Will Hodgkinson author of The Ballad of Britain Martin Skegg

A few years back, author Will Hodgkinson and his wife were invited to the ­centenary bash at Cecil Sharp House, headquarters of the English Folk Dance and Song Society.

“It was really remarkable,” he says. “In the heart of Camden there were all these bearded men attacking each other with brooms, and wearing ­alligator heads to ‘abduct’ 12-year-old girls.”

His wife compared the scene to 70s horror The Wicker Man. “It was easy to laugh at, but these arcane traditions were really ­mysterious and exotic.”

The bizarre night was one of the triggers for a project that’s led him to roam the country in the footsteps of Sharp who, 100 years earlier, collected local songs he believed “exposed the real nature of the people and the land they were part of”.

The result is a brilliant travelogue, The Ballad of Britain, and accompanying album of 18 of the songs Hodgkinson – whose ­previous tomes, Guitar Man and Song Man, have been similarly obsessed with all things musical – found and recorded.

The 38-year-old drove from Cornwall to Fife, meeting famous folk ­enthusiasts, such as Jarvis Cocker, Pete Townshend and Richard Hawley. But the people he was most ­interested in were, by ­definition, not well known – rather, gently eccentric amateurs making music on their own terms, for its own sake.

So, where is the musical heart of Britain?

“It’s impossible to say,” says Hodgkinson, but “certain places have really strong musical identities, like Liverpool and Manchester. I think one of the reasons is that it rains all the time up there, and you can only spend so long in the pub.”

And what did he ­discover about London? “London’s difficult because it’s become so vast and pluralistic,” he says.

He came to the conclusion that “grime is as valid as a style of folk music as a ­Sussex farmer singing an ode to the nymphs of May”. He uses Lady Sovereign as an good example; likewise “kids rapping into their mobiles on the top of the bus”.

He did, he adds, approach a group of schoolgirls in Peckham and ask if he could record them. “They said ‘P*ss off, Michael ­Jackson’, so I thought I’d just stick to traditional folksy types.”

The Ballad of Britain, £12.99, Portico. Album out 28 Sept