The new and second volume of the monumental trilogy Selling England for a Pound – A Social History of British Progressive Rock of the journalist, editor and teacher Norberto Cambiaso now it focuses on British folk (the next one will focus on jazz). It cost the author seven years of research and writing. But beware: just as coincidences do not exist and this book is about a time between the 60s and early 70s, paradoxically very similar to ours in its context of energy crisis (Europe today), nuclear threat (yesterday the cold war, today Russia-Ukraine) and destabilization of the English government, we are not facing a work only for fans of the anthological symphonic rock.
On the contrary, Cambiasso manages several tenses in addition to the past and the present. And what he reveals here is not “the anguish of the (folk) influences” of groups like Yes or Emerson Lake & Palmer, but something greater: how fascinating groups like the Incredible String Band (Silvio Rodríguez’s favorites) or cult soloists emerged. like Richard Thompson and Sandy Denny. In other words, the origins of british rock universalismthat from The Beatles to Queen, continues to reign today.
The book is at the same time erudite, deep, encyclopedic, playful and clear. If in the previous volume a whole chapter on the grammar schools (fearsome education and forced English childhood that we met through the cinema with Pink Floyd – TheWall either Ifby Lindsay Anderson) or shed light on the connection of the opposite hippie VS punk through The Clash, there are surprises here too. The author finds threads, consequences and continuities never thought of within the official history of rock and culturein which The Kinks, Nick Drake and films with an English social imprint intersect such as The servant.
-The English folklore, like any tradition, was disputed by both the right and the left within the history of British rock that you deal with? I wonder if it is related to other inventions of the tradition, such as the gauchesca in Argentine literature.
-It was even more than that, because the question of British folk is the attempt to promote and rediscover a conception of English popular culture as a whole. This is a book about progressive, but progressive rock can be perfectly thought of as a new kind of “British folk music”. What I ask myself is the question of how rock, pop music in English without an American accent emerged. Through recovering its traditions, an English popular music was reconstituted. And this is going to happen through two differentiated revivals or movements, first by plain English folk and then by the Music Hall so dear to Paul McCartney. Starting in 1965, those two traditions will go hand in hand with psychedelia. That it was also an English way of opposing groups to the American advance of groups like the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, The Doors, etc.
-However, it seems difficult to recognize that the simple, folkloric and acoustic folk in progressive rock groups, extremely electric, with layers and layers of keyboards like Yes.
-It’s that progressive rock, if you have to define it, is syncretism. It is perhaps the last moment where it was thought that the synthesis of all styles and all cultural stimuli was possible. In the musical progressive, its counterpart is also played on the political plane, which is “faith in progress”. Now, starting with punk or post-punk, things change… But in the 70s, only a group like Roxy Music could consciously cross all genres, what today we would call “postmodern”. If you’ll excuse my distance, a musician like John Zorn, from jazz and from North America, also thinks of music that way, like progressive.
-Then there are always conducting vessels in history.
-Of course. Like for example Johnny Rotten, from the Sex Pistols, praising a progressive group like Van der Graff Generator. The most violent part of Peter Hammill’s group or solo albums makes what Rotten says perfectly reasonable.
-Going back to the topic of the invention of tradition: did there exist in England in the 1960s, with almost no peasant population, a folklore with songs connected with the land?
-Folklore was effectively an abstraction at that time, a mirage… but the interesting thing is that this search for folklore founded a fundamental rhetoric for all subsequent British popular culture: nostalgia. And it was an extraordinary force that built an absolutely English pop and that operated even in high and literary culture. Post-war English culture is all about looking back. It is not a reactionary nostalgia, it is a creative nostalgia that makes English Pop something without comparison anywhere in the world. And for that new vernacular language of English pop, that nostalgia, to work, it has to be in relationship, worth the paradox, with modernity. English psychedelia is a perfect example: songs about ancient times, but with all the technology of the recording studio.
-And talking about nostalgia implies talking about a great band like The Kinks. Melancholic but modern: pre-punk on “You really got me” or proto-glam and heavy metal on albums like Lola.
-The Kinks is the total defense of the obsolete. Ray Davies and company sing about an England whose traditions are lost. They look back, but to build the future. And that is also Magical Mystery Tour. There is no way to understand that great film by The Beatles, if the characteristic uses of the British working classes, the vacations of the English people, are not known. That’s very McCartney, the most committed to popular art forms, that is, the Music Hall. “Martha my dear”, “Your mother should know”, “Maxwell Silver hammer”… are tributes to the old English song. With something very British that are songs about characters, like “Eleanor Rigby” or “Happy Jack” by The Who.
-And politics sneaks in there?
-If one listens to the lyrics “She’s leaving home”, a composition by McCartney, the conflict is generational. Instead, in a song like Ray Davies’ “Sunny Afternoon,” with a similar theme of abandonment, the conflict is one of class and revolves around a decadent English aristocracy.
-There is another element of that English folk circuit that you describe, very up-to-date, and that is that it was more of a live scene than record sales. There is something of that now, with hundreds of bands in Buenos Aires that fill small places and one does not know their recordings.
-It’s that music has become so immaterial and individualized (through headphones) that the only way to recover its materiality is through performance: go and listen to it. Something much deeper than the fashion for vinyl. People currently fill a Teatro Colón to see works that are not as simple as Blue Beard by Bela Bartok.
-You recover in your book a fundamental song-writer like Bert Jansch, Led Zeppelin’s favorite.
-Jansch infected authenticity. He belonged to the Baroque Folk line to end up being an extraordinary typically English songwriter. An exquisite guitar, with extremely delicate phrasing and chord transitions, that will gravitate to artists no less than Nick Drake, Jimmy Page of Led Zeppelin and Neil Young, who called him “the Jimi Hendrix of acoustic guitar”. Another of his great admirers was Johnny Marr, guitarist for The Smiths and even the brothers Noel and Liam Gallagher. His heritage is a metaphor for the whole range of English folk: a musician discovering British traditions in the ’50s and ending up being an influence on threshold groups in the ’70s, ’80s and ’90s.
Presentation
Place: Museum of Books and Language. General Las Heras 2555.
Date: Friday, November 4 at 7 p.m.
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How did the most fascinating musical groups of the 60s arise?