Electric Eden is a new book from Rob Young, The Wire’s editor-at-large and one of the UK’s finest music writers.

The full title of the mouthwatering 500-pager is Electric Eden: Unearthing Britain’s Visionary Music, and it’s due to be published on August 5 by Faber & Faber. It traces the “visionary” classical and folk tradition in Blighty from the nineteenth century through to the present day, and if Young is on his usual form, you can expect it to be an insightful, stylish and accessible text. On his dedicated EE blog, the author explains the work’s origins:

“[…] It  dates back to 1998, when I was dispatched to interview John Martyn for a Wire cover story. That meeting was a tale in itself – one that I hope to tell in detail at a later date. But the experience started me off thinking about why figures like Martyn, or the other music that I loved and returned to (and, miraculously, still do) like Nick Drake, Sandy Denny, John Renbourn, Incredible String Band, Comus, etc, are all described as ‘folk’ even though they all bear significant differences from each other and didn’t sing folk songs in the traditional sense.

“The questions never really seemed to be addressed, and there was little in print that dealt with a wider picture of British music. Apart from isolated examples – Ian MacDonald’s brilliant ‘Exiled from Heaven’, on Nick Drake, one of the most evocative essays on music I know; Patrick Humphries’s biogs of Drake, Richard Thompson and Fairport Convention; Colin Harper’s meticulous Bert Jansch biography Dazzling Stranger – there was very little available that seemed able to oversee where all this stuff was coming from and where it was going. Folk, especially in Britain, has had a notoriously and cripplingly partisan discourse around it for decades, and only in the late 1990s did it become OK to reference ‘folk’ uncontaminated by issues of authenticity.

“The subject seemed to be crying out for a substantial re-evaluation – something that, for instance, took up where the 1975 book The Electric Muse left off. That was the only previous attempt to assess the complex relation of contemporary British folk to its origins in the twin roots of rural folk music and industrial workers’ songs, looking at the degrees to which it accepted and rejected aspects of the American tradition in the 1950s and 60s, and embracing its late 60s electrification without any hint of apology. It was compromised, though, by being the work of four credited authors – Karl Dallas, Robin Denselow, David Laing and Robert Shelton, a ‘too many cooks’ arrangement that leaves the whole thing slightly difficult to navigate.

“I was waiting, and hoping, that Ian MacDonald, author of the Beatles recording chronology Revolution in the Head, and of The New Shostakovich (the book that, more than anything else, inspired me to start writing about music in the first place), might attempt to write some kind of overview of the grand narrative of British folk-into-rock. But when he tragically committed suicide in 2003, it gradually began dawning on me that if I wanted to see anything like it, I was probably going to have to try and do it myself…”

You can pre-order the book here.