THE IMAGINED VILLAGE
June 4th, 2008 adminWe were at the Wychwood Festival this weekend, held at Cheltenham Race Course. An intimate event started four years ago, which has quickly established itself as the first major festival of the summer season.
The highlight was The Imagined Village who performed on Sunday night.Â
The Imagined Village is an ambitious project bringing together folk musicians including Eliza and Martin Carthy with established pop and rock acts – Paul Weller, Billy Bragg – and a flavour of multicultural England from Transglobal Underground, the British-Asian singer Sheila Chandra and the poet Benjamin Zephaniah.
The project has been masterminded by Simon Emmerson, a DJ and producer best known for his work with the Afro-Celt Sound System and with African acts such as Baaba Maal and Manu Dibango. Emmerson was determined for traditional English music to assume its rightful place on the “world music” scene.Â
The aims of the project, as stated on their website, are:
“We started this project back in 2004 as a way of exploring our musical roots and identity as English musicians and music makers. There is a lot of discussion in the media at present about what constitutes the English identity, we hope to use this web site and our first record as a contribution to this discussion. We are not trying to re-invent the wheel or for that matter re-invent the English folk tradition. What we are interested in is building an inclusive, creative community were we can engage in the debate passed down to us by the late Victorian collectors of English song, dance and stories spearheaded by Cecil Sharpe and his contemporaries.
We all walk in the footsteps of our Victorian song collecting ancestors but feel it is more relevant now than ever to question who decides what it is to be authentic and English and more importantly what it is that makes us proud to be English musicians. We are not providing a manifesto or for that matter any easy answers.”
Read more about the project in an article which featured recently in the New Statesman.
Or find out more about the individual artists-
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