No Folk For Old Men

There once was a time when folk music was for squares. Tweed wearing hippies, armed with an acoustic guitar and all peace and love. The sound of immigrants and refugee’s, the sound has been with us for hundreds of years. Singing songs of pain, sorrow, loosing the one you loved and hard struggles, it’s a sound that will never go away. The same could be said for jazz and gospel respectively.
London, home of the swinging’ sixties now has it’s own folk scene. Much like the one that was in Greenwich Village. The sound has been evolving from the post Libertines day’s around the west of the City and out to the suburbs that surround it. With the rise of the oddball outfit Mystery Jets in late 2005 to the mass media it was unaware of the party’s they threw on a small, bohemian island in Twickenham. Nearly four years have passed since these gatherings and the sound has gone from strength to strength in the city.
New acts are coming from the west once more, a few even packing there bags and moving to the bright lights of Piccadilly and the buzzing sound that is coming from the East-end of town. Artists such as Mumford & Sons, Eugene McGuinness, Kid Harpoon, Laura Marling (who was nominated for a Mercury Music prize this year) and Johnny Flynn. Gone are the days of middle-aged men singing tales that their elders had once sung to them. Now the sound is new, fresh and exciting. All still very young, but singing the songs that can rival these tales once sung.
Gone are the days where American singer songwriters rule the sounds of our stereos. The British have taken it back, and it seem’s like It won’t be handed to only one else very soon.