(IT has set me a writing assignment to produce two hundred words without recourse to “parentheses, italics, quotations marks or references to either relationships or topology”. In the spirit as well as the letter of the thing, I shall also eschew colons, semicolons and dashes; this will further limit my ability to resort to asides and interjections to qualify - or obscure - the main argument. Relationships and topology are both knotty subjects, so to speak, and appeal to my fascination with strange loops, weird involutions and the general fucked-upness of things: I will try to prevent that fascination from taking hold of this post, although I fear the outcome will be banal. I will also try to avoid describing anything as radically inconsistent, either with something else or, as more usually turns out to be the case, with itself.)

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A week or so ago I was listening to a performance by the Worcester-based folk group Foxtail Soup, two of whose three members are directly related to me. The sound they were producing reminded me strongly of the Watersons and Young Tradition records my mum used to put on when I was very small. No wonder, really, as the the Foxes of the group are my dad and my sister, who used to listen to the very same records. There was a pleasing continuity in hearing such music performed live by people who first started absorbing it over three decades ago. That is something like how it is supposed to go, although learning songs from records is not quite the same as learning them from singers in person. I once got hissed at, albeit in fairly good humour, when I owned up during my slot at a trad folk club to having downloaded the song I was playing from the internet. Over the weekend I had Fairport Convention’s Liege and Lief on while I was cooking dinner, and was listening again to Richard Thompson’s extraordinary playing on Matty Groves. Before he began seriously writing songs, Thompson was already a seriously good electric guitarist. Mercurial is the word. As a songwriter he is known for a certain resolute glumness and mordancy, the flipside of which is a furiously inventive lead guitar style with a wide and yet distinctive vocabulary of signature licks. The essentials of this style are all present in his early playing with Fairport, in which he is spurred on continuously by Dave Swarbrick’s fiddle. It’s a fantastically exciting sound, and completely different from anything else around at the time. Thompson has a claim to be considered one of three players who laid the foundations for the British folk guitar sound of the next thirty to forty years. The other two in my opinion would be Bert Jansch and Martin Carthy. Jansch drew on influences from India and Morocco, via Davey Graham, making his signature a rhythmic and tonal unpredictability that catches the ear sideways. Carthy adapted the percussive, bass-driven style of Big Bill Broonzy to the playing of English traditional tunes, joining with Dave Swarbrick to forge a music of a propulsively energetic virtuosity. Thompson soaked up everything around him, from jazz to Jimmy Shands, and lacking a horn to blow it out of ran it across the fretboard instead. It’s probably true that most folk guitar players of my dad’s generation owe more to Donovan than they do to any of these three, chiefly because Donovan’s generally a lot easier to play. But Donovan’s style is also comfortably trans-Atlantic, not outstandingly different from the way performers like Tom Paxton or Joan Baez accompanied themselves. You’re never far from Simon and Garfunkel, not that that’s always a bad thing. Jansch, Carthy and Thompson are instantly recognisable as belonging to a different current, deeply committed to traditional music but at the same time entirely without folksiness or cultural chauvinism. You couldn’t accuse any of them of simpering faux-naif ingenuousness, or nostalgic indulgence in feudalist kitsch. Let’s say that the solo in Matty Groves is where Thompson’s early style arrived, proved itself, and set the template for what was to follow. There might be other candidates, but for me that’s the song where the penny really dropped. It’s harder to identify a similar moment for Bert Jansch, although the ornamental flattened second in the opening figure of Blackwaterside sent a message loud and clear enough to be picked up by Jimmy Page, who promptly nicked it for the instrumental White Summer. Needle of Death is the song of Jansch’s I most strongly felt I had to learn to play, a quietly devastating drug requiem, ahead of its time in recognising the damage being done all around it. It should also be noted that Jansch’s partnership with John Renbourn opened a seam of invention that is still being mined by some of the most creative players today. For Martin Carthy, the song Prince Heathen was an eruption of primal anger at injustice, a voice thundering from out of the midst of a tradition and thundering against the conservative and politically pacifying uses it had been put to. Here I think it is possible to draw a line between the current represented by Jansch, Carthy and Thompson and the protest singing of Dylan and his peers. For Carthy, the protest is in the music itself, not merely supported or accompanied by it. Dylan could quit being a protest singer and go on being Dylan, but Carthy I suspect could never sing Prince Heathen without feeling once again the fire in the blood. Today the folk guitarist you want to be, if acoustic fingerstyle’s your thing, is probably Martin Simpson or Pierre Bensusan, superb technicians refining and reinvigorating a traditional repertoire. I don’t see a young electric guitarist of the stature of Thompson, though, and this is odd because there are things that are technically within the reach of any decent young player that literally nobody knew how to do thirty years ago. Strangely enough there’s been a surge of interest recently in slappy-tappy techniques among acoustic players, largely due to the influence of the late Michael Hedges. But where is the folk musician who has mastered the wide-interval legato playing of Allan Holdsworth, the economy-picking techniques developed by Frank Gambale or the melodic tapping style of Greg Howe? More importantly, where is the player who has something new to say using these techniques, who has been captivated by something as foreign and yet essential to British traditional music as the driving rhythm of Broonzy or the meditative invention of Raga?