Folk: album review – Jon Loomes ‘Dust in the Sun’

Dust in the Sun by Jon Loomes is presented as a ‘lost’ English folk album, recorded in the long hot summer of 1976. According to the press blurb: “A troubled artist made a remarkable folk album whose creation was beset by difficulties. Almost immediately, the label collapsed into insolvency. A pressing plant fire destroyed almost the entire original run, after which the album slipped into rumour and half-memory, after which the album slipped into rumour and half memory. Dust in the Sun was long thought lost forever. Miraculously, a single copy arrived into the present day, and the album has now been reissued to mark its fiftieth anniversary.” This is an all an elaborate scene-setting fiction, of course. Unlike yours truly I doubt Loomes was even old enough to be spending the summer of ’76 tearing around the streets on a chopper bike, let alone recording long lost folk albums. What the album does do, however, is authentically capture the ambience and repertoire of some of the great…