This fascinating book, The Ballad of Britain, charts the journeys of Will Hodgkinson around Britain as he travels around Britain tracking down the answer to the question, What is the “music of the people” today? As he loaded his state-of-the-art recording equipment into his beaten up old Vauhall Astra, his goal was to “capture the spirit of the land and its people through music”.
The book is both travelogue and also music research, and Will is at pains to find out what happened to the old songs form the 19th century and before, but also what moves people today. He has ended up with a highly eclectic book in which in one chapter he dances at night with gypsies in a Sussex wood and then, in another chapter, travels to Richmond to conduct an extended interview with Pete Townsend of The Who (Will is an established musical journalist and is able to pull in a few favours from time to time!).
I particularly enjoyed the vast range of music covered in this book. Its easy to forget that music is like a flowing stream – new things don’t just arrive, but rather build on or diverge from what went before. Will is particularly good at bringing out the links between Cecil Sharp and Vaughan Williams who went around Britain collecting folk songs over 100 years ago, and modern song writers and bands who draw on more recent traditions.
Will visits the Brit School, the part music-industry-funded comprehensive school in South East London which concentrates on the performing arts and has churned out massively successful artistes like Katie Melua, Leona Lewis, Adele, Amy Winehouse and The Kooks. The students all seem to work hard and put in long hours, but Will finds that its common for now-famous students to distance themselves from the schoool, “Once you’ve left, it might not be cool to say you went to the Brit – its much more rock and roll to say you dropped out of school and never had a music lesson in your life”.
The Vauxhall Astra limps on to Cornwall and Will manages to track down Clive Palmer, a founder member of The Incredible String Band, 60′s whimsical folk/hippie band who filled large London venues like The Roundhouse and the Royal Festival Hall in their day (I know, I was there!). If you ever want to know what happens to old hippies, Will’s word-picture of Clive’s tiny house in says it all: “the house (around the back of a row of shops) looked like a squat. An off-cut carpet didn’t quite cover the bare floorboards and the sofa looked like it had been pulled out of a skip”. Despite the surroundings, its fascinating to read the interview and to see how hippie philosophy lives on in the life of this ageing and musically gifted drop-put.
There’s quite a lot of discussion about what music means in this book. I think many folk-revival people would be bothered by various views put across that modern “folk music” is actually about historical re-enactment than the passing on of a living tradition. Will suggests that the “wild spirit” which gave birth to these earthy elemental songs about fertility writes, drinking and war cannot really found in performances of the songs centuries later. He quotes musicologist Charles Hazelwood who says that documenting traditional songs is like pinning a butterfly. The butterfly is only valuable when its flying around.
The range of this book is vast and its purpose is achieved. By the end you have a very good overview of how music affects the British people today. Whether its bopping in a London club singing pop anthems, or going to Sheffield to find out how this town produced so many hugely popular bands, Will puts himself into as many musical corners as he can within the 300+ pages of his book. He has a humorous style which sets this book between the “humorous travelogue” and “serious investigation” genres, but it achieves both rather well. For myself, its answered quite a few questions (Who are? What happened to? etc) and I found it a rewarding, entertaining and informing read which I am going to lend to other friends with an interest in musical culture.
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