the genre into psychedelia via California bands like the Byrds and Jefferson Airplane; the maturation of folk-rock composers in the singer-songwriter movement; the re-emergence of Bob Dylan and the creation of country-rock; the rise of folk-rock's first supergroup, CSN&Y; the origination of British folk-rock; and the growing importance of major festivals from Newport to Woodstock. Based on firsthand interviews with such folk-rock visionaries as: Jorma Kaukonen, Roger McGuinn, Donovan, Judy Collins, Jim Messina, Dan Hicks and dozens of others.

Download or read book The Peel Sessions written by Ken Garner and published by Random House. This book was released on 2010-12-15 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a story of teenage dreams, which, as any Peel fan knows, are hard to beat. Between 1967 and 2004 John Peel picked over 2000 bands to come and record over 4000 sessions to be played on his radio show. Many were young and had never been in a recording studio before, for some it was the start of an illustrious career, for others it was the only recognition their musical talent ever got. For over 35 years the cream of British musical talent made the journey to the BBC's studio in Maida Vale, from Pink Floyd to Pulp, the Small Faces to the Smiths. And because John Peel was so respected his sessions took on a legendary status - they were a rite of passage that every new band wanted to go through. Unfettered by commerical pressure the Peel Sessions were a unique British institution - an archive of music that reflects one man's passion for finding and encouraging new music. Includes a full sessionography listing songs, band members and broadcast dates. Jarvis Cocker writing about his first Peel Session aged 18 (Wayne the drummer was 15): 'We travelled down to Maida Vale in a van driven by a very strange man we'd contacted via a card pinned to the Virgin record shop noticeboard. We'd had to borrow lots of equipment from a band called The Naughtiest Girl Was a Monitor 'cause we didn't have enough stuff of our own. The session was to be produced by Dale Griffin, who used to be the drummer in Mott the Hoople; I seem to remember that he was wearing cowboy boots. I think the crisis point came when Wayne was attempting to get a home-made synth-drum to work that a friend of his at school had made out of a rubber burglar-alarm mat and an old electronic calculator - Dale Griffin looked at this 15-year-old kid crouching on the floor bashing what looked like a doormat with some wires coming out of it and just put his head in his hands. But to his credit, the session did get finished and after it, everything else started for me...'

Download or read book Electric Eden written by Rob Young and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2011-05-10 with total page 674 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Kirkus Reviews Best Nonfiction of 2011 title In the late 1960s, with popular culture hurtling forward on the sounds of rock music, some brave musicians looked back instead, trying to recover the lost treasures of English roots music and update them for the new age. The records of Fairport Convention, Pentangle, Steeleye Span, and Nick Drake are known as "folk rock" today, but Rob Young's epic, electrifying book makes clear that those musicians led a decades-long quest to recover English music-and with it, the ancient ardor for mysticism and paganism, for craftsmanship and communal living. It is a commonplace that rock and R&B came out of the folk and blues revivals of the early 1960s, and Young shows, through enchanting storytelling and brilliant commentary, that a similar revival in England inspired the Beatles and Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin and Traffic, Kate Bush and Talk Talk. Folklorists notated old songs and dances. Marxists put folk music forward as the true voice of the people. Composers like Benjamin Britten and Ralph Vaughan Williams devised rich neo-traditional pageantry. Today, the pioneers of the "acid folk" movement see this music as a model for their own. Electric Eden is that rare book which has something truly new to say about popular music, and like Greil Marcus's Lipstick Traces, it uses music to connect the dots in a thrilling story of art and society, of tradition and wild, idiosyncratic creativity.

Download or read book The British Folk Revival written by Michael Brocken and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-09-29 with total page 386 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The British Folk Revival is the very first historical and theoretical work to consider the post-war folk revival in Britain from a popular music studies perspective. Michael Brocken provides a historical narrative of the folk revival from the 1940s up until the 1990s, beginning with the emergence of the revival from within and around the left-wing movements of the 1940s and 1950s. Key figures and organizations such as the Workers' Music Association, the BBC, the English Folk Dance and Song Society, A.L. Lloyd and Ewan MacColl are examined closely. By looking at the work of British Communist Party splinter groups it is possible to see the refraction of folk music as a political tool. Brocken openly challenges folk historicity and internal narrative by discussing the convergence of folk and pop during the 1950s and 1960s. The significant development of the folk/rock hybrid is considered alongside 'class', 'Americana', radio and the strength of pop culture. Brocken shows how the dichotomy of artistic (natural) versus industry (mass-produced) music since the 1970s has led to a fragmentation and constriction of the folk revival. The study concludes with a look at the upsurge of the folk music industry, the growth of festivals and the implications of the Internet for the British folk revival. Brocken suggests the way forward should involve an acknowledgement that folk music is not superior to but is, in fact, a form of popular music. The book will create lively debate among the folk music fraternity and popular music scholars, as well as folklorists and ethnomusicologists. A unique discography and history of the Topic Record label is also included.

Download or read book Performing Englishness written by Trish Winter and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 2015-11-01 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Performing Englishness examines the growth in popularity and profile of the English folk arts in the first decade of the twenty-first century. In the only study of its kind, the authors explore how the folk resurgence speaks to a broader explosion of interest in the subject of English national and cultural identity. Combining approaches from British cultural studies and ethnomusicology, the book draws on ethnographic fieldwork, interviews with central figures of the resurgence and close analysis of music and dance as well as visual and discursive sources. Its presentation of the English case study calls for a rethinking of concepts such as revival and indigeneity. It will be of interest to students and scholars in cultural studies, ethnomusicology and related disciplines.

Download or read book Freaks Out written by Luke Haines and published by Nine Eight Books. This book was released on 2024-03-28 with total page 218 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'Dividing pop sheep from out-there GOATS with spite and guile, it's part SCUM manifesto, part insane hot or not list.' SUNDAY TIMES The followers - this book is not for you. The salt of the earth - this book is not for you. The worthy - this book is not for you. The ideologists - this book is not for you. Hedonists and bohemians - this book is not for you. The middlebrow - this book is not for you. The highbrow - this book is not for you. Dilettantes - this book is not for you. 1970s middle school RE teachers - this book is not for you. The England football team (women's and men's) - this book is not for you. The litanists - this book is not for you. Gatekeepers - this book is not for you. Gamekeepers - this book is not for you. (Not even for the poachers...) The curators - this book is not for you. The left, the right - this book is not for you. The list-makers - lists are for shoppers not rockers, and this book is not for you. This is not a list - this is a manifesto, and this book is for ... the Freaks. Musician and author Luke Haines embarks on an odyssey through the ages, exploring how the 'freaks' infiltrated modern culture - and almost won the rock 'n' roll wars - only to lose to the rise of Cool Britannia and TV 'talent' shows that turned the strange and the outsiders into fodder for laughter. In this ultimate celebration of freakdom, Haines tells the story of pivotal freaks - including Johnnie Ray, Gene Vincent, Hank Marvin, Syd Barrett, the Incredible String Band and Big Youth - through the prism of rock 'n' roll and explains how freaks infiltrated wider culture through history in the form of the Cathars, the Ranters, Hells Angels and the Yippies. Part memoir, part manifesto, Freaks Out! is a righteous alternate history of rock 'n' roll.

Download or read book Sixties British Pop Outside in written by Gordon Thompson and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2024 with total page 425 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Itchycoo Park, 1964-1970--the second volume of Sixties British Pop, Outside In--explores how London songwriters, musicians, and production crews navigated the era's cultural upheavals by reimagining the pop-music envelope. Thompson explores how some British artists conjured up sophisticated hybrid forms by recombining elements of jazz, folk, blues, Indian ragas, and western classical music while others returned to the raw essentials. Encouraging these experiments, youth culture's economic power challenged the authority of their parents' generation. Based on extensive research, including vintage and original interviews, Thompson presents sixties British pop, not as lists of discrete people and events, but as an interwoven story.

Download or read book Singing Out written by David Burke and published by Soundcheck Books. This book was released on 2015-03-01 with total page 210 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Life And Work Of 3 Female Folk Icons David Burke takes the lives of three of British folk music’s best-known and best-loved women and intertwines their stories. Why these three? As David explains: “Maddy Prior, June Tabor and Linda Thompson have both endured and evolved. The people’s relationship with its heritage may be capricious, but Maddy, June and Linda have remained resolutely committed to it while concurrently contemporising it.” They all began in the folk clubs of the second folk revival in the 1960s but, whilst staying true to their roots, have never been afraid to try new things (sometimes to the horror of traditional folkies). Maddy Prior MBE is best known as being the singer with Steeleye Span, though she has done many different things, including the Silly Sisters with June Tabor. June tried to juggle being a librarian and a singer, until singing, thankfully, won out. Elvis Costello said, “If you don’t like listening to June Tabor, you should stop listening to music” To a large extent, Linda Thompson’s later career has been blighted by hysterical dysphonia, a condition that has stopped her singing for long periods. For this book, all three women kindly provided interviews, but Linda could only communicate via e-mail; her condition (which comes and goes) was so bad at the time. However, her albums with ex-husband Richard Thompson are classics, as are her own solo albums: it is just sad that illness has deprived her (and us) of more of them. In addition to the three subjects, David has interviewed, amongst others, Ian Anderson, Martin Carthy, Christy Moore, Martin Simpson, Rufus Wainwright and even the creator of the Wombles pop group Mike Batt, who produced Steeleye Span.

Download or read book Fairport Convention and Electric Folk written by Rob Young and published by Faber & Faber. This book was released on 2012-06-07 with total page 107 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Faber Forty-Fives is a series of six short ebooks that between them tell the story of British pop music from the birth of psychedelia in the late sixties, through electric folk, glam, seventies rock and punk, to the eclecticism of post-punk in the late seventies and early eighties. Each book is drawn from a larger work on Faber's acclaimed music list. 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. 'A thoroughly enjoyable read and likely to remain the best-written overview for a long time.' GUARDIAN 'A perfectly timed, perfectly pitched alternative history of English folk music . . . wide-ranging, insightful, authoritative, thoroughly entertaining.' NEW STATESMAN 'A stunning achievement.' SIMON REYNOLDS 'A masterpiece.' CAUGHT BY THE RIVER 'Excellent . . . blissfully quotable.' NEW YORK TIMES 'An authoritative account.' THE TIMES 'Consistently absorbing.' INDEPENDENT 'An impassioned and infectious rallying cry of a book.' SUNDAY TIMES In this groundbreaking survey of more than a century of music making in the British Isles, Rob Young investigates how the idea of folk has been handed down and transformed by successive generations - song collectors, composers, Marxist revivalists, folk-rockers, psychedelic voyagers, free festival-goers, experimental pop stars and electronic innovators. In a sweeping panorama of Albion's soundscape that takes in the pioneer spirit of Cecil Sharp; the pastoral classicism of Ralph Vaughan Williams and Peter Warlock; the industrial folk revival of Ewan MacColl and A. L. Lloyd; the folk-rock of Fairport Convention, Sandy Denny, Nick Drake, Shirley Collins, John Martyn and Pentangle; the bucolic psychedelia of The Incredible String Band, The Beatles and Pink Floyd; the acid folk of Comus, Forest, Mr Fox and Trees; The Wicker Man and occult folklore; the early Glastonbury and Stonehenge festivals; and the visionary pop of Kate Bush, Julian Cope and Talk Talk, Electric Eden maps out a native British musical voice that reflects the complex relationships between town and country, progress and nostalgia, radicalism and conservatism. An attempt to isolate the 'Britishness' of British music - a wild combination of pagan echoes, spiritual quest, imaginative time-travel, pastoral innocence and electrified creativity - Electric Eden will be treasured by anyone interested in the tangled story of Britain's folk music and Arcadian dreams. 'A treat.' TIME OUT 'Young is a fine writer.' MOJO 'Young's immense narrative is both educative and gripping.' UNCUT 'A multitudinous, fascinating and beautifully written account.' TLS