354: The Imagined Village, by the Imagined Village

The Imagined Village (United Kingdom)
The Imagined Village (2007)
11 tracks, 61 minutes
Bandcamp ∙ Spotify ∙ iTunes

Allll the way back at the beginning of this blog, in the very first entry, looking at Bellowhead’s Burlesque, I said that I’d be writing about the Imagined Village here at some point. Well, with only 12 days and 12 albums left to go, I’m finally getting around to it. No time like the present, right?

Alongside Bellowhead, the Imagined Village were the group to turn me on to English folk music. I can’t remember which one I’d listened to first, but they both hit me at roughly the same time, and I think that’s important. If I’d have heard one group doing interesting, exciting and different things with English folk music, maybe I would have been tempted to write it off as a one-time thing, the work of a few particularly talented musicians. When there’s two doing it – and making very different music from one another on top of that – that means there’s a movement happening. ‘Hmm,’ thought I, ‘maybe there’s something to this…’ thus leading me down a years-deep rabbit hole of scratchy field recordings, folk clubs in the upstairs rooms of pubs, fragile tomes of folklore and many great albums and gigs from the English folk scene.

Really, if you ever wanted to draw me into English folk music, you could barely come up with a formula as compelling as the Imagined Village. The idea was to use the music of the past to conceive of how the folk tradition may more accurately reflect the England of the 21st century. All the repertoire here is made up of traditional English songs and tunes or else directly inspired by them, and the musicians involved include such folk royalty as Martin and Eliza Carthy, Chris Wood and the Coppers but also big names from other fields such as Paul Weller, Benjamin Zephaniah, Billy Bragg, Sheila Chandra, the Afro Celt Sound System and Transglobal Underground.

It’s one of those projects where you look at the line-up with all its suitably impressive names and go ‘…can it actually work, though?’ Well, that’s an emphatic YES from me. You don’t have to listen to many of the tracks from here to realise it. Take ‘Tam Lyn Retold’, in which Benjamin Zephaniah updates the age-old story of a whirlwind romance, unexpected pregnancy and an epic battle between elf and fairy into one of clubbing, asylum seeking and the cruelties of the UK’s immigration system. He recites this genius spin on the old folktale in a dubwise fashion, backed by the beats and bass of Transglobal Underground, the sitar of Sheema Mukherjee and the fiddle and vocals of Eliza Carthy. That’s probably my favourite of the bunch, but they’re all like that, fresh takes that put the old songs in a different light while an astounding cast create magic around it.

By the time you read this in a week or so (or maybe years in the future, I don’t know), this won’t be news any more, but as I’m writing this, it’s the day that we’re coming to terms with the Conservatives’ massive re-election that keeps Boris Johnson as prime minister for another five years. It hurts, a lot; not just for me but for the millions whose lives will be negatively affected over the coming years. But I’m glad I get to write about the Imagined Village today, because this project, this group and this album are the opposite of Boris Johnson. The Imagined Village takes something that has been a valuable part of English culture for centuries and brings it more in line with the make-up of English culture today without dumbing down either side or losing anything in the process. The Imagined Village doesn’t hark back to a time long gone, but instead embraces all that is wonderful about multiculturalism, modernism and progressivism. Introducing dance beats and rock singers and dub poets and Indian sitars and dhols into English folk music doesn’t make it any less English – that is the England that I see around me and that I love. And it makes me love all these beautiful old traditions of England even more. Fuck Boris Johnson – I don’t live in his country. And I will strive to make my corner of this green and pleasant land a welcome home for all. This Imagined Village doesn’t deserve to return to the imagination.