By page 15 of a book named after Ralph Vaughan-Williams’s romance for violin and orchestra, after an evocation of the soaring, floating, intoxicating solo that takes us flying with the lark up over the orchestral sounds of the earth, we might expect to be getting started on the contexts of the English music renaissance or the meanings of pastoralism. Instead, we have Richard King’s enraptured memories of Castlemorton Common festival in 1992, when 20,000 (or was it 40,000?) revellers danced night after night, and the sound systems vibrated through the Malvern hills.
With this leap, the nation’s favourite piece of music is established as the presiding spirit of an idiosyncratic pilgrimage through 20th-century experiments in life and sound. King relieves Vaughan Williams of his tweeds and supplies an honorary bandana in their place. Finding some vestige of hope and glory in a land pulsing with bass beats, he is moved by the thought of “Elgar Country”, the Malverns, hosting on its few remaining pieces of common ground a free gathering of commoners wanting to be outdoors together.
For King there is a kind of sublime impersonality in the outdoor rave that unfolds spontaneously, without organiser or programme, generating a shared sense of reverie. And in this it answers to his experience of The Lark Ascending “as intimate, if not spiritual, as music can create”. In the poem that inspired Vaughan Williams, George Meredith described the lark’s song as “seraphically free / Of taint of personality”. The lark, the violin, and the techno bass all prompt dreams of a landscape open to everyone; they license individual imaginative flights while seeming to affirm the possibilities of community.
As a boy, King was a cathedral chorister in Newport, staunchly singing “Eternal Father, Strong to Save” with the Anglican congregation. Powerful feelings for the hymn book and for musical ritual clearly remained with him when, later, he sought out convergences of jazz, folk and rock, and launched the underground label Planet Records. Those feelings shape The Lark Ascending, which wanders between cathedral stalls and festival fields, magnetically drawn to overlaps of avant-gardism and popular song, radicalism and tradition.
The general idea is to explore the musical lives and ideals of people with strong responses to landscape, and to reveal the intense, diverse, mystical and often bizarre ways in which music has been used to solemnise new relationships with the land. Prioritising distinct events and encounters over cultural survey, King seeks out the extremities of interwar ruralism, the radical thinkers grouped around Resurgence & Ecologist magazine, and the rites of new age travellers at Stonehenge.
Some of the music is not rural in its genesis, but becomes so in the minds of its listeners. King finds room for a delighted appreciation of the Penguin Cafe Orchestra, describing Simon Jeffes’s domestic dreamscapes as the accompaniment to numerous British family holidays in the 1980s. He thinks of the grazed cassette boxes that rattled in glove boxes as miles of Day-Glo rapeseed fields went past the window, and before we know it memories of the Penguin Cafe Orchestra have become inseparable from discussion of industrialised agriculture.
With an appealing breadth of sympathy, King notes the gulf between the good-lifers who left comfortable suburbs with aspirations of self-sufficiency on remote farms, and the country people whose hopes, after years on the land, lay in the direction of modern watertight houses and reliable electrics. He sees why farmers working round the clock looked askance at the new age rejection of regular working hours and “the more solipsistic politics of the self”. In 1970s Pembrokeshire, the “Dionysian and nocturnal tastes of the newly arrived hippies were at odds with the reserved stoicism of the local population”. King observes with sadness how little of the music at the 1975 Meigan Fayre had any connection with the landscape of the Preseli hills. “The stoned jam sessions were the very opposite of genius loci.”, and the film-makers even managed to spell the place names wrongly in the credits. If followers of the rural rave scene were keen on going back to nature, they often had their backs to the view. Not many readers would have put drugged travellers first among naturalists in any case, but the Preselis were also drawing committed environmentalists whose lives would offer models of self-reliance and sustainability. King is interested in figures who cross the divide: John Seymour, for instance, whose broadcasting and books, including The Fat of the Land (1961) and Self-Sufficiency (1973), inspired thousands of hopeful Toms and Barbaras to try growing their own.
King’s pattern of ideas and enthusiasms is potentially revealing and timely, though so loosely wrought that it’s hard to make out the implications. Anyone hoping for an intricately researched panorama of alternative music would do better reading Rob Young’s Electric Eden. By contrast The Lark Ascending is a morning-after muddle of non sequiturs and dangling threads Sentences loiter vaguely beside each other, and discussions of rural Britain “in the height of its decline” are liable to cause giddiness for the wrong reasons.
All the same, this is a valuably original book. I liked the bursts of vivid passion, the cameo sketches of “post-psychedelic crofters”, the heartfelt account of travellers criminalised after the Battle of the Beanfield, the portrait of Kate Bush triumphantly pulling the levers of Wilhelm Reich’s “cloudbusting” contraption on Oxfordshire’s Dragon Hill. I liked the refusal of easy town-country divisions and the idea of Stan Tracey on a London bus between Streatham and Soho, composing his Jazz Suite Inspired by Dylan Thomas’s Under Milk Wood, imaginatively uniting Polly Garter, Welsh fishermen and Duke Ellington.
The richest potential lies in the borderlands between what King offers for celebration and what he must describe with more caution and detachment. He gives us the image of women at Greenham Common dancing on the silos of the nuclear base in a ceremonial rite that echoes hilltop dancers through time. sets this scene of peaceful protest next to the vigorously masculine and sometimes militaristic folk dancing led by Rolf Gardiner in 1930s Dorset. He does not unravel the connections and contrasts but lets the dances sit side by side as commentaries on each other: two forms of ceremony born of deep attachment to the land, however different the politics of that attachment may be.
• The Lark Ascending is published by Faber (RRP £14.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Free UK p&p on all online orders over £15.
