ROB ADAMS meets Mike Heron, a man who still feels some ties to a past musical life
On the cover of Changing Horses there were four of them. One became the Mayoress of Aberystwyth. One has disappeared altogether. One does the rounds constantly, singing songs and telling stories, a veritable fin de siecle shannachie. And the final member of the Incredible String Band, 1969 edition, Mike Heron, ventures out of his lair near Innerleithen to do gigs with the rarity value of hen's teeth.
Heron is cheerfully vague about the reasons for vast open spaces in his diary. No hurt, neglected artist he, which is just as well since the people at the record company which released his most recent album, Where the Mystics Swim, are similarly vague about Heron's existence.
A recent Sunday broadsheet article by the String Band's producer, Joe Boyd, might have jogged their memories. In it, Boyd wrote of Heron's and Robin Williamson's involvement in Scientology and how, post-String Band, there was no love lost between the mainstays of one the best-loved groups of the late 1960s and early 1970s.
Heron found the whole thing silly. ''Robin called me up and we both said, 'what's all that about?' Because we're still very fond of each other. We worked together for eight years and the only rivalry between us was to see how many songs each of us could get on an album.''
Indeed, there have been murmurs that the pair might work together again. ''We could do, maybe Robin could do something with my band. The only stumbling block is that Robin's view of the String Band isn't only the time when it was just him and me, it's all the phases, and he might be reluctant to do something with just the two of us and call it the Incredible String Band.''
With annual conventions, a fanzine (Be Glad) and a cassette of String Band songs sung by fans (The Hangman's Beautiful Granddaughter, no less) circulating, 23 years on, interest in the String Band is still strong.
Meanwhile, Heron has a sudden burst of activity this weekend - the first gigs since last year's Edinburgh Festival. Unlike Williamson, Heron
doesn't fancy solo work. He prefers to bounce ideas off other people and enjoys the camaraderie of a band, in this case a ''sitting down, working together, friends thing'' with percussionist Dave Haswell and guitarist John Rutherford.
They'll be playing songs from Where the Mystics Swim as well as drawing on a vast reservoir of Heron songs. Heron has always found it easier to express himself by putting himself into other people's shoes.
Although ideas can come from anywhere, a recent source of inspiration has been an old hero, Jack Kerouac. ''Most people who have read On the Road remember him meeting the Mexican girl on the bus and I wrote a song about that. But there was also a woman who had an affair with him. After they split she married a professor and had a family. Then 30 years on she wrote this book about her relationship with
Kerouac and I was fascinated by how the husband lived with finding all those photographs that she'd forgotten to rip up.''
His way of working with other musicians similarly follows a tried and trusted method. ''With Robin, I used to take him a finished song and he would illustrate it, or vice-versa. It was a creative compromise. I played them lots of stuff and they decided what they were happy working with. To take a song to another stage, I like other people to breathe on it.''
n The Mike Heron Band plays the Blue Lamp, Aberdeen, tonight; the Bongo Club, Edinburgh, tomorrow; and the Piping Centre, Glasgow,
on Sunday.
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