Joe Moran's Top Historic Moment of 2010

Rob Young’s Electric Eden: Unearthing Britain’s Visionary Music (Faber, 2010) is really two books in one: a history of the folk music revival since the anthologising efforts of Cecil Sharp and Percy Grainger in the Edwardian era and a history of the idea of a rural English idyll, from the medieval land of Cockayne to 1960s hippies going ‘back to the garden’. It begins with an unforgettable account of the long-forgotten folk singer Vashti Bunyan, who in 1968 set off on an 18-month trek along Albion’s roads in a horse-driven gypsy cart heading for the remote Hebridean island of Berneray. Young writes both wryly and sympathetically about some of the more obscure folk groups of the 1960s and 1970s – with names like Alphane Moon, Our Glassie Azoth and Trembling Bells – and their naïve but touching idealism. The whole book is exhaustively researched and wonderfully evocative.

Joe Moran is the author of On Roads: A Hidden History (Profile, 2009).