Compiled by Bob Stanley to document the acid folk scene, “Gather In The Mushrooms” was first issued in 2004 on Sanctuary as a CD-only release; it proved popular enough for a sequel entitled “Early Morning Hush” two years later. That original disc quickly became a secret handshake among collectors and musicians, a portal into a parallel England where chart pop and heavy rock were peripheral noise and the real action was happening in village halls, student flats and half-forgotten studios. Drawing on late-60s and early-70s recordings, the compilation framed British acid folk not as a museum piece but as a living, breathing underground - a quietly radical way of life that blurred the border between pastoral reverie, psychedelic experiment and pragmatic escape from a country at war with itself.
The newly expanded edition on Ace Records folds in the “cream” of both Gather In The Mushrooms and Early Morning Hush, then adds key figures who were previously out of reach - COB, Roy Harper, Fotheringay - to thicken the narrative and push it beyond easy nostalgia. Across its running time, familiar names orbit deep cuts: Magnet and Paul Giovanni’s “Corn Rigs,” indelibly tied to The Wicker Man, sits alongside the haunted choral sway of Comus’s “The Herald,” the brooding open-road eeriness of Barry Dransfield’s “The Werewolf,” and the liminal shimmer of Vashti Bunyan’s “Window Over The Bay.” Groups like Stone Angel, Midwinter and Oberon bring their privately pressed, near-mythical LPs into view, their lo-fi hiss and hand-cut sleeves now recast as part of a coherent underground rather than isolated obscurities; as one recent appraisal put it, they sound “as distant and mystical as the field recordings of Alan Lomax.”
Stanley’s sequencing emphasises mood over taxonomy, tilting the set toward what he describes as an “autumnal atmosphere and a naivety” that would echo, improbably, into the 2000s neo-folk bloom around Devendra Banhart, Joanna Newsom, Alasdair Roberts and Tunng. This is not folk in the narrow, club-bound sense of purist balladry, nor psychedelia as pure freak-out; rather, it’s music that treats tradition as a useful hallucination, a set of gestures to be bent, stretched or quietly abandoned. For many of the original artists, that stance was entwined with daily life: Anne Briggs living in a caravan in Suffolk, Shelagh McDonald in a tent, Vashti Bunyan travelling by horse and cart and largely rejecting electricity, all choosing a kind of deliberate marginality far from the centre of British pop. Listening straight through, what emerges is less a genre primer than a map of refusals - of conscription into the Vietnam war machine, of urban grind, of a political folk scene whose slogans didn’t match these musicians’ more interior forms of dissent.
Visually and physically, the new edition underlines its role as both gateway drug and serious archival work. On vinyl it arrives as a double LP in a thick gatefold sleeve with extensive liner notes; the CD counterpart mirrors the care, offering a sixteen-page booklet that reprints essays, track-by-track details and period ephemera. The expanded tracklist bridges the gap between cult worship and accessibility, interleaving touchstone names like Fotheringay and Roy Harper with near-unknowns so that even seasoned diggers find themselves blindsided by a new favourite. In an era saturated with algorithmic playlists and frictionless discovery, Gather In The Mushroomsstill feels distinctly curated - a hand-drawn constellation of songs that rewards front-to-back listening, its shifts from warm-as-soup homeliness to hoar-frost chill charting the extremes of a scene that never needed to call itself a scene at all.
