A good article. Thanks for posting that link.
This is a minority genre in all quarters - even in the old country.
Liege and Lief eventually went gold - about 40 years after it was released.
For me the big problem, not just with "British Folk Rock" is this need to pigeon hole everything into a category. The categorisation is always questionable for a start - Nick Drake is "folk"? (well he's not most people's idea of "rock"). Richard Thompson albums often have helpful advice on the sleeve for record store staff: "file under folk". Well some of his work might not unreasonably be categorised as "folk" or "folk
y", but there are albums on which he doesn't play a note on acoustic guitar and wrings the neck off of his stratocaster. John Martyn is an even more egregious example - like that article says, he emerged from the folk scene but rapidly left it far behind, but albums on which he is backed by a jazzy electric band and plays electric guitar are filed under folk. And the folk section is usually in a corner, at the back of the shop, behind the stairs.
The categorisation erects arbitrary barriers that may dissuade us, or prevent serendipitous discoveries (you used to get Sandy Denny simply filed under "D" along side Neil Diamond, Def Leppard and Dire Straits), and sometimes physically (if unintentionally) hide things from seekers of the path less trodden. That spills into radio programming (with some exceptions, such as the glorious NPR in the USA) and TV programming and what the papers bother to write about (again with marvellous exceptions such as Richard Haslop's weekly column in Business Day).
The pigeon holed world is a poorer world.
