Tony Cummings looks at the sudden surge of interest in non electric music.

Bob Dylan

Nowhere does the wheel of fashion turn quicker than in the world of music. With relentless efficiency the pop machine in recent years has recycled 50s' rock and roll, the beat groups and soul sounds of the 60s, and now the hippy daze of the late 60s and early 70s with beads and flares once more flapping down our high streets. Psychadelia is back, albeit with a disco beat and deja-vu has become an almost permanent condition for the seasoned music-watcher.

Aside from the pop mainstream down the years have been the acoustic balladeers - the folk purists reacting against the music business hype of their day. The young Bob Dylan at the turn of the 60s walked into a Greenwich Village folk scene that had been well established by artists like Pete Seeger and the Kingston Trio in the 50s. They sought relief from the banalities of American Bandstand and the plastic pop of Fabian and Frankie Avalon by digging deep into the folk music vaults - the music of the working people of America and beyond. The 70s in turn spawned a host of introspective bards - Canada's Leonard Cohen and Britain's Nick Drake and Al Stewart to name but three - many inspired originally by Dylan and taking refuge from the heavy-rock assault being unleashed at the time in their sensitive singer-songwriting.

Ironically of course, these outsiders soon became pillars of the industry they'd sought to subvert, and thus made prime targets for the punk iconoclasts of the late 70s, to whom monied ex-hippies were the ultimate anathema. Yet in their back-to-the-basics motivation the new wave of acoustic musicians of the late 80s and early 90s have a similar polemic to their punk forbears. "No Elvis, Beatles, or the Rolling Stones" sang the Clash in the song "1977".

Today a radical Christian singer-songwriter like Billy Penn's Brother can look around at the disco-dominated 90s and say "the dance boys have had it long enough," and quote Bob Dylan's famous phrase "one man and a guitar can do a lot more damage..." Every generation of musicians needs to have a go at clearing out the stables, and the Christian music scene desperately needs a blast of fresh air.

It's certainly getting one with Britain's 'back to acoustic' movement. Much of the most stimulating and thought-provoking music to be heard at Europe's premier Christian music showcase The Greenbelt Festival this year was down at the continually-packed 'River' tent, a showcase for acoustic music, while there's a steady proliferation of Christian bands and singers swopping synths and sequencers for acoustics and mandolins. In many ways the circles-within-circles pattern which is the history of popular music is no more evident than in the Christian counterculture. Many of the 20th century's earliest musical pioneers came out of the hillbilly and black church so it's fitting that there should be revivalist tributes to their pre-war sound and songs via the Famous Potatoes (country) and the Woebegone Brothers (Black Gospel). And a throwback to more recent music history is to be found in some of the new acoustic orientated bands currently springing up for it was 60's 'folk music' as much as the Mersey-beat which set the pop-gospel wheel rolling in the UK with bands like Britain's folk rock gospel Parchment actually making the Top 50 in the late 60s. Today 'acoustic roots' is an umbrella under which many diverse elements shelter. It covers folk traditionalists and angry young protestors, introspective singer-songwriters and ceilidh bands. Yet for all its diversity the musicians opting for guitar picking rather than pop-picking and preferring the hush of the folk club rather than the blare of the dancefloor are a growing number. Perhaps in the 90s the times really are a changin?