We were born to be free range.
Hop Farm was the most hotly anticipated music festival of the summer. I even decided to choose it instead of a tenth year at Reading Festival. But, strangely, it didn’t have any of the usual pop or rock bands performing. There were no Dizzee Rascals and no U2s. Not even any Biffy Clyros or Feeders; just a few talented, young folk musicians, many of whom are still relatively unknown to the mainstream media. Hop Farm is essentially a folk festival, and it labels itself as an alternative to the bigger, overgrown summer music festivals. Even the godfather of folk himself, Bob Dylan, made a rare appearance.
But it wasn’t just this folk element that made Hop Farm so appealing - it was the fact that the majority of the line up was specifically British folk, and boasted all of the front-runners of this fledgling movement, such as Laura Marling, Johnny Flynn, Mumford And Sons, Tunng and Stornoway.
British folk music – the genre that harks back to traditional, medieval British culture and song – has made a triumphant, unmistakeable comeback. And it’s quite different from the American folk championed by legends like Dylan. Instead of singing about The Dust Bowl and freight trains, these bands are referencing the English countryside and English life, such as Marling’s ‘Goodbye England (Covered In Snow)’.
They have also decided to step away from the conventional, four-piece rock instrumentation of drums, guitar, bass and vocals, and traditional British folk instruments that were previously rarely seen in popular rock music have returned to prominence. The mandolin, fiddle, flute and double bass are all, once again, taking centre stage. And there has been a renewed interest in the power of voice and harmony – a fundamental characteristic of any folk music. Mumford And Sons – one of the more successful and better known bands of the revival – recently released their debut album ‘Sigh No More’, which not only uses traditional instruments in abundance, but also experiments with voice, masterfully creating complex, ambitious walls of vocal harmonies.
Britain has seen a resurgence in this same kind of Anglo-folk music before, with musicians in the 60’s such as Donovan, Richard Thompson and Nick Drake, but for a while it slipped into obscurity. One possible reason for this new, second folk revival (a genre many are clumsily calling Nu-Folk), is our propensity to search the past for inspiration. Our musical trends are surprisingly cyclical, and we seem to have a constant desire to recreate and renew ideas from other eras in history. A few years ago saw a musical return to the 80’s, with Franz Ferdinand, The Futureheads and Kaiser Chiefs bursting onto the scene with choppy guitars, synthesizers and abrasive vocals. But now, with the likes of, not only the Hop Farm line up, but also bands such as Noah And The Whale and Emmy The Great, we are back in the folk-obsessed 60’s. Surprisingly, even the Seattle-based band Fleet Foxes play a very British-influenced folk.
With this renewed interest in British folk, we have finally been offered something more natural, more human and more profound than the oversimplified, sterilised pop created by such recent phenomena as The X Factor. Listen to Stornoway’s banjo-led ‘We Are The Battery Human’ for example, and you will instantly find yourself transported to a simpler time – a time without TV screens, global warming and 24-hour CCTV surveillance. Suddenly, you’re “free range”, sitting somewhere in the English countryside with a few close friends and a glass of ale in your hand. The evening sun is slowly sinking behind the hills as the bonfire steadily crackles on, and the smell of wood smoke gently nudges you and reminds you that things might just be ok after all.
