Music Aficionado

In part 5 of the British folk rock scene in 1970 we turn our focus to a number of psychedelic-leaning groups, a style that some call acid-folk or freak-folk. While the last three groups in this review are now relics of that time, the first half is dedicated to one of the genre’s legendary and most-influential bands, known fondly as The Incredibles.

At the end of 1969 The Incredible String Band, at that point in time a quartet led by Mike Herron and Robin Williamson and also including their partners Licorice McKechnie and Rose Simpson, decamped to a group of cottages at Glen Row near Innerleithenin in Scotland. Along with them they took members of the dance group Stone Monkey plus custom and set designers and painters, collectively forming a commune with the goal of creating a multimedia project. A cab driver who picked a visiting Melody Maker reporter from the Edinburgh airport, described them as “the people who live up on the estate with strange clothes and long hair.”

Just a few months earlier The Incredible String Band (ISB) performed at the famed Woodstock festival. Invited by event organizer Michael Laing for the respectable fee of $2,250, they were scheduled to play the first night of the festival which was focused on the quieter sounds of folk music, following Ravi Shankar. During the virtuoso sitar player’s performance heavy rain started to come down, and the ISB decided to reschedule their show. It was a missed opportunity about which manager Joe Boyd said he had “nightmares about the might-have-beens.” Their spot was taken instead by singer Melanie, who came on stage relatively unknown and left it a star. The ISB performed the next afternoon, a day dedicated to much noisier and more energetic music, and their mostly acoustic set left the ecstatic crowd lukewarm. They were not included in the resulting film nor in the soundtrack that were released in 1970, a chance of a lifetime to be exposed to audiences far beyond their niche followers. It is ironic that perhaps the most truly hippie group to perform at the epicenter of hippiedom is barely remembered for their performance.

The band performed six tunes at Woodstock, half of them they would record in early 1970 while the group was enjoying their communal bliss. One of the songs, written by Mike Heron, is called The Letter. Drummer Dave Mattacks (then with Fairport Convention), who was invited to play on this track, recalls his experience of playing with the band: “I didn’t really understand that band the way I understand it now. I had a much more literal approach to music in those days. I didn’t start to get the aesthetics and to approach things a little bit more organically having deeper understanding of material until a bit later on. I remember thinking it was very strange, but again, you know, realizing that they were just great musicians.”

The resulting album, I looked Up, was released in April 1970. As with their previous album, Changing Horses, it was not a commercial success. Gone were the days when the band was able to climb into the UK Top 10 albums chart. Their classic and most memorable albums were behind them, but the music they made in 1970 was still at a high standard.

Robin Williamson – vocals, guitar, flute, gimbri, violin

Mike Heron – vocals, guitar, harp, organ, piano, violin, horn

Licorice McKechnie – vocals, percussion, drums, dulcimer, keyboards

Rose Simpson – vocals, bass guitar, violin, percussion

Dave Mattacks – drums

John Gimbri – flute

Back to the commune. The main goal of that rural convention was not the release of the album I looked Up, but to rehearse an ambitious project, a brainchild of Robin Williamson. When the band toured the US in 1968, they met Malcolm Le Maistre in New York City. His performance group was, as Williamson described, “fusing Indian street theatre and far eastern mask puppet ideas with a curious English/eccentric vision of his own.” Williamson came up with the idea of creating a multi-visual performance called ‘U’, “a surreal parable of love across time and space in song and dance.” Why ‘U’? “The shape of the letter U seemed to suggest the descent of a soul from the mystic realms of origin – its physical presence in the outer world – and whence its joyous return into the bosom of the grand finale.” If you followed the ISB in the late 1960s, this project was as logical a next step as any.

Mike Heron recalls how they assembled the various talents: “We decided upon all the people we’d like to work with – dancers, set designers and so on, and we went up to live in a row of cottages in Scotland around Christmas. We all sat round and just talked, first of all to get the story-line, which had to be something that would inspire the dancers to dance, and give us the inspiration to write the songs. After a while the whole thing just started to emerge.”

Jac Holzman, manager of the band’s label Elektra Records, remembers that the resulting show was reminiscent of something like Cirque du Soleil: “Just without muscles, and much less rehearsed. It was a very different style, but still singular, and that’s what Elektra was about. The early albums did tremendously well in Britain and helped launch Elektra there, but I think the later albums found more of an audience in the US.”

The cast premiered its multimedia creation at Chalk Farm Roundhouse in London for 10 days, a three-hour spectacle that included twelve dancers. Williamson described it as having “the necessary elbow room for slapstick – Hindu – cabala –P.PG. Woodhouse style 20’s camp sci-fi – katak tarot. Plus a mainline dose of undiluted hippy, love it or leave it pivotal to those heady days when a brand of ordinary popcorn could be called Screaming Yellow Zonkers.”

The full ensemble and its paraphernalia travelled across the Atlantic to perform for five nights at Fillmore East. You can only imagine the commercial prospect of such an attempt. Manager Joe Boyd tried to salvage the financial ruin by booking the band into a recording studio while in New York. With close to non-existent budget they managed to record two hours of music in two days. Smart decision, as we now have a record of that music and it definitely stands on its own. The double album U was released in October 1970. An article in Beat Instrumental magazine commented on the contrast between the visual and aural experience of U: “The total concept of U, which is basically a look at various states of awareness in a somewhat obscure, if jokey, overall context, may have been a bit hard to follow. The songs, however, sounded as good as anything the String Band have done in the past.” Here is a tiny snippet from that album:

We move on from the Incredible String Band to three other groups, much less known but all with a similar vibe of ethereal folky strangeness that was so prevalent at the time in the British Isles. The first is Bread, Love and Dreams, who were signed to Deram, the progressive subsidiary of Decca Records. They took their name from a 1953 Italian film of the same name, starring Vittorio De Sica and Gina Lollobrigida. After releasing their self-titled debut in 1969, the original trio lost one member, Carolyn Davis, and remained the duo of David McNiven and Angie Rew. Despite low sales of their album, they were able to sign an extended contract and secure an additional week of recording sessions in the summer of 1970. Their producer Ray Horricks, known for his work with Davy Graham, invited a number of stellar musicians to the studio, including Pentangle’s Danny Thompson and Terry Cox.

The duo planned to release the recorded material as a double album, but Deram balked at the idea and split the tracks onto two separate albums. The first of them was released in November of 1970 with the curious name of ‘The Strange Tale Of Captain Shannon And The Hunchback From Gigha’.

The title track was written by David McNiven, who explained its origin. As a boy he visited relatives north of the Mull of Kintyre, where he met a seaman called McShannon: “The Captain collected ships in bottles and smoked baccy in a white clay pipe. He would regularly enthrall me with tales of the sea and monsters of the deep. My holiday bedroom had a picture window, which perfectly framed the misty isle of Gigha in the Inner Hebrides. Gigha (pronounced Gee-a) means ‘God’s island’, and had a mystic significance for me from an early age.” Angie Rew commented on the song topics across the album: “I think they are very pictorial. There is a tremendous amount of imagery in the lyrics. You can see the places, see the people very clearly.”

Danny Thompson’s contribution to this track is fantastic, you can hear him starting the tune with a bowed double bass phrase. David McNiven singled him out: “Danny became a member of Bread, Love and Dreams for a week. He would go off with his double bass and work on the songs alone, before returning with invaluable new ideas and contributions.”

Album credits:

Bass Guitar – Dave Richmond

Double Bass – Danny Thompson

Drums – Terry Cox

Organ, Piano – Alan Trajan

Vocals, Guitar – Carolyn Davis

Vocals, Guitar, Harmonica, Flute – David McNiven

Vocals, Guitar, Percussion – Angie Rew

Orchestrated By – Graeme Robertson

The band had to make a decision about how to split the songs they recorded into two albums. David McNiven recalls that, “When it came to dividing up the songs, we decided to put the more mystical ones on Amaryllis.” One of his more ambitious works was a song cycle he called Mother Earth. As he described, “It was about the earth being destroyed, but something positive emerging from the calamity. It was also a stream of conscious, unlike the rest of our material.” The composition impressed Max Stafford-Clark, director of the Traverse Theatre Group in Edinburgh, who asked the duo to adapt it for his company. Prior to the stage production the group had to change the name of the cycle, because Mother Earth was already taken as the name of an American Band. Instead they opted to call it Amaryllis, after the name of one of the company’s actresses. The show was performed around the UK, Scotland, Scandinavia, Holland, France and Spain (an anomaly during Franco’s rule).

Amaryllis was released a year after its recording, in the summer of 1971. The song cycle took the full first side of the LP. The album also included a lovely song by Angie Rew named Brother John. This is a showcase tune for Rew who explained its background: “My father was a diplomat and I spent part of my childhood in Mexico. On one expedition we came across the beautiful but desolate remains of a hermit’s shelter, with a tiny chapel, orange trees and a neglected gravestone. It moved me to think of the work this forgotten man must have done for the community.”

After a stint with an 11-piece soul band in the mid-1960s, Derek Noy’s ears opened up to a new style of music. He recalls: “How I got into the folk thing was I saw Donovan with a flute player, I think it was on Top of the Pops. It was obvious that contemporary folk music was taking off in quite a big way.” He quickly broke up the soul band, recruited Michael Bairstow and together they became Jan Dukes de Grey. They were one of the first acts to be signed to Nova, another sublabel of Decca. Over a period of four days in October 1969 they recorded their debut album under supervision of David Hitchcock, in one of his very early producing projects. In the next few years he would produce albums by some of progressive rock’s finest bands including Genesis and Caravan.

Jan Dukes de Grey’s debut album Sorcerers is made of 18 tracks, all quite short. Derek Noy: “We were playing all those songs live, but each one was much longer. Dave Hitchcock wanted the improvisational stuff taken out, because he wanted to fit as many tracks on it as possible.” The album was released in January 1970, the band at that point adding Denis Conlan on drums to their lineup.  The same month they interviewed with the Yorkshire Evening Post, listing Roy Harper, Bob Dylan, Blood Sweat and Tears, Yes and Roland Kirk as inspirations. Derek Noy said of the album: “The whole idea of the album was to get a record where people can sit at home and relax. Next we would like to play in the clubs – something heavier.”

The band would move on to perform much more elaborate tracks, with longer improvisations. Noy said of that shift to experiment with folk music: “I found there was a lot of freedom in it. You weren’t constricted, because people weren’t going to dance to it. I liked the freedom of being able to split time, and go off into suspended time. I liked the artistic element of that.

Here is the title track from the band’s debut:

We close this interview with another relic of that wonderful period in music, this one the husband and wife duo of Graham and Anne Hemingway. What do you call your band when you are well-read and your last name is Hemingway? “The Sun Also Rises”, of course. Great novel, and a great band as well. Unfortunately they released a sole album in 1970 before disappearing from the scene.

The liner notes on the back of their album shed some light into the obscure duo: “Graham writes most of their material, some of his work he says is an attempt to express a mood by patterns of sound and words rather than have literal meaning. He plays a blend of classical and contemporary folk guitar. Anne does most of the arranging and plays various instruments including dulcimer, glockenspiel and percussion. They both sing.”

Like many groups who were into the more psychedelic and sometimes bizarre side of folk at the time, the duo was heavily influenced by the Incredible String Band. Anne Hemingway: “I don’t think we ever tried to copy them as such, but they were so influential and so different. It was the rawness, the simplicity, and the experimental nature of it all.” They were signed to the small Village Thing label run by Ian A. Anderson (not the guy who stands on one leg while playing a flute), who said about them: “They were a bit kind of Incredible String Band –husband and wife who had some time previously turned up at ‘The Troubadour’ and blown everybody away and got regularly booked and we thought: ‘We should make an album with them’, and it got incredibly well reviewed and sold reasonably and then they vanished off the face of the earth.” Indeed. But before they vanished they left us with a gem of an album. Here is the album closer, Death:

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Sources:

Seasons They Change: The story of acid and psychedelic folk, by Jeanette Leech

Liner notes by Robin Williamson from the CD release of The Incredible String Band ‘U’

Liner notes by Richard Morton Jack and David McNiven from the 2006 CD release of Bread Love and Dreams ‘Amaryllis’