Go Back. What Was Must Never Be. [spotify]

Nic Jones — The Little Pot Stove
Dan Deacon — Wet Wings
Davy Graham — She Move Through The Fair
Gorodisch — Moth To The Flame
The Watersons — The North Country Maid
Directing Hand — Down In Yon Forest
Iva Bittová — Ne Nehledj 
Laurie Anderson — Same Time Tomorrow (live) 

The title of my list is taken from the first line of Alan Garner’s novel Thursbitch. Garner, in turn, borrowed it from Jean Cocteau’s film Orphée. I first thought I was compiling a celebration of Folk Music, the songs which my parents passed on to me as a child. But as I listened for suitable songs, I was haunted by Thursbitch's tale: an 18th century Cheshire salt-trader's shepherding of the Earth using ancient ritual, broken by the planting of a Christian Church. I dreamed folk memories of the Pennines, bleeding into visions of Albion. I thought of the trade and hunting routes which brought hominids from the East, crossing the sunken kingdom of Doggerland. I wrote an essay on the subject, and then crossed it out. I felt the pain of the incorrigible nostalgic when I realised that a map is not the same as the thing mapped. So... the playlist begins with a song that took roost in my head during a childhood narrow-boat holiday, (back when Dave Stewart & Barbara Gaskin's "It's My Party" was Number One). It finishes with a song I heard recorded, from the gods at Saddler's Wells Theatre, with my new girlfriend, who eventually gave birth to our two kids and then became my wife. It is an incomplete, inaccurate, incomprehensible and intimate map of (English?) history. Io! Euoi!

About Playlist Club-er: Dan Sumption (@dansumption)

Dan Sumption set up the web agency Hard Media in 1995 and, three years later, sold it to Leo Burnett's, where he rode the dot com boom. After several more years of freelancing and working for private clients, he wound up at the BBC building the iPlayer, and now works for YouView creating the interface for the next generation of connected TV. Most people, however, know him as the guy who totes a camera around Sheffield at night, posting the resulting pictures on Facebook and at danshotme.com. He also blogs, less freely and less often than he used to, at www.sumption.org. In his spare time, he fosters children and dreams of owning goats, growing walking-stick kale, and building a masonry stove covered in fancy ceramic tiles. Possibly green ones.

Image: Lady Canning's Plantation at night by "Dan Sumption"