Over the decades, Scottish musicians have made many classic albums that have stood the test of time. Today, we look a duo whose third album saw them continue searching 'for something that doesn't just sound modern, but timeless and nationless'.
In late August this year, the great American record producer, Joe Boyd, was interviewed at the Edinburgh International Book Festival on the subject of his new book, And the Roots of Rhythm Remain. Sitting in the front row of the filled-to-capacity Spiegeltent was one Mike Heron. For fans of the Incredible String Band, the renowned psychedelic-folk duo who were such a big part of the sixties counterculture, it was a moment to treasure.
Boyd, after all, had not only discovered and managed ISB, but also produced their LPs. And Heron and Robin Williamson were the Incredible String Band, who caused such a stir six decades ago with ground-breaking LPs such as The 5,000 Spirits or the Layers of the Onion, and its follow-up, The Hangman’s Beautiful Daughter.
Paul McCartney chose the former as his favourite album of 1967. Robert Plant, of Led Zeppelin, admired their music. And when the Rolling Stones were in the process of launching their own label, Mother Earth, they tried without success to tempt ISB from Boyd and their record label, Elektra.
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An expanded ISB, which by then included Christina ‘Licorice’ McKechnie and Rose Simpson – the partners of Williamson and Heron, respectively – even played the Woodstock Festival in August 1969, one of the key events in popular culture. They had been due to top the Friday-evening bill along with Joan Baez and John Sebastian but, faced with the prospect of making substantial alterations to their set in the driving rain, opted to delay their performance until the following afternoon. The singer Melanie took their Friday slot, and it made her a star.
By coincidence, the venue for Joe Boyd’s book festival appearance was but a short walk from Sandy Bell’s, the celebrated folk-music pub on Forrest Road, which is where, in 1965, he was hugely impressed when he first heard Robin and his friend Clive Palmer play.
“They performed Scots traditional music as if it had taken a journey to the Appalachians and back via Morocco and Bulgaria, complementing each other’s playing with skill and wit”, he wrote in his memoir, White Bicycles.
Six months later, in early March 1966, discovering that they had left the capital, he tracked them them down to Clive’s Incredible Folk Club, high above Sauchiehall Street in Glasgow, where they were playing a regular Saturday-night date. He found the place locked, however, it having been deemed a fire hazard. Mike Heron had joined them by this point.
Heron told NME in 1973: “Edinburgh’s a fairly conservative, insurancy-type town and it doesn’t exactly rave all that much except during the Festival, so we went to Glasgow and started an all-night club on Sauchiehall Street which is the other end of the spectrum completely – Britain’s Chicago! It was the only place like it around and we were getting huge audiences but, after about seven months of madness, the police finally closed it down”.
The trio played Boyd their music, and he was astonished: “The songs were completely original”, he wrote in White Bicycles, “influenced by American folk and Scottish ballads, but full of flavours from the Balkans, ragtime, North Africa, music hall and William Blake”.
The debut LP was made very quickly in London but Palmer quit, bound for Afghanistan and India. "There was never any animosity", he told the Herald in 1999. "When I left they were beginning to move in a direction that I found difficult to follow. Those were free and easy days. We were young and probably too far ahead of our time".
Williamson, for his part, spent four months in Morocco with Licorice. He was deeply influenced by the sights and sounds of Morocco, and before long he and Heron were at Temple Cottage in Balmore, outside Glasgow, beginning work on the songs that would make up 5,000 Layers, their second album.
It remains an otherworldly record, all these decades later, with unfamiliar instruments such as the gimbri, a plucked bass lute used in
north Africa, and some striking songs: Chinese White, The Mad Hatter’s Song, The Hedgehog’s Song. The ubiquitous Danny Thompson (who died just last month, aged 86) was on double bass.
“In a way”, Karl Dallas wrote in Melody Maker at the time, “it’s a sort of folk Sgt Pepper, encompassing all branches of folk — blues, ballad, oriental music, children’s songs — and mixing them up in a way that extends the boundaries far outside the category …Without in any way destroying the unity of the two-man group, Robin and Mike are emerging as quite distinct musical personalities … In fact, there is almost everything in this record: humour, lyricism, seriousness, even a sort of protest song, ‘Way Back in the 1960s’, which succeeds because of its rather black sense of humour”.
Williamson himself told the magazine: “We are reaching for something that doesn’t just sound modern but timeless and nationless — trying to be true to our true selves”.
The album, described in the Guardian as “the most sophisticated piece of experimenting that the British pop world has seen for some time”, enjoyed sales success on both sides of the Atlantic. John Peel was a big fan, too.
Under Boyd’s astute guidance, ISB became big in the States, playing the 1967 Newport Folk Festival and such prominent venues as the Fillmore West, in San Francisco, and the Fillmore East, in New York. A British tour launched shortly after the March 1968 release of The Hangman’s Beautiful Daughter saw the sold-out notices going up time and again. A date at London’s Royal Albert Hall, notes Boyd, was a dreamy affair, with girls placing “home-made cakes and other offerings on the stage before the concert”.
The Hangman’s Beautiful Daughter is a fascinating piece of work, notable for its deft multi-instrumentalism (hammered dulcimer, sitar, oud, pan pipes) as much as for its fearless approach to songwriting, as in Heron’s 13-minute long centrepiece, A Very Cellular Song, which was partly written on acid and which contains several disparate elements, among them observations on the life of an amoeba.
Other songs – The Minotaur’s Song, Waltz of the New Moon, Three is a Green Crown – showed how far Heron and Williamson had come in just a few years. When the poet Pete Brown, lyricist for Eric Clapton’s Cream, heard it, he declared: “That’s what the Rolling Stones have been trying to do”. The album peaked at number five in the UK and reached the US Top 30.
“Much of The Hangman’s Beautiful Daughter has the cluttered, disjointed aura of a dream”, writes Rob Young in a perceptive analysis of the album in his book Electric Eden. “The genre shifts across the whole LP. from Bahamian spiritual to Indian hymn, Elizabethan lament to acid raga, smoggy industrial blues to abstract neo-gamelan improv, act as scene changes for a living theatre peopled by an alternative Tarot deck of increasingly bizarre archetypes”.
There’s a further passage of Young’s that is worth quoting: “The sonic wizardry made heads smoke; the pantheistic fusion flared like a bonfire of religions, fuelled by the duo’s ecstatic scrying games. From this elevated position, The Incredible String Band were incapable of going downstairs and playing with the rest. There were few maps at the time to navigate the waters the duo were sailing; no-one fused the enlightenment of existing in the landscape so powerfully with the luminous effects of acid”.
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Ahead of the band lay Woodstock, further projects such as the double album, Wee Tam and The Big Huge (1968) and a switch from Elektra to Island records. There would be a lengthy immersion in the Church of Scientology; and Rose would leave, to be replaced by Malcolm Le Maistre, a dancer from the Stone Monkey dance troupe. In the opinion of many ISB fans he brought a different singing voice and a different style of songwriting to the group.
In the years since they were at their most active and influential, the Incredible String Band have since become associated with the excesses of the hippie era, but those first three albums, in particular, are a forceful reminder of how much they rose above them. And as the former Fairport Convention guitarist Richard Thompson has put it: “Their first three albums still slay me with the originality of their songwriting”.
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