neo-folk

(Album of the Month) December 2014: Kate Bush – The Kick Inside (1978)

2015/01/12

Kate Bush – 1978 Its taking me a while to suss out how I was going to give due diligence to an artist I admire as highly as Kate. One of the wonders of December is that its a month so long, and at times so cold, that you settle into the warmth of comforting…
Paul McCartney: Mull of Kintyre (1977)

2015/01/10

Paul McCartney at Mull of Kintyre Let me set the stage for you. Sometime in 1977, EMI and a young 19-year old artist tussled over what single to release and launch her career with. Finally released in January 1978, few expected how absolutely out of the norm a song like this would take the whole…
Duncan Browne: Wild Places (1978)

2015/01/08

Duncan Browne – 1978 Someone who turned to many places and never found the audience he merited was Duncan Browne. When we last left him in 1973, he had released one of the most sophisticated neoclassical folk albums ever. Neo-Romantic but modern, perhaps too modern for its day that self-titled release languished in the forgotten…
The Bothy Band: Old Hag You Have Killed Me (1977)

2015/01/06

The Bothy Band – 1977 Where do we turn next? That’s the question I imagine many new breed neo-folk musicians were asking themselves then. The rise of Punk, Metal, and New Wave groups, coupled with the further fragmentation of Rhythm away from Blues had many musicians searching for a way to go forward. Take a…
John Martyn: Black Man at Your Shoulder (1977)

2015/01/03

John Martyn – 1977 Talk about a meeting of worlds. At the intersection of Echo and Delay, in 1977 met John Martyn and Lee “Scratch” Perry. By then, they had treated listeners from both of their traditions to mind expanding sounds that stretched and blurred the lines of roots music. In England, John’s treatment of…
Al Stewart: Year of the Cat (1976)

2014/12/22

Al Stewart – 1976 You all know or have heard Year of the Cat right? It was nearly four decades ago that this single became neo-folk steam train that could. Little things about its creation distilled in a wonderfully universal way nearly all the transformation, and rungs that neo-folk had taken by then. You hear…
Nigel Mazlyn Jones: Ship To Shore (1976)

2014/12/20

Nigel Mazlyn Jones Nigel Mazlyn Jones, now this is another great artist waiting to be rediscovered. His album 1976’s Ship to Shore introduced a thoroughly unique take on the singer-songwriter genre. He was part of the second wave of progressive folk styles that Roy Harper, John Martyn, and Al Stewart sorta introduced earlier in the…
Horslips: The Rocks Remain (1976)

2014/12/19

Horslips – 1976 Let me go back in time for a bit. Back in April, when I had a small kindling to start this blog, I wrote of a track from The Book of Invasions, “Warm Sweet Breath of Love”: “[This track] has everything that could be so right about music. Its all of these…
Penguin Cafe Orchestra: The Sound of Someone You Love Who’s Going Away and It Doesn’t Matter (1976)

2014/12/18

Simon Jeffes on bowed guitar (left) with David Sylvian and Ryuichi Sakamoto Wow, what a loaded track title and what a loaded track. This band was born out of a hallucinated dream experienced by one Simon Jeffes while recovering from food poisoning. In one fever dream he saw an all seeing eye viewing a couple…
Strawbs: Ghosts (1975)

2014/12/17

Straws – 1975 Ghosts album cover photo session. Let’s get out of 1975, and start floating through the decade. It has to be that way. This is the year too many other musical movements (Punk, New Wave, Arena Rock etc.) had started to change everything culturally that English people now tuned to. Making it so,…