neo-folk
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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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Renaissance Renaissance, what a name, and what a band. This is another band that travelled the third way, I wrote about yesterday in Amazing Blondel’s post. The third way was a path where you didn’t necessarily have to leave your musical chops or imagination at the door. This group, especially with 1973’s release Ashes Are…
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Amazing Blondel Allow me to take a step back. It was correct that English neo-folk music was struggling to find a way forward in 1972. Many groups were succumbing to the larger than life music from the likes of the Who, Zeppelin, and Yes, forcing them to stray away from their folk underpinnings or create…
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Paul Giovanni singing “Gently Johnny” in a The Wicker Man scene. Somehow, we’ve come full circle. At a time when most of English neo-folk bands were in some weird half-baked musical purgatory, an American came along to light a fire in their bellies again. This time it was New Yorker Paul Giovanni, sometime playwright, actor,…
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Last we left Clive Palmer’s old, new band C.O.B. they were creating a fascinating sound, one that hearkened to pre-traditional days, days of Crusaders and Moors. When 1972 rolled around rather than accept the sales flop that Spirit of Love was for CBS Records, they were signed to a much smaller label Polydor’s Folk Mill Records…
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Mike and Lal Waterson If you’re going to come back, when you’re flame has almost been extinguished by time, you can find no better accompaniment to your resurrection than the meaningful work of Lal and Mike Waterson. This brother and sister duo by the time 1972 had rolled around, were thought of as great icons…
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