There is The Imagined Village, an ongoing multicultural folk band putting English balladry into radical new settings. In recent years there have been major albums and stage productions that address the present while exploring the past.

British folk is part and parcel of the national conversation in a multicultural age, not a pastoral retreat or a muttering on the fringes.īritish folk is part and parcel of the national conversation in a multicultural age, not a pastoral retreat or a muttering on the fringes British folk music takes its place alongside roots music everywhere, expanding the musical palette and breaking down the boundaries of genre, culture and language. There are folk music degrees, a new National Youth Folk Ensemble, the annual BBC Radio 2 Folk Awards, and dozens of clubs and pubs playing host to a vast range of new and established artists from the UK and Ireland as well as Europe, the Americas and beyond. These days there are hundreds of annual folk festivals up and down the country, from Cornwall to the Orkneys, from small-scale one-dayers to epic week-long blow-outs. It’s not a museum culture, but a space anyone can move into and inhabit. Britain’s folk music stretches back to medieval sources and beyond, and while on the surface we may be digitally scrolling ourselves further and further away from the analogue world from which traditional songs and their stories stem, in reality the hunger for human connection that is at the heart of the folk tradition remains undimmed.

Love songs, murder ballads, pagan carols, rebel songs, songs of struggle and tales of the supernatural, all with enough passion, power, transgression and violence to fuel a thousand contemporary dramas, sit alongside rich and strange tune traditions from across the British Isles. Writer Tim Cumming surveys a wealth of new and established artists exploring the living and ancient legacy of Britain’s myriad folk traditions and provides 20 folk albums that are well worth exploring further.īritish folk music has rarely been in more vigorous health than it is today.

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