Folk Off
Bearded men with acoustic guitars always appeared to be the antithesis of prog: by their very nature, folkies seemed to be making regressive music, retreating to “tradition”, to rootsiness. They also seemed to epitomise that most nausea-inducing spectacle: the sensitive young man, the lonely boy outsider, the bedroom poet who can’t get a girlfriend and tells the world so in dreadful, self-pitying verse. Who among us has not guffawed uproariously at the scene in National Lampoon’s Animal House when John Belushi, descending the stairs to find some anaemic beatnik with an acoustic guitar serenading a girl with a sensitive folk ballad, seizes the guitar and smashes it savagely against the wall? Who among us hasn’t wanted to do the same to the whey-faced, bum-fluffed fun-annihilators who produce their bloody 12-strings and start picking out Neil Young’s The Needle And The Damage Done at parties?
“The wallflower image was soundly destroyed when John Martyn headbutted my mate in a Glasgow bar…”
Growing up in Glasgow in the late 70s and early 80s, one of the party favourites of the acoustic guitar and scraggy beard massive was John Martyn’s , a haunting, Celt-tinged blues ballad from his classic. You probably heard it murdered many times by some flat-voxed James Taylor wannabe before actually hearing the original.
