If, on a late summer night, you drive on the A4 – running as it does from the stones at Aylesbury, east down the Kennet Valley winding past Silbury Hill and climbing the Ridgeway toward Marlborough’s quiet grandeur and Sevenoaks’ ancient trees – should you pick the right night you will see Nick Drake’s Pink Moon, the hunter’s moon as it is known, sitting bigger than reality in the wide Wiltshire sky.
Many lay claim to this quiet pocket of Britain; here you have the farmers, the druids, the academics, the bankers, and even the soldiers’ loud guns on Salisbury plain. But just as Europe struggles to preserve its great project and America flounders in the tears of old cowboys and waves of new internationalism, so we wonder where is Great Britain? The loss of the colonies, the aftermath of wars, tired captive of late capitalism, stripped of ideology. Why is it, that in this muddled island, music always feels so vital and so at home? So tied to land and landscape, the wild scrub of the west and north, the manicured tapestry of its southern counties, the streets of London or its villages and towns, the church steeples or industrial red brick echoes of empire...
Here are some of my favorite musical dreams of this Small Island.
