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* At the height of psychedelia and the worldwide Summer of Love, Traffic retreated from the bright lights of the city and the music industry hurly-burly to get their act together in the wilds of rural Berkshire – where, away from the outside world, they worked on an fusion of jazz, folk, pop and R&B elements that would herald a game-changing new maturity in British rock. * Over the next twelve months or so, Traffic’s symbiosis of bucolic living and naturalistic music would be mirrored by events of the other side of the Atlantic: The Band’s rootsy country/soul/R&B stew, The Byrds’ move into country-rock and Crosby Stills & Nash’s intricate harmonies and acoustic-led instrumentation would all strike a chord with British rock bands and the burgeoning hippie scene in general. * Traffic’s concept of getting it together in the country, together with the nascent West Coast sound and the first real stirrings of what would subsequently become known as Americana, had a seismic effect. Numerous bands – Brinsley Schwarz, Bronco, Heron etc - began to live communally, retiring to remote farmhouses and country cottages to write, rehearse and even record in splendid isolation. * The peacock plumage and -in-wonderland lyrics of psychedelia were rejected. Instead, The Band’s down-home appearance and tales of old-time rural America were adopted wholesale. Polite, middle-class young men raised in quiet suburban towns on a diet of Marmite, The Dandy and early closing on Wednesdays suddenly assumed the appearance of weather-beaten, late 19th-century Klondike Gold Rush prospectors. The Aquarian Age was slowly turning into the Agrarian Age. * Across The Great Divide: Getting It Together In The Country is the first compilation to shine a light on this curiously neglected stitch in the constantly-evolving British rock tapestry of the late Sixties/early Seventies. Joining huge names like Rod Stewart, Traffic and Fairport Convention are cult underground acts, mainstream Sixties pop groups updating their sound, a post-Dylan wave of back-to-the-land singer/songwriters and a clutch of righteously obscure rural rockers whose music failed to find an outlet at the time. * Over three 3CDs and four hours of music (including several tracks that have never previously been issued), and housed in a clamshell box containing a 44-page booklet, Across The Great Divide assiduously charts the fascinating period when a posse of British musicians bravely attempted to build Cripple Creek in perfidious....