As you'll notice if you're watching my latest iTunes music buys, I've just bought The Imagined Village — a set of resettings of traditional English tunes, with the likes of Billy Bragg, Paul Weller and Ben Zephaniah helping out folk stalwarts such as Eliza Carthy.

The results are pretty wonderful, not just because of the music (which has been rather unkindly described as Sitar lines and funky beats grafted on, and frankly is where Scots music was ten years ago with Martin Swan's Mouth Music), but firstly because this project takes up the grand old broadsheet ballad tradition of updating or replacing the words to songs to fit whatever the current situation, and secondly because it's exposing contemporary young(ish — le Bragg is about to be 50) musicians to traditional performing practises.

Anyway, it's very much worth a listen; and if you like your free samples before laying down the cash, here are some video tasters:

The Imagined Village Trailer

A look at the artists and music of The Imagined Village.

Hard Times of Old England Retold

The Imagined Village band perform this track live in The Big Room at Real World prior to their first performance at the WOMAD festival.

Wait a Minute, There's More

They've released Cold, Hailey, Rainy Night as a samplepack, downloadable from RealWorldRemixed, so with Garageband or similar, you can produce your own mixes, which is just what I've done:

Hey - great news! One of my favourite albums of my teenage years is to be re-released after many years in deletia. The Travelling Wilburys Vol 1 is out on June 11, and is available for pre-order on iTMS now!

Here's a sample: their debut single Handle with Care.

In my teens, I had a really cool compilation album of progressive underground rock. It introduced me to Fairport, Nick Drake, Jethro Tull, Arthur Brown and lots of other bands that just didn't make the Radio 1 playlist... even in John Peel time. I lent out the vinyl years back and never got it back. Recently however, as I've been buying music from the 60s and 70s in various compilations and original albums, I've realised that I've been slowly rebuilding it, track by track.

Uses Amazon Web Services to look up the album and display the cover art.

http://sprote.com/clutter/index.html