VARIOUS - Gather In The Mushrooms VARIOUS

CD

This new edition of Gather In The Mushrooms contains the cream of both long-deleted compilations with a few additions—C.O.B., Roy Harper, Fotheringay—that weren’t available to Sanctuary at the time.

Though they aren’t traditional, these songs have an authenticity of their own, an autumnal atmosphere, and a naivety that proved influential in the 2000s neo-folk boom (Devendra Banhart, Joanna Newsom, Alasdair Roberts, Tunng, et al.) but remain impossible to replicate.

For many of these acts at the end of the ’60s, folk music and the hippy world that surrounded them was a way of life—a way of opting out from the Vietnam War, the Angry Brigade, and the three-day-week early ’70s. Anne Briggs lived in a caravan in Suffolk, Shelagh McDonald lived in a tent, Vashti Bunyan eschewed electricity; they weren’t part-timers.

Listening to Gather In The Mushrooms, we are transported to a time when no one used the term post-modern.