When rock & roll first burst onto the scene it was thought of only as a small genre, a passing fad. By 1960 people had already declared its death many times. But it turned out rock & roll was only the seed from which sprouted many branches: folk rock, jazz rock, psych rock, garage rock, soft rock, and on and on.

When punk rock first hit, it, too, was only thought of as a small offshoot of rock & roll, a passing fad. This was partially true since the original buzzsaw sound quickly morphed into post-punk, which took the spirit of 1976 and applied it to all sorts of adventurous instrumentation and genre combinations. But they all originated from the same seed.

Traditional folk and icy, electric post-punk would seem antithetical (how do you combine The Clancy Brothers with Joy Division?), but nothing is antithetical in music, and the dichotomy certainly didn’t stop The Dancing Did.

The group formed in 1979 in Evesham in the West Midlands of England, not far from Shakespeare’s home of Stratford-upon-Avon. Along with rural farmland, ancient history surrounds the area, the site of abbeys, castles, and battles as far back as 701.

Growing up in Evesham, the members of The Dancing Did steeped in all of that historical English atmosphere like so much Earl Grey in a bone china teapot, and blended it with post-punk electric guitars, all reverb-laden and dissonant, to create something uniquely theirs. The group self-released a couple of singles which subsequently brought them to the attention of Stiff Records — one of the biggest UK indie labels at the time — who released their third single, “The Lost Platoon,” in 1981.

Unfortunately, the public showed no interest and the band had to move back to a smaller indie label for their full-length debut the following year. Despite effusive critical praise from NME, the country’s leading music magazine, nobody wanted what the writer Barney Hoskyns called “pastoral Edwardian rockabilly.”

If you weren’t ready for battle before, you will be.