Audiopile Review: Bob Stanley of Saint Etienne is the kind of MF who could make you a killer CDR of B-sides and radio session tracks by the godlike Peter Hammill. He’s had a hand in some of the most creative various artists compilations of recent times, but his masterwork as a curator is surely 2004’s ‘Gather in the Mushrooms: The British Folk Underground 1969-1975’. This previously CD-only comp was essential in introducing many of us to the whole concept of acid folk, right when that style was becoming a defining influence on the hippest music of the day. It opens with a track from the ‘Wicker Man’ soundtrack and features songs by Sandy Denny’s Fotheringay, John Peel protégé Bridget St. John, hardcore UK folk legend Anne Briggs, the inimitable Vashti Bunyan, and the terrifying Comus. For us, the real standout track is ‘Graveyard’ by Forest (also Peel protégés). And any album that introduces people to the wonder of Clodagh Simonds and her Mellow Candle is okay by us. Great to see a vinyl edition, just as interest in this stuff is back on the upswing, thanks to folk freaks like Lankum and Milkweed.

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Compiled by Bob Stanley to document the acid folk scene, Gather In The Mushrooms was first issued in 2004 on Sanctuary as a CD-only release; it proved popular enough for a sequel entitled Early Morning Hush two years later.

This new edition of Gather In The Mushrooms contains the cream of both long-deleted compilations with a few additions – C.O.B., Roy Harper, Fotheringay – that weren’t available to Sanctuary at the time. Though they aren’t traditional, these songs have an authenticity of their own, an autumnal atmosphere and a naivety which proved influential in the 00s neo-folk boom (Devendra Banhart, Joanna Newsom, Alasdair Roberts, Tuung et al) but impossible to replicate. For many of these acts at the end of the 60s, folk music and the hippy world that surrounded them was a way of life, a way of opting out from the Vietnam war, Angry Brigade and three-day-week early 70s. Anne Briggs lived in a caravan in Suffolk, Shelagh McDonald lived in a tent, Vashti Bunyan eschewed electricity; they weren’t part-timers. Listening to “Gather In The Mushrooms”, we are transported to a time when no one used the term post-modernist.

It may not have resonated with dyed-in-the wool political folkies, but over five decades later this music sounds very evocative of an England of yore – not necessarily one of poachers and pedlars, but one of long-haired youths in tie- dye T-shirts, bikers and hippies, acoustic guitars played in white stone cottages. Groups such as Midwinter and Oberon made primitive, privately recorded folk albums; today they sound as distant and mystical as the field recordings of Alan Lomax. The sincerity and folk knowledge of a group like Forest becomes irrelevant onceyou hear something as eerie and evocative as ‘Graveyard’. Home-made, homely, warm as soup or chilling as a hoar frost, this is music of innocence and rare beauty.