Quotes from Rob Young

Meic Stevens, influential in his home country for founding psychedelic labels Sain and Wren and singing mystic troubadour songs in his native Welsh tongue. In autumn 1969 Stevens took part in an event playing alongside the ten-piece Indo-Jazz Fusions, and the following year the group's sitarist Diwan Motihar and tabla player Keshav Sathe recorded parts on the Welshman's Warners LP Outlander

Van Morrison's Astral Weeks

For all that, we have to realize that many revived folk songs today, in their "second existence", are probably enjoying a more vigorous life than they did in their first, restricted time, even if they are bent to different purposes.'9 Folk music had been set free to soar like the kestrel. Two years after this was printed, Lloyd was playing 'Deep Throat' consultant to Fairport Convention's revamping of folk on Liege and Lief.

Anne Briggs, The Hazards of Love EP (1964); John Renbourn, John Renbourn (1965); Mick Softley, Songs for Swingin' Survivors (1965).

More recent critics of the folk revival have suggested that the entire body of work considered 'British folk', from the Victorian age onwards, has been nothing more than carefully staged illusion, the product of a wholesale middle-class appropriation of working people's culture.

well formed. 'Angi', Graham's most famous composition, first appeared on 3/4 AD, a 1961 Topic EP split with blues guitarist Alexis Korner. Based around a deceptively easy four-chord sequence, the plucking right hand appears to do the work of a jazz trio, the thumb maintaining a steady bass pulse while the rest of the fingers tweak out the tune's ruminative syncopations. Combined

William the Conqueror was an enthusiastic builder of churches and monasteries, but even by the time he and his invading armies arrived from Normandy in 1066, Britons' national psyche – their customs, culture and language – had already been shaped by almost 900 years of wrestling for possession between competing religious doctrines, heathen, pagan and Christian.

For aspiring folk progressives of 1965 the essential record to spin on the Dansette was Folk Roots, New Routes.

The Watersons' polyphonic austerity refreshed the sound of modern folk in Britain to the extent that publications as diverse as Sing, Melody Maker and Gramophone all praised Frost and Fire to the stars, while BBC Two commissioned a documentary on the group, Travelling for a Living, aired in 1966.

Because of the subsequent commercial impact of Steeleye Span – sell-out American tours, their own TV series and two enormous hit singles – it's easy to think of the group as representing all the crass aspects of British folk music. But the pizzazz of the 1970s has eclipsed the raw thrills of Hark! The Village Wait and Please to See the King, two hungry-sounding albums that held out a tantalising vision of a potential pan-British music that never materialised.

Ashley Hutchings has been beating the bounds of English traditional music ever since. When he first heard Shirley and Dolly Collins's Anthems in Eden, just after quitting Fairport back in 1969, he broke down in body-shaking sobs; the suite finally unlocked and articulated all that he loved about English music. 'It evokes the countryside and it evokes the healing … I imagine it defined the whole of the rest of my career.

hurdy-gurdy

The magical switch between the hawk and the hurricane reflects the very British experience of living in the past simultaneously with the present. Pentangle's music, in its swirling vortex of referents, the galliard shading into the raga, the ballad transmuting into the acid jam, unwittingly reflects these contested territories.

Liege and Lief, the

time. The first Fairport Convention gig as a four-piece (with original, short-lived drummer Shaun Frater) took place on 27 May 1967 at St Michael's Hall in Golders Green. Even in that momentous year for rock music, the date was auspicious: Are You Experienced? had been on the streets for a week and a half, and Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band was five days away. As they

the landscape retains its grip on the collective imagination, offering the promise of tranquillity, open space, freedom from responsibility; a rustic souvenir of permanence and stability. Britons treasure their shrinking countryside like a family heirloom wrapped in silk, locked away in the secret compartment of a writing table, protected from foreign invasion for most of a millennium.

Breaking out beyond London's green belt was, and remains, like crossing the border into another country altogether.

Although recordings were done in London, Winwood confessed he preferred the sound of the cottage: 'Every room has its own character, and the room in the cottage where we do rough takes of the songs has its own special quality, because it is an old house and you can tell what kind of room the sound was recorded in when you listen to the tape.'4 Instead of the airless precision of modern multitrack studios, artificially aged acoustics were the way to go.

It was a magical time,' confirms Hutchings. 'And there's a lot of magic on that album. There was a special feeling in the house, in the room, and also a lot of hidden magic and weirdness on that album. Well, the past is weird, you know, our ancestors did a lot of weird things.

Most remarkable of all, of the album's eight tracks 'Come All Ye' is the only song that has a chorus that can easily be joined by an audience. The rest wander deeper into their respective narratives; unlike a pop song with refrains, hooks and totemic, easily assimilable recapitulations, these songs hold the attention with the persistence of a tale-spinner.

Savage death and ritual resurrection: upon these lodestones was Liege and Lief erected.

These were songs from Merrie England's springtime, and later, on Summer Solstice (1971), they would much better capture the mood of sun-kissed medieval Arcadia.