Pour down like silver. What an apropos name for whatever the hell was going on in classic English folk and folk-rock music in 1975. Nothing you’ll find this year from overground artists like Richard and Linda Thompson, Steeleye Span, Sandy Denny and more would truly be as valuable as the stuff that poured for from their minds before. It had to be. Other artists, in other styles, heard elsewhere were discovering ways to rework folk music (Mike Oldfield being a great examples), but it seems like English folk artists themselves were getting lapped in the effort department. You had to dig deep, and I mean thoroughly plunder, to find some nuggets of splendor.
Here’s one nugget, a product of their exploration and indoctrination into the Sufi religion, is Richard and Linda Thompson’s not-quite golden but brilliantly silver-like performance of “A Heart Needs a Home” from Pour Down Like Silver:
John Martyn, the ever restless experimenter, was treating fans to a magnificent live albums Live at Leeds, which gave an indication of future electronic folk that would slowly infiltrate their airspace:
and Steeleye Span somehow went to the top of the charts (a very late entry for English folk-rock) with “All Around My Hat”, a heavy albatross they’d carry for the long future:
When you hear something from one of Eno’s slew of masterful released in that same year specifically Discreet Music, its title track a modern pastoral and neo-Romantic song (a sonic background filler of sorts) reminding us of this other green world that can be invoked with other methods…then you start to see the end of the old guard’s watch at the helm and some new golden hour.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SE6nQ0lkLdY