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Kate Bush and Darkly Cinematic Flickerings Through the Meadows, Moors and Mazes: Revisiting 15/26

As the year’s go by from time to time I seem to accidentally discover the meaning and references in Kate Bush’s songs. It’s something of a double-edged sword as I often seem to prefer for her work to exist in a world unto itself and to have my own interpretations of it, while also being fascinated and intrigued when I discover about some of the references and history of her work.

Along which lines, the article Let Me Grab Your Soul Away – Kate Bush and Gothic Films at the BFI’s site is more on the “fascinated and intrigued” side of that scale. It’s an exploration of “how the darker side of cinema influenced some of her greatest hits” and considers the influence on Kate Bush’s work of Powell and Pressburger’s The Red Shoes, Night of the Demon, multiple adaptations of Wuthering Heights, The Innocents and The Shining.

If you visit it and find it intriguing, it may also be worth wandering over to Daniel Petersen’s article Just Saying it Could Even Make it Happen: A Short Introduction to Folk Horror in the Work of Kate Bush at the Folk Horror Revival website, which begins with the following text:

“This [article] was inspired by a member of the FHR Facebook page querying mention of Kate Bush on the group; it struck me suddenly that many people may not understand why this pop-star has such a hold on the hearts of those who grew up in a certain time, in a certain place, and why she is so indelibly linked with that particularly eccentric Englishness that is a core of folk horror. There is the same dark and capering glee in Kate’s work, a mindset that makes dressing up as itinerant monks to perform ‘Running Up That Hill‘ on Wogan seem perfectly normal, as there is in the concluding procession of The Wicker Man, as there is in Cotswold cheese-rolling and the fireworks of Lewes. There is the delight in sun-kissed mornings and the melancholy of mist-shrouded nights, there is the sadness of loss and the purity of love.”

The original post published during the first year of A Year In The Country:

 

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Pale Horse – The Outsider is Lead a Merry Folkloric Dance: Wanderings 15/26

Sarah Phelps’ “Albion in the overgrowth” television adaptation of Agatha Christie’s Pale Horse; urban wyrd meets folk horror meets Jacob’s Ladder meets The Wicker Man meets The Man Who Haunted Himself, with populuxe Mad Men-esque and The Long Firm style, Profumo Affair era Soho shennanigans, showgirls and privileged decadence all stirred into the mix.

Set in 1960 it is intriguing television and one of the first times I’ve seen folk horror intertwined with urban sophistication  in this way. As with The Wicker Man it’s a murder mystery where the lead “detective” outsider is lead a merry dance and ultimately (spoiler alert) discovers that the victim is himself.

Strangers abroad? The urbane couple stepping out of their comfort zone and into an inland foreign land.

There is more than a shade or two of the final sequence of The Wicker Man to the Pale Horse intro sequence.

…and further shades of The Wicker Man in a folk ritual procession…

Although its the approach to a Home Counties British village, there’s something about these folk figures and adornments around the village’s sign that brings to mind “stay away, forbidden zone” style warnings in some American science fiction film that I can’t quite put my finger on. Planet of the Apes perhaps?

The trio of rural fortune tellers from the drama. They are local healers but are they also witches? Rita Tushingham on the left seems to be reinhabiting or channelling the manipulative magic using matriarch she played in Nicolas Roeg’s 2007 film Puffball.

“At home he’s a tourist.”

The rural wyrd finally fully invades the subconscious of the urbane urbanite. The blue light and silhouetting in this scene is reminiscent of 1982 film Poltergeist and its tale of television as a supernatural portal. Also the repeated appearance of prosaic day-to-day corridors in the nightmares of the lead character brings to mind Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining.

A man who declares himself an empty shell and likes it that way. Although it is not commented on, after the above night time visitation he finally stops wearing his sharply tailored suits. His carefully constructed and controlled world is crumbling and his amoral coldness can no longer protect him.

“There’s something about the exteriors of these people, that in order to support that level of luxury there’s an underbelly of brutality to maintain it, in society… That seemed to be really reflected in this particular character’s story, and I think it runs through Agatha Christie.” (Mark Sewell who plays lead character Mark Easterbrook, talking in an interview with The Herald.)

“In every dream home a heartache.” All mod cons, isolation and emptiness. Note the folkloric face mask ornaments displayed in the fireplace – a possible accidental cultural leyline or gateway to the rural “other”?

Links: 

 

Elsewhere at A Year In The Country:


(File post under: Wanderings / Subsection: Visual Findings.)

 

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Folk Horror Review and Digital Spectres: Revisiting 14/26

The website Folk Horror Review site was available online until some time earlier in the 2010s and it was a relatively early site etc where the gathering together and exploring of some of the iconic “canon” of folk horror and interrelated otherly pastoral culture took place.

At the site there was writing on The Wicker Man, its possible forebear Robin Redbreast, ghostly scribe Arthur Machen, A Field In England, The Twilight Language Of Nigel Kneale book, Nigel Kneale’s The Stone Tape, various BBC Ghost Stories For Christmas, Kenneth Anger’s Lucifer Rising, Children Of The Stones, Psychomania and Alistair Siddon’s In The Dark Half.

There were also posts on interconnected items such as the compilation album that accompanies Rob Young’s Electric Eden book; Hail Be You Sovereigns, Lief and Dear from Cold Spring’s undercurrents of folk Dark Britannica album series, the BFIs DVD release of film recordings of folk customs and ancient rural games Here’s A Health To The Barley Mow and the academic conference A Fiend In The Furrows, which explored folk horror in it’s various forms.

Back then the phrase folk horror was still relatively esoteric and niche and although The Wicker Man was undergoing critical rehabilitation it was also still a relatively niche taste. How things have changed (!) Today it seems like I can hardly pick up a mainstream newspaper or magazine without coming across something being described as folk horror or see a reference to The Wicker Man.

As is often the way with the sometimes mayfly existence of online content The Folk Horror Review site is now long gone. It’s a shame as I expect it would make interesting reading as a snapshot of a time before the otherly landscape of folk horror had been so thoroughly explored and harvested.

It doesn’t even seem to have been archived at the Internet Archive Wayback machine, which attempts to store the back catalogue of the internet and the site is now merely another spectre in the history of lost online content.

The original post published during the first year of A Year In The Country:

 

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The Final Spectral Fields Wyrd Kalendar Mix – An Aural Appendix to Accompany “Journeys in Otherly Pastoralism, The Further Reaches of Folk and the Parallel Worlds of Hauntology”

Over the last year or two Chris Lambert, working as Wyrd Kalendar, has been creating an “aural appendix” to the A Year In The Country: Wandering Through Spectral Fields book.

This has taken the form of audio mixes posted at Mixcloud that include music discussed in the book and/or inspired by the topics covered in it, extracts and soundtracks from the film and television programmes featured in the book and so on.

Reflecting the structure of Wandering Through Spectral Fields, which takes its cue from the cycle of the year, there are four of these mixes, as there are seasons in the year.

Each mix is presented by the Kalendar Host and explores 13 chapters of the book: the fourth and final one is now online and “steps over the Ghost Box stile for one last time”. Below is the tracklisting for it:

Chapter 40: The Stone Tape, Quatermass, The Road and The Twilight Language of Nigel Kneale – Unearthing Tales from Buried Ancient Pasts

1) Quatermass and the Pit – Closing titles by Tristram Carey (careful where you go digging, you don’t know what you might find!)

2) An extract from the radio drama of Nigel Kneale’s The Stone Tape (which was an adaptation written by Matthew Graham and Peter Strickland, the latter of whom also directed it, and featured music and electronics by James Cargill of Broadcast, with vocal effects by Andrew Liles).

3) Hobgoblins by Mount Vernon Arts Lab (from the 2001 hauntological antecedent album The Séance at Hobs Lane, which was reissued by Ghost Box Records in 2007).

4) Electronic Music Cues by Tristram Carey (further work from Tristram Carey for Quatermass and the Pit).

5) Disempowered by Olan Mill (something of an ambient musical respite, which here is intertwined with a reciting of the rhyme Huffity Puffity from the final series of Quatermass).

Chapter 41: Folklore Tapes and the Wyrd Britannia Festival – Journeying to Hidden Corners of the Land/the ferrous Reels and Explorations of an Arcane Research Project

6) Ritual in Devon Folklore by Paper Dollhouse (spectral wordless singing, created for the Folklore Tapes project, that wouldn’t be out of place on Cat’s Eyes’ The Duke of Burgundy soundtrack).

7) Fields of Blackberry by The Soulless Party (on which Chris Lambert sings an unaccompanied folk-style song, which sounds as though it has tumbled backwards and forwards through time from a set of field trip recordings back when, and which is featured on The Soulless Party album Tales from the Black Meadow that accompanied Chris Lambert’s book of the same name).

Chapter 42: Skeletons – Pastoral Preternatural Fiction an a World, Time and Place of its Own Imagining

8) Polregnala E Pschenitza by The Bulgarian State and Television Female Vocal Choir (who contributed to Le Mystère des Voix Bulgares album released on 4AD, and whose work seems to have almost uncannily and coincidentally synced with the “classic” 1980s 4AD ethereal sound).

Chapter 43: Field-Trip England – Jean Ritchie, George Pickow and Recordings from the end of an Era

9) John Barleycorn by Haxey Hood Singers and Customers at The Kings Arms, Haxey Lincolnshire (a playful harvesting song that if you listen to the lyrics is both grizzyly and seems to be folk horror-ish before the phrase existed).

10) Jonny Todd by Isla Cameron and Ewan McColl (a folk song duet that you could almost imagine soundtracking a tale in Bagpuss!)

11) Oranges and Lemons by Dianne Endicott (a reciting of a traditional rhyme, the lyrics to which are also a little grizzly when you think about it).

Chapter 44: Noah’s Castle – A Slightly Overlooked Artifact and Teatime Dystopias

12) Noah’s Castle by Jugg (a fine slice of “teatime dystopia” soundtracking synthery).

Chapter 45: Jane Weaver Septieme Soeur and The Fallen by Watch Bird – Non-Populist Pop and Cosmic Aquatic Folklore

13) Europium Alluminate by Jane Weaver with Demdike Stare (a rumbling, ominous soundscape reimagining of the original, with Jane Weaver’s voice a spectral will o’ the wisp off in the distance).

14) The Fallen by Watchbird by Jane Weaver (non-populist pop at its finest).


Chapter 46: Detectorists, Bagpuss, The Wombles and the Good Life – Views from a Gentler Landscape

15) The Miller’s Song by Beautify Junkyards (which opens the Tiddlywinks album released by Mega Dodo, which was released in aid of Save the Children, on which nursery rhymes are reimagined).

16) Detectorists by Johnny Flynn (a joyful yet quietly melancholic song; “I’m with the ghosts of the men who can never sing again”).

17) The Bony King of Nowhere by John Faulkner and Sandra Kerr (and there’s nothing like a visit to the marvellous mechanical mouse organ, accompanied by some musical “bleeping” or censoring!)

18) The Good Life by Matt Berry (from his Television Themes album of subtley reinvented theme music).

19) Womblin’ Free by The Wombles (underground, overground…)

Chapter 47: Weirdlore, Folk Police Recordings, Sproatly Smith and Seasons They Change – Notes from the Folk Underground, Legendary Lost Focal Points and Privately Pressed Folk

20) Blackthorn Winter by Sproatly Smith (lovely pastoral acid folk from the Weirdlore compilation).

21) Gently Johnny by The Woodbine and Ivy Band (a softly seductive siren call – if Kate Bush’s In The Warm Room was a slice of folkloric Americana that had somehow ended up The Wicker Man soundtrack, it might sound a little like this).

22) Nottanum Town by Oberon (a classic example of privately pressed folk from 1971, originally released in an edition of just 99 copies).

23) Rosebud in June by Sproatly Smith (and talking of The Wicker Man, as said on the Gaping Silence silence website, this song is “…like something from The Wicker Man, if The Wicker Man had been a 1960s children’s TV series about time travel”).

Chapter 48: The Moon and the Sledgehammer and Sleep Furiously – Visions of Parallel and Fading Lives

24) Avril 14 by Aphex Twin (from Sleep Furiously but this piece of gentle piano song is far removed from the electronic music you might expect from Aphex Twin).

25) Ma’er Aderyn Glas by Trefeurig Community Choir (this is a track performed by a village choir in Sleep Furiously – the title translates as “The Bluebird”).

26) Extract from The Moon and The Sledgehammer (a collage of sounds and voices from the film, which evocatively conjures up the lives of the family it focuses on).

Chapter 49: From Gardens Where We Feel Secure, Wintersongs, Pilgrim Chants & Pastoral Trails – Lullabies for the Land and Gently Darkened Undercurrents

27) Hearth by Plinth (from the gently melancholic pastoral album Wintersongs).

28) It’s Too Hot to Sleep by Virginia Astley (a bucolic lullabye full of owl song…)

29) Dark Pool by Sharron Kraus (…and its fever dream flipside, from the album Pilgrim Chants & Pastoral Trails).

Chapter 50: Strawberry Fields and Wreckers – The Countryside and Coastal Hinterland as Emotional Edgeland

30) Labour of Love – Troubadour Rose (an Americana tinged song from the soundtrack to the pastoral hinterland of the film Strawberry Fields).

31) To the Barn by Andrew Lovett (further gentle piano song, as featured on the soundtrack to Wreckers).

Chapter 51: Zardoz, Phase IV and Beyond the Black Rainbow – Seeking the Future in Secret Rooms from the Past and Psychedelic Cinematic Corners

32) Zardoz Opening by David Munrow and his Early Music Consort of London (choral chants from the world of the Vortex).

33) Phase IV by Brian Gascoigne and David Briscoe (considering the nature of the film this is misleadingly gentle contemporary classical in style… although it segues into something much more John Carpenter-esque).

34) Run Program: Sentionauts by Sinoia Caves (…and talking of John Carpenter-esque… from the soundtrack to the “Reagan era fever dream” of Beyond the Black Rainbow).

Chapter 52: Winstanley, A Field in England and The English Civil War Part II – Reflections on Turning Points and Moments When Anything Could Happen

35) The Damp of Hell by Jim Williams (from the soundtrack to A Field in England, this could well be a darkened piece of worship orientated music, which fades away into the ghost of a dream…)

36) The Digger’s Song by Chumbawumba (a performance of the 17th century protest song, which connects with the story of the film Winstanley).

37) Excerpt from The Battle of Orgreave (extracts from the Jeremy Deller and Mike Figgis’ film, which featured original archival material and a contemporary re-enactment of a turning point in British history).

38) Walking There, Two Shadows Went by Jim Williams (and to – almost – finish the mix and its journey, another track from the soundtrack to A Field in England).

The mix ends with some final words from the Kalendar Host: “I trust you have enjoyed your jaunt through the spectral fields… goodbye for now, tread carefully.”

It’s well worth putting on some sensible shoes, packing some sandwiches (and a cagoule just in case) and stepping over the Ghost Box stile with him…

Chris Lambert is the author of several books which explore the myths and mysteries of the Black Meadow, including Tales from the Black Meadow, Christmas on The Black Meadow, Songs from the Black Meadow and The Black Meadow Archive Volume 1. He is also the author of Wyrd Kalendar, illustrated by Andy Paciorek of Folk Horror Revival, which takes a dark fictional journey through the months of the year. Details of the books can be found at his website.

 

Links:

 

Elsewhere at A Year In The Country:

 

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The Radiophonic Workshop, Delia Derbyshire Appreciation Society and Drew Mulholland – Sonic Archaeology and Electronic Explorations Inspired by Delia Derbyshire: Wanderings 12/26

Over the last two or three years I have come across the three albums below that in various ways are inspired by electronic music pioneer and BBC Radiophonic Workshop member Delia Derbyshire:

1) The 2017 Delia Derbyshire Appreciation Society eponymous album, which was their first full length release.

Musically it makes me think of if Brian Eno’s ambient albums went a bit more techno but still didn’t have beats. There’s a lovely warm vintage sound to it, without it being overly retro. And there are some sub-bass bits that are just wonderful and all enveloping, and which I’ve found myself listening to over and over again.

2) The Radiophonic Workshop’s soundtrack to Mathew Holness’ film Possum.

As mentioned in the sleeve notes the album includes “elements composed and recorded by Delia Derbyshire”, which are taken from the Delia Derbyshire archives held at the John Ryland Library at the University of Manchester.

The soundtrack was composed and performed by the reformed Radiophonic Workshop. Well, sort of reformed, possibly more autonomously recreated as they are no longer a department of / directly connected to the BBC.

Released in 2018 it begins with some pastoral flute sounds, which may mislead the listener into thinking they’re about to listen to something, well, nice and calming. Far from it. The first intimations that something is awry are briefly reversed sections and then… well darkness and melodic dissonance tumbles forth and builds until it just suddenly stops on a reversed note. And that’s just the first track. Unsettling doesn’t quite cover it.

“Unsettling doesn’t quite cover it” may well also be applied to the film Possum. It has its own unique character, atmosphere and presentation that feels unlike and separate from much of contemporary cinema. Set in a psychic and literal hinterland / edgeland, watching it is like stepping into a never-ending recurring personal nightmare, one where the “bogey man” keeps returning no matter what you do.

Possum’s artwork was designed by Julian House of Ghost Box Records, Children of Alice and the Intro design agency, and features a number of his signature graphic design styles: the front cover has a subtle slightly off kilter cathode ray television effect couple with a form of cosmic light show that adds a darkened dreamlike atmosphere to it, while elsewhere there are stark gridded duotone stills from the film, accompanied by a minimal modernist type layout. It’s both beautiful (or should that be entrancing?) and something that you want to get away from you as quickly as possible, and the sense of being drawn in and also repulsed reflects the character of the film.

3) Drew Mullholland’s Three Antennas in a Quarry.

This was released in 2019 by Buried Treasure and featured rather fine design work by Nick Taylor of Spectral Studio. It was one of those “blink and you miss it” very limited vinyl releases and is now sold out but the digital version is still available.

The album was inspired by a copy of a graphic score that Delia Derbyshire sent Drew Mulholland after they became friends in the late 1990s. She couldn’t remember what it was for but dated it vaguely as “the late ’60s”. In his sleeve notes Drew Mulholland talks of how she had provided him with a fragment of a recipe but no indication of what its ingredients were or what the intended sound sources were. He goes on to say that in order to create the album he began to “sketch with sound” after studying enlargements of the score that he had pinned to his study wall. The subsequent album could be considered a ghost-like, will-o’-the-wisp interpreting of the score, and the spirit of Delia Derbyshire’s music.

In what could be thought of as a hauntological psychogeography manner it utilises field recordings Drew Mulholland made when visiting the university where Delia Derbyshire had studied music and mathematics. The resulting music is resolutely experimental and at the same time accessible, and has a homespun character while also seeming to conjure up images of some long-lost studio hall.

In the 1990s and early 2000s, long before the ongoing current interest in hauntology, folk horror, The Wicker Man, Quatermass, the Radiophonic Workshop and so on, Drew Mulholland seems to have been exploring these areas and navigating paths through and interlinking them. Alongside contacting Delia Derbyshire in the ’90s, working as Mount Vernon Arts Lab he released the album The Séance at Hobs Lane, a concept album which took as its inspiration Quatermass and the Pit: the album was influential on Ghost Box Records, who subsequently reissued it in 2007. In the late ’90s he also made field recordings at the locations of key scenes of The Wicker Man, recordings from which were subsequently used (alongside fragments of the actual Wicker Man figure from the film) in the “sonic archaeology” of his The Wicker Tapes album that was released in 2019. Which is another “blink and you miss it” release and also sold out and I’m not sure if it’s even available digitally.

 

Links:

 

Elsewhere at A Year In The Country:

 

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Willow’s Songs – A Haunting Lament and Tales of Late Night Trysts: Revisiting 9/26

Willow’s Songs is a compilation released in 2009 by Finders Keepers Records which gathers together “12 vintage recordings of haunting, rowdy and risque British balladry” which are said to have influenced the soundtrack to The Wicker Man.

The album was released after the first official release of The Wicker Man’s soundtrack in 1998 by Trunk Records. It is part of a not-so-small industry of all things Summer Isle related, that takes in multiple releases of the film on DVD and Blu-ray, the soundtrack and novel, alongside collectors cards, documentaries, academic conferences, a book of sheet music, zines, t-shirts, posters, several non-fiction books, near endless seeming posts online and so on.

Six of the tracks don’t have recording artists listed, which as I said in the first year of A Year In The Country, is quite nice in these days of instant digital knowledge about almost everything. It helps to create a slight sense of mystery to the songs, which suits both The Wicker Man itself and the many myths that surround its production, and also the sense of mystery and ancient semi-known tales which sometimes surrounds traditional folk music and culture, particularly in its more “wyrd” aspects, interpretations and explorations

As I also say in the first year of A Year In The Country it is Highland Lament, the first track on the album, which is a particular standout for me. I’m listening to it as I type and it has a timeless quality and is indeed haunting, both musically and in its heartbreaking tale of dispossession due to the “unrelenting cruelties” of those in power.

On the 2002 Silva Screen release of The Wicker Man soundtrack the song is known as “Opening Music” and is used as Sergeant Howie flies towards Summer Isle. The song is shortened so that the lyrics only tell of rural hardship and poverty but not actual dispossession; its use ties in with the imagery and themes of the film, being heard as Howie flies over more arid landscape but then once he arrives over the fertile greenery of Summer Isle it ends and “Corn Rigs” sung by Paul Giovanni begins and tells of “bonnie” crops and late night trysting amongst them.

 

The original post published during the first year of A Year In The Country:

 

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The Owl Service’s The View from a Hill – Ploughing the Furrows for the Future Blooming of Otherly Pastoral Culture: Revisiting 8/26

The View from a Hill by The Owl Service was one of the first albums I bought when the ideas and themes of what would become A Year In The Country first began to coalesce, alongside the “cosmic aquatic folklore” of Jane Weaver Septième Soeur’s The Fallen by Watchbird, the enigmatic cut-ups of Broadcast and The Focus Group Investigate Witchcults of the Radio Age, and Gather in the Mushrooms, on which Bob Stanley curated British acid folk from the 1960s and 1970s.

The album revisits and reinterprets traditional folk music in a way that is very accessible but also it is not purely mainstream folk music, or as I said during the first year of A Year In The Country, it is an exploration of the patterns beneath the plough.

The album’s title is in part inspired by M.R. James’ short ghost story A View from a Hill, in which a historian borrows a pair of binoculars that have been bewitched in order to show objects which no longer exist. The story was adapted for television in 2005 as part of BBC Four’s revival of the Ghost Story for Christmas series that was originally broadcast between 1971 and 1978. The series has included a number of adaptations of M. R. James’ stories, and the original episodes have become ongoing hauntological / otherly pastoral reference points.

The Owl Service was formed by Steven Collins in 2006 and he has said that:

“Essentially what I was trying to do at the start was to somehow capture in sound the feel of some films and TV shows that had a major effect on me as a child – things which, for reasons I can’t explain, have always evoked the same feeling in me as my favorite folk music. Films like The Wicker Man, Blood on Satan’s Claw, and the Quatermass films, and also TV shows like Children of the Stones, The Stone Tape and the BBC’s M.R. James adaptations.”

In this sense it could be considered to have helped laid the pathways, or ploughed the furrows, for the current blooming of interest in wyrd folk / otherly pastoral culture, and where it intertwines with the parallel worlds and spectres of hauntology.

 

The original post published during the first year of A Year In The Country:

  • Day #30/365: The Owl Service – The View from a Hill

 

Index: Year 6

Click the links below to peruse the indexes for the different years of A Year In The Country:

All Years     –      Year 1     –      Year 2      –      Year 3      –     Year 4      –      Year 5      –     Year 6      –     Year 7      –     Year 8

 

The Corn Mother Novella and The Corn Mother: Night Wraiths Album – Release date 16th March 2020
Build Your Own Stonehenge Model Kits (and Other Sacred, Profane and Playful Simulacra): Wanderings 1/26
250-0001-A-Year-In-The-Country-Gather-In-The-MushroomsGather in the Mushrooms: Revisiting 1/26
Lisa Bond’s Landscape Phantasms: Wanderings 2/26
The Quietened Journey – Reviews, Broadcasts and Dreams of Overgrown Sidings and Crumbling Platforms
Rob Young’s Electric Eden: Revisiting 2/26
Worzel Gummidge – Mackenzie Crook’s Albion in the Overgrowth Recalibrating of Mainstream Family Television: Wanderings 3/26
Day-14-The-Twilight-Language-Of-Nigel-Kneale-Strange-Attractor-A-Year-In-The-Country-1The Twilight Language of Nigel Kneale: Revisiting 2/26
The Corn Mother Novella and The Corn Mother: Night Wraiths Album – Released 16th March 2020
Marion Adnams, Paul Nash and Matthew Lyons – Wyrd Culture Forebears, Otherly Geometric Landscapes and the Shape of the Future’s Past: Wanderings 4/26
250-Day-6-The-Fallen-By-Watch-Bird-Jane-Weaver-1-A-Year-In-The-Country-575x314Jane Weaver Septième Soeur’s The Fallen by Watchbird: Revisiting 4/26
A Quatermass Book Mini-Achive: Wanderings 5/26
Day-7-Devon-Folklore-Tapes-Vol-IV-Magpahi-and-Paper-Dollhouse-A-Year-In-The-Country-2Folklore Tapes – Rekindling Myths and Otherly Geometry: Revisiting 5/52
The Corn Mother Novella and The Corn Mother: Night Wraiths Album: Released
Future City – Experiment and Utopia in Architecture 1956-2006: Wanderings 6/26
The Telegraph Pole Appreciation Society: Revisiting 6/26
The Wicker Man Soundtrack and a Summer Isle Mini-Industry: Wanderings 7/26
She Wants to be Flowers – Filming The Owl Service: Revisiting 7/26
77 Posters / 77 Plakatow, Quest for Love and The Man Who Haunted Himself – The Phantasmagoric Parallel World of Eastern European Film Posters and Other Cinematic Alternate Realities: Wanderings 8/26
The Owl Service’s The View from a Hill – Ploughing the Furrows for the Future Blooming of Otherly Pastoral Culture: Revisiting 8/26
Beth Moon’s Ancient Trees and Ancient Skies – Natural Stalwarts Set Against a Cosmic Backdrop: Wanderings 9/26
250-Day-16-Willows-Songs-b-Finders-Keepers-A-Year-In-The-Country-575x481Willow’s Songs – A Haunting Lament and Tales of Late Night Trysts: Revisiting 9/26
Pulselovers’ Cotswold Stone – Hazy Gently Pastoral Hauntological Memories: Wanderings 10/26
Homer Sykes’ Once a Year and Other Folkloric Photography Journeys: Revisiting 10/26
Whistle Down the Wind – A Time Capsule New Wave Cinematic Landscape: Wanderings 11/26
250-Charles-Freger-Wilder-Mann-Dewi-Lewis-Publishing-A-Year-In-The-Country1Charles Fréger’s Wilder Mann: Revisiting 11/26
The Radiophonic Workshop, Delia Derbyshire Appreciation Society and Drew Mulholland – Sonic Archaeology and Electronic Explorations Inspired by Delia Derbyshire: Wanderings 12/26
250-John-Benjamin-Stone-A-Record-of-England-folk-customs-and-traditions-A-Year-In-The-Country-4John Benjamin Stone’s Folkloric Ritual Photographs: Revisiting 12/26
The Final Spectral Fields Wyrd Kalendar Mix – An Aural Appendix to Accompany “Journeys in Otherly Pastoralism, The Further Reaches of Folk and the Parallel Worlds of Hauntology”
Gone to Earth / The Wild Heart, the Haunted Region of Wild Wales and a Sidestep into Talking Pictures TV’s Broadcasts of the Overlooked, Shadowed Archives of Cinema and Television: Wanderings 13/26
250-Corn-Husk-Crafts-Facklam-Phibbs-A-Year-In-The-Country-1Faded Foundlings: Revisiting 13/26
The Modernist and Ghosts of the Past: Wanderings 14/26
Folk Horror Review and Digital Spectres: Revisiting 14/26
Pale Horse – The Outsider is Lead a Merry Folkloric Dance: Wanderings 15/26
250-Experiment-IV-Kate-Bush-A-Year-In-The-Country-354x575Kate Bush and Darkly Cinematic Flickerings Through the Meadows, Moors and Mazes: Revisiting 15/26
The Heartwood Institute’s Tomorrow’s People – Exploring Far Off Utopian Flipsides: Wanderings 16/26
250-The-Advisory-Circle-Jon-Brooks-Ghost-Box-RecordsThe World Out of Joint Tales of The Advisory Circle’s And the Cuckoo Comes: Revisiting 16/26
Eldritch House with Green Moss – Quatermass, the Planet People and the Lay of the Land Refracted by The Fall and Mark E. Smith: Wanderings 17/26
250-Belbury-Poly-Belbury-Tales-Rob-Young-Julian-House-Ghost-Box-Records-A-Year-In-The-Country-3Belbury Poly’s Geography and Gateways to Far-Off Neverland Dream Memories: Revisiting 17/26
An Abandoned Village Scrapbook (Incorporating One Abandoned and Restored Phone Box): Wanderings 18/26
The Layering – Preorder and Release Dates
Edward Chell’s Soft Estate – Spectral Depictions of a World Unto Itself: Revisiting 18/26
The Layering – Preorder
Hilla and Bernd Becher’s Four Decade Journeying Amongst Faded Industrial Sculptures: Wanderings 19/26
The Arcadian Idyll of Virginia Astley’s From Gardens Where We Feel Secure: Revisiting 19/26
The Layering – Released
Simon Stålenhag’s The Electric State – Scenes from a Psychic Edgeland: Wanderings 20/26
250-Hollyoaks-Savage-Party-folklore-A-Year-In-The-Country-4-575x323The Temporary Autonomous Zone Fantasia of Savage Party: Revisiting 20/26
The Top of the Tower Restaurant – Dining Amongst a Concordian Reaching for the Stars: Wanderings 21/26
Broadcast and The Focus Group’s #1: Witch Cults and #2: I See, So I See So: Revisiting 21/26
The Quietened Dream Palace – Preorder and Release Dates
Edge of Darkness – Revisiting Hidden Silhouettes: Wanderings 22/26
Elsa Mora’s Folkloric Dream World Fantasias: Revisiting 22/26
The Quietened Dream Palace – Preorder
A Bagpuss Mini-Collection and Portals Into a Magical Never Never Land: Wanderings 23/26
The Layering – Reviews and Broadcasts
Wyrd Britannia Festival: Revisiting 23/26
The Quietened Dream Palace – Released
A Gathering of Bear’s Ghosts – Soviet Era Hauntology and Lost Futures: Wanderings 24/26
Further Wanderings Amongst a Garden of Earthly Delights: Revisiting 24/26
Broadcast Findings and Cultural Constellations: Wanderings 25/26
Folk Art and a Time Unto Itself: Revisiting 25/26
Shadows and Otherly Introductions: Revisiting 26/26
The Owl Service, The Village of the Damned, The Prisoner, Quatermass, Zardoz, The Wicker Man, The Touchables, Sapphire and Steel, The Nightmare Man, Phase IV, The Tomorrow People and Gone to Earth – A Gathering of a Cathode Ray Library and Rounding the Circle: Wanderings 26/26

 

Click the links below to peruse the indexes for the different years of A Year In The Country:
Year 1     –      Year 2      –      Year 3      –     Year 4      –      Year 5      –     Year 6      –     Year 7      –     Year 8

 

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Gather in the Mushrooms: Revisiting 1/26

Due to the ever-expanding nature of the internet and the way that search engine results often seem to focus on more recent posts etc, a lot of older online content can be, if not lost, then at least a little lost-to-view. A bit like a book in an overcrowded second-hand bookshop that’s hidden away near the bottom of a pile of books. Still worth a look-see but you’ve got to forage a bit to find it.

I’ve had something of a hankering to return to and have a wander through the first year of A Year In The Country, to revisit some old cultural “friends” and inspirations. Maybe it will be a bit like picking up an old magazine that you’ve had on the shelves for years but haven’t browsed through for a fair old while.

I find myself enjoying that, appreciating the way that the contents can be like time capsules or snapshots of a particular point in time, and also how sometimes things that you missed the first time around or didn’t fully take in can now catch your eye and interest.

(As an aside, I also appreciate, particuarly in older music magazines, the prices of things back then – adverts for gigs by bands who now play stadiums and that it might cost you £80 or more to see playing a small venue with an entry fee of £2.50 and so on.)

Sometimes as well, when you pick up older magazines you spot cultural trends or themes that weren’t apparent at the time. Picking up an older magazine can also sometimes give you a moment to stop, pause and reflect, which is somewhat precious in these times of such a vast array of access to culture in various forms.

It’s also a form of digital scrapbooking, in a not dissimilar way that once upon a time people may have created actual scrapbooks of things in magazines etc that caught their eye.

These posts are in part inspired by all that and this is the first of a series of posts which will revisit posts from the first year of A Year In The Country.

And so, without further ado, the first of these “revisitings” jumps all the way back to one of the very first posts at A Year In The Country:

The collection of acid folk etc on the Gather in the Mushrooms compilation album released in 2004 was a notable inspiration for A Year In The Country. Particularly Trader Horne’s Morning Way, that begins with “Dreaming strands of nightmare, Are sticking to my feet”, which seemed to open something up in my mind and thoroughly cast aside any preconceptions of folk music I had.

Compiled by Bob Stanley of Saint Etienne, it has the subtitle The British Acid Folk Underground 1968-1974. Alongside Trader Horne it includes, amongst other things, an instrumental version of Magnet’s Corn Riggs from The Wicker Man soundtrack, the ethereal gothic folk of Forest’s Graveyard, Pentangle’s haunting take on traditional song Lyke Wake Dirge, Sandy Denny’s beguiling journey through love and the seasons Milk and Honey and Sallyangie’s Love in Ice Crystals, which features a rather young Mike Oldfield and his sister prior to his Tubular Bells fame.

The album is a rather fine and concise gathering and representation of the different strands of exploration in British folk in the late 1960s and into the 1970s, and although it is long out of print and can sometimes be a bit pricey used, it is well worth seeking out.

 

The original post published during the first year of A Year In The Country:

 

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Build Your Own Stonehenge Model Kits (and Other Sacred, Profane and Playful Simulacra): Wanderings 1/26

Now, I know that Stonehenge holds a unique place in people’s imaginations, and there are endless and ongoing debates about why  and how it was built etc.

Alongside more traditional heritage and archaeological interest in them, the sense of mystery, the ancient past and so on that stone circle’s often contain also interconnects with a “wyrd” or “otherly” sense of history, folk culture and so on, which has added to the interest in them.

I also knew that there have been an awful lot of books published on Stonehenge and stone circles in general. However, even allowing for all that I was still somewhat pleasantly surprised to see just how many Stonehenge model and construction kits of one form or another have been released commercially. In this post are just a few of those that I’ve come across.

English Heritage’s online shop stocks some of them along with all kind of Stonehenge ornaments, including two different “Stonehenges in a tin” (!)

English Heritage also used to sell a Stonehenge fridge magnet cross stitch kit, which I rather liked the idea and look of, as it seems to interweave so many things in a sort of slightly wrong but also interesting way; a certain Wicker Man-esque aesthetic, ancient history, traditional crafts, the commercialisation of religious or sacred souvenirs etc. Other related cross stitch items which I don’t think are still available from them include a bookmark and a keyring. For some reason the bookmark seems a bit more “acceptable” than a fridge magnet or a keyring, perhaps because books are often held in higher esteem than such things.

I like the figures of the visiters in the pop-out kit above, who seem to variously be questioning or bemused by Stonehenge, or in one case imagining an elaborate possibly worship orientated wooden structure over the top of it.

(Above: Stonehenge model kit with Arthurian extras, completed by zoidpinhead – link below.)

These various model kits seem to be a mixture, and possibly inspired by, an interest in the sacred, profane and at times just sheer playfulness. In that sense, they could well be filed alongside some of HeyKidsRocknRoll pop-up diorama sets of the likes of Delia Derbyshire, The Stone Tape, Quatermass and the Pit, The Wicker Man etc. Those dioramas could be considered examples of when contemporary secular cultural work, which for some people has gained an almost sacred-like aspect, is the inspiration for playful or child-like build at home ornaments.

Actually, surprisingly, I don’t think HeyKidsRocknRoll have made a Stonehenge or stone circle related diorama. A Halloween III: Season of the Witch set might well work, one which incorporated the film’s nefarious company scientists’ lab and their use of chippings from Stonehenge, the ancient power of which is used in novelty Halloween masks sold to the public, that are intended to bring about the destruction of their wearers.

Another reference point might also be Zupagrika’s various build your own Brutalist architecture kits, particularly those based on Soviet-era Eastern Bloc architecture, as that was built during and as symbols of a regime which attempted to do away with traditional religion and replace it with a belief or faith system based around the political system and its figureheads.

The above model isn’t a Stonehenge LEGO kit as it first may appear, but rather a LEGO compatible nanoblock kit, which in its utilising of the grey areas of copyright law could well be considered a form of profanity in terms of the corporate world’s belief systems.

I was rather taken by the above adapted kit, the photograph of which is included in an article on building your own miniature stonehenge garden – link below.

When I was searching for Stonehenge model kits I came across a blog called Clonehenge which contains a searchable set of posts, lists etc of Stonhenge replicas “from the megalithic follies of the 1800s to the present”. It includes amongst other things posts on retail bought and custom kit builds, large permanent replicas and laptophenge which, of course, does what it say on the can. And a whole lot, lot, lot more. Blimey, there’s been a fair old bit of Stonehenge clonehenging that’s gone on in the world.

And talking of mixing the sacred, profane and playful, last but not least, there’s Jeremy Deller’s inflatable bouncy castle replica which has travelled around Britain and the world. Funded in part by Creative Scotland and Arts Council England it is called, appropriately enough, and in a way that I expect both undercut and annoyed its critics, Sacrilege.

 

Links:

 

Elsewhere at A Year in the Country:

 

The A Year In The Country Books

There are currently eight A Year In The Country books:

Click the links above or below for more details.

Crossing the Boundaries of Woodland Wraiths, the Uncanny City, Edgeland Expeditions and Frontier Dreamscapes

For more details click here.

A Year In The County: Threshold Tales is an exploration of the edgelands, borderlands and liminal places in film; of the places whether literal, in the mind, cultural or amongst the paranormal realm where the boundaries between worlds, ways of life, the past and the future become thin and porous.

The book wanders amongst the overlooked, the hidden from view, isolated spaces and parallel planes of existence in cinema, taking in films that interconnect with both rural and urban “wyrd” culture from the shores of Albion out into the American Deep South and across the snowbound landscapes of Europe.

Amongst its pages, you’ll find a wide-ranging interthreaded journey that takes in the woodland wraiths of Without Name and The Watcher in the Woods, Columbus’ love letter to a time capsule of modernist architecture, Nadja and Vampir-Cuadecuc’s media phantom reimaginings of their genres, Dark Tower’s concrete bound haunting, Ghost Dog’s intertwining of spectral hip-hop with ancient Japanese tradition, No Surrender’s black comedy set amongst 1980s urban decay, the creating and discovering of new worlds of electronic sound in The Shock of the Future and the darkly seductive temptations of a preternatural carnival in Something Wicked This Way Comes.

Elsewhere the book journeys through the American wyrd frontier in Searching for the Wrong-Eyed Jesus and explores the folk horror precursor The White Reindeer, the unearthing of buried secrets in Stephen Poliakoff’s Hidden City and Glorious 39, the rudderless tumbling down the rabbit hole in Kate and Laura Mulleavy’s Woodshock and the thinning of the barriers of time and place in Mike Hodges’ Black Rainbow.

 

A Year In The Country: Lost Transmissions – Dystopic Visions, Alternate Realities, Paranormal Quests and Exploratory Electronica

For more details click here.

The book weaves amongst brambled pathways to take in the haunted soundscapes of electronica, the rise of the occult in the 1970s, cinema and television’s dystopian dreamscapes and hauntological work which creates and gives a glimpse into parallel worlds. It is a recording of a personal journey that delves amongst both the esoteric fringes and mainstream of culture, and which at times holds a shadowed scrying mirror up to the modern world and some of its ills, while also reflecting visions of a hopeful future in its depths.

Alongside other experimenters in electronic sound the book explores Boards of Canada’s invoking of “the past inside the present”; Paul Weller’s visiting of Ghost Box Records’ elsewhere universe; work by Cosey Fanni Tutti, Hannah Peel and the reformed Radiophonic Workshop, and their collaborations across time with electronic music pioneer Delia Derbyshire; Dominik Scherrer and Natasha Khan’s summoning of “pastoral spook” via a hidden language of angels; and takes a trip in the company of fairground and rural ghosts conjured up on records released by Castles in Space.

Alongside these it examines the paranormal and “worlds beyond” via the semi-lost supernatural-orientated television series Leap in the Dark which included work by Alan Garner and David Rudkin, Sharron Kraus’ contemporary investigations into the preternatural and the conjuring of modern-day phantasms in Luciana Haill’s artwork.

The book also includes an intertwined consideration of the “deluxe dystopias” that can be found in films such as Rollerball and Andrew Niccol’s Gattaca and prescient views of the future’s past and media collusion in film and television including Nigel Kneale’s work and the overlooked corners of science fiction.

 

A Year In The Country: Cathode Ray and Celluloid Hinterlands – The Rural Dreamscapes, Reimagined Mythical Folklore and Shadowed Undergrowth of Film and Television

For more details click here.

This book undertakes in-depth studies of films, television programmes and documentaries and wanders amongst depictions of rural areas where normality, reality and conventions fall away and the landscape becomes deeply imbued with hidden, layered and at times dreamlike stories, taking in modern-day reinterpretations of traditional myth and folklore and work that has become semi-obscured from view through being unofficially available or otherwise having become partly hidden away.

It explores film and documentary hinterlands including, amongst others, the embracing of the ‘old ways’ in The Wicker Man; John Boorman’s creation of an otherworldly Arthurian dreamscape in Excalibur; the alternate retelling of folk legend in Robin and Marian; the unreally vivid seeming snapshots of folk rituals in Oss Oss Wee Oss; the slipstream explorations of The Creeping Gardenand stories from the ‘haunted borderlands’ in Gone to Earthand The Wild Heart.

The book also investigates the hauntological spectral and ‘wyrd’ undergrowth of television, including, alongside other programmes, the unearthing of mystical buried powers in Raven; the utopian meeting of starships, pedlars and morris dancers in Stargazy on Zummerdown; teatime Cold War intrigues amongst bucolic isolation in Codename Icarus; the layering of time and myth in anthology drama series Shadows; Frankenstein-like meddling away from the mainland in The Nightmare Man; the magical activation of stone circles’ ancient defence mechanisms in The Mind Beyondepisode ‘Stones’; and the ‘Albion in the overgrowth’ recalibrating of mainstream television in Mackenzie Crook’s Worzel Gummidge.

Stephen Prince has dug hard to uncover these gems… A fine, thoughtful and thoroughly researched book… an invaluable guide.Cathi Unsworth, Fortean Times

 

A Year In The Country: Wandering Through Spectral Fields – Journeys in Otherly Pastoralism, the Further Reaches of Folk and the Parallel Worlds of Hauntology

For more details click here.

Wandering amongst the further reaches of folk culture, “otherly” pastoralism and their intertwining with the parallel worlds of hauntology, the book connects layered and, at times, semi-hidden cultural pathways and signposts, journeying from acid folk to edgelands via electronic music innovators, folkloric film and photography, dreams of lost futures and misremembered televisual tales and transmissions.

It includes considerations of the work of writers including Rob Young, John Wyndham, Richard Mabey and Mark Fisher, musicians and groups The Owl Service, Jane Weaver, Shirley Collins, Broadcast, the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, Virginia Astley and Kate Bush, the artists Edward Chell, Jeremy Deller and Barbara Jones and the record labels Trunk, Folk Police, Ghost Box and Finders Keepers.

The book also explores television and film including Quatermass, The Moon and the Sledgehammer, Phase IV, Beyond the Black Rainbow, The Spirit of Dark and Lonely Water, Bagpuss, Travelling for a Living, The Duke of Burgundy, Sapphire & Steel, General Orders No. 9, Gone to Earth, The Changes, Children of the Stones, Sleep Furiously and The Wicker Man.

A new book caught my eye recently – the title A Year In The Country: Wandering Through Spectral Fields, that goes in search of the darker, eerier side of the bucolic countryside dream by looking at films of a certain genre, books, TV series, music; it is great to have this fascinating subject explored so thoroughly and brought together under one title.Verity Sharp, Late Junction, BBC Radio 3

 

The Corn Mother novella

For more details click here.


The Corn Mother novella is both a standalone piece of work and also a further exploration of the world, stories and dreamscapes of an imaginary near-mythical film, which first began on an album released with the same name in 2018. It is an exploration and relection “of the whispers that tumble forth from the corn mother’s kingdom”. A place and story where fact, fiction, reality and dreams blur into one:

1878: A villager is forced to flee from her home after rumours begin that she has cursed the crops. Her vengeful spirit, known as the corn mother, is said to visit those responsible in the night, bringing ill fortune and an all-encompassing sense of guilt.

1982: A film called The Corn Mother begins to be made. Although the plot is fictional, it closely resembles the story of the fleeing villager. The film is completed but never released, with all known copies disappearing after its production company collapses.

1984: A lifelong quest begins to find the near-mythical film.

2020: All mentions of The Corn Mother begin to disappear from the world, calling into question if the film ever existed.

A fascinating and truly inventive novella… This is an original and significant piece of work, not only in its novel, singular and successful approach to folk horror and ‘imaginary’ films but in the creation of its own self referencing folklore.” Grey Malkin, Folk Horror Revival

 

The Shildam Hall Tapes novella

For more details click here.

The novella is both a standalone piece of work and also a  further exploration of an imaginary abandoned film that first began on an album called The Shildam Hall Tapes released in 2018. It is set among the cultural hinterlands of wyrd, otherly pastoral, folk, psychedelic and hauntological culture, and follows the journey of a song through time: one that appears to bring disarray to all who hear it. Is this coincidence or something more?

1799: A young woman who lives at the Shildam Hall country mansion writes a lament for a lover she can never be with, and locks it away forever.

1840: The song is discovered by one of her relatives and begins a journey through time. It entrances those who hear it, but does it also lead to their potential demise?

1969: A film set among the decadent milieu of late 1960s counterculture commences production at Shildam Hall, before collapsing amidst potential scandal after the song is rediscovered.

2004: A recording of the song is stumbled upon but all who listen to it seem to disappear…

Spellbinding… The Shildam Hall Tape releases are… stellar examples of a fertile imagination and of an ability to create a singular, immersive world, one that exists within our own world but is not quite of it, with odd corners and shadows.Grey Malkin, Moof magazine

 

A Year In The Country: Straying From The Pathways – Hidden Histories, Echoes of the Future’s Past and the Unsettled Landscape

For more details click here.

From eerie landscapes and folk horror to the dysfunctional utopian visions of Brutalist architects via hidden histories and hauntological reimagined cultural memories, the book explores such varied and curiously interconnected topics as the faded modernity and “future ruins” of British road travel; apocalyptic “empty city” films; dark fairy tales; the political undercurrents of the 1980s; idyllic villages gone rogue; photographic countercultural festival archives and experiments in “temporary autonomous zones”.

The book also discusses film, television and books, including: Requiem, Prince of Darkness, The Prisoner, The Company of Wolves, Detectorists, A Very Peculiar Practice, Edge of Darkness, Day of the Triffids, Penda’s Fen, High-Rise, The Living and the Dead, Night of the Comet, In the Company of Ghosts: The Poetics of the Motorway, The Twilight Language of Nigel Kneale, GB84, This Brutal World and The Fountain in the Forest, as well as music that draws from, or interconnects with, hauntological spectres and reimaginings of the past, including hypnagogic pop, synthwave and the work of Ghost Box Records, Adrian Younge, D.A.L.I., Grey Frequency, The Ghost in the MP3, DJ Shadow and Howlround amongst others.

Chock full of treasures, both well-known and obscure… the twelve chapters tackle their subjects in an accessible yet scholarly manner, never shying away from often weighty concepts but never using unnecessarily complex language when simple terms will do… Simply put, A Year in the Country: Straying from the Pathways is a delight, and will thrill existing seekers of hauntological fare as well as serve as an introductory hit to those yet to sample its enchantments.Alan Boon, Starburst

 

A Year In The Country: The Marks Upon The Land

For more details click here.

Collects all 104 images which were created during the first year of A Year In The Country – a visual exploration the patterns beneath the plough, pylons and amongst the edgelands, taking in the beauty and escape of rural pastures, intertwined with a search for expressions of an underlying unsettledness to the bucolic countryside dream.

The imagery in the book takes inspiration from and channels the outer reaches of folk culture and hauntology, alongside memories of childhood countryside idylls spent under the shadow of Cold War end of days paranoia and amongst the dreamscapes of dystopic science fiction tales.

The Marks Upon The Land… converts the bucolically familiar into something more eerie or even sinister, a series of widescreen mutations that create pareidolia spectres through symmetry and layering. Seen in isolation, these images are arresting enough but they gain power by being collected together, fashioning a statement of intent.” John Coulthart, feuilleton

 

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The Dangers of Straying from the Path and Tales of Lycanthropy Part 4 – A Consideration of Red Riding Hood, Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters, The Company of Wolves and their Varying Degrees of Separation from Folk Horror: Wanderings 41/52

Part 4 of a post that takes as some of its starting points the folk/fairy tale Little Red Riding Hood, the films The Company of Wolves, Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters and Red Riding Hood, alongside “The dangers of straying from the path and tales of lycanthropy” (visit Part 1 here, Part 2 here and Part 3 here).

The Wicker Man Collage-A Year In The Country-1080

As a final point or few in connection to such things, would it be fair to describe the likes of The Company of Wolves, Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters and Red Riding Hood as folk horror? They might not be directly connected to what has become a fairly compact near canon of folk horror cinema that includes at its core the films The Wicker Man (1973), Blood on Satan’s Claw (1971) and Witchfinder General (1968) but they do appear to contain some similarities with work that has come to be connected with folk horror.

To quote myself in the A Year In The Country: Wandering Through Spectral Fields book folk horror could be defined as often containing:

“…a sense of their inhabitants living in, or becoming isolated from, the wider world, allowing moral beliefs to become untethered from the dominant norms and allowing the space for ritualistic, occult, supernatural or preternatural events, actions and consequences to occur.”

A number of those characteristics can be found in The Company of Wolves et al, while their source material is often folk and/or fairy tales and they are all horror films in part. The communities they focus on often do appear isolated and in say Red Riding Hood there appears to be a breakdown of the rule of law and its restrictions on the arbitrary exercise of power, with their isolation enabling such actions to be undertaken in a relatively unfettered manner.

In The Company of Wolves and Red Riding Hood there is a kicking back against the authority and advice given by elders but this is more due to rites of passage rebellion than necessarily due purely to isolation from the wider world.

To a degree Red Riding Hood and Hansel & Gretel Witch Hunters could be considered connected to but not strictly folk horror in the subcultural sense that has flourished in recent years, while The Company of Wolves may possibly be more closely connected or entwined with it. In part those different degrees of closeness and separation are due to the way in which folk horror has often become a genre definition that refers to work of a more cult, subcultural and less mainstream commercial nature.

Such differing degrees of separation may in part be due as much to the mainstream, escapist, commercial and non-cult film nature of Red Riding Hood and Hansel & Gretel Witch Hunters as much as their cultural differences.

 

Elsewhere:

  1. The Company of Wolves trailer
  2. The Company of Wolves DVD and Blu-ray
  3. Red Riding Hood’s trailer
  4. Red Riding Hood DVD and Blu-ray
  5. Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters DVD and Blu-ray
  6. Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters trailer
  7. Folk Horror Revival
  8. The Book of the Lost
  9. A Fiend in the Furrows
  10. Robin Redbreast DVD
  11. The Wicker Man Wikia

 

Elsewhere at A Year In The Country:

  1. The Dangers of Straying from the Path and Tales of Lycanthropy Part 1 – The Cautionary Warnings of Little Red Riding Hood and The Company of Wolves: Wanderings 38/52
  2. The Dangers of Straying from the Path and Tales of Lycanthropy Part 2 – The Company of Wolves, the Thwarted Pop Career of Danielle Dax and the Bridging of Worlds: Wanderings 39/52
  3. The Dangers of Straying from the Path and Tales of Lycanthropy Part 3 – Hollywood Dons the Red Cloak Once More and Reveals “What They Did Next”: Wanderings 40/52

 

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The Folklore on Screen, Folk Horror in the 21st Century, The Geographies of Folk Horror and Contemporary Folk Horror in Film and Media Conferences – A Return to Investigations of the Spectral Landscape: Wanderings 36/52

Late summer in the UK this year there’s something of a gathering of academic conferences that focus on folk horror, the spectral undercurrents of folklore and the landscape and so on.

They could be considered this summer’s academic research flipside of the A Midsummer Night’s Happening, Weirdshire and The Delaware Road: Ritual & Resistance events that I wrote about earlier in the year.

Anyways, I thought it would be good to gather them together, and also to place them in a lineage of earlier events which explored similar themes.

The 2019 conferences are:

Folklore on Screen, presented by the Centre for Contemporary Legend at Sheffield Hallam University on 13-14th September 2019, which is described as “A 2-day international conference, with a hauntological music event”, and is said to explore “the meaning, import and relevance of folklore in the media and its representation, communication and perpetuation”.

The events at the conference are split into different categories: Monster Mash, Ghosts in the Machine, I Want to Believe, The Haunted Generation, The Devil Rides Out, Island of Lost Souls and At the Mountains of Madness, with some of the papers being presented having titles which include Beasts, Monoliths & Witchcraft – the Unsung Nigel Kneale and The Wicker Man and the misuses of Folklore.

In a connection to less academically orientated otherly folkloric, hauntological etc work, the event also features a panel called The Haunted Generation, the members of which are David Southwell of Hookland, Andy Paciorek of Folk Horror Revival/Wyrd Harvest Press and Bob Fischer, who writes The Haunted Generation column for Fortean Times, which the panel is named after.

In an interconnected manner to that panel, one of the organisers of the conference, Diane A. Rogers, also contributed an article and was interviewed for the Folk Horror Revival: Urban Wyrd – 2. Spirits of Place book (other members of the team behind the Centre for Contemporary Legend include David Clarke, Andrew Robinson and newer member Sophie Parkes-Nield).

Also, connected to the event, Heretics Folk Club are hosting an accompanying music night featuring Sharron Kraus, Cath & Phil Tyler and Hawthonn (coincidentally, back in the first year of A Year In The Country in 2014, I wrote about a Heretics Folk Club event where Sharron Kraus performed – the photograph/collage in the middle above is from that event.)

Coming soon/about now, there is a conference at Falmouth University on 5-6th September 2019, which is titled Folk Horror in the 21st Century.

Reproduced below is some of the accompanying text from the conference:

Since at least 2010, critics and bloggers have been working to define folk horror, understand its appeal, and establish its key texts, including what has become the central triumvirate of the folk horror canon of the 1960s and 1970s—Witchfinder General (Michael Reeves, 1968), Blood on Satan’s Claw (Piers Haggard, 1971), and The Wicker Man (Robin Hardy, 1973)… The 1960s and 1970s also saw a rise in folk horror texts in British literature and TV series: Robin Redbreast (1970), BBC’s A Ghost Story for Christmas (1971-78), Penda’s Fen (1974), Children of the Stones (1977), and Alan Garner’s novels The Owl Service (1967) and Red Shift (1973)… Critics have also begun to uncover a rich pre-history for the folk horror of the 1960s and 70s, looking back to the 19th and early 20th century fiction of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Arthur Machen, and M. R. James. But the history of folk horror can be traced still further back, to Beowulf, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Shakespeare, and the mystical poetry and witchcraft plays of the seventeenth century… At the same time, directors in the 21st century have been re-inventing the genre with such new incarnations with films such as The Blair Witch Project (1999), Eden Lake (2008), Wake Wood (2009), Kill List (2011), A Field in England (2013), The Witch (2015), The Hallow (2015), Without Name (2016), Apostle (2018), and Hereditary (2018)… This conference will aim to explore and represent the ‘state of the art’ of folk horror scholarship about all periods and regions…

This conference is organised by Ruth Heholt, Dawn Keetley, Joanne Parsons and David Devanny, and its website features a rather fascinating Bibliography, some of which I’ve already read and written about such as Robert Macfarlane’s article “The Eeriness of the English Countryside”, and I expect the rest could well keep me busy for a month or few…

As with Folklore on Screen, the conference is also accompanied by a musical event; this features We Are Muffy, a duo that comprises of Nick Duffy and Angeline Morrison, who are said to spin narratives “of remembered and imagined pasts”.

(Angeline Morrison also collaborated on an album called In the Sunshine We Rode the Horses, which was released under the name Rowan : Morrison. For that she worked with Stephen Stannard of The Rowan Amber Mill – it’s something of a fine album, that has its own character but also feels like listening to some lost acid/psych folk album from the late 1960s or some point in the 1970s. I’ve written about it elsewhere at A Year In The Country and it also features in the upcoming A Year In The Country: Straying from the Pathways book.)

While just gone, on 29th August 2019 the Royal Geographic Society hosted a conference called The Geographies of Folk Horror: from the Strange Rural to the Urban Wyrd, a selection of accompanying text for which is reproduced below:

Over approximately the last decade, Folk Horror has seen increasing popularity in films, blogs, books and on internet fan pages. Folk Horror concerns itself with marginal and liminal landscapes that in various ways are active in the production of the horrific. Folk Horror’s landscapes are predominantly rural, coding the countryside as oppositional to modernity and capable of hosting ancient secrets ready to be revived or unearthed to the terror of the outsider… The reach of Folk Horror arguably extends beyond the rural through the Urban Wyrd, wherein the cracks in the sheen of the cosmopolitan urban let forth the ghosts of occluded pasts and disturbing practices. This session therefore seeks to bring together those interested in Folk Horror, the Strange Rural, the Gothic countryside or the Urban Wyrd.

Those presenting papers at the conference were Katy Soar, Owain Jones and its co-organisers James Thurgill and Julian Holloway. Their respective paper’s were called “Wraith-like is this native stone”: folklore, folk horror and archaeological landscapes; Horror in (English) Folk Music and the Rise of Eco-Horror as a new Theme; On the Geographies of Folk Horror; and Sounding Folk Horror and the Strange Rural.

A more recent development that has emerged [from earlier] explorations of the strange and uncanny has been the retrospective coining of ‘Folk Horror’, a strain of horror based largely on (mis)representations of pastoral geographies and the people who inhabit them as menacing, malevolent and anti-modern.” (From James Thurgill’s paper.)

Also, coming up on 30-31st July 2020 is the Contemporary Folk Horror in Film and Media Conference, which will take place at Leeds Beckett University.

This conference is being organised by Melody Blackmore and Sue Chaplin, and although the programme is yet to be announced, the conference’s name suggests it will more be focusing on contemporary folk horror, although the website and accompanying text includes references to and potential ideas for papers on films and television dramas from the 1960s and through to contemporary times:

The 1960’s and 70s folk horror canon brought the ‘Unholy Trinity’ of Witchfinder General (1968), The Blood on Satan’s Claw (1971), and The Wicker Man (1973), establishing a platform for rural horror and isolated cults. There is a current folk horror revival, with films such as Kill List (2011), A Field in England (2013), The Witch (2015),and Midsommar (2019) heading the film and media popularity. But what does this mean? What cultural, political and social reflections are part of the folk horror renaissance?” (From text on the conference’s website.)

The above conferences continue a lineage of previous events and related academic research groups, some of which I have written about at A Year In The Country before, and which could be said, loosely, to explore the hauntological landscape and the undercurrents of folk/folklore.

Those earlier events include 2017’s Child Be Strange: A Symposium on Penda’s Fen, 2014’s A Fiend in the Furrows: Perspectives on Folk Horror in Literature Film and Music and The Alchemical Landscape research group at the University of Cambridge, which has hosted a number of ongoing events and discussions and focuses in part on “occultural” representations of rural, landscape and spectral work.

In a more strictly hauntological sense, in 2013 there was a one-day academic symposium at the National Media Museum organised by the Communication Culture and Media Research Group, which is part of the University of Bradford, and which focused on the legacy of philosopher Jacques Derrida, who coined the phrase/concept hauntology.

Going considerably further back, in 2003 there was a three-day academic conference on The Wicker Man called The Wicker Man: Readings Rituals and Reactions at the University of Glasgow, which lead in 2005 to the release of a book called Constructing The Wicker Man, that collected essays based on the papers presented at the conference. That in turn lead to a further academic collection of essays, The Quest for the Wicker Man: Historical, Folklore and Pagan Perspectives, that featured an intertwined set of writers and editors.

(As an aside, Constructing The Wicker Man is one of the rarer books that I have come across during the wanderings of A Year In The Country, and in that sense I would probably file it alongside the likes of Filming the Owl Service and the book version of Penda’s Fen’s script.)

There may have been earlier academic conferences etc along these lines than that 2003 one but I don’t know of them, and in some ways it could be considered something of a root or fount for all the following conferences listed in this post. It also follows what I think was the first release on DVD of The Director’s Cut (aka The Long Version) of The Wicker Man in 2002, which was one of the notable stepping-stones towards the growing popularity and exploration of folk horror etc, the flowering of which has been one of the factors which led to the hosting of the conferences listed in this post.

And why that flowering and interest? Well there are a number of possible factors, explanations and so on, some of which I wrote about earlier in the year in a post on The Disruption booklet, which documents a conversation between Andy Beckett and Roger Luckhurst on the 1975 gently post-apocalyptic television series The Changes, and also the abovementioned “The Eeriness of the English Countryside” article by Robert Macfarlane. Below I revisit some of the text and theories from those earlier posts:

Robert Macfarlane suggests in “The Eeriness of the English Countryside” that the current interest in the darker, eerie side of the landscape and pastoralism in culture may well be:

“…an attempt to account for the turbulence of England in the era of late capitalism. The supernatural and paranormal have always been means of figuring powers that cannot otherwise find visible expression. Contemporary anxieties and dissents are here being reassembled and re-presented as spectres, shadows or monsters: our noun monster, indeed, shares an etymology with our verb to demonstrate, meaning to show or reveal (with a largely lost sense of omen or portent).”

Connected to which, much of the canon of films and television that has come to be touchstones for contemporary hauntological and otherly folk work were made during the 1970s, a period when the UK experienced extended and extensive turmoil – a description which could also be applied to contemporary times.

Along which lines, in The Disruption booklet comparisons are drawn between the mid-1970s and the state of flux which British society was then in, and 2016-2017 when the conversation on The Changes in the booklet took place. It is suggested in it by Becket and Luckhurst that during that period, after the stability of the time when Britain’s Prime Ministers were John Major and Tony Blair – approximately the early 1990s until the current economic crisis began around 2007 – it was hard to predict the future, with Britain appearing to be going through a time of uncertainty.

Because of this they propose that the worries, catastrophes and the England-on-the-edge-of-disaster scenarios found in the likes of television dramas such as The Changes, The Survivors and the final Quatermass series, alongside the spectral, supernatural unearthings of The Stone Tape, as well as loosely-related, unsettling pastoral work, such as the triumvirate of folk horror films that includes Witchfinder General, Blood on Satan’s Claw and The Wicker Man, fit our era much better than they might have done 10 years ago:

“It feels like there has been an embrace of catastrophe across the spectrum, alarmist on the left, almost welcoming on the right. I suppose this also makes sense of us wanting to re-watch that whole strand of 1970s apocalyptic films now, and also that the culture seems compelled to remake them.”

An interconnected viewpoint on the reasons for the current interest in the confluence of wyrd folk, otherly pastoralism, hauntology etc could be that it is part of the creation of an imagined parallel world or plane of existence – one which variously allows for a break from the abovementioned “contemporary anxieties and dissents” or just because humans as a species seem to possibly uniquely be fascinated by and have a need to tell stories, spin yarns and create waking dreamscapes.

 

Links:

 

Elsewhere at A Year In The Country:

 

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The Prisoner Part 2 – Ongoing Battles and a Circle of Escape: Wanderings 34/52

Part 2 of a post on The Prisoner television series (visit Part 1 here), which tells of a secret agent who resigns, is abducted and incarcerated in a superficially pleasant isolated village, given the denomination No. 6 and does repeated battle with the authorities/his superiors who use complex and often convoluted methods to try and have him tell them why he resigned.

Throughout the series No. 6 battles with his interrogators – who as mentioned previously were a series of different No. 2s – and repeatedly asks and tries to find out who No. 1 is – i.e. who is ultimately in charge of The Village. In the final episode No. 6 rips a mask off who he thinks is No. 1 and the viewer is very briefly shown a glimpse of a face that appears to be his or at least a mirror of his No. 6’s. This was decidedly not the “resolving of the puzzle” reveal apparently expected by much of the audience and many may have missed even that it was No. 6’s own face as the face is distorted and only seen for a few seconds; apparently as result Patrick McGoohan had to go into hiding for a few days after the episode’s broadcast due to disgruntled viewers besieging his home.

Such details and the layered history of the series’ production is part of what has helped to create and maintain its ongoing cult following and fascination, something which it shares with that other cult British behemoth The Wicker Man (1973), which has had a notoriously chequered production and release history.

Accompanying which the series is open to almost endless debate, particularly due to it not providing a neatly resolved explanation as to just what had been going on and why, alongside Patrick McGoohan being often reluctant to discuss The Prisoner.

(Above left: the Dinky Toys released version of the Mini-Moke as featured in The Prisoner, which was released in the 1960s and reflecting both its rarity and the ongoing interest in The Prisoner that now tends to fetch hundreds of pounds online.)

One of the first times that he did was when he agreed to a series of interviews with Chris Rodley in 1983 which were intended to be used in a documentary called Six Into One – The Prisoner File which would have been shown on British television. These interviews were plagued by technical difficulties and Patrick McGoohan, despite agreeing to them, was a rather reticent and elusive interviewee and they and would largely be left unused in the documentary, which Patrick McGoohan disowned and apparently particularly disliked – as did Chris Rodley.

However sections of them would appear in Chris Rodley’s feature documentary In My Mind (2017), in which he explores the making of Six Into One and which he describes as:

“…a rare opportunity to try and put things right. The chance to make a new film, the film Patrick McGoohan deserves.”

The resulting documentary is a fascinating and heartfelt insight into the way in which Chris Rodley attempts to put to rest the ghosts that appear to have haunted him since his first attempt at a Prisoner related documentary proved unsatisfactory, The Prisoner in general and also Patrick McGoohan’s character and motivations in making the series.

One of the No. 2’s who attempts to break and interrogate No. 6 in the series says of him “He can make even the act of putting on his dressing gown appear a gesture of defiance” and this sense of rebellion about almost everything is a core feature of The Prisoner, something which seems to be reflected in the character of Patrick McGowan as shown during In My Mind when he seems to angrily resent even the act of needing to sign in when entering a studio for an interview and his daughter says during the documentary that as No. 6 he was not playing a part.

This is further reflected in In My Mind when McGoohan says that the general themes of The Prisoner had been with him for years, since he was a young boy when he was brought up in a very strict religious household and gone to a school with strict schoolmasters, something which he describes as “the individual little boy up against this sort of pressure” and the sense of isolation that can be felt in such a situation. He goes on to say that this is what the theme of The Prisoner is; the individual in revolt against the bureaucracy.

To a degree period footage of In My Mind shows him to be, as is his character in The Prisoner, a person of unbending will, who needs things to be just so. An “awkward” character in some ways – Lew Grade who commissioned the series is shown saying the following during In My Mind:

“Somebody once asked me ‘How do you get on with Patrick McGoohan?’. I said very easily, I have no problems with him at all. ‘Well how do you do it?’. I said very easily, I just give in to him.”

The nature and production of The Prisoner also in one way reflects that of Sapphire & Steel (1979-1982) in that it created its own unique visionary world within conventional mainstream cinema and did not provide an easy or resolved ending for its viewers. And also both its creator Peter J. Hammond and Patrick McGoohan would not go on to produce another similarly auteur like very distinctive project, although intriguingly when talking in In Your Mind McGoohan says that its concept is still rattling around in his mind.

His reluctance to talk about The Prisoner is explained by his daughter during In My Mind as being in part connected to its deliberately unresolved nature and her father wanting to leave work open to individual interpretation – that he did not wish to explain too much about its meaning nor did he believe in actors giving away their secrets. At the end of the interviews recorded for Six Into One he says that if his interviewees have understood any of it, it will be disappointing as he’s done the best to confuse them.

He also talks about The Prisoner’s connection to fairy tales:

“Of course I always loved fairy tales… I imagine most of us do, we like the fantasy, our myths, our legends, our belief that the impossible is possible – that anything can happen within the mind… (The Prisoner) had something of a fairytale about it.”

The ornate setting of Portmeirion as the series’ shooting location does indeed create an almost fairytale like aspect to The Prisoner but as with many fairy tales darkness and corruption lurk just under the surface (or not even that far) and Patrick McGoohan says in a further interview section also shown during In Your Mind that he always felt The Prisoner was designed for 1984 and so it was ironic that it was being broadcast again at the tail end of 1983.

1984 was the year chosen by George Orwell as the name of his iconic dystopian novel of the same name that was published in 1949, with 1984 depicted as being characterised by an unrelenting surveillance of the population combined with an unbending repression, control and authoritarianism.

These aspects are shared with the nature of The Village in The Prisoner, although in contrast with the grim austere urban society depicted in 1984 its inhabitants are in some ways nearer to being well-kept pampered pets within a superficially pleasant location but this conformist facade proves to be one of the ultimate fictional expressions of “the village gone bad”.

In fact the control and surveillance in The Prisoner while not always as overtly brutally applied as in 1984 is in some ways more invidious as even in their sleep The Village’s inhabitants may be having their dreams surveilled and being   subject to brainwashing and mind altering processes.

Ultimately the events in The Prisoner are shown as possibly being all part of some ongoing circle, as in its final shot there is a thunderclap and No. 6 is shown driving away on an open country road with a determined look in his eyes, repeating and mirroring the series’ opening sequence.

While this is not strictly a happy ending then it is at least one which shows that the unbending individual will eventually be free or hopefully have further moments of or a chance at freedom.

Elsewhere:

  1. The Prisoner opening sequence
  2. The Prisoner at 50 / trailer
  3. Portmeirion
  4. The Prisoner: 50th Anniversary Edition
  5. In Every Mind at Network’s site
  6. An In Every Mind review at The Unmutual – The Prisoner News Website
  7. The paperback of George Orwell’s 1984

 

Elsewhere at A Year In The Country:

  1. The Prisoner – Part 1 – A Visit to a Real Life High-Definition Dream: Wanderings 33/52
  2. The Wicker Man – Notes on a Cultural Behemoth: Chapter 10 Book Images
  3. Sapphire & Steel and Ghosts in the Machine – Nowhere, Forever and Lost Spaces within Cultural Circuitry: Chapter 15 Book Images
  4. Michael Radford’s 1984 Part 1 – The Privations of an Alternative Past, Present and Future, V for Vendetta and the Last Inch: Wanderings 19/52
  5. Michael Radford’s 1984 Part 2 – Pop Music Controversies and Pastoral Escape/Non-Escape: Wanderings 20/52

 

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The Folk Horror Revival: Urban Wyrd Books – Exploring Hidden Narratives from Between the Forgotten Cracks: Wanderings 28/52

Just recently published are the books Folk Horror Revival: Urban Wyrd – 1: Spirits of Time and Folk Horror Revival: Urban Wyrd – 2: Spirits of Place.

These two volumes are flipside companions to the other often more overtly rural and folk orientated Folk Horror Revival non-fiction books which contain work by multiple authors, with these new books focusing on the uncanny, unsettling and, as the titles suggest, the wyrd in urban settings. They take their initial inspiration from the urban wyrd concept and phrase created by author Adam Scovell, author of Folk Horror: Hours Dreadful and Things Strange, and describe urban wyrd as being:

A sense of otherness within the narrative, experience or feeling concerning a densely human-constructed area or the inbetween spaces bordering the bucolic and the built-up or surrounding modern technology with regard to another energy at play or in control; be it supernatural spiritual, historical, nostalgic or psychological. Possibly sinister but always somehow unnerving or unnatural.” (Quoted from Spirits of Time.)

While in his Introduction to Spirits of Time Adam Scovell says:

So, what essentially can be described as the Urban Wyrd ?… The Urban Wyrd is a form that taps into the undercurrent of the city. In a similar way to psychogeography, it can find new narratives hidden below the top-layer; of dark skulduggery and strangeness beyond the reasonable confines of what we consider part of city life.

(Above left: image by Grey Malkin from Spirits of Time.)

In a similar manner to hauntology or what is sometimes called wyrd folk, urban wyrd is not a strictly defined and delineated area of work or genre. In some ways it is more a loosely gathered common feeling, atmosphere or spirit. This sense of the looseness of what constitutes urban wyrd is acknowledged in Spirits of Time’s Foreword and also its Introduction, in which Adam Scovell describes urban wyrd as being more like a mode, i.e. nearer to a general sense of how something is expressed, rather than a genre or specifically defined category. It is connected in this sense to other loosely gathered grouped cultural areas including folk horror, hauntology, psychogeography etc and Spirit of Time contains a sense of caution with regards to narrowly overly defining such concepts:

Folk Horror does not quite work like a genre and, therefore, should be considered a mode instead. There are many such modes with interlinking material – terms often bandied about such as Hauntology, Psychogeography et al. – that fit within some schemata of a mode. They have enough shared material to understand why they are discussed in the same breath but enough difference to accept that amalgamating everything under one descriptive banner homogenises material, undermines much of its thematic nuance and can be too general… Like all of these terms [Urban Wyrd] is just another context, another way of seeing material grouped together. It is not designed to dissect them and remove their dark hearts.” (Quoted from Spirit of Time’s Introduction.)

As discussed in the Introduction, urban wyrd, can be seen as a way of remythologising cities, as much of hauntology and folk horror does for sometimes interlinked subjects and/or types of areas. It can also be seen as an expression or attempt to add a hidden, not fully explained, sometimes near mystical layering to contemporary life and is in contrast to the modern-day prevalence of focusing on the rational, scientific, that which is fully explained and so on. Urban wyrd in part could be considered as a way of adding mystery and what was once known as magic to urban environments and in this way could also be thought of as being loosely connected to similar attempts and urges in past and current religion and spirituality.

As with hauntology, work which could (loosely) be labelled urban wyrd often utilises known and recognisable locations but then adds a sense of the unnerving, unsettling, the uncanny to this. As Adam Scovell also says in his Introduction in reference to this and Quatermass and the Pit: “In the tunnel where you get the tube, there could be a devilish Martian craft under the brickwork”. An equivalent in folk horror, hauntology etc could be considered the beauty and nourishment provided by nature and rural landscapes, which become something much more unsettling in The Wicker Man; the pleasant rural village in The Midwich Cuckoos which becomes a site for an in some ways subtly enacted alien invasion; previous eras’ TV station idents becoming spectral totems which are imbued with an underlying “otherlyness” and so on.

These things all curiously interlink, which is something I discuss in the chapter “Spectral Echoes: Hauntology’s Recurring Themes and Unsettled Landscapes”, which I contributed to Spirits of Time:

“Hauntological orientated work is often, although again not exclusively, urban orientated and at times conjures a landscape where Brutalist architecture and post-war new towns become part of a parallel world hinterland of the imagination in which all is not quite what it seems and that can contain a subtly off-kilter dystopic or unsettled atmosphere. Although not obvious bedfellows it has also curiously come to share territory and intertwine with the further reaches of folk culture and what could be loosely called wyrd folk, an otherly pastoralism or eerie landscapism. 

“On the surface such more rural flipside of folkloric and hauntological cultural forms are very disparate and yet both have come to explore and share similar landscapes. What may be one of the underlying linking points with both wyrd folk etc and hauntology is a yearning for lost utopias; in more otherly folkloric orientated culture this is possibly related to a yearning for lost Arcadian idylls, in hauntological culture it may be connected to a yearning for lost progressive post-war futures and a past that was never quite reached.

“Particular points of interconnection could be seen to be the sometimes focusing in related work on abandoned or decommissioned Cold War infrastructure including once secret bunkers and also electricity pylons and broadcast towers. Such bunkers etc. although often rural in location also often share a Brutalist architectural aesthetic with the likes of concrete built urban schools, government buildings, tower blocks etc. from previous decades.

“Despite their utilitarian day-to-day nature rural and urban located electricity pylons and broadcast towers in hauntological and otherly pastoral orientated work, as with abandoned bunkers and Brutalist architecture, have become symbols and signifiers of an eerily layered landscape.”

The two Folk Horror: Urban Wyrd books jointly contain nearly 1000 (!) pages and have literally dozens of chapters by also literally dozens of authors. Below is just a slight taster:

Quatermass and the Pit: Unearthing Archetypes at Hobb’s End by Grey Malkin 

The Haunted Generation: An Interview with Bob Fischer 

A Tandem Effect: Ghostwatch by Jim Moon 

Voices of the Ether: Stone Tapes, Electronic Voices and Other Ghosts by James Riley 

An Interview with Richard Littler – Mayor of Scarfolk. 

“We Want You to Believe In Us, But Not Too Much”: UFOs and Folklore by S J Lyall 

“This isn’t for Your Eyes” – The Watchers by Richard Hing 

City in Aspic: Don’t Look Now by Andy Paciorek 

Review: Concretism – For Concrete and Country by Chris Lambert

Phantoms and Thresholds of the Unreal City by John Coulthart

Iain Sinclair: Spirit Guide to the Urban Wyrd – Interviewed by John Pilgrim

The City That Was Not There: ‘Absent’ Cityscapes in Classic British Ghost Stories by Anastasia Lipinskaya

High Weirdness: A Day-trip to Hookland by Andy Paciorek 

The Voice of Electronic Wonder: The Music of Urban Wyrd by Jim Peters 

 

Find out more about the books via the links below…

Links: 

 

Elsewhere at A Year In The Country:

 

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Hot Fuzz aka Rural Weapon Part 2 – The Village Gone Rogue: Wanderings 13/52

This is Part 2 of a post on Edgar Wright’s film Hot Fuzz. Part 1 can be visited here.

In Part 1 of this post I wrote about how Hot Fuzz referenced and was an affectionate home to American action buddy copy films such as Point Break, the Bad Boys and Lethal Weapon series of films (and also mentioned how Wright says that he originally pitched it as Rural Weapon).

Alongside it referencing such films, there is a strong nod towards what has come to be known as folk horror, in particular The Wicker Man (1973); in both films a priggish outsider policeman attempts to solve a mystery in a rural community where something untowards may be afoot and is lead on a merry dance by its inhabitants. This connection is made more implicit by the presence of Edward Woodward in Hot Fuzz, in his second to last cinema role.

In The Wicker Man Woodward played the priggish policeman Sergeant Howie who was investigating the rural folk on the side of the law and (to his mind) societal decency. This is stood on its head in Hot Fuzz as he is involved in the murderous conspiracy and is eventually shown as the last living rogue villager when near the film’s end he bursts into the police station and attempts to shoot Angel. He is foiled but accidentally activates a sea mine which Angel had earlier confiscated along with an arms cache from a villager. He is killed and the station is destroyed in a manner that in seems to bring to an end or close the circle of a story cycle in British cinema.

The film also has nods towards 1970s British horror, in particular that era’s portmanteau films and interest in witchcraft and the occult; ultimately the murderous conspiracy is shown to be the result of the actions of an essentially morally corrupt/very misguided village organisation (the Neighbourhood Watch Alliance or NWA – a humorous reference to and contrasting with the American urban gangster rap group). When Angel visits a secret NWA meeting they appear to be nearer to a coven or cult as they have gathered at night in black shawls and hoods around a stone table in a castle. However they still retain a curious friendly neighbourhood committee air as they discuss their dastardly deeds, which is mined for comic effect.

In a further connection to 1970s horror the death/murder of a journalist who is planning on revealing information about goings on in the village by falling church masonry also seems to reference such things in The Omen (1976), wherein a priest who is attempting to reveal secrets is killed by a lightning rod thrown from a church roof during a storm. While the film also references Hammer Horror-esque gothic films when Angel flees the NWA and falls into a catacombs filled with the bones and dead of those they have killed.

(Notably these murders have taken place due to relatively minor infractions which threatened to infringe on the village’s bucolic “ye-olde world” atmosphere, such as a metallic painted living statue mime artist who is found by Angel still holding his mime pose despite his deceased nature.)

Although to my knowledge not openly referenced by Hot Fuzz’s director or co-writers the film also shares some territory with an episode of the remake of television series Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased) which was broadcast on British television in 2000-2001. In particular the episode Man of Substance which also tells of a sleepy country idyll gone bad and is rather folk-horror like in its plot which tells that its population have been trapped in between life and death, unable to leave the village since the days that a pestilence had caused the demise of a considerable percentage of the English population a number of centuries previously.

As with Hot Fuzz this episode (and others in the series) is in part an affectionate homage to previous era’s horror and genre cinema, particularly in relation to folk/rural aspects of such work.

At the NWA meeting the head of the local police Inspector Frank Butterman, Danny’s father in the film who is played by Jim Broadbent, is shown as being one of the instigators of the conspiracy in a thoroughly misguided attempt to honour his wife’s memory and her wish to keep the Village of the Year title.

In contrast to Nicholas Angel his uniform appears to be nearer to that of an earlier era. This subtly unsettles expectations and norms as in a rural setting such a figure summons a sense of an avuncular “good old British bobby” and a previous gentler way of life rather than the mayhem over which he has presided.

As in The Murdersville episode of television series The Avengers, which I have written about at A Year In The Country previously and also The Wicker Man, Hot Fuzz flips the chocolate box idyll of the British village and rural communities on its head and shows them to be the “unknown” or other; a threatening and deceitful group closed and separate to the outsider or city dweller, with ways, morals and motivations that appear foreign and at a far remove from mainstream and urban society’s mores.

Hot Fuzz’s reversing of expectations and settings is further heightened when in a climactic scene Angel pursues and fights another of the conspiracy’s prime instigators ocal supermarket manager Simon Skinner, played by former James Bond Timothy Dalton, who is the film’s resident arrogant bad guy.

This scene takes part in a symbol of gentle Britishness – a miniature model village – with Angel and Skinner towering over the buildings and seeming nearer at points to giant battling monsters that might be found in science fiction/fantasy films. As with similar sequences in such films their fight leads to the literal destruction of whole structures, although here they are the small-scale replicas of the model village rather than say actual city skyscrapers.

After his first defeat and mirroring many such multiple returns of the bad guy in American genre film Skinner rises back up and attempts to attack Angel with a small plastic handled box-cutting knife rather than say a machete or similar weapon that might be seen in its overseas equivalent. The use of this prosaic and relatively small weapon along with the general wrongness of the setting of a pitched violent battle in a model village heighten the sense of the out-of-place nature of such actions amongst a bucolic idyll.

Before being defeated Skinner shouts:

“Get out of my village.”

To which Angel replies:

“It’s not your village anymore.”

Which would seem an apt point on which to end this post.

 

Elsewhere:

 

Elsewhere at A Year In The Country:

 

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Hot Fuzz aka Rural Weapon Part 1 – Flash and Spectacle Amongst the Bucolia: Wanderings 12/52

Hot Fuzz is a British made buddy cop action comedy film released in 2007, directed by Edgar Wright and co-written by him and its lead actor Simon Pegg.

In the film over achieving London police officer Nicholas Angel, played by Pegg, who takes his work very seriously, is relocated to Sandford, a place which initially appears to be a typical sleepy quaint British village.

However things are not as they seem and Angel and his colleagues are soon embroiled in a murderous conspiracy by prominent members of the village who are intent that no matter what Sandford will continue to win Village of the Year; cue fellow villagers and visitors who may get in the way of that being sent to their demise via the likes of large-scale explosions, tumbling masonry, and decapitation in a car accident.

In Sandford Angel is presented as somebody who is somewhat out-of-place after the hustle and grittier experiences of city policing, something which is heightened by his wearing of modern protective police wear and equipment despite him being likely to need it in the general peace and calm of his new surroundings. This is also in contrast to his new police duty partner Danny Butterworth, played by Nick Frost, who at least until the later action sequences, is more likely to be seen wearing a woolen policeman’s jumper and in both character and appearance is possibly nearer to the idealised image of the classic friendly British country policeman.

Butterworth is portrayed as a quite sweet, gentle, good-hearted soul but also as somebody who, in a similar manner to the film itself, is enthralled to the classic American buddy cop action film, the glamour of the shoot out and the chase etc and also more than slightly in awe of this “big city” newcomer and his metropolitan experiences.

Edgar Wright has said that he wanted to make a cop action film because unlike much of the rest of the world at the time Britain did not particularly have a tradition of such cinema – although to a degree it did on television via the likes of gritty police drama The Sweeney (1975-1978).

(As an aside in Hot Fuzz the two police detectives, both of whom are called Andy Wainwright and are played by Paddy Considine and Rafe Spall, seem to be channelling similar characters from some earlier decade in terms of their belligerent swaggering attitude, top lip moustaches and vaguely period clothing – sort of The Sweeney via 1980s police timeslip series Ashes to Ashes which was broadcast in 2009 to 2010.)

There have been a long line of American buddy cop action films such as Point Break, the Bad Boys and Lethal Weapon series of films etc (the first two of which are explicitly referenced in Wright’s film and he has said that he originally pitched the film as Rural Weapon) and as with many of such films at the heart of Hot Fuzz is the relationship between the contrasting characters of two “buddy” police officers, in this Angel and Butterworth.

Hot Fuzz transfers Hollywood action and cop movie aesthetics to a British rural setting and makes direct and indirect references to such American films in an often humorous manner but it is not so much a parody, spoof or satire of them but rather an affectionate homage and seems to hold its source material in high esteem.

Despite the relatively high production values, special effects and so forth, in some indefinable manner that is separate to its setting and characters Hot Fuzz retains a sense of being British drama – there is a subtle awkwardness to it that seems to reflect a film industry that has never fully embraced the flash and spectacle of Hollywood style cinema.

Connected to which there is a curious disconnect when watching an at times all out action film of this type set in a British village, its local supermarket etc and on seeing American style action, heroics and gunplay undertaken by British policemen, with much of the film’s humour and character being derived from the appearance and use of the trappings of wider cinema’s action cop films, such as chases, fight scenes, automatic weapons and explosions etc in the unexpected setting of a rural British village.

In this sense it shares some territory with Malcolm Pryce’s book Aberystwyth Mon Amour, which depicts a modern-day parallel world version of the Welsh seaside town Aberystwyth but which is run by druids who are essentially to all intents and purposes actually “gangsters in mistletoe”.

Alongside referencing American buddy cop action comedy films Hot Fuzz also makes a more than cursory nod towards other genres including Westerns and previous British horror and folk horror films, in particular The Wicker Man, The Omen, gothic Hammer Horror and even giant monsters on the rampage in the city films.

More on which in Part 2…

(Exploring similar territory to the current trend for alternative movie poster reinterpreting of films; the finding an old mine and arms cache scene in Hot Fuzz depicted in Lego construction bricks.)

 

Elsewhere:

Elsewhere at A Year In The Country:

 

Index: Year 5

Click the links below to peruse the indexes for the different years of A Year In The Country:

All Years     –      Year 1     –      Year 2      –      Year 3      –     Year 4      –      Year 5      –     Year 6      –     Year 7      –     Year 8

 

The Changes / The Disruption – Notes on a Flipside of the Pastoral Conversation – Part 1: Wanderings 1/52 (And the Start of a New Yearly Cycle)
Grey Frequency’s Immersion: Audio Visual Archive 1/52
The Changes / The Disruption – Notes on a Flipside of the Pastoral Conversation – Part 2: Wanderings 2/52
Hand of Stabs – Black-Veined White: Audio Visual Archive 2/52
Robert Macfarlane, Benjamin Myers, The Eeriness of the English Countryside and Unravelling of Dizzying Mazes: Wanderings 3/52
Michael Tanner’s Nine of Swords: Audio Visual Archive 3/52
When Haro Met Sally, John Hughes, Stranger Things, Twins of Evil, Hauntology and Dark Seed – Parallel World Reimaginings and Phantasms: Wanderings 4/52
The Quietened Village – Preorder and Release Dates
She Rocola’s Burn The Witch / Molly Leigh Of The Mother Town: Audio Visual Archive 4/52
Night of the Comet Part 1 – Shopping and Respect in “Empty Cities” at the End of the World: Wanderings 5/52
Howlround – Torridon Gate: Audio Visual Archive 5/52
Luciana Haill’s Apparitions – A Modern-Day Conjuring of Phantasms and Peering Down the Corridors of Time: Wanderings 6/52
Twalif X – Racker&Orphan: Audio Visual Archive 6/52
Night of the Comet Part 2 – Post-Apocalyptic Positivity in “Empty Cities” at the End of the World: Wanderings 7/52
The Quietened Village – Preorder
A Year In The Country – Airwaves: Songs From The Sentinels: Audio Visual Archive 7/52
The Debatable Lands, Undulating Waters, In The Sunshine We Rode The Horses and Ufology – Audio Undercurrents Part 1: Wanderings 8/52
Fractures: Audio Visual Archive 8/52
The Delaware Road, Mo’Wax, UNKLE, DJ Shadow, Tricky, Portishead, Massive Attack, Boards of Canada, Moon Wiring Club, DJ Food, Belbury Poly, The Memory Band, Grantby, the BBC Radiophonic Workshop and Andrea Parker – Universe Creation and Spectral Lines in the Cultural Landscape: Wanderings 9/52
The Quietened Bunker: Audio Visual Archive 9/52
John Carpenter’s Christine Part 1 – Anthropomorphisation, Magical Realism and Rock’n’Roll Dream Lovers: Wanderings 10/52
A Year In The Country – Spectral Fields – Wyrd Kalendar Mix 3 and the “What is hauntology? And why is it all around us?” BBC Archive Film
No More Unto the Dance: Audio Visual Archive 10/52
The Quietened Village – Released
John Carpenter’s Christine Part 2 – Autonomous Zones, Night Time Edgelands and the Restoration of the Natural Order: Wanderings 11/52
The Forest / The Wald: Audio Visual Archive 11/52
Hot Fuzz aka Rural Weapon Part 1 – Flash and Spectacle Amongst the Bucolia: Wanderings 12/52
The Restless Field: Audio Visual Archive 12/52
Hot Fuzz aka Rural Weapon Part 2 – The Village Gone Rogue: Wanderings 13/52
From The Furthest Signals: Audio Visual Archive 13/52
Reflections on Brutalism Part 1 – This Brutal World and a Study of The Shape of the Futures Past: Wanderings 14/52
Undercurrents – Audio Visual Archive 14/52
Reflections on Brutalism Part 2 – This Brutal World, Industrial Inspirations for Blade Runner, Memories of the Space Age and the Future Takes a Tumble: Wanderings 15/52
The Quietened Cosmologists – Audio Visual Archive 15/52
Reflections on Brutalism Part 3 – J. G. Ballard and Ben Wheatley’s High-Rise and All Mod Con Dystopias: Wanderings 16/52
All The Merry Year Round – Audio Visual Archive 16/52
Reflections on Brutalism Part 4 – A Return to the Experimentations and Aesthetics of This Brutal World and Paul Virilio’s Bunker Archaeology: Wanderings 17/52
The Watchers – Album Preorder and Release Dates
Audio Albion – Audio Visual Archive 17/52
Reflections on Brutalism Part 5 – A Curious Collector’s Piece and a Return to Acts of Enclosure: Wanderings 18/52
The Shildam Hall Tapes – Audio Visual Archive 18/52
Michael Radford’s 1984 Part 1 – The Privations of an Alternative Past, Present and Future, V for Vendetta and the Last Inch: Wanderings 19/52
The Quietened Village – Writing, Broadcasts and Traces of Ghosts
The Quietened Mechanisms – Audio Visual Archive 19/52
Michael Radford’s 1984 Part 2 – Pop Music Controversies and Pastoral Escape/Non-Escape: Wanderings 20/52
The Watchers – Preorder
The Corn Mother – Audio Visual Archive 20/52
Broken Folk, Is it Clearer? and Akiha Den Den – Audio Undercurrents Part 2: Wanderings 21/52
Grey Frequency – Immersion: Audio Visual Archive 21/52
A Midsummer Night’s Happening, Weirdshire and The Delaware Road: Ritual & Resistance – A Spectral Summer is a-Coming in: Wanderings 22/52
Hand of Stabs – Black-Veined White: Audio Visual Archive 22/52
The Fountain in the Forest – Further Explorations of Hidden History, Timeslip, the Ending of Arcadian Idylls and Pulp Fiction Subversion: Wanderings 23/52
No More Unto The Dance: Audio Visual Archive 23/52
The Watchers – Released
Stand By Me – The Undercurrents of an Unsupervised Journey Away from the White Picket Fences: Wanderings 24/52
Michael Tanner – Nine of Swords: Audio Visual Archive 24/52
Brick High-Rise – A Rather Curious Lego Simulacra of Ballardian Transgression: Wanderings 25/52
She Rocola – Burn The Witch / Molly Leigh Of The Mother Town: Audio Visual Archive 25/52
Looker and the Imagined Omnipotence of the 1980s Computer – Part 1: Wanderings 26/52
Howlround – Torridon Gate: Audio Visual Archive 26/52
The Watchers – Reviews, Broadcasts and Journeys amongst The Haunted Generation, The Unquiet Meadow, the Witching Hour and Other Flipside Furrows
Electric Dreams and the Imagined Omnipotence of the 1980s Computer – Part 2: Wanderings 27/52
Echoes And Reverberations – Preorder and Release Dates
Racker & Orphan – Twalif X: Audio Visual Archive 27/52
The Folk Horror Revival: Urban Wyrd Books – Exploring Hidden Narratives from Between the Forgotten Cracks: Wanderings 28/52
A Year In The Country – Airwaves: Songs From The Sentinels: Audio Visual Archive 28/52
Wolfen – Urban Decay, Sidestepping Genre Expectations, Lost Visions and a Brief Visit to The Keep’s Dreamscape: Wanderings 29/52
Fractures: Audio Visual Archive 29/52
A Very Peculiar Practice and Battles with the Old Guard: Wanderings 30/52
Echoes And Reverberations – Preorder
The Quietened Bunker: Audio Visual Archive 30/52
Day of the Triffids Part 1 – The Farmers Becoming the Hunted: Wanderings 31/52
The Forest / The Wald: Audio Visual Archive 31/52
Day of the Triffids Part 2 – Post-Apocalyptic Debate / Optimism: Wanderings 32/52
The Marks Upon The Land: Audio Visual Archive 32/52
The Prisoner Part 1 – A Visit to a Real Life High-Definition Dream: Wanderings 33/52
The Restless Field: Audio Visual Archive 33/52
Echoes And Reverberations – Released
The Prisoner Part 2 – Ongoing Battles and a Circle of Escape: Wanderings 34/52
From The Furthest Signals: Audio Visual Archive 34/52
The Quiet Earth – Loneliness and Redemption in the Empty City Film: Wanderings 35/52
The A Year in the Country: Straying from the Pathways Book – Release Date 8th October 2019
Undercurrents: Audio Visual Archive 35/52
The Folklore on Screen, Folk Horror in the 21st Century, The Geographies of Folk Horror and Contemporary Folk Horror in Film and Media Conferences – A Return to Investigations of the Spectral Landscape: Wanderings 36/52
The Quietened Cosmologists: Audio Visual Archive 36/52
Andrew Niccol’s Gattaca, In Time and Anon – Striving for the Stars in a Brutalist Retro Future and Other Near Future Tales: Wanderings 37/52
All The Merry Year Round: Audio Visual Archive 37/52
The Dangers of Straying from the Path and Tales of Lycanthropy Part 1 – The Cautionary Warnings of Little Red Riding Hood and The Company of Wolves: Wanderings 38/52
Audio Albion: Audio Visual Archive 38/52
A Year In The Country at The Haunted Generation and Kites and Pylons
The Dangers of Straying from the Path and Tales of Lycanthropy Part 2 – The Company of Wolves, the Thwarted Pop Career of Danielle Dax and the Bridging of Worlds: Wanderings 39/52
The Shildam Hall Tapes: Audio Visual Archive 39/52
The Dangers of Straying from the Path and Tales of Lycanthropy Part 3 – Hollywood Dons the Red Cloak Once More and Reveals “What They Did Next”: Wanderings 40/52
Echoes And Reverberations Reviews and Broadcasts (and Something of a Revisiting of The Quietened Village, The Corn Mother, The Quietened Bunker, The Watchers, The Quietened Mechanisms and All The Merry Year Round)
The Quietened Mechanisms: Audio Visual Archive 40/52
The Dangers of Straying from the Path and Tales of Lycanthropy Part 4 – A Consideration of Red Riding Hood, Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters, The Company of Wolves and their Varying Degrees of Separation from Folk Horror: Wanderings 41/52
The A Year In The Country: Straying From The Pathways Book – Released
The Corn Mother: Audio Visual Archive 41/52
The Nightmare Man Part 1 – Cold War Paranoia, The Island as Restorative Balm and Unsettling “Other”: Wanderings 42/52
Grey Frequency – Immersion: Audio Visual Archive 42/52
The Nightmare Man Part 2 – Frankenstein-like Meddling, Vodaynoid Myths and Exploratory Portals: Wanderings 43/52
Racker & Orphan – Twalif X: Audio Visual Archive 43/52
Constructing The Wicker Man and Explorations of the Bright, Beautiful and Serene Anti-Horror of Summerisle from Back When: Wanderings 44/52
The Quietened Journey – Preorder and Release Dates
A Year In The Country – Airwaves: Songs From The Sentinels: Audio Visual Archive 44/52
Designed in the USSR 1950-1989 and Further Wanderings Amongst a Bear’s Ghosts: Wanderings 45/52
Fractures: Audio Visual Archive 45/52
Seph Lawless’ Abandoned Theme Park Images and the Duality of a Library of Loss: Wanderings 46/52
The Quietened Journey – Preorder
No More Unto The Dance: Audio Visual Archive 46/52
In the Company of Ghosts – The Poetics of the Motorway Part 1 and The Joy of Motorway Service Stations – Considerations of Faded Futuristic Glamour: Wanderings 47/52
The Forest / The Wald: Audio Visual Archive 47/52
In the Company of Ghosts – The Poetics of the Motorway Part 2 – The Romance of the Open Road in 1970s Chocolate Bar Adverts and the Stark Glamour of Radio On: Wanderings 48/52
A Year In The Country: Straying From The Pathways – Wanderings Amongst a “Haunted House of a Book”
From The Furthest Signals: Audio Visual Archive 48/52
British Rail: Designed 1948-97 – Notes from an Impossibly Far Off History: Wanderings 49/52
Audio Albion: Audio Visual Archive 49/52
The Quietened Journey – Released
Woodshock – A Rudderless Tumbling Down the Rabbit Hole: Wanderings 50/52
The Shildam Hall Tapes: Audio Visual Archive 50/52
Strange Invaders – Paranoia, Safety and a Gently Skewed 1950s via the 1980s: Wanderings 51/52
The Quietened Mechanisms: Audio Visual Archive 51/52
The Corn Mother: Audio Visual Archive 52/52
Edge of Darkness, Lost Futures, Mark Fisher, Look Around You, Moon Stallion and Universal Harvester – The End of a Yearly Cycle and Something of a Round Up: Wanderings 52/52

 

Click the links below to peruse the indexes for the different years of A Year In The Country:
Year 1     –      Year 2      –      Year 3      –     Year 4      –      Year 5      –     Year 6      –     Year 7      –     Year 8

 

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The Changes / The Disruption – Notes on a Flipside of the Pastoral Conversation – Part 1: Wanderings 1/52 (And the Start of a New Yearly Cycle)

Well, the start of a new yearly cycle of A Year In The Country (and good cheer to you all!)…

…in order to draw a line between previously visited pastures and new harvestings, I thought to begin with The Disruption, a publication that focuses on the 1975 television series The Changes…

As I have referred to before at A Year In The Country one of the interesting things with the relatively quite small and compact area of 1970s folk horror and related otherly pastoral/hauntological television and film is that points of cultural interest in regards to them are now often not purely the actual programmes etc themselves but also includes work they have influenced and inspired people to make.

Which brings me to the just mentioned The Disruption, which is a booklet published by Texte und Töne that contains a conversation between the authors and academics Andy Beckett and Roger Luckhurst on the also just mentioned television series The Changes.

In the series a strange sound inhabits the brains of the inhabitants of Britain and drives them to destroy and fear any modern technology, leading to societal collapse and a return to medievalism. The story is told via a schoolgirl who has become separated from her parents and who sets off on a quest across the countryside to reunite with them and ultimately solve the mystery of what has caused these extreme disruptions. During the series England is shown to have become a place of authoritarian medieval hierarchy, roving gangs and witch hunts.

Along the way it takes in her finding a temporary surrogate home away from the city with a group of wandering Sikhs and she is accused of sorcery by a witch-finder. Ultimately it is discovered that The Changes are due to the awakening of a sentient lode-stone which had once given magical powers to Merlin and which is now trying to take England back to a better time, before the Industrial Revolution, when people were more at one with nature and each other.

Below are presented some of the main themes and topics discussed in The Disruption – essentially in part a selective precis, alongside comments on some of their conversation on The Changes. Unless otherwise stated sections in italics are direct quotes from the publication:

“It travels to the same dark and anti-pastoral territory as David Rudkin/Alan Clarke’s Penda’s Fen (1974) and the Nigel Kneale scripted Murrain (1975).”

While taking the series as its initial starting point, in part booklet is a discussion about the general social, cultural and political background in which the programme was made and broadcast, in particular in relation to the counter-culture in Britain from the 1960s and 1970s in terms of hippies and alternative ways of life and how that continued in some ways into the 1990s (re crusties, travellers, the Peace Convoy etc).

“The appearance of Merlin at the end of The Changes is another… older element, a return to an English mystical tradition that’s trying to find something underneath modernity.” 

Although expressed via an apocalyptic occurrence in society, in part The Changes could be seen as a reflection of an early 1970s yearning to return to the land and simpler more wholesome times and ways, of rediscovering the pastoral, folk music and culture.

In the series the characters have had to flee for their lives from the cities and they find themselves in a landscape that is in some ways a pleasant rural idyll, the apocalypse it presents seems almost gentle and society seems to largely fairly easily move back to:

“…it’s quite nice out there where they’ve taken refuge: high summer, archetypal English landscapes – the sort of rural loveliness a lot of counter-cultural people wanted in the 1970s, and which made them leave the cities, to try to find more mellow and fulfilled lives in Gloucestershire or Wales.”

In their conversation Beckett and Luckhurst consider how the attack on technology in The Changes echoes the attacks made on the new automated looms and the resultant crisis in mill labour in the 1810s and the ways in which such things connect with and reflect the turmoil of the 1970s in the West:

“…all of this evokes the end of the long postwar boom… the oil crisis and a sense of impending disaster, and it appears in popular culture in strange places… those anxieties billow out into popular culture, but it’s clearly there in children’s literature and TV too.”

They draw comparisons between the mid-1970s and the state of flux which British society is in and today where after the stability of the Major and Blair years – approximately the early 1990s until the current economic crisis began around 2007 –  it is now hard to predict the future and we are living in a time of uncertainty.

Because of this they propose that the worries, catastrophes and England on the edge of disaster of the likes of The Changes, The Survivors (1975-1977) and the final Quatermass series (1979), alongside the spectral, supernatural unearthings of The Stone Tape (1972) and also loosely related unsettled pastoral work, such as the triumvirate of folk horror films that includes Witchfinder General (1968), Blood on Satan’s Claw (1971) and The Wicker Man (1973), fit our era much better than they might have done ten years ago:

“It feels like there has been an embrace of catastrophe across the spectrum, alarmist on the left, almost welcoming on the right. I suppose this also makes sense of us wanting to re-watch that whole strand of 1970s apocalyptic films now, and also that the culture seems compelled to remake them.”

In this sense their theories connect with author and academic Robert Macfarlane’s comment in his article “The Eeriness of the English Countryside” that the current interest in the darker, eerie side of the landscape and pastoralism in culture may well be:

“..an attempt to account for the turbulence of England in the era of late capitalism. The supernatural and paranormal have always been means of figuring powers that cannot otherwise find visible expression. Contemporary anxieties and dissents are here being reassembled and re-presented as spectres, shadows or monsters…”

The interconnected nature of such work, both the original programmes and films and more contemporary writing, publications etc which have been inspired by them, is also reflected by the above observation by Robert Macfarlane  being quoted by Texte und Töne editor Sukhdev Sandhu in his introductory text for an edition of The Edge is Where The Centre Is, a publication also released by Texte und Töne which focused on the preternatural pastoral television drama Penda’s Fen (1974.)

Continued in Part 2 of this post (which depending on when you’re reading this post may not yet be viewable).

 

Elsewhere:

  1. Texte und Töne’s site.
  2. The Changes at the BFI.
  3. The Changes DVD release.

Elsewhere at A Year In The Country:

  1. Day #15/365. The Twilight Language Of Nigel Kneale
  2. Penda’s Fen and The Edge Is Where The Centre Is – Explorations of the Occult, Otherly and Hidden Landscape: Wanderings, Explorations and Signposts 2/52
  3. David Peace, Texte und Töne, The Stink Still Here and Spectres from Transitional Times – Part 1: Wanderings, Explorations and Signposts 16/52
  4. David Peace, Texte und Töne, The Stink Still Here and Spectres from Transitional Times – Part 2: Wanderings, Explorations and Signposts 17/52
  5. Robin Redbreast, The Ash Tree, Sky, The Changes, Penda’s Fen, Red Shift and The Owl Service – Wanderings Through Spectral Television Landscapes: Chapter 11 Book Images
  6. The Changes / The Disruption – Notes on a Flipside of the Pastoral Conversation – Part 2: Wanderings 5/52
    (Please note: depending on when you’re reading this post, Part 2 may not yet be viewable.)

 

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Margaret Elliot’s The Corn Dolly and an Otherly Layering as the Years Pass: Wanderings, Explorations and Signposts 51/52

The Corn Dolly-Margaret Elliot-Colin Dunbar-book-1976-folklore

The Corn Dolly is a book by Margaret Elliot, which was originally published in 1976.

If it was published today it would probably be called a Young Adult novel – i.e. aimed at a younger teenage audience.

There is very little information about the book online and not all that many copies for sale but it could be loosely connected to folk horror or the spectral, preter/supernatural likes of Alan Garner’s The Owl Service and The Weirdstone of Brisingamen in its themes.

The story of the book involves a form of sympathetic magic and the mystical powers and actions of a corn dolly, which is found by a young brother and sister, in protecting the harvest:

“Susie retrieved the Corn dolly from the river-bank where she was being attacked by a group of crows. With the help of her brother, Jack, she fished the doll out and took her back to Granny Cuddon’s house. Their Gran told them that the doll had been a good luck charm who ensured a successful harvest for her owner – and she mentioned that farmer Barham had once had a very similar doll. Farmer Barham had employed the children’s father but bad luck had struck his farm and he was almost bankrupt now.

“It seemed to Susie, and even to Jack, that ever since they had found the doll they had been followed by the attacking crows. And both children felt obscurely threatening forces closing in on them. In fact, finding the Corn dolly was to catapult them into a sinister adventure, connected with the evil powers that were trying to destroy Farmer Barham’s Highfield. But they discovered the Corn dolly, too, had powers – powers for good, which were tested to the utmost when the enemy struck.

“Margaret Elliot has written an unusual adventure story based on the folk lore of the English countryside.”

(From the inside cover text of the book.)

The Corn Dolly-Margaret Elliot-Colin Dunbar-book-1976-folklore-3 copy

Margaret Elliot wrote four books between 1976-1981 – The Corn Dolly, When the Night Crow Flies, Witch’s Gold and To Trick a Witch, all of which seem to be aimed at a similar audience and feature not dissimilar battles between mystical powers of good and evil (or white and black witches and their covens).

All four of the books feature illustrations by Colin Dunbar, on whom information also seems scarce.

If published today they might well be filed alongside the vast array of other, not dissimilarly themed Young Adult orientated books.

However with the passing of time older, previously fairly normal or mainstream culture can gain extra layers of interest/a patina of intrigue and character and that is the case with The Corn Dolly.

Viewed now and with the current interest in flipside Albion-esque and “wyrd” culture it seems like a curious, intriguing, semi-lost cultural artifact and also a signifier of some of the interests and background of its time of publication; post The Wicker Man and the canonic trio of folk horror films from the early 1970s, a relatively mainstream interest in the supernatural and the occult back then and a related yearning for and interest in rural and folkloric escape and culture at the time.

The Corn Dolly-Margaret Elliot-Colin Dunbar-book-1976-folklore-2

The book also connects further with The Wicker Man in that its focus is around the rituals and faith involved in protecting and hoping for a bountiful harvest and when viewed with an awareness of the above mentioned contemporary interest in the “wyrd” and eerie aspects of folklore etc the traditional verse below, which is included at the start of the book, seems to have gained a subtle “otherly” aspect:

“Corn Dolly:
“‘Tis but a thing of straw,” they say,
Yet even straw can sturdy be
Plainted into doll like me.
And in the days of long ago
To help the seeds once more to grow
I was an offering to the gods.
A very simple way indeed
Of asking them to intercede
That barn and granary o’erflow
At Harvest time, with fruit and corn
To fill again Amalthea’s horn.”

(Almathea’s Horn refers to Greek mythology, where a goat called Almathea’s broken horn was blessed by the god Zeus so that its owner would find everything they desired in it and which became a symbol of cornucopia and eternal abundance.)

 

Elsewhere:
Margaret Elliot at Good Reads

Elsewhere at A Year In The Country:
1) Wanderings, Explorations and Signposts 1/52: Hazel’s Kaboodles Corn Husk Doll Kit – Opening a Time Capsule from Back When and Faceless Folkloric Precedents
2) Chapter 7 Book Images: 1973 – A Time of Schism and a Dybbuk’s Dozen of Fractures