Kirjahaku

Rob Young's Electric Eden: Unearthing Britain's Visionary Music is a seminal book on British music and cultural heritage, that spans the visionary classical and folk tradition from the nineteenth-century to the present day. 'A thoroughly enjoyable read and likely to remain the best-written overview for a long time.'GUARDIAN'A perfectly timed, perfectly pitched alternative history of English folk music . . . wide-ranging, insightful, authoritative, thoroughly entertaining.'NEW STATESMAN'A stunning achievement.'SIMON REYNOLDS'A masterpiece.' CAUGHT BY THE RIVER'Excellent . . . blissfully quotable.' NEW YORK TIMES'An authoritative account.' THE TIMES'Consistently absorbing.' INDEPENDENT'An impassioned and infectious rallying cry of a book.' SUNDAY TIMESIn this groundbreaking survey of more than a century of music making in the British Isles, Rob Young investigates how the idea of folk has been handed down and transformed by successive generations - song collectors, composers, Marxist revivalists, folk-rockers, psychedelic voyagers, free festival-goers, experimental pop stars and electronic innovators.In a sweeping panorama of Albion's soundscape that takes in the pioneer spirit of Cecil Sharp; the pastoral classicism of Ralph Vaughan Williams and Peter Warlock; the industrial folk revival of Ewan MacColl and A. L. Lloyd; the folk-rock of Fairport Convention, Sandy Denny, Nick Drake, Shirley Collins, John Martyn and Pentangle; the bucolic psychedelia of The Incredible String Band, The Beatles and Pink Floyd; the acid folk of Comus, Forest, Mr Fox and Trees; The Wicker Man and occult folklore; the early Glastonbury and Stonehenge festivals; and the visionary pop of Kate Bush, Julian Cope and Talk Talk, Electric Eden maps out a native British musical voice that reflects the complex relationships between town and country, progress and nostalgia, radicalism and conservatism.An attempt to isolate the 'Britishness' of British music - a wild combination of pagan echoes, spiritual quest, imaginative time-travel, pastoral innocence and electrified creativity - Electric Eden will be treasured by anyone interested in the tangled story of Britain's folk music and Arcadian dreams.'A treat.' TIME OUT'Young is a fine writer.' MOJO'Young's immense narrative is both educative and gripping.' UNCUT'A multitudinous, fascinating and beautifully written account.' TLS

A LOUDER THAN WAR BOOK OF THE YEARA riveting journey into the psyche of Britain through its golden age of television and film; a cross-genre feast of moving pictures, from classics to occult hidden gems, The Magic Box is the nation's visual self-portrait in technicolour detail. 'The definition of gripping. Truly, a trove of wyrd treasures.'BENJAMIN MYERS'A lovingly researched history of British TV [that] recalls the brilliant, the bizarre and the unworldly.'GUARDIAN'A reclamation, not just of a visual 'golden age', but of Britain as a darkly magical place.'THE SPECTATOR'A feat of argument, description and affection.' FINANCIAL TIMES'Young unearths the ghosts of TV past - and Britain's dark psyche.' HERALD'Highly entertaining . . . [A] fabulous treasure trove.' SCOTSMAN'Young is a phenomonal scholar.' OBSERVER'Impassioned.' THE CRITICGrowing up in the 1970s, Rob Young's main storyteller was the wooden box with the glass window in the corner of the family living room, otherwise known as the TV set. Before the age of DVDs and Blu-ray discs, YouTube and commercial streaming services, watching television was a vastly different experience. You switched on, you sat back and you watched. There was no pause or fast-forward button.The cross-genre feast of moving pictures produced in Britain between the late 1950s and late 1980s - from Quatermass and Tom Jones to The Wicker Man and Brideshead Revisited, from A Canterbury Tale and The Go-Between to Bagpuss and Children of the Stones, and from John Betjeman's travelogues to ghost stories at Christmas - contributed to a national conversation and collective memory. British-made sci-fi, folk horror, period drama and televisual grand tours played out tensions between the past and the present, dramatised the fractures and injustices in society and acted as a portal for magical and ghostly visions.In The Magic Box, Rob Young takes us on a fascinating journey into this influential golden age of screen and discovers what it reveals about the nature and character of Britain, its uncategorisable people and buried histories - and how its presence can still be felt on screen in the twenty-first century.'[A] forensic dissection . . . this tightly packed treatise takes pains to illustrate how what we view affects how we view ourselves.'TOTAL FILM

A Kirkus Reviews Best Nonfiction of 2011 title In the late 1960s, with popular culture hurtling forward on the sounds of rock music, some brave musicians looked back instead, trying to recover the lost treasures of English roots music and update them for the new age. The records of Fairport Convention, Pentangle, Steeleye Span, and Nick Drake are known as "folk rock" today, but Rob Young's epic, electrifying book makes clear that those musicians led a decades-long quest to recover English music-and with it, the ancient ardor for mysticism and paganism, for craftsmanship and communal living. It is a commonplace that rock and R&B came out of the folk and blues revivals of the early 1960s, and Young shows, through enchanting storytelling and brilliant commentary, that a similar revival in England inspired the Beatles and Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin and Traffic, Kate Bush and Talk Talk. Folklorists notated old songs and dances. Marxists put folk music forward as the true voice of the people. Composers like Benjamin Britten and Ralph Vaughan Williams devised rich neo-traditional pageantry. Today, the pioneers of the "acid folk" movement see this music as a model for their own. Electric Eden is that rare book which has something truly new to say about popular music, and like Greil Marcus's Lipstick Traces, it uses music to connect the dots in a thrilling story of art and society, of tradition and wild, idiosyncratic creativity.

A colourful collection of pieces on the enigmatic genius of Scott Walker from THE WIRE.

The inspirational story of Rob Young, who has set numerous endurance records, including running 370 marathons in a year

The inspirational story of Rob Young, who has set numerous endurance records, including running 370 marathons in a year

See the lengths at with Arcadian Leontus, Lord Commander of the Segmentum Solar will go to in order to defeat the vicious Orks in this great novel from Black Library.A saviour pod screams a flaming path through the skies of Fortuna Minor, almost lost amidst the debris that rains down over the arid plains below. The Imperial fleet in orbit is in full retreat, their deployment undone by orkish cunning. Those lucky enough to make planetfall find the world a false sanctuary – one overrun by Speed Waaagh!s, its population enslaved to build weaponised effigies of the orks’ foul gods. For the Imperial forces, every hour will be a hopeless fight for survival. But the man in the saviour pod is Arcadian Leontus – Lord Commander of the Segmentum Solar, peerless tactician and mastermind of countless victories. Even stripped of his armies, Leontus has no intention to merely survive this war. He intends to win it.