ACFM - #ACFM Trip 15: Folk

Episode Date: April 4, 2021

Nadia Idle, Keir Milburn and Jeremy Gilbert go back to the land to dig into the politics of folk. With music from The Pogues, Steeleye Span and Enigma, the gang discuss island cults, progressive patriotism, Communist folkies and the pitfalls of accelerationism. Turn on, tune in, muck out! Music: Woodie Guthrie – You Gotta Join […]

Hello and welcome. Hello and welcome to ACFM, the home of the weird left. I'm Jeremy Gilbert and I'm here as usual with my friends at Nadia Idol. Hello. And Keir Milbin. Hello. And today we're talking about folk. Keir is going to tell us why we're talking about folk, at least where the idea came from. This idea came from my daughter, May, actually.

She was listening to a BBC podcast series, BBC Sounds podcast series called My Albion. It talks about like folk and, you know, the complicated relationship that lots of people have with England, I suppose, really. And she thought that folk music is like a classic A. CFM topic, isn't it, right? Because, you know, in many parts of the 20th century, in particular, folk music was really associated with a counterculture. And so it's sort of like, it's associated with a counterculture. And before that, actually, just we've left politics, you know, where people like such as Woody Guffrey in the US, etc. But it's also a sort of topic that takes you into other topics which are more closely associated with sort of conservative

thought like tradition, place, nationhood, actually, you know, folk music. and interesting folk music is really tied up with the idea of national cultures to a large degree. So it's sort of a way for us to talk about our really, the sort of countercultural and left politics stuff, but also to take us into areas we haven't really touched on. So far on ACFM, we've really sort of valorised the urban. You know, we did an episode in acid urbanism, in which we basically proposed that urban areas are the traditional homes of socialism, right? And so obviously folk music have. It's got some sort of, it sort of tends to evoke associations with the pastoral, with pastoralism,

although I don't think it is irreducible to sort of pastoral folk music, which takes us outside our comfort zone. But it also might want to make us want to think about the sort of left discussions around things such as progressive patriotism or attempts to produce new stories of what it means to be British or probably English in particular. I'd be really interested because obviously I didn't grow up in the UK, even though I've always had UK links, but it'll be interesting for me to know what is conjured up for you when we talk about folk. Like you mentioned the pastoral thing here, but what kind of imagery comes up? Are you folk? Are you folk or are you not folk? Or how does that work with the own image of yourself and how you're brought up? I'm interested in hearing from both of you. I've got my own ideas. Well, I mean, folk, the word folk is sort of, it's both a noun and an adjective, isn't it? I mean, as a noun, it means, but I think we can talk in a bit about the sort of genealogy of the idea of the folk as the people. Sure. It goes back to the sort of early 19th century. But then folk as an adjective, which you can apply to different words. I mean, we've been talking about folk music. You can talk about folk culture. You know, there's been a lot of

taught in the past couple of years about folk horror as a kind of distinctive genre. I mean, the stuff that's designated with that term is usually from the 70s. I guess even in my mind, if we're thinking about folk music, there's at least two different meanings that sort of overlap, but they're not exactly the same. And one is this very, very imaginary pastoral notion of a kind of pre-industrial or a sort of anti-industrial form of existence, which has some links with a kind of historic peasant past, but might be manifested in people, you know, leaving the cities on purpose to go live in the country, it's kind of rejecting, rejecting industrial society. And that version of folk

also kind of shades into sort of things like paganism and nature worship and people interested in sort of nature magic and what have you. And so that's one version of folk. It's a sort of hippie, version of folk, sort of pagan folk, the idea of a mythic Albion in a way. Now, Albion is kind of an old word for England. And then there's also a more sort of urban and industrial version of folk, which would be exemplified by figures like Woody Guthrie, you know, the great American protest singer, and Ewan McColl, the kind of key figure in the British folk music revival of the 50s. And in both cases, they're trying to use an idiom of music, for example, for that owes something to.

It's not even really traditional. It borrows a little bit from traditional musics, but it's more, it's folk in the sense that it's very easy, sort of cheap, portable music. It's music you can make just playing a cheap acoustic guitar and singing, so you don't need a lot of equipment. And it's an idea of music for the people. But the people who are imagined as being the people those songs are about,

the people you're singing for, especially in the case of you and McColl, I mean, they're not a kind of imagined peasantry. They're the industrial working class. Ewan McColl is sort of creating with his own songs and with some kind of rearranged traditional songs in the 50s, he's creating a sort of canon of music which tries to create a link between a kind of old world

of like work songs and sea shanties and stuff which does go back even to pre-industrial times, but which would include basically like union songs and songs about urban life and poverty and politics in the post-war period. And I mean, they're quite different versions of folk in a way, which partly pertain to real sort of political differences. I mean, that's sort of mid-20th century idea of folk,

from Woody Guthrie to Ewe-McCole, you're talking about people who are very politically close to the Communist Party. You've got to join that one big union. You've got a join. it by yourself everybody here will join it with you

you've got to join the one big union by yourself then from the kind of mid 60s onwards you get this kind of upsurge of this sort of almost sort of fantasy influence this sort of Tolkien influence sort of wing of the hippie movement

which is more sort of fairy folk in a way and bands like the incredible string band Fairport Convention Steylispan and this, you know, in some ways much more aggressively traditionalist, but then also much more appealing to a sort of completely imaginary tradition. And they're quite different, they're quite distinct from each other, although there's obviously kind of overlaps. And I guess for me, the phrase folk, it kind of evokes all of those things. It's kind of a continuum. And do you feel like any of that resonates with you? So do you think,

oh yeah, because of the music or because of this way of thinking about culture, I'm quite into that, or does it all feel other? Me personally, I mean, my parents met at a folk club in West London Right. In the mid-60s, which was a classic place for lefties to hang out at that time. Both my mum and my dad and the guy who was my stepdad for a few years, all of them were people who went to folk clubs. They were part of that kind of folk revival. And actually their points of identification with it were all along that continuum.

So for my mum and my dad, neither my mum or my dad had any real interest in music. It was just a badge of belonging to like the peace movement. and the Labour movement in certain ways, like being, you know, sort of liking that kind of music. And, you know, my dad would sing sort of folk club, you know, classic songs to me. It sounds like you're saying it's the way to be involved with left politics while also looking, dressing like a hippie from what you're describing. Well, no, they weren't hippies. No, they're not 67, 68 generation. They're like early 60s sort of radicals.

Okay. And even when they lived in San Francisco, they absolutely didn't identify. identify as hippies. To them, the hippies were just kind of people who were fucking off to the countryside to smoke weed and take acid and live in immunes. And they were sort of escapist. So they, and the kind of the real, I mean, the height of sort of folk club culture in Britain, in Britain and America was the early 60s. And those people tended to see, they tended to sort of look quite askance at the emergence of rock music, for example, which they saw as kind of commercial and sort of capitalistic. But I grew up with.

with it as, I mean, you're asking about my personal experience. So I grew up with it as very much like part of the sort of family heritage. And then my stepdad was actually more into the kind of late 60s, early 70s, kind of electric folk and this kind of steel eye span and stuff like that. So it was very much part of the heritage, but it was also, so it was something that I didn't take any personal interest in. Right. It was very specifically the culture of a very specific class fraction. It was the class fraction of post-war, public sector professionals, Like people who were the first of their generation to go to university, they got jobs in the expanding public sector of the sort of 60s and 70s, and they then just spent the 80s and the whole rest of their lives, sort of in retreat from that and a bit sort of depressed about it. And so by the time I was old enough to be forming my own tastes and identifications, I mean, that music sounded like the music of a lost moment of extreme political naivety.

And so I didn't really connect with it. Come gather around children, it's high time he learns about a hero named Homer and a devil named Burns. We'll march to we drop the girls and the fellas. We'll fight till the death or else fold like umbrella. You know, I guess like in Britain, my cohort, the last iteration of that tradition that had any sort of connection

with people my age was Billy Bragg listening to Billy Bragg was again a sort of marker of left identity in the 80s but he was always like a weirdly isolated figure to some extent and also for me like when I sort got really into techno and electronic music and stuff like that in the late 80s

that's out of the window mate yeah it was it was like Billy Bragg was like Biddy Bow was part of what we were rejecting, I thought. Right. I mean, my parents are probably a bit younger than Jeremy's. And so my older sister's called Carina after the Bob Dylan song, Carina Carina, and I grew up just out at the Swansea Valley in a town called Pontadawi. And from the early 80s, I think, there was Pontadawi Folk Festival used to happen every year,

and it turned into quite a big folk festival. So that was my relationship to it. But I was sort of external to him used to go to this festival. because everybody in the area did. But that emerged out of, like, folk clubs that were held in pubs around the area. And they always had a sort of slightly hippie tinge to them, I think. And so basically, you know, when you're a young kid and you're getting into punk, et cetera, you have to reject all of that stuff.

And then you have to come back to it later on sort of thing. And so as far as, like, relationships to, like, folk music go, I think alongside Billy Bragg, you have, like, in the 80s in particular, you have that sort of punk folk crossover in bands like the Pogs, etc. But the Pogs are resolutely not English folk. They are Irish rebel song. The page of the first band I ever went to see. I love the Pokes.

We have one million fives of the best lawyer rights. We have two million barrels of stone. We have three million sides of our blind horses hides. We have four million barrels of bones. We have 5 million hobs 6 million ducks 7 million barrels of parts We had 8 million whales

Of old Nanny ghost tales And a heart of the Irish rover I think it's an interesting thing Right This idea that in both the US and the UK Although in the US slightly earlier A sort of collating of folk music And then a sort of writing

And celebration of folk music It was specifically a left-wing project coming out of the Communist Party in both areas. And we can see that sort of like later on this sort of that folk-folk versus sort of acid folk. In some ways you could see it as a generational tension like Jim is setting up there between like, I'm not saying the orthodox left and the radical left, but like basically that sort of communist party left. And then, you know, a left that just kind of come to terms with the era of mass consumption, basically.

And so this sort of 1960s counterculture folk revival really is. is a sort of like, you know, it's in dialogue with mass culture, either rejection or inclusion of certain bits. But before that, there's a battle around folk music, because the really first interest in folk music is all around trying to, I mean, folk music and interest in folk music and folk cultures and folk dance is all about trying to create an idea of a national culture. And so in the UK, you get people such as Cecil Sharp and like Cecil Sharp House is still sort of like the place in London. It's amazing. I've had I've done a Cayley there. It's excellent.

Yeah, exactly, yeah. But these sorts of things, folk dancing, collecting at folk music and all this sort of stuff. Yeah, I love it. But the people who started that movement, that was a consciously sort of conservative of a small sea movement, basically. And so you can definitely see folk music as this constant battle to try to create a narrative around what the nation is, what the character of the national culture is, basically. And there's a battle really between left and right and then between sort of a particular form of post-war left, which is dominated by the Communist Party,

and a sort of psychedelic left. But in some ways, the psychedelic left saw themselves as more authentic than the Ewan McCall left. Well, also, I think if you're talking specifically about that moment of the late 60s and early 70s, I mean, to me, it always seems that the sort of electric folk and the kind of mythic Albion folk of that moment

is some of the least political of the stuff that's coming out at that time, I think. Yeah, yeah. The strands of the counterculture that are more politicised, they're either doing kind of acid rock, which is very different. They're into things like Pink Floyd or the Grateful Dead, or their sort of proto-punk. You know, they're going to evolve into the punks. So I don't think it is, it's not even really that there's communist folk and then there's kind of radical left folk. It's more that there's, there's communist folk and then there's a completely different kind of ecology

of musics and things in which folk music takes on quite a different meaning, like almost an anti-political meaning, I think. It does feel like the sort of episode where I wish I had a flowchart because on one hand, on one hand, we've got this kind of pastoral kind of vision,

which is the imagery that I get. So for me, I have a very different vantage point to all of this, which is that I have no, none of those experiences not growing up in the UK, but even just when we're talking in the beginning of like Albion, the concept Albion really scares me. I don't know.

I have a very visceral reaction to that word, which is interesting, like more than England. I feel like I have less of a problem with England than I do with Albion, which I don't really understand, kind of like from the outside, but it's an interesting position for me from where I'm standing.

But there's also the kind of, if I think about it from the UK and how people refer to folk or how I understand folk the UK. There's definitely, and we'll talk about this, I think, a bit in the end, this kind of return, going back to the land, people being removed from the land, something to do with roots and kind of pastoralism and all of that imagery which you guys touched on of like the small sea conservative like culture in place and that place is not big cities. But having grown up

in two urban metropolises, well, in the suburbs, which is probably far away from the culture of the urban and the culture of the countryside, I have this sense that, or at least I feel like I grew up with the sense that folk and folklore, at least here in Egypt, is a pretty part of your identity, which is often like female, it involves a certain kind of culture, it's like the mother, it's like dancing, it's like folklore, all that stuff. It's not progress. Progress with a capital P is kind of what happens with industrialization and it's kind of the city. So I'll be interested to hear what you guys think about how that goes full circle in terms of what you were saying with communism and a kind of progressive politics around the

return to the countryside or if there ever can be one and how that kind of maps in with the post-colonial setting where you don't want to go back to the village because that's, that's not where progress is or money is or education is. Well, I think that is really relevant. I mean, one of the things that's really characteristic of that late 60s, I'm going to call it fairy folk in its most extreme. And the most extreme example is the Incredible String Man. We should play something by the Incredible String Band.

thinking what could be wrong when this funny little hedgehog comes running up to me and it starts up to sing with a song Oh you know all the words What's interesting and what's going on there Is there is quite a deliberate attempt To create a highly feminized kind of rock music or post-rock or folk music

It's really playing down the percussion It's getting rid of all the distortion on the guitars It's even though there's a lot of like there's male vocals, it's very kind of ethereal, you know, almost sort of falsetto singing. Simon Reynolds and Joy Press, actually, in their book called The Sex Revolts, Gender Rebellion and Rock and Roll, they sort of identify that moment of the kind of pastoral coming into acid rock. You hear it in some of the music of people at the birds and the state. And then, as I say, people like incredible string down here, they absolutely identify it

in sort of psychoanalytic terms. It's a mode of masculinity as they analyze it, but it's a of masculinity which wants to sort of merge with the earth mother. It wants to kind of all return to the womb or something. It wants indeed to retreat from or reject the kind of aggressive masculinity of the city of the urban, you know, which is kind of the flip side. It's the kind of heavy rock that's starting to come out of Detroit, Birmingham and things like that. So there definitely is something going on there. And I think there's also something going on. I mean, they have this kind of fairly crude psychoanalytic reading. You can also say that it's partly a response to kind of Incipient Women's Liberation, people are trying to figure out, you know, what does it mean to get rid of all the macho elements from rock music and from folk music, which had folk music had sort of revolved around the idea of the heroic male singer mainly with his guitar. And it was Woody Guthrie, it was Ewan. It was Bob Dylan and it was Phil Oaks. So there is definitely something going on there with that sort of pastoralism. And that is the sort of defense of it actually. That's the defense of it being something other than just a sort of reactionary,

sort of middle-class retreat from confrontational politics is that it's actually trying to get rid of all these very macho, sort of heroic element from its different musical sources. The very interesting thing brings up for me, Nadia, you're talking about your experience as a folk law and folk music in Egypt and then thinking about like the British experience is obviously urbanisation, industrialisation happens a lot later in Egypt than it does in the UK. Yeah. If you remember back to the ACFM, we did. did on intoxication and sobriety and we started talking about, I don't know quite how it fitted

in, but we started talking about how bad English food traditionally is, basically. And the reason for that is because the English working class is not traditionally bad. It's that the UK is very unique in how people were delinked, were removed from basically food. It doesn't exist anywhere else. But that's the thing, isn't it? Because it's like this early and very brutal urbanisation protest because of the early industrialisation in the UK, there's a sort of separation gets broken with peasant cultures, basically, so you can recognise that in food. But it's also, you know, so you can argue that that's why there is this separation between the British urban working class and like pastoral roots, you know what I mean, which helps

explain why Bitton's one of these folk centres where, you know, starting in the late 19th century, actually, there's this real search for folk traditions, which have to sort of be reinvented in some ways. In fact, there's probably a couple of different strands in folk, which actually I'm thinking about Alex Nivens wrote a book called Folk Opposition a few years ago. And in that, he's sort of, he's trying to set root this sort of division within interesting folk music and folk cultures. He roots it in like two tendencies within Romanticism. One of them is a sort of a yearning for pre-capitalist pastoral societies. But in that, there's a conservative sort of theme of, we have lost this organic.

unity that we used to have in the pre-capitalist days. It's like a call for anti-alienation, isn't it? Yeah, that's a perfect way of putting it. Yeah, so a call for anti-alienation, but if urbanisation and capitalism caused alienation, then perhaps we can go back to pre-capitalist times, but of course those were pretty unequal and unpleasant times in their own ways. So it's like this creation of a sort of mythical lost unity. Yeah.

Yeah, so Alex Niven sort of traces that into sort of green Toryism, right? And he says, look, there's another tendency that comes out of romanticism, which is trying to escape alienation, but starting with the lives of working class people now or perhaps then in, you know, early urban sort of settings, etc. And so, you know, there's a need to escape this sort of like, you know, the environmental hell, actually,

of those early towns. If you think about those early towns, where coal is power in industrialisation, etc. And you can sort of see those two tendencies going through folk music. And, you know, those two tendencies trying to think, or two ways you want to go back to folk cultures. But you can also see that the failure to separate this sort of like

yearning for a pre-capitalist organic unity away from this sort of like other ways in which we want to escape the environmental problems of the present. You can see that failure as like a real weakness in green politics. Because there is this in green politics, there is this constant re-emerging of sort of like reactionary green politics dominated by sort of aristocratic figures, you know.

Who set up the environmentalists and then stood for London? You think he was Zach Goldsmith. Yeah, Zach Goldsmith's dad set up the environmentalist. James Goldsmith. James Goldsmith, thanks, yes. Who then sets up sort of like a pre-Eukyp site party. Yeah, the referendum party. God, yes, thank God, thank God you've got a working memory.

And then Zach Goldsmith then sort of takes on editorship. I always remember, right, going to this, go into one of these protests. I think actually might have been the European Social Forum in Florence, probably like 2003 or something. I remember like reading in the newspaper on the way there, an interview with Zach Goldsmith in The Guardian in which it said, Zach Goldsmith is one of the UK's leading anti-capitalists,

but that doesn't mean he's anti-business. Do you think everyone knows who he is? Is that a big enough? I mean, it's a bit last generation, isn't it? He was a conservative politician. He was a candidate for the mayor of London. Is he still an MP, though? Wasn't he an MP in Richmond, wasn't he?

I think he's still an MP for Richmond, isn't he? And now he's in the House of Lords, apparently. Of course. Of course. Where else would he be? Where were we? Oh, we should just, just to finish off the Zach Goldsmith's story, because it is a story of like, you know, he was seen as like this green figure.

And because, you know, the anti-capitalism is used in a very loose way in the early 2000s, he gets held up as one of Britain's leading anti-capitalists. And of course, you know, he ends up running an overtly regular. campaign for London Mayor against Sadiq Khan. I then ended up in the House of Lords, of course. Anti-capitalism, it was just co-opted, wasn't it? Because it was useful to brand himself as that. I mean, there's no way that he would be seriously categorized as an anti-capitalist.

Yeah, it sort of signals the idiocy of the guardian of some guardian columnists, actually, we should put it that way. That sort of idea of like, there are two sort of traditions running through interest in folk. One of them is like this sort of lost pastoral pre-capital. to this world, which is not always reactionary politics, we should put it that way, but perhaps has some tendency towards that. And then this other one, which is much more to do with songs and these sorts of things, the one thing I was going to say actually was, yeah, you and McCall is like really, really associated with the latter, right? And one of the songs

we're going to have to play at least one version of is Dirty Old Town, which Ewan McCall writes, I found my love by the gas works. Croft. Dreamed a dream by the old canal. He started off as a playwright, actually. In Dirty Old Town is not a traditional song. He's writing that, and he's writing it in a... I think it was actually a song for a play when he first wrote that. But then he gets picked up and becomes...

Is it a folk classic? I'm not sure. Yeah, it's a folk club anthem for years before the Pogues record it. Like, I knew it by heart before the... the price ever recruited it. But then the most famous version is by the Pogues, well, yeah, that's fair to say, isn't it? Who punk it up, basically, and turn it into a great... Yeah, and it sort of popularised it with the sort of post-punks

of indie sort of audience in the mid-80s. Early old town, dirty old town. Fouts or dress. There is a sense of romanticising that urban working class life, even though it also has that sense of rejection of the horrors of that world. Because it's not, it feels like the pastoralist end of it is very, it's not the same as sort of a culture or an aesthetic to me of the urban working class going out into the country to claim the countryside or like the mass trespass or the ramble. That doesn't feel folk to me. And I wonder why it doesn't. It feels like the return to the countryside is something like that is branded as apolitical or like an opting out, isn't it?

I think like I keep saying, there's a big break basically end of the 60s within what those things signify and how people understand them. I mean, one of Ewan McColl's most popular and best loved songs is the Manchester Rambler. The chorus is, yeah, I may be a wage slave on Monday, but I am a free man on Sunday. and it's about rambling. And the whole culture of rambling, of the rambling association of walking, which comes out of indeed the sort of outdoor movement of the 30s,

which has its political manifestation in the Kinder Scout trespass. I mean, that absolutely is just indissociable from the folk club, from the culture of the folk clubs, in the 50s and 60s. But I think it is completely right because that is about a kind of mass political

idea of claiming the land. I mean, it's completely true. and it's completely crucial. I mean, as Keir was saying, that really right back to the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, there's always this ambivalence in the tendency to critique

industrialisation and its effect. I mean, it's one of the main themes of Raymond Williams' first and most famous book, Culture and Society. One of his main themes is the fact that it's very difficult, actually, to separate out the kind of the radical from the reaction rate,

right from the beginning, because right from the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, people are saying, well, look, this is bad, you know, village life is being disrupted and destroyed, and people's life expectancy is going down, and people are suffering terrible exploitation. And even people who are kind of revolutionaries, even people in the communist and Marxist tradition, who think that that's a necessary phase you're going to have to go through to get to a world of affluent for all. Nonetheless, you're still using a sort of pre-industrial set of benchmarks as a way of measuring in a way how exploitative and awful. that unregulated capitalism is. So you can never quite get away from that ambivalent. You can never quite get away from it. And the notion of the folk, you know, the term the folk,

you know, it starts to get used first in German with the de Volk and then, or de Volk, I don't remember. And it's an idea which both is associated with romantic nationalist critiques of liberal modernity, which are eventually going to evolve into fascism. And it's associated with democratic and populist rejections of elitism and, you know, both traditional and liberal forms of hierarchy. So, and that ambivalent and that potential for the, for the idea of the folk and the idea of folk culture, fake traditions, to sort of go either way, it just never really changes. And so then in that

mid-20th century period, you've got a notion of folk, and folk really does refer to the people as they are then. It's an ideal of basically, you know, sort of proletarian culture and proletarian cultural autonomy. It's not really associated with pastoral, or with anti-modernity. I mean, Woody Guthrie is singing songs about having to leave the farmland of the dust bowl and head off looking for work. But I don't think Woody Guthrie is perceived as in any way a traditionalist figure, as any way an anti-modern or an unmodern figure.

And then the sort of crux point, obviously the symbolic crux point is the mid-60s, when Bob Dylan, who's emerged as the kind of darling of the early 60s folk music scene, in which there's a kind of elision between what's called folk music. music and what's called protest music, actually. And there's a general assumption that they're sort of the same thing. So you've got people playing mostly sort of traditional, modern arrangements of traditional songs, and you've got people mostly doing contemporary songs, like using acoustic guitars, protesting against, you know, things like the Vietnam War and racism and Jim Crow and things like this. And they're all sort of part of the same thing. And then there's this classic moment,

very famous moment, when Bob Dylan, who's really kind of interested in the Beatles and the way they're producing this very popular, but also very increasingly experimental kind of music. Bob Dylan decides to start playing electric guitar instead of acoustic guitar, and he starts playing with a rock band instead. Sell out. Yeah, well, no, it's at Manchester, it's a concert at Manchester Free Trade Hall in, what, at 65, I think, 65 or 66, where, you know, there's a famous bootleg, which, you know, you can still get copies of, where somebody shout, you know, people call it shout Judas.

I don't believe you. The really famous tour film, No Direction Home, it's outside a concert in Liverpool where he's kind of accosted by some girl fans who are like kind of complaining at him. They feel abandoned because he's now playing rock and roll instead of playing folk and protest, which is the music of the left.

They see is the music of the left. I mean, there's an image there, isn't there? I was going to say when you were first talking about going to the your parents going to folk clubs or whatever Jeremy that conjures up an image of me of at least one man in the front on a stool with an acoustic guitar and then you get to fairport convention and other kind of bigger bands right where there's more people in it but there seems to be a lot of there's definitely that image there of that kind of folk music being centered around the acoustic isn't it it's definitely not electric guitars and definitely not distortion no that's

right, that's right. And then there's this whole break, really. And then there's this whole new ecology, Iberts in the mid-60s. Fairport Convention and Steele-Espan and the birds in the States, for example, they're playing either what comes to be called folk rock. That's Fairport Convention, the birds. People like Steele-I-SPAN say they're not playing folk rock, they're playing electric folk. In other words, you play very traditional sort of arrangements. You just happen to use electric instruments. Which is kind of really weird effect, but it's really it's also really popular for a few years. I mean, Fairport, I think, a really interesting example.

And, I mean, for me, Fairport Convention always sort of, you know, they produce this really powerful music, actually. And it's a really, it's an attempt, it's a deliberate attempt to do a British version of what the birds are doing in the States. So it is really synthesising kind of rock idioms with folk idioms and rock instrumentation. And they're trying to produce something which is quite self-consciously new, actually, even though it uses these very traditional arrangement. So you take a song like Tam Lin,

it's them doing a version of an old sort of Scottish ballads about sex and murder, but it's done in, you know, it's done in this really distinctive style. And to me, it does sort of evoke this attempt to, in some ways, to get beyond a kind of simple distinction between sort of urban industrial modernity and sort of pastoral romanticism.

And I think that also, I think we've got to acknowledge that as an important strand in left thought that goes right back to the Communist Manifesto and before. One of the key demands of the Communist Manifesto is to erase the distinction between the country and the city. And, you know, Raymond Williams writes a whole book eventually called the country and the city. And that is also one of the ideals, like one of the ideals in some sense is of the most highly developed strands of the counterculture, for example, I think, are to somehow neither say, well, we have to go through this kind of accelerationist process of

destroying the country, building the cities, and that's how we'll build communism, or just escaping, going off to live on a rural, organic farm, you know, trying to turn your back on modernity, that somehow you don't want to do either of those things. Somehow you want to arrive at a form of society and a form of social life and a form of ecology in which people aren't forced to choose between a kind of life completely alienated from nature and a life completely dominated by nature. And that somehow relates back to what we were talking about, about the deriv and about that one of the things

that the situationists were on about which has turned, what was it, turning churches into manners. Oh yeah, it's when we were talking about. The places to experience fear. Oh, yes.

Churches after the revolution. Churches will be preserved as places in which to experience fear. But also the hacienda, the hacienda, as in like the manor, but in the city, wasn't it?

Yeah, the hacienda must be built. Yeah. This might be a place to go into the rural commune movement of the 1970s. If Fred Turner's book from counterculture to cyberculture, he makes this claim that a million Americans went back to the land to live on communes in the 1970s. It was a hell of a number, do you know what I mean? I think that plays a role in this turn to the pastoral that you can sort of see in folk music and sort of other things and sort of like that fascination with sort of paganism

and these sort of things that emerges in the counterculture in a 1970. That might be a way to get into talking about folk horror, actually. Well, folk horror is really interesting because basically folk horror refers to a genre, the er-text of which is the Wicamah, which is a film from what, 72, 73? Yeah, 72, something like that. And yet, I hadn't heard the term folk horror before, like, two years ago. I don't know, like, I'm sure people were using it, but people have definitely been

using it more. Yeah, it sort of goes back to 2010, I think. There are sort of like three classic er-text films for folk horror. So it's the wicker man, the blood on Satan's claw, and what's the other one? I can't remember what the third one is. And the director of Blood on Satan's Claw, you know, in 2010, in an interview, he said, basically, that was a folk horror movement, and it sort of took up, took off. But those, so like, wicker man. What's folkie about it?

Well, I, well, I just about to tell you that, yeah. Oh, I'm sorry. Well, no, no, no, but it's. Because I literally cannot imagine, like, this is very other to me. I don't know what you're talking about, but you're about to say. Have you ever seen the Wickerman film? I don't think so, but I think I know. I'm trying to get the aesthetic.

So basically the Wickerman is, you know, this police officer is very uptight Christian police officer. It flies to an island up in the Northern Scotland, north of Scotland where there's sort of like this cross between, you know, an ancient culture and basically a thinly disguised sort of counterculture of free love and all this sort of stuff on the island. I won't do any spoilers about the way. he ends up in a giant wooden wicker man, which gets set on fire as a ritual to try to

replenish the apple growing that goes on there. But that and the Blood on Satan's Claw one, Blood on Satan's Claw is set in sort of English Civil War times, but it's about a cult of satanic worship amongst young people, which takes the form of like sexual licentiousness. And they're basically semi sort of conservative meditations on the counterculture and semi, like, total fascination with it, basically. Now, all of those films always have this sort of theme of, if you loosen morals a little bit, these sort of atavistic things will emerge, these atavistic things from the deep past sort of idea.

I don't know, that's, well, the Wickhaman just sounds like Hastings on Bonfire Night or Lewis. I mean, they... And on that bed, there was a girl, and on that girl, there was a man, and from that man, there was a seed, and from that seed, there was a boy, And from that boy, there was a man And for that man there was a grave And from that grave there grew a tree It's an interesting film

Because it's pretty sharp in terms of its historical reference book The story in The Wickerman is that there's been this cult Has grown up on this island since the early 20th century And it is linked in the film directly to what was like a genuine moment. It's all of early Edwardian times when there's a kind of revival of folk music and the idea of witchcraft. And it's the first time when people start to believe the sort of historical myth, the witchcraft was a direct survival of, you know, Neolithic paganism or whatever. So the film is pretty sharp about that. I don't think it really is about the

counters. I think it's more generally responding to this sort of permissive society. You see what I mean. But also that folk horror thing, it sort of ties into this fear of the rural, which then gets in, it extends into films like straw dogs and deliverance. It's also, to me, it's also, it's a reaction to the fact that Britain, which is the first fully urbanised country, has gone through another big cycle of urbanisation. And so just the very idea of like people living off on a Scottish island, the way that seems really scary. Like, they must be up to some weird shit.

So it sounds like the reversal of what's happening in the slums. Like, we don't understand what's happening in the slums. This is the opposite way around. Yeah, it's sort of like isolated communities with their own cut-off sort of moral worlds, which are at odds with the wider world, et cetera, and often lead to murder on those sorts of things. One of the other things that folk horror is really, really interested in, is this idea of like time as sort of cyclical, that sort of repeated patterns of behavior being linked to particular places. So that's one of the things with folk horror is like really about place and so forth.

I watched The Owl Savage, which is like a 1970s kids TV show recently with May. my daughter may, which is probably why she suggested folk. And that's all about, you know, basically people trying to live different lives, but being unable to escape these sort of, you know, repeated patterns of behaviour, which are embedded in a particular place, etc. And so probably Nigel Neal is like another one of these people who writes around these sorts of things. He wrote the Quatermas films and series, and there was one in 1979, which really is about the counterculture.

It's all about these sort of youth cults in a deteriorating society. and they sort of congregate around stone circles and they discover they do dancing we haven't talked about dancing yeah they're all dancing they dance across the UK picking up people as they come and then they congregate in these stone circles excellent see that's yeah that will get me totally what is I called what is he called it's called ringston round but though this is the this is the punchline sorry to do the spoilers everyone but like when they get when they get in these stone circles this beam of energy comes down and carries them off into the well destroys them The idea was that, like, the aliens have been harvesting humans through the millennia.

The stone circles to the mark, I suppose, are there to mark the places not to go, basically, because that's the place where they get harvested from. That's a really upsetting ending, but the dancing was bad in the end. I was going to say folk dancing is the one thing that I'm here for. Like, I'm totally up for that. I mean, that's the thing, isn't it? So these horror, I mean, folk horror is partly drawing on, I mean, in the same way that horror in the early 20th century, actually, is also drawing on a kind of general increase in interest in things like the occult

and witchcraft and what have you. I think the horror writers just respond to the fact that people are looking interested in weird magic, there's a good hook for a scary story. What if it's all really dark and evil? Because also, and this is really is connected to that sort of, that kind of late 60s, early 70s version of pastoral folk, it is very much connected to the growth of wicker, the growth of interest in witchcraft, the growth of interest in witchcraft, the growth of interest in paganism, for example. It's very deeply connected to those things. Those tendencies,

again, retain this political ambivalence all through the 70s, 80s. That Quatermas was, I think he wrote it in the late 60s, but by the time it gets made in the late 1970s, there's a big festival at Stonehenge, and it becomes this huge sort of free festival where young people are congregating in the countryside, in the case of Stonehenge, and probably Glastonbury, actually, around these sort of sites of ancient. And Davebury Stone Circle. I love it. I love all of that stuff. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That's what horror writers do.

They sort of sense contemporary fears and then sort of like exacerbate them so we can see them a bit more clearly, you know. So in Fred Turner's thing, from counterculture to cyber culture, he does an examination of this sort of, this back to the land sort of movement of rural communes, etc. And his analysis of it is it doesn't work. It breaks down because the people who go to the land, they think they're just escaping from the cities is enough to de-aliener. yourself. And in fact, what happens is that they just bring all of this sort of racism and

sexism and classism, I don't really like that word, into these spaces and they don't sort of try to overcome them in any way. And so you can sort of see that as this inability to overcome these repetitions of behavior because you're not examining them. And you can link that back to these two different modes of trying to deal with the alienation of capitalism. You know, can you just go back to a pastoral past? Well, no, because, you know, we are made up of all of these, of all of the sort of influences of contemporary life, you know, we have to undo them we can't just escape them in a sort of geographical manner.

Well, yeah, I think that's absolutely right and I don't. And it happens in Britain as well. I mean, it's completely forgotten about now, but that's what, you know, the travellers, the so-called new age travellers, the traveller convoys of the 80s was people like living away from the cities a lot of the time,

living on traveller campsites. There was the TP village in Mid Wales, was there for years and years. there was a surprising number. I mean, nothing like the scale of the States, but a surprising number of people did go off to become like sort of crofters in the island and sort of stayed there.

If you go into certain parts of the island, at least in my, maybe my experience is taking anecdotal. It's a surprising number of old hippies who'll run into it. I've got a friend who bought a farm with a load of people in early 70s, in mid Wales somewhere to get away, and now it's, you know, now it's runners. It's got strawberry houses, everyone,

all these sorts of things. There's a continuum from it. I think people did do that, you know, they tried to escape. And you've got to remember that, you know, in the 1970s there was that sitcom The Good Life. Yeah, that's true. Which was about people choosing to opt out of the rat race. And it was, they were actually in suburbia where they, you know, they did farming in their garden, etc. It was a bit of a pistic of it.

But everything you guys are talking about is sounding like you're talking about an escape from. So that all of these examples are leaving the city and going somewhere else. Well, are we saying that because of the way that the British working class was alienated off the land and brought into the cities, that effectively there isn't anyone in the countryside that is not posh? Is that what we're saying? Because otherwise, there can be cultures from the countryside, right? Why is it that all of these, the examples we've given involve that movement from urban to kind of pastoral or countryside or simpler life or organic farm, all of that? that are there no people who, I suppose, what we're saying from the Wickerman, is the Wickerman example of people who had left to those places or these cultures that are there, just not keeping up, quote, unquote, with the urbanisation?

I mean, it is true. This is different from the States, really, but in Britain, yeah. I mean, the countryside got massively depopulated from the beginning of the Industrial Revolution up to the 50s with the mechanisation of farming. So, and you did arrive at a situation. by the 60s in which there were very few people in the countryside. And mostly it was landowners or a very small, disorganised,

very subjugated population of agricultural labour. Because you can't just go and buy land that easily in the UK, right? In a lot of other countries you can. No, well, this is, when you could, no, not southern agricultural land. I mean, land's still relatively cheap now. If you just want a bit of hill farming land in mid Wales or Scotland. Scotland is pretty cheap because it's really, really hard. Like, it's really hard to make a living from it.

But the expensive land is all even land for development or southern kind of flat, arable land. But it was never been impossible to get a bit of land if you just want some hills to put the only thing that will grow on is grass and sheep. Trouble is the only thing that will grow on them is grass and sheep. I mean, that is also an interesting thing to think about in terms of the British experience, which is different from other European countries, that the fact that the left always was, you know, so heavily based in the cities because really there was barely

a kind of rural working class and the rural working class that existed was very subjugated as people tended to be living in tied cottages connected to specific farms tend to be living isolated from each other so there was a very weak organisation you compare that to France

where basically the sort of communal peasant villages were never really kind of dispersed and enclosed the way they were here so there's lots of parts of France where the peasant communes. became the basis for they're still basically like many of like French rural communes where the entire area is effectively farmed cooperatively and and the left and people vote for the or have historically like supported strands of the left which feels unthinkable in

the UK like that setting it seems like if France is not that far away but in terms of relationship to the land and food it feels like you know another like planet It's very different. Yeah, well, it is, yeah. That might be a way into talking about this ever movement, which we should probably think about in terms of like this idea of trying to construct different folk histories of the UK, which is that whole history from below movement

from people like E.P. Thompson, etc. Because E.P. Thompson in particular, his history is really about that, trying to create a sort of different narrative around how that industrialisation took place. So it's all about trying to construct a, find sort of the histories of struggle, basically, how people resisted that. There's a trend in it which sort of links to folk music of trying to construct a sort of progressive narrative

about the English character, which is much more based in these forms of revolt and these uprisings, etc. Yeah, that's right, yeah. Well, like the sort of thumbnail sketch of that, the quick history of that is that basically, if you ask anyone in the world or in England, like, what does it mean to be English up until about the 1880s, really? then you're going to get some answer which has to do with the fact that what it means to be English is to be at the cutting edge

of liberal industrial modernity. You know, in the French Revolution, the French revolutionaries would ask their tailors to make them close in the English style because England was seen as being the cutting edge of liberal modernity.

And this carries, this is still the case up until the time of the Great Exhibition, for example, and up until the late Victorian period. I mean, this is a really crude simplification, but a really crude simplification from a left perspective

is by the late 18th century, the ruling class have got to shut down this idea that what it means to be English is to be urban and industrial, because everybody, on both the right and the left, assumes that the logical conclusion of that is that England's going to be the first country to have a workers' revolution and go socialist. I mean, that's what Marx presumes in the 1840s. People are still worried about that. And also, at the same time, in the late 19th centuries, the ruling classes start to have to win popular support for the project of imperialism, which they didn't really mean before that. Before that, the imperialism was largely done by sort of private companies with sort of licences from the government. And so there's this

complete reimagining of British and specifically English identity in the kind of really in the 1890s. It's a complete reimagining of English. And central to it is this notion of England as a pastoral utopia. It's sort of England as a green and pleasant land, which I mean, still to this day dominates like conservative ideas of Englishness. It was still John Mayer. was still giving speeches in the 1990s about England as a land of shadows lengthening on village greens. And it was absolutely central to persuading people to go fight in the First World War. They didn't want to say to people, well, go fight for your industrial urban community, because that was already addressing people, I had sort of proletarians, and they knew that was dangerous.

So they said to people, though, go fight for this vision of England as like pastoral and rural, which is complete nonsense. England was the first major country, along with Belgium. but it's much bigger than Belgium, in which a majority of the people lived in cities and towns, by almost 100 years, there's almost a hundred year period from the mid-19th century to the mid-20th century when England is the only country in the world, which a majority of people live in towns and cities. So it's absolute nonsense. It has no bare connection to historical reality. You can see how you can build that picture, though, right? But it is pretty green and pleasant

in a lot of places in England. You can see that and you can see that, and you can see. how that is an excellent communication technique, like from a strategy's perspective. It's because it rains all the time. But it's because it rains all the time. It is green and pleasant, though. Green and wet. Green and quite unpleasant a lot of the time. I love England's green.

I've not seen it anywhere else. I think it's amazing. But it won't turn me into a conservative. No, I know. I know. So that's all true. But then so by the mid-20th century, you have this, the talk, the conservative imaginary is completely kind of won the battle.

for the idea of English identity and the idea of Englishness. So, yeah, so then you, of course, you get this generation of, you know, the communist historians and their students, people like E.B. Thompson, Raphael Samuel, and they want to construct a different story. And it's a story of political resistance

to the enclosures and the throwing people off the land, putting people into the cities, a political resistance to industrialisation and the waves of mechanisation, which deskilled kind of artisans like the weavers. And they want to construct this completely different idea of Englishness, which challenges the assumption that what it means to be English is basically to be a Tory. And, yeah, I mean, it's not an accident that, for

example, Billy Bragg is one of the great contemporary advocates of this idea. You know, he advocates for the idea that we should celebrate a notion of Englishness, which is defined by the legacy of William Blake, the levellers, the radical trade, the chartists, the mass trespass on into Scout, et cetera. It feels like this is because the left has been shit on place. The left is really shit talking about place and the right is good talking about place. And I think what Billy Bragg's argument is, is that place is real for people. It's experiential.

And they organise the concept of community or people or lived experience around that. And if the left doesn't deal with that, then pockets of nationalism are always going to work in the discourse. I don't dispute it. I don't dispute it. I just tend to think it's very difficult because, I mean, intellectually, I was completely raised on that tradition. Like as an undergraduate, I was taught nothing but the E.P. Thompson-Rap Samuel version of history. And then it was only after I read more sort of comparative, like European and sort of world history, I realised that you're on pretty shaky ground because all of those movements, by historic standards, were very weak in Britain compared to the strength of suburban liberalism and just imperial conservatism. The everything that gets invented in a late 19th century is basically the royal family.

All of the traditions around the royal family get invented in the... Yeah, well, it's the same moment. It's exactly the same moment. But of course, like what's getting invented around the, around, well, Queen Victoria, basically, is, you know, a notion of Britain as part of, as the mother country of this vast empire. That's the everything we need to think about

when working class folk traditions get broken by early urban industrialisation. But the other reason why it's so difficult to talk about Englishness and why Englishness such a fraught topic is because of colonial history. And, of course, like, the first colony is Ireland. I think I can say that. I'm Wales, man.

Wales. Yeah, I know. That is true. That is true. What I'm trying to get at is, if we think about, like, the other sort of folk culture, which is really, really prevalent in the UK, it's Irish folk culture, which is much more organically based around rebellion. And so, like, Irish rebel songs, etc.

having sessions where you sing Irish rebel songs and it's linked to a definite idea of like basically anti-colonial struggle, right? That's not accessible to the English. It probably is more accessible to the Welsh. You're on slightly more dodgy terms with the Scottish because Scotland was really involved in empire. You can see, well, like last we talked about the Pogues earlier,

you know, you can see that sort of Irish rebel song sort of culture. I think the Pogues were called the Republicans first or something like that, basically. I'm not talking about the American Party, but about, you know, Irish Republicanism, etc. I just wanted to mention one thing we could talk about is we've talked about Chumber before on the show, partly because they're my mate. But they did this really interesting thing in 1988. They released a song called English Rebel Songs, and it was like a direct reference to

Irish Rebel songs, and it was collecting up sort of traditional songs. Going back to sort of like the diggers, songs about the diggers, right up until 1984, basically. my song sung in a minor strike. And that does fit with that sort of Billy Bragg sort of moment, but with more of a nod, I think, to the reason that Englishness is such a difficult thing to talk about i. colonial history. Billy Bragg's New England is a really ironic phenomenon because it's a song, the lyrics of which are ostensibly about somebody not caring about whether we get a New England, like a new political settlement, but just wanting their sort of relationship issues to be resolved one way or another. But of course, it's become a massive anthem,

which is always sung by crowds with a very self-conscious identification with Billy Bragg's left-wing politics. So it's a really interesting example of the song where the lyrics have a sort of ironic relationship to the feelings people end up associating with it. I don't want to change the world. I'm not looking for New England. I'm just looking for another. I don't want to change the world. I'm not looking for a New England. I'm just looking for another girl. One of the issues we keep circling around

and an issue that's there from the beginning of the 19th century for the left in its relationship to industrial capitalism is to what extent can you escape from or reverse or retreat from the negative consequences of industrial capitalism? modernisation. And to what extent are those things you sort of have to go through in order to get to the other side of the communist utopia? This term accelerationism first emerges a few years ago as a critical term for a really simplistic idea that's being criticized with the term accelerationism. That somehow actually the way to get to communism is to accelerate capitalism

because it's like a necessary stage you have to go through. that's this is a weird pseudo-delersian version of accelerationism. And then a few years ago, there's interest in what the idea of what's called a left accelerationism in various quarters. And people like Alex Williams and the externally check, who I think have really since then, it has to be said, they really have abandoned all of this terminology, really. For a while, they're promoting the idea of what they call a left accelerationism, by which they really just mean a left politics, which is positive about technological. change and sees it as enabling rather than something to resist. And that is predicated on their

critique of what they call folk politics, which is a critical term for what they understand at the time as being a typical set of habits and presumptions on the activist left, which tend to always favour decentralised activity, small groups, consensus decision making, low tech. It's a weird term folk politics. So it partly draws on these philosophers, the Metzinger's there's a couple, and their surname is Metzinger. Can never remember the first names.

And they're sort of influenced by neuroscience and they have this critique of what they call folk psychology. And folk psychology is like just ordinary understandings of subjectivity and individuality which are shared by people who don't

know enough neuroscience to know that actually there is no such thing as a coherent self. So partly they borrow this term folk politics from that. It just means like stupid common sense ideas of the world shared by people who don't know any better. But also specifically, they use folk politics refers to the fact that around the time when Alex and Nick are writing this stuff, which is sort of 10, 12, 15 years ago, at least within the kind of middle class left sort of blogosphere and wider social networks, are they're part of or not part of sort of commenting on, projects like climate camp are the sort of central form of political

activity. And there is this real stress on things like consensus decision making, as opposed to democratic structures, things like, you know, sort of spontaneous forms of organisation as opposed to buildings or party structures or whatever, things like sort of low-tech, localised solutions to social and political problems as opposed to using the power of the centralised state, to contest the power of capital. So they use this term folk politics as a way of critiquing all those assumptions. Their critique in it was a bit problematic

because I don't think it acknowledged how relatively recent and localized it was, but it was referring to this moment just before sort of Corbinism and the Sanders movement in the States when most of the sort of activists left just had no engagement whatsoever with mainstream structures

or any notion of sort of long-term institutions. building, any notion of sort of long-range political strategy. I think it was a kind of accurate critique, actually, of a set of tendencies at the time. I think it is that. It's sort of like, it's almost like the folk politics is almost like the spontaneous politics that emerge out of a conjuncture, perhaps something like that, we could say, which doesn't sort of examine the way that, you know, the way we think about the world is made up by these wider, sort of structural forces. And that the politics they're arguing for is actually sort of, a basically, It's just more of a strategic politics, but a strategic politics, it's just like far-sighted

and takes into account this idea that, you know, we will have to change ourselves as society changes. And we can't just accept, build politics around the sort of common sense understandings of the world that we're existing, which I think does relate to that, that critique. I was talking about Fred Turner making of the communes in the 1970s, you know, this idea that because they didn't examine, you know, the racial structures of the US, etc. They became extremely white places and brought racist attitudes with them, those sorts of things. So I think it sort of fits in that way. I think one of the problems with the idea of folk politics was what they were calling folk politics at that time

was just one iteration of, you know, there must always be a folk politics in every sort of conjuncture, by the way, they're sort of talking about it, basically, and that was just one iteration of a folk politics. And it was on its way out as they were making it, making the critique, I think. It feels like it's a defensive. It feels like a defensive thing as well, as in the culture that they're critiquing. It's when you feel like the rug is being pulled out from underneath you in terms of the effect of late capitalism. I can understand why people are like, okay, small groups, no technology, you know. It's just the interesting connection for me is like where it sits along the spectrum of rationality.

Like how is it rational and how is it about progress? and it feels like accelerationism is basically saying, no, this is the way, you know, this is the way you get some forward movement, whereas what can be understood as folk politics, if you take it from their position, is basically, you know, hold on here, we've got to preserve something

because it's all going to, you know, go up in flames, which is the beginning of, you know, forms the kind of psyche behind a lot of the climate work, understandably. Perhaps only other things that sort of relates to sort of, the ECFM project. as well is what they were calling folk politics that the iteration of folk politics

they were critiquing had a sort of sense that we wanted a less complex society and that's perhaps like linked to this idea of like you know we can return to a pastoral pre-capitalist simpler age sort of thing but basically I think on ACFM

we've had this really strong trend that we want to embrace complexity the full complexity of life basically we probably don't want a less complex life we want a much more well not individual have complex lines, but we want society to be as maximum complexity, so basically maximum freedom and maximum options, do you know what I mean? So I think that's a way of thinking about it in terms of our own obsessions. Although we're also not accelerationists, I'd say.

So another thing we were going to talk about that relates to that, though, is how we understand the project of things like rewilding, like reforestation, the sort of rebuilding of the natural environment because there definitely was a moment when, you know, a certain version of accelerationism was popular in a certain section of the blogosphere when it was basically like hippie hating, you know, slightly miserable, like urban blokes who just didn't want to have anything to do with nonsense like sort of reforesting, rewilding nature, you know, it was informed partly by an aesthetic, a sort of, you know, sort of slightly industrial, or slightly gothic, and the sort of supposedly anti-vitalist philosophy. But my problem with that

was always, well, it was itself based on a sort of really narrow and kind of basically silly understanding that somehow reforestation could only be regressive, would be kind of the logical conclusion of that aesthetic and that idea. Whereas I would say, look, the point is actually things like reforestation, even things like rewilding, although they use this term re, they're not actually returning to anything. They're actually constituting a completely new sort of ecological context, which might be sustainable, which might be, you know, preferable, but they are a way of imagining the new. They're sort of hypermodern, actually. It's a hypermodern thing for me to actually say, okay, we're going to take a bit of land. We're not going to

exploit the hell out of it. Because actually, I mean, if you get into the history, like deforestation has been going on literally since the Paleolithic. And I think that is important for us. And I think that is, for me, that as an important part of the sort of A.C. sort of aesthetic and project is to say, No, we don't really have any notion of a return to the past. But on the other hand, that doesn't mean we can't want to sort of completely create a kind of sustainable and an ecological or green environment. Yeah, I think this is definitely the point where we should play one of my favorite songs, which is also massive lulls, The Return to Innocence by Enigma from 1993, I think, which is totally not a folk song, but is very very. very much about this kind of like the return to the land and it has

this kind of chant at the chorus who anyone around the 1990s who have the radio on will know of my heart. I do love the song and think it's hilarious and the video has like everything going backwards. The return to innocence if you want then start to laugh

you must then start to cry yourself don't take just believe in destiny. Yeah, it's funny because it calls on that certain sentiment, which is about a return to the land, that everything was better before and we must go back, which is also part, as we discussed earlier, of this concept of folk, like one concept of folk.

But I would be against that in terms of I think we would all be against that there isn't a forward trajectory, because in a way it has to be conservative if you're going back. But at the same time, but based on what we were just talking about, like, I completely get why people would want that when they see everything in front of them, like, tearing their society apart. To return to that idea of England is a green and pleasant land and as traveling on train through the UK and looking at this green nature.

And, of course, the point is, all of that is like farmland. That's what it is. It's completely, it's no more natural than an urban environment. is artificial, it's man-made, it's man-man-managed, etc. But we all go walking in the countryside, yeah? Like all three of us go walking. Yeah, I love to go walking. So I feel like it's, I don't know.

I don't, yeah, it just feels like you don't know what you've got, man. It is green and it's nice, and we all like walking in it. No, I do like, I do like going to the countryside. But like the project of rewilding and reforestation is sort of interesting. It's sort of, in a way, it's an attempt to, it's an attempt to undo the damage, not just of urbanisation, but of like agriculturalisation. So there was a book, The Human Planet by a friend of mine, Simon Lewis, and another author I can't remember because they're not a friend of mine.

That was one of their proposals. It was a book about the Anthropocene. One of their proposals was for rewilding and rewilding in the UK. In fact, I think it was part of the 2019 manifesto. What that would mean would be to trying to link up the sort of like, you know, the sort of forested areas. the things which look closest to what we might think of as wild, to try to create basically corridors at the country for wildlife to be able to travel from one area to another. And that is

undoing urbanisation, you know, trying to overcome the problems created by the motorway network and all that. But it's also, you know, trying to overcome the problems created by the fact that most of Britain has been turned into farmland. Yeah, and that the land is, that people's access to land is restricted. I went to a talk the other day and there was a statistic that the percentage of UK land is given over to homes, etc. It's something like 5%. I couldn't believe it. And so like 95% of the populations, their access to land is going to be limited to like that 5% of land, which is under home ownership and that sort of, and the rest of it is just owned by huge land, you know, landowners, incredibly rich people. And of course, like dotted around the country.

side, the other place we like to go and visit are these stately homes, you know, which is created by both that history of pushing people off the land into, into the cities and also the history of colonialism, which was created all the other conditions upon which capitalism could emerge. And did those feet in ancient times be lit? War on England's pastures green. Outrageous. Are you?

Uh, uh, and uh, e, uh.