
Electric Eden by Rob Young
Rob Young's new cultural history does for English folk music what Alan Lomax and Greil Marcus did for its American counterpart. Arcane and wide-ranging, the book contends with Rudyard Kipling, faeries, and Paradise Lost as much as it does still-influential artists such as Nick Drake and Incredible String band.
There are countless books on the history of British music in the '50s, '60s, and '70s. Consider, for example, the eight hundred-odd books that Amazon currently has about the Beatles, or the numerous volumes chronicling the roots of mod, glam, punk, and post-punk. The veritable mountain of literature on David Bowie alone could take a lifetime to sift through.
In Electric Eden, Rob Young uncovers a hidden seam of British music, a fascinating tangle of stories that have not been told in great detail. This encyclopedic tome, which weighs in at over 600 pages, grapples with the unwieldy history of