Why non-fiction books need their indexes

I'm coming across increasing numbers of new non-fiction books that lack an index. No doubt it's done to save costs, but I wonder if it's a false economy.

Not only is a book without an index less satisfactory after you've bought it, but that lack makes you less likely to buy it in the first place.

I can't be the only person who, faced with a promising new title in a bookshop, turns to the index and looks up a couple of relevant topics I know something about. What the books says about them gives me an idea of the author's thoroughness, judgement and originality.

Without an index it's much harder to gain this insight, which makes an impulse purchase less likely.

Besides, the absence of an index means there are none of the juxtaposed entries I so enjoy.

The other day I turned up a Liberal Democrat Voice post from 2010 in which a number of bloggers made their choice of Christmas books.

My choice was Electric Eden by Rob Young, which is a history of the folk rock genre. I ended by saying:

The book has a wonderfully complete discography to guide your own exploration of folk and folk rock, and the most engrossing index I have ever come across. Richard Jefferies stands next to Jefferson Starship. Traffic next to Thomas Traherne. Steve Winwood next to Gerrard Winstanley, It reads like notes towards my own vision of Britain.

But the real master of unlikely couplings in indexes is Mike Brearley. In included a collection of finest work in one of my JCPCP columns:

• Archer, Jofra/Aristides the Just;
• Bowlby, John/Boycott, Geoff; 
• counter-transference/Cowdrey, Colin;
• Gower, David/Gramsci, Antonio;
• idée fixe/Illingworth, Ray;
• Muralitharan, Muttiah/Murdoch, Iris;
• Snow, C.P./Snow, John;
• Thomson, Jeff/Thorndike, Sybil;
• Trueman, Fred/Trump, Donald;
• Wittgenstein, Ludwig/Woakes, Chris.

The Joy of Six 1394

“What Ofsted found was a total breakdown of safeguarding, with staff unable to cope and most not qualified to provide the care these vulnerable young people so desperately needed. Living conditions were poor, staff were untrained and poorly supported, and worst of all the young people faced clear risks to their wellbeing.” Jane Haynes has been reading Ofsted reports on three small private children's homes in Sandwell, Coventry and Telford.

Patrick Barkham reminds us that brownfield sites can be havens for wildlife: “In its ruination, this brownfield site beside the Thames in Essex has become one of the most nature-rich places in Britain, home to 3,200 species including endangered shrill carder bees, pantaloon bees, water vole, cuckoos and long-eared owls.”

Emanuel Maiberg reports on the policies Wikipedia is enacting to counter AI slop.

“When the women of England are enfranchised and the State acknowledges me as a citizen, I shall, of course, pay my share willingly towards its upkeep. If I am not a fit person for the purposes of representation, why should I be a fit person for taxation?” Historic England celebrates the career of the suffragette and Punjabi princess, Sophia Duleep Singh.

"Do not be lulled into complacency by the family-film aesthetics. When Mom the Sheepdog instructed Babe the Pig to dominate other animals by abusing them, demeaning them, and telling them what to do, and Babe refused because disrespecting another living creature would be wrong? That moment might have radicalised a generation." Roxana Hadadi on how Babe put radicalism into a family favourite.

Sonic Bookshop nominates seven essential books on British folk and folk rock in the Sixties and Seventies.

Traffic: Gimme Some Lovin'

The Glastonbury Festival did not become a regular event until the 1980s, but it began to take a fixed shape in 1971 with the first appearance of the Pyramid Stage.

And the festival was filmed, as Glastonbury Fayre, by Nicolas Roeg and David Putnam.

Rob Young writes in his Electric Eden:

Viewing the film Glastonbury Fayre, and photographs of what went on inside that enchanted boundary, is like seeing some superimposition of William Morris’s Earthly Paradise, a sanctuary for post atomic-war refugees, and the Glastonbury Zodiac remade as a gigantic bed-sitting room. A transient city of tepees, cellophane sheets and splayed guy ropes. 

Charred cauldrons bubble over blazing log fires; queues snake around outside soup kitchens; the Union Jack flutters with the ying and yang; women cradle kittens and hold wild flowers to their lips; babies crawl alongside basking dogs; couples shyly slink to the edge of a copse. 

Hell's Angels sport mirror-sheen Wehrmacht helmets; flowers are tucked into headbands or drawn on torsos; spliffs are puffed and passed around; Hare Krishna devotees chant over tamburas; pipe-pulling or denim clad vicars join throbbing circles of Jesus-haired dancers. 

Impromptu spontaneous music ensembles band together and march through the site with fifes and drums. Baked revellers clatter empty coke cans together, bash tambourines, blow recorders, tin whistles; ocarina; greet the morning sun with yoga, ivy wreaths and hands clasped in prayer. A wrecked car lies half-buried in a makeshift grave. You can almost smell the mingled aromas of charred corn cobs, veggie burgers, natural body odour and humming latrines. 

Above all, there are outbreaks of decidedly unEnglish nudity and hedonistic dancing, whether to Fairport Convention’s electric jigs, or to the 4/4 power stomp of Traffic’s ‘Gimme Some Lovin’’, or the shamanistic space ritual of Hawkwind.

You can see those photographs on the UK Rock Festival site's pages for Glastonbury 1971.

And you can also watch Traffic in my video. The crowd includes a kooky chick with a piece of pink plastic and the celebrity drug dealer Howard Marks.

This is the larger version of Traffic that toured in their later days. The bands includes Leicester's Rick Grech on bass and founding member Dave Mason on guitar.

Mason was thrown out of the band by Steve Winwood and Jim Capaldi for writing "Hole in my Shoe", but made intermittent returns, He does not seem to be enjoying himself much here and these days tends to appear as the black-hatted bad fairy in films about Steve Winwood.

Eclection: Nevertheless

Eclection were a short-lived Sixties band, perhaps most notable for the fact that Joni Mitchell suggested its name and for what its members went on to do.

Trevor Lucas and Gerry Conway formed Fotheringay with Lucas' girlfriend (and later wife) Sandy Denny.

Perhaps more unexpectedly, Georg Hultgreen was later known as Georg Kajanus, and enjoyed chart success in the mid-1970s with the much poppier Sailor - a sort of very poor man's Roxy Music.

As to Eclection themselves, Rob Young in his Electric Eden describes them as "a fairly pedestrian beat group with shades of Jefferson Airplane or The Byrds". Others have compared them to The Mamas & the Papas.

There is another parallel to be made, particularly because several of the band's members came originally from Australia.

That is The Seekers. They are largely overlooked now, but they were hugely popular in Britain in their day.

Al Stewart: Pretty Golden Hair

I knew Al Stewart as the long-haired singer of The Year of the Cat, which was always on the radio in the 1970s even though it was a much bigger hit in the USA.

This recording, made in 1965 and taken from the BBC's Folk Britannia series, shows him a decade before that with a very different look.

The venue justifies the comment by Rob Young in Electric Eden:

The crossover folk stars of the late 1960s, such as [Roy] Harper, Ralph McTell and Al Stewart, were still men of the people, having worked their way through small city venues, feet away from their peers in the audience.

Such a forthright song about male prostitution and, reading between the lines, abuse at boarding school, challenges our view of the era. If you listen to the treacle that was poured over the recorded version of the song it is clear that not everyone could cope with Stewart's approach.

I wonder if Nick Drake would be so well remembered today he had suffered under the same arranger?

John Renbourn: Just Like Me

Electric Eden introduces us to John Renbourn:

Born in London in 1944, he was encouraged to explore the medieval and Elizabethan lute tradition by his classical guitar teacher. 

He was drawn, by way of skiffle, to the American blues picking of Elizabeth Cotten, Brownie McGhee and Ramblin' Jack Elliott while studying at Kingston College of Art, which at that moment was a breeding ground for as many upcoming musicians as artists - undergraduates included Eric Clapton, Sandy Denny and members of The Yardbirds.

Renbourn's beatnik credentials were as impeccable as his art-school grounding: in the early 1960s he lived in a barge on the Thames and followed the European busking trail, even writing a bluesy eulogy to the National 7 highway through France to St Tropez.

In 1967 he formed Pentangle with, among others, Bert Jansch and Danny Thompson. That band split at the start of 1973, and Renbourn recorded Just Like Me the same year.

It was intended for a solo album that was never completed and was not released until 1996 and his Lost Sessions LP.

Devendra Banhart: Cripple Crow

A couple of summers ago I bought a copy of Electric Eden by Rob Young, which informed several Sunday music choices in the following months. This song by Devendra Banhart, right down to the mannered vocals, reminds me of some of those videos.

It seems I was on to something. Wikipedia says "Banhart's music is often associated with the New Weird America genre, along with Vetiver and Joanna Newsom".

And the entry for New Weird America says:

The musical style described as New Weird America is derived mainly from psychedelic rock and folk groups of the 1960s and 1970s, including American performers Holy Modal Rounders and English and Scottish groups, such as Pentangle, The Incredible String Band, Donovan, and Comus.

No further questions, m'lord.

Roy Harper: One of Those Days in England

Roy Harper is an artist who gets many passing mentions in Rob Young's Electric Eden, but never a paragraph to himself. Yet Alex Petridis in the Guardian recently called him "the most original, and the most underrated of the singer-songwriters who followed the 60s folk boom".

Here he is on The Old Grey Whistle Test with a song that owes much to the 1960s, though the lyrics - "One of those days in England with the country goin' broke" - certainly belong to the economic problems of 1977. This was a year when we almost won Eurovision with a number called "Rock Bottom".

Harper's best-known song is probably "When an Old Cricketer Leaves the Crease". He sang in on Test Match Special last summer, and if you explore the later segments of that View from the Boundary interview you will come across the unlikely juxtaposition of Aggers and the trashing of hotel rooms.

Bert Jansch: Angie

I am still away from home helping the Dowager Lady Bonkers and do not have my copy of Electric Eden to hand. So my tribute to Bert Jansch will just be this Sunday video choice.

Angie was written by Jansch's fellow Scottish acoustic guitar pioneer Davey Graham, who died in 2008. Graham's Wikipedia entry quotes Ralph McTell talking about it:

here was a tune that combined a quirky rhythm figure with a tune of simple beauty with sexy blue notes with a hypnotic descending bass line. The hard part of this was that there were two beats to every bass note instead of the one that most of us were able to play. I was captivated and for the next few weeks played nothing else. Finally I could manage a passable version. My mates were impressed! It practically became my signature tune.

Angie became the song that every aspiring folk guitarist wanted to master, but Jansch learned it from a tape borrowed from Graham's half-sister, Jill Doyle, who was giving him guitar lessons. He included it on his 1965 debut album, which was entitled simply Bert Jansch.

You can read more about Jansch's career in his Washington Post obituary.

Jethro Tull: Cross-Eyed Mary

On the sleeve of Jethro Tull's Songs from the Wood (1977), Ian Anderson sat, a Robin Hood brewing a cauldron at his forest hearth; their follow-up, Heavy Horses, pictured shire horses harnessed for farm labour.The romance of time travel had tipped over into outright Luddism.

Rob Young's Electric Eden does not have a lot of time for Jethro Tull's folk-rock period, but when I was in the sixth form I thought these were just about the best albums ever.

Then a strange thing happened. I bought another Tull LP - Repeat: The Best of Jethro Tull, Vol. 2 - and it was completely different. Loud, bluesy... it was nothing like folk rock.

Yet, though I found this music more difficult, I very much wanted to like it. And after listening to it several times I did like it, and eventually came to like it more than Songs from the Wood or Heavy Horses. In fact that there was a sense in which I knew the bluesy songs were better even when I did not like them.

So you can educate and extend your taste by listening to new kinds of music. It is rather like the time, at the age of 13 or so, when you don't like the taste of beer but very much want to.

Dando Shaft: Rain

Three years ago I wrote about the wonderful Polly Bolton. I was looking for a Dando Shaft track that featured her, but I liked this one best. The band must have recorded it before she joined them. The loose, rhythmic guitar playing put me in mind of Nick Drake.

I turned to Electric Eden, hoping to that Rob Young had written about them, but they get only a passing mention. But I did find that he now has a blog called Electric Eden too.

The Watersons: Hal-an-Tow

The folk singer Mike Waterson died last week. He was a member of the family group the Watersons, described in a tribute by the Guardian Music blog as:

the Yorkshire singing family whose dynamic voices and instinctive harmonies galvanised the nascent folk scene back in the day and whose early career was guided by the great folklorist Bert Lloyd.

"He asked us to sing a song once, which we did, and then he asked us to sing it again," Mike told me, recalling early days with his sisters Lal and Norma. "When he asked us to do it yet again we said are we doing it wrong? He said: 'No, it's pure indulgence because it's giving me so much enjoyment.'

He told us we had wonderful mixolydian harmonies. We all looked at each other and when we got home we went to Hull Library to find out what it meant."

This song is taken from a 1966 documentary about The Watersons, filmed by the new BBC2 in 1966. Rob Young writes in his Electric Eden:

It's a rare visual record of the folk scene at that moment. Fly-on-the-wall cameras inveigle themselves into The Watersons' terraced house in Hull, where mountains of books jostle for space with LPs by The Beatles and The Rolling Stones.

What's most interesting is the musicians' awareness of their own position as pretenders to an established tradition. The films shows the group visiting Cecil Sharp House and studying various old cylinder recordings, reinforcing their entitlement to be seen as "authentic" singers because they see this connection with the older revivalists.

Hal-an-Tow forms part of the Helston Furry Dance celebrations each year:

This feature of the day is distinct from the Furry dance and, owing to its association with drunken revels in the 19th century, fell in disrepute and decay. In 1930 it was happily and decorously revived by the Helston Old Cornwall Society, and is now one of the interesting events connected with Flora day. Some antiquarians declare that Hal-an-Tow may be the oldest part of the days proceedings. Whether this is correct or not, there can be no doubt that it is a further expression of the reason for the day's rejoicings. "For Summer is a come O, and the Winter is a Gone O."

Very early in the morning youths go out into the neighbouring woods to gather branches of sycamore. they return at 8.30 a.m., and waving the branches above their heads perambulate the town, stopping at places of vantage to sing the Hal-an-Tow song. Some youths dress in costume to represent the characters in the song.

Morton Nance, the late Grand bard of Cornwall, suggests that the delightful old song seems likely to be Elizabethan rather than much older. the words in the chorus, "Hal-an Tow, Jolly Rumble O" appear to have come from a mediaeval seaman's shanty, while the verses are all in the English tradition and have no special Cornish flavour about them.

Six of the Best 164

There has been much disquiet in Liberal Democrat circles at the news that the people constituency parties send to the party's Conference now have to be approved both by Cowley Street. Disgruntled Radical makes a substantial contribution to the debate.

It gets worse. Welcome to Spiderplant Land points out that, while campaigning to keep the cheque, the party is refusing to accept them itself.

Did you get any Olympic tickets? Ian Ridley writes: "An online survey is being used to gather data on who has  tickets to see if the distribution was even-handed. Initial results seemed to indicate that you had to apply for around £1500 worth of tickets to have a chance of getting any."

FlavorWire offers a brief survey of some of the most ridiculous anti-drugs propaganda ever produced.

My favourite book of last year, Electric Eden, is reviewed in the New York Times.

Diamond Geezer has been to see the new Hepworth Wakefield gallery: "Given a choice between here and the Turner Contemporary, sorry Margate, I'd come here. Whether it's worth a lengthy trek from London, that's another matter, but oh you lucky folk who live up North, Wakefield's opened a treat."

Heron: Lord and Master

Back to Rob Young's Electric Eden for another minor curiosity of British folk rock.

A few years after Traffic, and a few miles away from their cottage at Aston Tirrold, another band attempted to get it together in the country. That band, writes Young, was Heron - "a Berkshire semi-acoustic quartet whose two surviving albums from the dawn of the 1970s were both recorded by a mobile unit en plein air."

He goes on:

Frustrated with their experience of taping a single in Pye Studios in summer 1970, the group made their way to a farmhouse in Appleford, Berkshire ... and settled down in a circle of chairs in a meadow at the back of the house to play the thirteen songs of their first album, Heron (1970), as Pye engineers set up microphones booms around them.

A separate mic was positioned some distance way, specifically to capture the ambience of the great outdoors. As a result, twittering, trilling blackbirds and larks and swishing foliage fill the spaces between the tracks, and the gaps are longer than average, as if urging the listener to slow down and tune in with the spirit and rhythm of the place.

This song - a reverie by a nature god whose being is entwined with the cycle of the seasons - comes from that album, even if we can't hear any blackbirds. Young describes it as achieving "an exceptional harmony with the countryside", which is perhaps a little kind. The effect is certainly less striking than that achieved by Comus: Heron's England is far gentler place.

Heron are still with us. The story of the band's revival is told on the Relaxx site. Today you can lots of recent performances by them on Youtube, including one of Lord and Master recorded at Bridport in 2005.

Comus: Diana

Diana Diana kick your feet up
Lust bears his teeth and whines
For he's picked up the scent of virtue
And he knows the panic signs

It is back to Rob Young's Electric Eden for inspiration, but we are a long way from "All Around My Hat". Here Diana is the quarry not the huntress and is pursued "through the steaming woodlands".

Comus were a band based at Ravensbourne College of Art and then in Beckenham and were championed by the young David Bowie.

They were very much a band of the early 1970s. The recording of their first LP was hit by strikes in the electricity supply industry and its publicity and distribution was hit by a postal strike.

Young writes of them:

Comus deployed mainly acoustic elements - guitars, violin, flute and oboe, bongos and percussion, plus electric bass - with a viciousness seldom heard in the pastorally inclined folk-rock of the time.

[Roger] Wootton wrote songs around a distinctive chopping, driving rhythm guitar. Colin Pearson's fiddle buzzed and trilled like a forbidden pagan jitterbug. Andy Hellaby's electric bass urged the music forward, occasionally locking into a Can-like mantric groove. Rob Young's flute cavorted like Pan gloating at the revels.

And then there were the vocals - Wootton swooping from a saturnine soprano to a guttural, lecherous goading, shadowed by [Bobbie] Watson's angelic counterpoints and milk-souring disharmonies. Their repertoire was snarled tales of innocence corrupted, brutal ravishment, clinical derangement and murderous gore.

Blimey.

Comus was the son and cupbearer of Bacchus, representing anarchy, chaos and excess. Comus is also the title commonly given to a masque by John Milton that was first performed at Ludlow Castle in 1634.

You can read more about the band on the Comus Official Website and there is a good article about them by Chris Blackford.

Steeleye Span: Boys of Bedlam

Time for another choice inspired by Rob Young's Electric Eden.

After Ashley Hutchings had left Fairport Convention and hung out with Mr Fox, he formed a new band called Steeleye Span with, among others, Tim Hart and Maddy Prior, a folk duo from St Albans.

For their second LP "Please to See the King" the band was joined by Martin Carthy, who sings the lead on this track.

As someone who remembers Steeleye Span from the days when it was in the charts and dominated by Maddy Prior's voice, I find this incarnation infinitely preferable. Prior's voice can be irritating in large quantities, and it is hard to forgive her for not being Sandy Denny.

Incidentally, I once read an article that argued that the widely held belief that people used to pay to see the inmates at Bedlam for entertainment is mistaken. But I can't remember where I read it or how this misunderstanding arose.

Later. The original video has disappeared from Youtube, so here is one with the cover Paul remembers.

Mr Fox: The Ballad of Neddy Dick

So here is the first of what will be probably several Sunday video choices inspired by the book Electric Eden.

Mr Fox was a short-lived but distinctive folk rock group centred on Bob Pegg and Carole Pegg. Its fame rests upon two LPs - Mr Fox (1970) and The Gipsy (1971) - but if you follow those links you will see that both the Peggs have enjoyed interesting musical careers since the group broke up in 1972.

In Electric Eden Rob Young writes:

Bob and Carole modelled the group's instrumental palette on the combinations of strings, woodwinds and wind organs found in the village harvest-home and church bands of the Yorkshire Dales, where Bob had conducted folklore research and field recordings in the mid-1960s.
Mr Fox's Gothic guignol concentrated the energy of Dalesmen's country dances and the spookiness of British lore within convincing reproductions of antique song.

Another interesting point is that after Ashley Hutchings left Fairport Convention he spent some time with the Peggs and they rather expected him to join them. Instead he went off to found Steeleye Span and pursue other projects.

Young suggests that Hutchings was not uninfluenced by Mr Fox:

Listening to Mr Fox's version of "House Carpenter" (1971) next to The Albion Country Band's "Poor Murdered Woman (same year), or their "Ballad of Neddy Dick" (1970) and "Dancing Song" (1971) back to back with Hutching's electric versions of country dance on Morris On (1972) and The Compleat Dancing Master (1974), it's easy to understand why the Peggs might have been aggrieved at the time.

The albums Mr Fox and The Gipsy have been reissued on a single CD as Join Us In Our Game.

Electric Eden has the best index ever

I have been recommending people with the slightest interest in folk rock to read Rob Young's book Electric Eden: Unearthing Britain's Visionary Music ever since I started it.

Not the least of its attractions is its index. I have already pointed out the run:

• Winstanley, Gerrard
• Winwood, Steve
• Witchfinder General

But you will also find:

• Jefferies, Richard, After London, or Wild England
• Jefferson Airplane

and:

• Traffic
• Traherne, Thomas

both of which beat even the

• Edrich, W.J.
• Eliot, T.S.

of C.L.R. James's Beyond a Boundary.

Electric Eden: Unearthing Britain's Visionary Music by Rob Young

When I saw that "Winwood, Steve" came between "Winstanley, Gerrard" and "Witchfinder General" in the index, I knew that I was going to love this book. I am currently halfway through its 650 pages.

As the blurb puts it:

In 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.

Anyone with the slightest interest in this sort of music will enjoy this Electric Eden. I bought my copy in Browers Bookshop in Porthmadog while on holiday and it will no doubt inspire some of my Sunday music videos in weeks to come.

There is also an Electric Eden blog.