the pagan sound of british and irish folk 1966-1975

Released 2020/Acquired 2021/Listened 2022

Back in 1975, I found a British package called Electric Muse in the import section of a local record store. It was a 4-album box set subtitled “The Story of Folk into Rock,” and acts listed on the front included The Chieftains, The Dubliners, Fairport Convention, Roy Harper, Lindisfarne, John Martyn, Ralph McTell, Pentangle, Steeleye Span, and Traffic. I knew a lot of science fiction fans who were into this music, but I myself had relatively little exposure to it. This collection was pretty expensive for my budget at the time, but I managed. I liked these four records, and played them often, but this set alone satisfied my need and I bought very little by the artists sampled. (By now, years later, I’ve bought quite a lot of it on cd.) There were cd versions of Electric Muse that I heard about but never saw, with varying contents, but I let them be.

A couple years ago I bought a similar 3-cd set called Dust on the Nettles. This, like other Various Artists collections I was buying from Grapefruit Records, featured some well-known tracks and many deep dives into the archives of record labels and artists’ attics, including sampling the soundtrack to the 1973 horror film The Wicker Man. Even dedicated folkies had never heard of some of these treasures.

Now Grapefruit has released a sequel, this time purportedly focusing on the pagan side of the folk/rock scene. There’s nothing at all pagan about some of these tracks (on the other hand, at least one act joined a coven and “stripped naked and danced round in a circle”), but overall there is a darkness here that I found quite appealing, from singalongs to acid folk. There are murder songs and seduction songs galore (and at least one seduction-then-murder song), with sitar and even synthesizer mixed in with the guitars and flutes. Maybe a third of the songs are traditional, the others written by the artists, but it’s hard to tell them apart. Some come from well-produced major labels, others are essentially garage folk, with the vocals and/or instrumentation somewhat lacking, but as I listened to these cds repeatedly over the course of a couple months, I found I didn’t care. They’re all part of the overall tapestry and make for an extremely satisfying whole.

There are two of my all-time favorites here, Fairport Convention’s “Tam Lin” (beautifully sung by Sandy Denny and with wonderful guitar by Richard Thompson) and Traffic’s “John Barleycorn” (their only folk song, completely unlike anything else they ever did). There’s also Sally Oldfield’s “Song of the Healer,” a better version of which is on her album Water Bearer, but this early version with her brother Mike is interesting (and previously unreleased). But most of these songs I was completely unfamiliar with, and for the most part I only know the performers from their appearance on Dust on the Nettles (or in some cases, as with Dr. Strangely Strange, on other Grapefruit collections). A band delightfully called Fresh Maggots has a nice version of “The House Carpenter” (also previously unreleased). Carole Pegg uses her hard-to-like voice to good effect on an eerie song she wrote called “The Sapphire,” in which the character in the song tries to use a gem to ease her troubled mind. (It took me quite a few listens to get into this, because I just haven’t cared for her singing; she was also in the influential group Mr. Fox. But yeah, I’m okay with it now.) I love the acoustic guitar on the MacDonald Folk Group’s version of “Geordie” – nothing special in the way of technique, but very appealing. I could go through the 61 tracks and list something I liked about most of them, just because of becoming so familiar with them over the past couple months. There’s also a great booklet detailing a lot of the history here.

I have to give the engineers at Grapefruit (and Cherry Red, their parent label) major kudos for all of these packages. Working with a conglomeration of master tapes, vinyl records, cassettes, and acetates, they make the track-to-track listening experience very consistent. Sometimes there isn’t much they can do – a demo’s a demo – but really, everything sounds at least good, and usually more than good.