you gotta love this sharity blog Time Has Told Me

"prog and folk" is its avowed remit, but mostly its folk, and mostly its Britfolk – and you're thinking "oh yes how terribly fashionable, vashti/watersons/ISB-love for the freak-folk massive" but nah, this guy is a serious scholar, there's very little of the wilfully wyrd (some COB, bill fay, ISB solo stuff and rarities, etc) but overall it's much more the real-deal Britfolk--the world of chunky sweaters, wood-whittling, women with wenchy complexions but clad in knee length leather boots. The kind of thing that was still lingering around at the end of the 70s, early 80s, the kind of people us with our Penthouse and Pavement and ACR 12 inches liked to scoff at (but now who's laughing, eh)

So you get a lot of things like this lot, Silver Birch

how ghostboxy is that, that they were originally called The Forestry Commission!

Or this sturdy-looking fellow who rejoices in the name Cyril Tawney.

And the even more marvellously named Vin Garbutt

And then the ur-Britfolk (non-wyrd, non-acid folk) combo Hedgehog Pie

Like so many of the sharity blogs you can see how the logic of obsessive specialist collecting has taken this fiend on a strange, barrel-scraping, cranny-of-History-rummaging journey

the motor principle neatly condensed in this phrase--"one of the best, most obscure”--as if the two things were identical!

that collector logic has driven Mr Time Has Told Me (who appears to be Japanese--now that country is the empire of retro isn't it? did you know there was a bizarre fad in Japan for groups that did immaculate reproductions of Elizabaethan madrigals and the like? Ryuichi Sakomoto of all people was involved in one of them), driven him further and further afield: Irish folk, French folk, Dutch folk, what he calls "Canadian hippie folk", and even, and I love this, to outright Christian folk (like this record, Young Folk in Worship) . And even, apparently, Christian psych folk which seems like it ought to be wrong.

I don't download any of this stuff, I hasten to add, just visit for the album covers and titles and band names, like this dude , or this what-the-fuck sleeve, or gorblimey this one. and seriously you have to click on this one.

A couple of sharity-blogz on a similar tip, if not quite so hilarity-rich:

Fat Pam
(some Quebec Folk in there, and more “UK Xtian Folk”)

Grown So Ugly