Bob-Dubery
I've been listening to the Incredible String Band for a while. A lot of fun. Very eclectic. One might argue that they performed World Music before there was such a thing. Their background and influences are squarely in the early 60s Scottish folk and blues boom, but they folded in sounds from all over the world. As producer Joe Boyd put it "They performed traditional Scots music as if it had journeyed to the Appalachians and back via Morocco and Bulgaria." It being the 60s it wasn't long before Indian colours got added to their palette.
There's also a touch of the eccentricity that the British love (or used to love - think back to things like The Goon Show).
The lineup changed over the years. The key members were Robin Williamson and Mike Heron. Both played guitar and sang, but brought other instruments into the mix - oud, gimbri (North African ancestor of the violin), fiddle, harmonica, whistles, sitar.... The first record was a trio with Clive Palmer. who actually started up the ISB and the club in which they played. but then decided he wanted to do some traveling and he might be gone awhile so nobody should wait for him. So the lineup settled down with Heron and Williamson. They bought in their girlfriends, Rose and "Licorice". to augment the sound. Then as time went by Rose and Licorice became more prominent, and then the band started beefing up their sound with other musicians.
IMO the early albums - with the two core members and little else and Joe Boyd producing - are the best. You can sometimes pickup their later albums, especially Hard Rope And Silken Twine, their last, at bargain prices, but there's nothing like the earlier releases.
At their best they combined huge eclecticism with mystical lyrics and a real wildness to the music. Not "wild" as in out of control or aggressive, but as in uninhibited and vital and free.
Some vids to give a taste of what the ISB (and the 60s) were about....
The Half-Remarkable Question
Painting Box
I have the first 5 albums - what I've heard of their later output is much less interesting. Still well played, but lacking the spark of the early albums.
The key albums, by consensus of most ISB fans are The 5000 Spirits Or The Layers Of The Onion and The Hangman's Beautiful Daughter. I also have the first album ("The Incredible String Band' - with the short-lived trio line up) as well as Wee Tam and The Big Huge which were released as a double album in some markets. There's quite a bit more. They wrote at a dizzying pace, releasing 3 albums (or one album and a double album) in 1968 and three (including a double) in 1970, with every year from 1966 to 1971 seeing at least one ISB release.
Heron always had a leaning towards rock that didn't fit in with what the ISB were doing, and an over supply of songs. So in early 1971 he and Joe Boyd went into the studio to cut the gloriously eclectic, and much harder rocking, Smiling Men With Bad Reputation. They must have had a lot of fun putting this together. There are different guest players on every track, and with the guests invited to do what they do rather than play to instruction. The opening Call Me Diamond will get South African toes tapping with the fantastic township horn intro courtesty of Dudu Pukwana. Elsewhere you get The Who, Jimmy Page, Steve Winwood and ensembles of indian musicians. Not much here would fit onto an ISB album, but the attitude is the same - gleeful, willful eclecticism. And it works. The record somehow hangs together as a unified whole despite it's stylistic breadth.
Squonk
Good stuff Bob
I had a couple of albums in the 70's, especially enjoyed the different styles of music, The lyrics were brilliant, I remember a song about a plane getting stuck in smoke... My memory has gone a bit and I just cant remember the song.
Thanks for the memory Bob, I enjoyed ISB, but lost my albums in 1980 and haven't heard them since.
I had Wee Tam and the Big Huge and also a "Best of type album" that I picked up in the sale section of the Hillbrow Record Library. ?
