england
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Gryphon – 1974 The further we head down this neo-folk decade the more strained the strands holding it to the base become. It had to be that way. Nearly a decade into its creation, advances in technology, and a growing influence of outside musics started to gild the lily of what most considered English folk…
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Richard and Linda Thompson There’s something about the year 1974 that will trigger a sea change in the English musical landscape. A year before the rise of Thatcher and near the beginning of Labour’s inept descent into centrism, musicians were starting to feel the pangs of rebellion again. Before punk existed, there was one man…
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What a weird time its must have been for England in 1974. It was during this year that the IRA started to launch an all-out offensive to rid Northern Ireland from England’s grasp, rampant energy blackouts forced the reintroduction of Three-Day Weeks to conserve electricity, Monty Python was ending, and the government itself was having…
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Bert Jansch – 1974 Sometimes you need a bit o’ change to right a trajectory. By 1974, many of the great English folk-rock artists of past had been either disbanding or watering down. One steady man had always been Bert Jansch. Maybe because of it, he’d always find ways to keep his group, the Pentangle,…
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Duncan Browne Londoner Duncan Browne is another one of those brilliant, forgotten ones. In 1973, with classical guitar in tow, he released another great totem for neo-folk music. His self-titled sophomore album combined some of that astounding experimentation with folk forms that John Martyn had shown, only he did it with more tempered, bittersweet music.…
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John Martyn (Danny Thompson in the back) If John’s fans thought that he had gone out there for Solid Air, imagine the look on their faces the first time they heard Inside Out. Now trekking further beyond what any artist was doing at that time, John amped up his experimental side until it broke from its seams.…
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John Martyn When you hear the first percussive taps of John Martyn’s acoustic on “Solid Air”, you know this is something special. Written about and dedicated to his friend Nick Drake, it represented something even more beguiling, a fork in the road. His friend was in the throes of depression, to the point that any…
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Carole Pegg I guess you can call this a “A Track, A Day” exclusive. Remember the sinisterly awesome Mr. Fox band? Lead by Bob and Carole Pegg, they pioneered a darker form of neo-folk which drew from their Yorkshire Dale region. Before the dark tales of Comus, theirs was the haunting sound that shocked early…
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Steeleye Span There’s something so telling about today’s tracks. Everything about Steeleye Span signify the bloated culmination of English folk-rock as most people know it. So spectacularly dense in its concentration of Englishness that the songs I chose from them today both contain everything most people hate about the genre and everything that people justifiably…
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Barbara and Martin There’s a bit near the 10:30 minute mark in my track of the day, “In the Western World”, a multi-part suite by Spirogyra, when Dolly Collins (Shirley Collins’ sister) magnificent arrangements join in with the sound of oscillating synthesizers and Barbara Gaskins harrowing voice, that the sign of a new branch of…
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