Music Arcades: Various: Gather in the Mushrooms - The British Acid Folk Underground 1968-1974

You know me. I love an anti-climax, a non-sequitur, a take that ends not with a bang but a whimper. I like jokes like, "What do you call a boomerang that doesn't come back?" So I liked the story of the mystery surrounding Shelagh McDonald, one of whose tracks is included on this CD. It was a story that boiled up in the wake of Vashti Bunyan's re-emergence. You could hear the sound of record industry men and music journos wondering if they could sniff out any more "long lost" waif-like ex-flowerchild girl singers. The sleuths wondered whether Shelagh MacDonald, the children's author of the '70s, was the same woman — I'm sure they had an explanation for why the name was spelt differently. Then, after a couple of years of this intoxicating enigma, she broke cover and popped into the offices of the Scottish Daily Mail just "to let everyone know I'm safe and well." And yes, she admitted to doing some hippy travelling, but she evidently wasn't desperate to relaunch a performing career. And then she went back to her life, as before. How satisfying.

Lots of hippy trippy folk on this CD, some of heavy of the trimmings and trappings while a couple of tracks — basically Bert Jansch and Pentangle — have some more serious, beard-tugging musical chops about them. Since the album came out in 2004, this "underground" scene-that-never-was-a-scene has become part of the mainstream canon of any music phenomenon that styles itself as being "underground". Like the Freakzone from those revolutionaries at the BBC. I like it though. I like the cherries on the top of it anyway, which is what this CD compiles very effectively. Plus Lucy got an album by The Trees, which is quite fun. In this context even Vashti, whom I often find a little too fey even for me, sounds good.

As Bob Stanley writes in the (very poorly copy-edited) sleeve notes, this music conjures an atmosphere of a bygone England that was the ideal cocktail of innocence, idealism, a natural order and just a soupçon of excess. It's not the same bygone England of medieval times that "authentic folk" imagines; it's the almost equally distant and out-of-reach England of 1970.