The stock of Brit-Folk has rarely been so high. Salutary re-appraisals of The Incredible String Band and Fairport Convention abound, while the Witchseason productions of Joe Boyd are now the stuff of legend. Donovan's late Sixties recordings sound fresher than campside cooking, and with his electronic interpretations of ancestral songs, 22-year old Jim Moray may even succeed in taking Folk into the mainstream.

It's a good time for sexagenarian Julie Felix to step back into the spotlight. California raised, but adopted as one of our own back in Blighty, Julie Felix was brought to fame after a chance meeting with David Frost. A veteran of the Sixties folk boom, her own UK TV series, and the legendary Isle Of Wight Festival, there is plenty of turf to reclaim. With the help of some heavyweight studio players (Ian Catt, Danny Thompson and John Paul Jones to name but three), The Rainbow Collection should be an unqualified success.

It's certainly difficult to argue with Felix's credentials for the role of guitar-slingin' agitator. Returning to England in the late 80s, Felix became a noted figure in women's gay rights and peace protests. Her work for Latin American refugees is reflected in the many Spanish language recordings on this collection.

Assembled from recordings over the last thirty years, The Rainbow Collection is certainly beautifully played, not least by Felix herself. But...but...but...The Rainbow Collection belongs purely in an alternative world where Bob Dylan never played the Newport Folk Festival, where the archness of Masters Of War and the hope of Children Of Abraham would still sound like clarion calls-to-arms for earnest young liberal types. There's no doubting the commitment, but there's something binary and absolutist in performing straight such material in the twenty-first century.

Of course, the modern world is in direr need of peace protests than ever before (when isn't it?), but there's a homespun quality to the material that is unlikely to inspire many to rage against that ever-imperious war machine.

Perhaps part of the problem is that much of the record has an unerring similarity to BBC Schools programming soundtracks from the seventies. Guitars are plucked with primary-coloured heartiness, and Felix's voice quivers throughout like a Play School Joan Baez. Dylan standards such as Hard Rain and Mr. Tambourine are given a shrill reading while songs like Woman and The Ballad Of Doris Kathryn Rodehaver are well-meant but mawkish deliberations on femininehood and suffer from a literal motherlode of sentiment. And after John Cale and Jeff Buckley, does the world need another treatment of Leonard Cohen's Hallelujah?

If there are brighter moments to this set, then the hoary treatment of Wild Mountain Thyme, buoyed, rather than burdened by a choir, provides the careful conflation of fear and reverence that informs some of the best Folk. Half-Mexican herself, Felix brings informed authority to Woody Guthrie's Plane Wreck At Los Gatos (AKA Deportee), and indeed, Los Mananitas and La Barert De Oro, sung entirely in Spanish, have a unforced intimacy lacking in many of the other recordings.

If good politics always equalled great music, the eternal verities of humanity just might be resolved overnight (alright, maybe over the course of a week...) As it rarely does, I guess those Masters of War will be 'building their bombs' for some time yet.

share

end of year feature musicOMH's 50 Best Albums Of 2009 From the nearly 700 albums we reviewed this year, which did our writers love the most? Introduction 50-41 | 40-31 | 30-21 20-11 | 10-4 | 1-3