Artists:The Incredible String Band

The Incredible String Band were popular music’s ultimate chameleons. They began in the mid Sixties as a folky trio comprising fiddler Robin Williamson, banjoist Clive Palmer and guitarist Mike Heron, perambulating the Scottish club circuit with their skewed mixture of bluegrass and Celtic folk. Their first album release, however, was largely made up of original songs by Heron and Williamson. Their producer, Joe Boyd, spotted their potential as songwriters and figured they could appeal beyond the folk constituency. After the release of the first album, however, the band promptly split. Palmer headed east, and Williamson "followed the Tarot to Fez" to study oud and Berber flute playing, intending never to return. His money ran out, however, and he was repatriated, returning to Scotland clutching an oud, a gimbri, assorted flutes and ethnic drums. He and Heron regrouped in the autumn in a rambling cottage north of Glasgow with a sackful of seriously strange and beautiful songs. Boyd, now their manager as well as their producer, booked them into London’s UFO and Middle Earth clubs alongside the likes of Pink Floyd, and the emerging counter-culture instantly clutched them to its bead-hung bosom.

Six months after 5000 Spirits, the band’s acknowledged masterpiece, The Hangman’s Beautiful Daughter, hit the shops. To play it was to cross the threshold into a different world. The hallucinatory clarity of childhood memories mingled with mythic tableaux and pantheistic prayers, all infused with the logic of dream. The album propelled them into the Top 5 of the British album charts—they were the fourth best-selling band on the scene, behind The Beatles, Cream and The Rolling Stones. Luminaries such as John Lennon, Mick Jagger and Led Zeppelin’s Robert Plant openly acknowledged their influence. Round about this time, film-maker Peter Neal began to follow the band around, sensing that their approach to music-making and communal living offered a sort of counter-cultural blueprint to a generation casting eagerly around for alternatives. Neal’s film, Be Glad For The Song Has No Ending, was over a year in the making, as funding came in dribs and drabs. The BBC slated it for their Omnibus arts programme but got cold feet, deeming it “too advanced” for viewing sensibilities. The reels lay forgotten in a barn in the West Country for decades before finally being transferred to videotape for commercial distribution in the mid-Nineties. (It’s just been reissued by Weinerworld to a chorus of admiring reviews.) By the time filming was completed, the band had released a double album, Wee Tam And The Big Huge, that consolidated the achievements of its predecessors. “Williamson and Heron are writing better songs than the Beatles,” one critic frothed admiringly.

1969 was perhaps the ISB’s high water mark. Their appearance at the legendary Woodstock festival acknowledged their status as brand leaders in the field of cerebral acoustic-based music. The following year they collaborated with the dance troupe Stone Monkey on a multimedia extravaganza called U, playing a week in London before touring the States with it. It was innovatory, but lost money, and thereafter the ISB contented themselves with incorporating pantomimic interludes into their concerts. Though Heron and Williamson remained the hub of the ISB, other members came and went, bringing new musical elements with them. By the early Seventies the band were drawing upon just about every musical style and idiom under the sun, and continued to release albums with indecent regularity. Ultimately, the ISB made the jump to full-blown rock band: their final and—it’s generally agreed—their least successful phase. But in eight years they’d produced some extraordinary and inimitable music, and added greatly to the gaiety of the nation. Their best work deservedly stands with the finest that era has produced. Following the split, Williamson and Heron promptly “reverted to type”, to quote Williamson. He himself relocated to California and immersed himself in poetic divigations, antiquarian studies and the traditional music of the Celtic lands. This led to his development of a “Bardic” form of performance, incorporating song, harp music and storytelling. Heron, meanwhile, took the hard-rockin’ nucleus of the String Band and set out his stall as a sort of thinking-man’s Bruce Springsteen, later forging a career as a songwriter, penning hits for Bonnie Tyler and Manfred Mann.

After languishing among the footnotes of rock for almost two decades, the ISB were suddenly rediscovered by the music press around the 25th anniversary of Woodstock. By a curious and entertaining coincidence, it turned out that their former bassist and second fiddler Rose Simpson was now (1994) Lady Mayoress of the Welsh resort of Aberystwyth. “Incredible! Hippy queen’s the Mayoress!” ran a not-untypical headline. Celebrities suddenly appeared from the wainscoting who remembered the band not as a hippy-dippy rizla-rustling harlequinade but as (in the words of Led Zeppelin’s Robert Plant) “an inspiration and a sign”. Neil Tennant, Bill Drummond and Crispian Mills queued up to testify to their influence on a newer generation of popsters. Recently the Simpsons creator Matt Groening confirmed in an interview how he based his new series Futurama on the ISB’s song Robot Blues from their U album. Their classic Elektra albums opportunely reappeared on CD and outsold the rest of the Elektra catalogue. Could a reunion be far behind? In 1997, Heron and Williamson took to the boards together for a couple of toe-in-the-water concerts in Glasgow and London. Devotees travelled from as far afield as Argentina and Australia to attend, and were there again in 2000 when the officially-reformed Incredible String Band—which by this time had recruited the long-lost Clive Palmer, Welsh keyboard wizard Lawson Dando and Bina Williamson—did a short concert-and-festival tour, playing to wildly enthusiastic sell-out crowds at every venue. By happy happenstance, Mojo ran an eight-page retrospective on the band the same month; and there were also substantial features in the Daily Telegraph and Independent, and the band were booked for a session on Radio One’s Peel Show—their first in 27 years. Such is the renewed interest in the band they were booked for the Peel Sessions Live at The Royal Festival Hall, London in October 2000 appearing alongside The Delgados and Clearlake. Earlier that year, they’d played a headlining set at Fairport Convention’s annual Cropredy festival. The following two years saw further concert and festival appearances, culminating in a major UK tour in Autumn 2002.

With the advent of 2003 shows in the UK and on the continent were booked — the band also made their Icelandic concert debut! By this time, however, Williamson had withdrawn from touring with the band, to concentrate on his many solo projects. The remaining line-up of Heron, Palmer and Dando was augmented by the singer and multi-instrumentalist Fluff. The centrepiece of the new repertoire is Heron’s 13 minute epic A Very Cellular Song, unperformed in its entirety since 1968 and regarded by many as the finest flowering of the ISB’s genius, the rest of the material performed will mostly come from the much loved first 5 albums. The Song, truly, has no ending….