In a Beautiful Place out in the Country: The Lark Ascending by Richard King

Richard King’s The Lark Ascending is cultural history at its most invigorating, a work of connections made through music and across the landscape

There’s a transcendent moment late on in Richard King’s remarkable study of the music of the British landscape, where he describes the break of dawn at a Boy’s Own rave out in the Sussex countryside. It’s a moment that pulls together threads that have run throughout the book’s narrative – from Vaughan Williams’s pastoral masterpiece “The Lark Ascending”, taking in personal freedoms across the countryside, the preservation of folk songs, draconian laws and police brutality, pagan rituals enacted and ley lines traversed – to end up in a field overlooking a reservoir, as MDMA-fuelled ravers reconnect with the landscape:

“After several hours of dancing through the night, dawn broke on the Weir Wood Reservoir water at five o’clock to reveal a deep layer of mist on its surface. The change in conditions provided the tiring revellers with a new source of energy as the beauty of the surroundings were revealed in the new morning sunlight.”

Not only does Richard King make the reader feel as if they were there at this Albion Ibiza, but he is able to establish a spiritual connection to the time and place. This may be an isolated point in the lifecycle of rave culture, but King casts it in a light that makes it seem as powerful and significant as a ring of ancient stones. It surely is.

The Lark Ascending is cultural history at its most invigorating. It’s a book of connections made, of roads travelled by the author in body and mind. Indeed King frames music’s relationship to the landscape with his personal practice of listening to music on any walk of “reasonable length”. His “choice of listening material was always instrumental music,” the “meditative sounds that weaved in and out of one’s consciousness”: from Steve Reich, through Boards of Canada, Jim O’Rourke and Aphex Twin, to the likes of John Fahey. No passive experience for King, he would become overwhelmed on occasion: “I felt as though I was demanding too much of my senses, which could quickly grow resistant to such a concentrated form of transcendence.” He goes on to tell the story of the twentieth century through concentrated moments of transcendence, weaving togther people, places and sounds.

The author always feels close at hand, present within the narrative, which is a comforting experience particularly as he leads us through discomfiting events with disturbing outcomes. When the police use riot tactics ‘learned’ from the miners’ strike against travellers congregating at Stonehenge, for example, it is truly sickening. King’s subsequent interview with traveller, Peace Convoy member and activist Alan Lodge brings more than veracity to proceedings, it allows reflection from someone who was there and has dealt with the repercussions down through the years. His consideration of the Convoy’s legacy deflates into resignation – “in the end they won” – and it is beyond disheartening.

The most profoundly moving section concerns the Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp, a women-only protest outside a nuclear missile base that was sustained between 1982 and 2000. They employed innovative, aggression-free means of resistance that were nevertheless “met with increasing hostility from the authorities”. Their actions included dancing and singing atop missile silos, dressing as soldiers and carrying flowers instead of rifles, surrounding the perimeter holding mirrors towards the armed guards, and frequent communal singing, which was “among the most powerful tools of disruption the women used”. This all feels as relevant and, unfortunately, as necessary as ever in today’s world.

King visits the site in the present and has an experience as grounded as it is mystical. “Today Greenham Common was a thin place”, he writes. “By placing a hand on the railings on what had once been Green Gate [one of nine gates arounbd which the Peace Camp was assembled] I was immediately connected with the terror that had shrouded the recent past.” It’s an experience that speaks of psychogeography and Stone Tape theory; a cry from the past in fear of the present.

Music runs like holloways through the book, making connections as it goes. Between exercises in self-sufficiency by Paul McCartney, the soundtrack to Ken Loach’s Kes, and folk revivalist and fascist sympathiser Rolf Gardiner. The passages dedicated to music employ the same carefully crafted prose – both revelatory and restrained – that the author sustains throughout the book’s course. King digs deep into Vaughan Williams’s “The Lark Ascending” of course, but he also pulls other pieces under the microscope. His thoughts on Gavin Bryars’s “The Sinking of the Titanic” are particularly insightful and evocative: “here the sinking of the title reflects the immersive properties of the music and the moment when, at the conclusion of the piece, anyone who has found themselves lost is Bryars’s chord progressions might sense they have yielded to an experience with a powerful undertow.” Or Kate Bush’s Hounds of Love album, which King views as distilling “many of [her] recurring obsessions: water, witchcraft, death, the supernatural, the power of the senses, the frail line between reality and fantasy.”

Boards of Canada are mentioned early on as one of the musical accompaniments to King’s walks. So it feels appropriate that the story comes back around to them at its conclusion. To arrive there King makes one final connection, constructing a new mythology from the past of some of my abiding musical interests: Optimo and Boards of Canada. Kevin McIvor (Optimo’s Twitch) organised a secret rave on the banks of Loch Lomond during the summer solstice 1991 and since Boards of Canada brothers Michael Sandison and Marcus Eoin attended the weekly Pure nights run by McIvor, King cannot help but speculate – perhaps dream – that they were in attendance. In an act of imagination in the present, King conjures the birth of Boards of Canada:

“Standing on the small shore next to the premises where McIvor and his friends had danced at the start of that decade [the 1990s], it is easy to imagine the landscape imprinting itself on the disoriented minds that witnessed the solstice here together. There are eagles in the sky, and once the generators had been switched off in the morning and the music had ended, the hypnotic sound of the tide must have sounded calm and powerful.” 

It’s a visionary passage that extracts new beginnings from the end of a rave. The music, coursing through the veins of the revellers like ley lines, lives and breathes with the landscape. Listen carefully and you might just hear it still.

The Lark Ascending by Richard King is published by Faber & Faber.