The Incredible String Band - Quotes & Reviews

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Danny Neill - Record Collector Jan 2005
Jon Pareles : New York Times 9/24
Justin Hopper : Pittsburgh City Paper 10/21/04
Kevin Elliott : Columbus Alive 10/20
Gene Armstrong : Tucson Weekly 9/30/04
Joe Nickell : Missoulian 10/10
Andy Smetanka : Missoula Independent 10/7
Bill Meyer : Chicago Reader 10/20
Jay Babcock : LA Weekly 10/15
Jason Gross : Village Voice 10/5/04
Ben Ratliff : New York Times 9/15
Mike Joyce : Washington Post 9/24
Scott Thill : AOLCityGuide.com 10/7/04
Tucker Petertil : Sitting Duck
Mark Jenkins : Washington Post 9/29
Ethan Brown : New York Magazine 9/20/04
Jon Takiff : Philadelphia Daily News 9/24
Michael Fremer : Musicangle.com 8/10/04
David Pescovitz : Boingboing.net 8/27
Jennifer Kelly : Neumu.com [Monday, October 18, 2004]

Record Collector Jan 2005
The Incredible String Band
Cambridge Junction - 10/11/04
View: upfront, stage right

Five years into their reformation, The ISB are showing no signs of losing momentum as their momentum, as their unique, angular acid-folk show notches up a further round of gigs. One original member, Robin Williamson, may have bailed out, but Mike Heron and Clive Palmer have recruited the perfect multi-instrumentalist foils for their collective muse - Lawson Dando and Fluff excel.

Still touched by perversity (Palmer mentions his new solo album before playing City Life because "It's not on it"), they focus on material from their legendary first five records. The Water Song is a delicate beauty, while Painting Box seduces. The standout centrepiece is 1968's epic A Very Cellular Song, dominated by Heron's fruity organ and Fluff's fluent recorder work - unperformed in its entirety till now.

"Come see us again, because we're going through all the songs on those early albums and you'll hear something different", says Heron at the close; just one of a myriad reasons to see a challenging band resolutely at the cutting-edge of folk.
Danny Neill [back to top]

Jon Pareles : New York Times 9/24
In the 1960's, the Incredible String Band fused Celtic traditions with psychedelic whimsy and all sorts of international inflections, from ragas to Middle Eastern music to Gilbert and Sullivan. A new collegiate generation has rediscovered the band as a precursor to folky experimenters like Devendra Banhart and Joanna Newsom. Although the group's main songwriter, Robin Williamson, left after a 2000 reunion, two of its three founders, Mike Heron (on stringed and keyboard instruments) and Clive Palmer (on banjo) have kept the name…Their sets have lately been including "A Very Cellular Song," Mr. Heron's playful epic of evolution. [back to top]

Justin Hopper : Pittsburgh City Paper 10/21/04
Even for your average ’60s iconoclastic psychedelic-music revolutionary in the midst of a period of surging rediscovery and revival, Mike Heron is a particularly cheery soul. Sure, he’s itching for a bath -- after all, this isn’t 1966 proto-hippie Scotland anymore, and the public expects even its avant-folk precursors to take a splash now and again. But Heron’s willing to put it off for a string of fan and interview phone calls, if nothing else to rave about indie-folk harpist Joanna Newsome, who opened for Heron’s Incredible String Band the night before, with somewhat predictable results. “She’s with us for about seven nights, last night being the first,” says Heron from his Oregon hotel, “and everyone in the band has already fallen completely in love with her.”

The feelings, it’s safe to assume, are mutual. Newsome is just one of a string of young indie weirdo-folkies who’ve been picked to open for Incredible String Band on the group’s first tour of the U.S. in 30 long years -- artists whose unifying factor is an overtly pronounced, name-dropped adoration for ISB. Because although the Incredible String Band’s heyday was an almost bizarrely creative six years from 1968-1974, during which ISB recorded more than a dozen albums, it’s in this early 21st century that the Scottish band’s first six records seem to have reached a critical mass of influence on American music. So with founding members Heron and long-missing banjoist Clive Palmer on board -- but sans ISB’s third creative force, Robin Williamson -- a reformed Incredible String Band has set out to give the people what they want, and maybe taste the musical fruit its tree has borne. “It does make you feel a bit older,” says Heron. “We saw Joanna, and she’s 22, up there on stage, playing a full-sized harp like she was Pete Townsend. But these [artists] we’re touring with each have their own audience of young people who wouldn’t miss a show they played, and they’re being very patient and staying through our set. It’s a new audience for us and for them -- they don’t want to get stuck into this ‘alternative’ circuit, and we don’t want to be stuck doing ‘old people out of the woodwork’ gigs. A lot of our old hippies have loved [the opening acts], and I think that’ll continue.”

ISB was formed in the mid-’60s as part of the British folk revival, playing the banjo-based Uncle Dave Macon-style folk-club numbers common on the scene. But by 1968 Incredible String Band had become something almost unnamable in ’60s music. Together with producer Joe Boyd, Heron and Williamson (Palmer had already departed) began incorporating instruments from North Africa and Far East Asia, as well as the twisted sounds and drug-addled theories of England’s psychedelic-rock world, into ISB’s music. The group’s songs melded British-folk structures, foreign instrumentation, psych atmospheres and soundscapes, and often simple, playful lyrics (songs include numbers about hedgehogs, caterpillars and “Ducks on a Pond”) into something that might today be called “world music.” But at that time, it was simply Incredible String Band -- and while the group had a sizable following, the mainstream music fans, even of the allegedly open-minded hippie ’60s, didn’t really get it. “In Scotland, for instance, they loved the first album,” says Heron, “and some people who got into the hippie thing and psych rock went along with us from there, but in, say, Glasgow, they still like the first album the best. “Between [1968] and 1974, we made 13 albums, and every time we toured we were promoting the next thing, so often even the most popular songs never got done more than three or four times live. By the time we got to Woodstock, we were onto fairly obscure material, and everyone else was doing their best-of. So that was our fault.”

You may not have noticed Incredible String Band on your Woodstock album or film, but the group certainly played the festival: What could’ve been the big-time-success turning point in the band’s history ended up on cutting room floors, thanks to a performance that was simply too out-there for even the penultimate hippie-fest’s audience. “I always thought that we must’ve played badly at Woodstock,” says Heron, “but recently we came across real, camera-crew film footage of it on the Internet. And you know, it was actually pretty good!” Fans of Incredible String Band’s two opposing sides -- the mythologized first six albums, and the aesthetic of forward musical motion -- are in luck. Heron and Palmer’s String Band tours, according to the singer/songwriter and multi-instrumentalist, concentrate on those immortal recordings such as The Hangman’s Beautiful Daughter, playing songs in an acoustic setting similar to last year’s reunion-band live album, Nebulous Nearnesses. Recorded in Peter Gabriel’s Real World studios in England in front of a Bush-rally-style audience of staunch fans, Nearnesses is about as intimate as a live disc could be: Heron’s tongue clicks and his words muddled by years and accent are all up close and gorgeously personal on songs like “Cousin Caterpillar.” The notably absent Williamson continues the other side of Incredible String Band: While the initial ISB reunions, spawned by a millennial New Year’s celebration gig in Edinburgh, included him, Williamson has chosen not to continue with the touring band -- for friendly and honorable reasons. “Robin likes to do new, creative things all the time,” says Heron. “The last thing he wants to do are old things from those first albums. Clive and I saw that the first six [albums] were what the fans really wanted. So it’s really fallen to me and Clive.” [back to top]

Kevin Elliott : Columbus Alive 10/20
The current crop of neo-folkies rarely namedrop the Incredible String Band as an integral influence, but the irony is that they should be lined up out the door to pay their respects and perhaps learn a thing or two. After all, the String Band can be credited with birthing Britain’s bohemian psych-folk scene, first turning traditional Americana and Celtic classics into whimsical and complex pop songs before traveling even further by incorporating Middle Eastern and Asian tones into the mix. Their wave crested in 1969 with the release of The Hangman’s Beautiful Daughter and an appearance at Woodstock. From then on the initial pairing of Mike Heron and Robin Williamson couldn’t resuscitate the magic of their early catalogue and they disbanded in 1974. Nebulous Nearnesses (Amoeba) is a new live recording showcasing the band back together and effortlessly playing their collection of timeless standards after 30 years of stasis. If their modern version of “A Very Cellular Song” is any indication, they have yet to miss a step. [back to top]

Gene Armstrong : Tucson Weekly 9/30/04
Often nestled in rock history texts between the Impressions and Indigo Girls is a British folk act that remains cherished by its devoted cult of followers 30 years after it dissolved--the Incredible String Band. Revered on both sides of the Atlantic, the band never fell from favor, even as its LPs became harder and harder to find. Then, in 2000, the original trio of guitarist Mike Heron, banjo player Clive Palmer and fiddler Robin Williamson regrouped to play a series of gigs for which they play sets generously stocked with old jug band music and traditional folk tunes. "We played the kind of stuff we played before we were the String Band," said Heron by phone from his Glasgow home a few weeks ago. "It was really about the music, not about the band."

By 2002, Williamson had wearied of the old stuff and wanted to return to making new music--he had enjoyed a thriving solo career in the years since the ISB broke up--so he left the band again. Heron and Palmer miss their old compatriot, but they have gamely soldiered on with Welsh keyboardist Lawson Dando, bassist Gavin Dickie and a female multi-instrumentalist and vocalist named Fluff, who is young enough to be Heron's daughter. That is the lineup that will turn up at Tucson's Solar Culture Gallery for a gig on Tuesday, Oct. 5. It's one of 30 North American dates in 32 days. This intense assault will take the Incredible String Band to many parts of the United States that it has not visited before, Heron said. "Back in the original band days, where we were strong in the United States were the East Coast and the New York areas and in New Jersey. We actually split up in 1974 on an American tour in New York. "We never made it much on the West Coast, although in San Francisco, we did play the Fillmore West there." Heron said he's delighted that his group of old "hippy-dippy" folkies will be playing in a Tucson venue known for avant-garde, punk and alternative music, as well as being a working community art gallery. These days, that's not uncommon for the ISB. "We've actually gotten a lot of support from younger listeners and the punk-rock community, because we play music that is raw and unrefined," said Heron, who also has penned tunes for the likes of Bonnie Tyler and Manfred Mann. Nobody's going to mistake the musicians of the Incredible String Band for virtuosos--their music is less for the concert hall than it is for the porch and parlor--but they play with a genuine love. Their music is like a homemade pie--not as neat around the edges, but a lot more tasty and less processed than Hostess. In fact, music industry types have emerged from their estates and garages of late to voice approval for the Incredible String Band. Their professed fans include such figures as Robert Plant and Pavement's Stephen Malkmus. Makes sense, considering the vast influence the ISB has exerted on such acts from art rockers to roots and folk musicians.

The ISB recorded a baker's dozen of albums in nine years back in the 1960s. Their new one, Nebulous Nearnesses, is an attempt to update the songs on those records with 21st-century technology while retaining a robust, old-timey quality. Featuring re-recordings of past tunes, it was recorded live-in-the-studio before an invited audience 100-strong in Peter Gabriel's Real World Studios in rural Wiltshire. "It was amazing to have a studio that big and have an audience that attentive as we recorded in the round," Heron said. It provides a potent example of the ISB charm that will be displayed on the current tour, which focuses primarily on the band's first six albums, Heron said. Classics such as "Chinese White," "Ducks on a Pond," "Log Cabin Home in the Sky" and "The Hedgehog's Song." The live shows will include a full version of Heron's 13-minute epic "A Very Cellular Song," which until this tour has not been performed in its entirety since 1968. On record, the extended tune proves where bands like Yes and the Moody Blues found inspiration for lengthy, classicist excursions with twee-medieval leanings, complete with harpsichord. Also, evident on Nebulous Nearnesses is the ISB's affection for leaping gnome and misty-mountain fabling. Some things never go out of fashion [back to top]

Joe Nickell : Missoulian 10/10
If Mike Heron doesn't know where he is right now, he can be forgiven. After all, it's been 30 years since he last toured the United States as a member of the Incredible String Band. "We were in Austin (Texas) yesterday and now we're in Š where are we?" he mused in a telephone interview last Tuesday. "I've forgot Š Oh, yes, El Paso." Wandering the countryside with his mates isn't new to Heron. More than three decades ago, the Incredible String Band was one of the most notoriously psychedelic bands on the international circuit. They played Woodstock, they played London's UFO and Middle Earth clubs alongside Pink Floyd, they made films and composed a multi-media dance-and-music freak show called, simply, "U." In its time, the Incredible String Band was far and away the most adventurous explorer of acoustic world-music boundaries. Not only that, the group had a knack for writing lyrics and song structures that defied logical sense while titillating the senses, songs that sounded like a nonsensical joke but actually stood up to repeated listening. "Back then, we did this full-scale psychedelic thing; it was very off-the-wall modern-classical. Everyone would stay all night at the club and absorb the music," says Heron. "Out of that atmosphere came the adventurousness of the music."

Although the Incredible String Band was never huge in the United States, they quickly rose to notoriety in the British music scene of the late-'60s. Their third album, 1968's "The Hangman's Beautiful Daughter," topped out at No. 5 on the British album charts, and for awhile they were the fourth best-selling band on the charts, behind the Beatles, Cream and The Rolling Stones. In September 1974, the band broke up, after a run of 11 studio albums in eight years. Mike Heron went on to write music for Manfred Mann's Earth Band. Other members pursued their own musical interests. Nobody played covers of the Incredible String Band anymore. Their records stopped showing up on "All-Time Greatest" album lists, and some went out of print. Perhaps some fans starting thinking that the Incredible String Band had just been one truly wild hallucination.

Then a strange thing happened: Sometime in the late 1990s, people started talking about the Incredible String Band again. Robert Plant referred to them as "an inspiration and a sign." Matt Groening - creator of "The Simpsons" - said in an interview that his second TV series, "Futurama," was based on the Incredible String Band's song, "Robot Blues." British indie-rock magazine Mojo ran an eight-page article on the band. Elektra reissued the band's records on CD. Maybe it had something to do with the resurgence of psychedelic rock or the 25th anniversary of Woodstock or the new-grass revival. Maybe it was some kind of prophecy - or curse. The Incredible String Band came back. "We do embarrassingly '60s-type stuff, but fortunately, we're not easily embarrassed," says Heron. "There's a whole new scene of folk-music people doing what I suppose you would call experimental folk music. These people sometimes name-drop the (Incredible String Band), so I guess there's some relevance." Heron reunited with two of his original bandmates - Clive Palmer and Robin Williamson - for a concert in 2000. It went well, and so the group decided to put together a few more concerts. Those concerts likewise went well. Williamson eventually bowed out, but the others went on, along with keyboardist Lawson Dando, singer and violinist Fluff, bassist Gavin Dickie, and percussionist Steini Gudmundsson.

This year, the Incredible String Band released its first album of new recordings in three decades. Those recordings, as well as the material that the band is playing on its current tour, consist of new renditions of old songs from the band's first six records. "We felt that there was so much of the music that had been underdone," says Heron. "We liked playing the songs, and nobody else is doing them." [back to top]

Andy Smetanka : Missoula Independent 10/7
There is a tendency in journalism, Mike Heron agrees, to lump similar bands together in the same scene simply because members knew each other in passing, or got started around the same time, or simply lived within five kilometers of each other. All the same, Heron insists that there was a real sense of togetherness in and between the outposts of the UK folk scene of the early-to-mid ’60s. In Edinburgh, it included Robin Williamson and Clive Palmer, whom Heron would eventually join to form the Incredible String Band, and the scene initially revolved around folk vanguard Bert Jansch. When Jansch hitched to London around 1965, Incredible String Band members took up the flag for his Tuesday night folk club at the Crown Bar with a new all-comers event in Glasgow: Clive’s Incredible Folk Club. There was room for nearly any performer who happened to drop by, says Heron, and plenty of room for experimentation and branching out. “We had the whole night to fill,” Heron recalls, “so the String Band would do two sets, and then Clive, Robin and I did sets individually. John Martin was very much a part of that scene, and so was Bert.”

It was during one of these all-night folk-ins that the three-piece version of the Incredible String Band came to the attention of Joe Boyd, an American producer and London club owner who doubled as a talent scout for New York-based Elektra Records. “He’d heard about Clive and Robin the year before,” says Heron. “They were doing just a duo at that time, playing Gypsy versions of old British folk material, rough versions of traditional songs. He was already interested in signing them to Elektra, but when he found them they had become three—I had joined them and we were off in a different direction.” Boyd signed the trio anyway, and the Incredible String Band’s eponymous debut LP was released in 1966. Critics raved about the record, though band members had their initial misgivings about its commercial prospects. “We were making jug band music,” Heron explains, “and of course Elektra weren’t very interested in that. They were the label with the Doors and Love and Bread and Carly Simon—very much a songwriter’s label, if you like. The reason they signed us, I think, was probably because of [opening track] ‘October Song.’ ’Cause that’s a really good song, and Jac [Holzman, Elektra founder and CEO] always had an ear for good songs, so we were nudged in the direction of writing original material. Robin and I were happy about that because we were doing it anyway. Clive, though, was more into reviving the old jug bands, so he left after the first album and went to [Afghanistan and] India. Later on he did become interested in writing songs and made a few albums, which are now quite collectible. But at the time he wasn’t, so he left.”

Bandmate Robin Williamson also took some time off after the band’s debut recording. His exotic destination of choice was Morocco, where he intended to study music, but the musical instruments he encountered there gave him other ideas. “Robin came back with a load of instruments and was keen to start again, so he got in touch with me. Joe Boyd put us in the studio together and we played each other the songs we’d done in the interim. We brought in our girlfriends and started to go in a world-music direction. “We were also very influenced by the whole psychedelic scene,” Heron continues, “because Joe Boyd was the kingpin of it. He was right in the center of the whole thing. We were kind of pulled into it—catapulted into the middle of that scene.” The retooled band became a fixture at the UFO, Boyd’s legendary London club, bemused participants in psychedelic carnivals featuring live performances, simultaneously projected films by Kenneth Anger, and above all the massive cross-pollination of musical styles. During their UFO tenure, Incredible String Band members rubbed elbows with everybody from Jeff Lynne (future mastermind of the Electric Light Orchestra) and Monty Python co-conspirators the Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band to the pint-sized dynamo who would eventually trade his kaffiyeh for skintight gold lame at the helm of T. Rex. Heron recalls that when the Incredible String Band mounted its production of U—an ambitious pageant of music, dance and theater—at the London Roundhouse, UFO acquaintance Marc Bolan attended the performances every night. “We loved it,” Heron says of the group’s stint in the musical hothouse of swinging London. “We laughed it off. And we were influenced by everything that was going on around us. I think everyone was. It was one of those times when the barriers were down and everyone was interested in what other people were doing. People were very open-minded.” U later toured the United States, marking one of the Incredible String Band’s last stateside jaunts before breaking up in 1974. The group’s highest profile American performance, however—by 1974, five years behind them—had been a nonevent. Woodstock, Heron agrees, was hardly a smashing success for the group. The band declined to perform on Friday night due to heavy rain, opting for a slot the next afternoon. Sandwiched between Creedence Clearwater Revival and Canned Heat on Saturday, they were treated to a less than rousing reception. “Joe Boyd has a theory,” Heron says, “that the people who went on while it was raining became famous—Melanie and Richie Havens and all that. His thing is that, on Friday, people were just pleased to be there. The heavier drugs hadn’t kicked in yet. By the time everyone had spent a day eating beans in the mud, they were more into listening to Canned Heat—which, I must say, was a band I enjoyed, too. But people were really roughing it—it was very pioneer-like. To have this flimsy String Band up there doing their thing, well…”

Aside from the peevishness of the crowd, Heron insists that the group chose the wrong songs for the performance. Even while ostensibly touring to support a new record, he explains, the Incredible String Band always drew heavily on new, obscure and otherwise unrecorded material; in retrospect, Heron thinks they should have stuck to stronger tunes. A recently discovered “proper film” of the band’s Woodstock set, he says, has at least convinced him that the performance wasn’t as bad as he and his fellow band members remembered. At the very least, Heron muses, it was an interesting experience. “We were helicoptered in with Ravi Shankar, in one of these military helicopters with no side. I was absolutely terrified. There’s actually footage of us coming out of the helicopter, and I look very white. It was one of the high points of terror in my life, and I had to share it with Ravi Shankar.” Joe Boyd, according to Mike Heron, has a lot of theories about the band. He’s suggested that Palmer’s departure after the first album left remaining members Williamson and Mike to soldier on somewhat alone in each other’s company. He’s also ventured that Heron and Williamson didn’t like each other very much. Both claims are untrue, says Heron—although he does affirm a third assertion: that girlfriends Rose Simpson and Licorice “Likky” McKenzie were brought aboard as a kind of checks-and-balances system once the band departed in its more psychedelic direction. “Joe is very fond of nailing theories,” Heron laughs, “and they’re usually wrong. He’s always saying that the reason Robin and I produced great music was because we bounced off each other, didn’t like each other. Which is complete rubbish. I would write a song and bring it to Robin, and he would suggest all the things he could do on it. And he would do it, too, the other way round. That’s why I eventually took up the sitar. I wanted to add color to things he brought in. I got as far as I could on it, and then when the band broke up I sold it the next day. The whole point of it was to illustrate Robin’s stuff. I didn’t use it to write stuff myself. So the whole theory that Robin and I wrote well together because we didn’t like each other is rubbish, really.” [back to top]

Bill Meyer : Chicago Reader 10/20
INCREDIBLE STRING BAND Just a couple years after the Beatles raised eyebrows with a single sitar, this Scottish combo made two of the most fearlessly and promiscuously eclectic folk albums of all time. The 5000 Spirits or the Layers of the Onion (1967) and The Hangman's Beautiful Daughter (1968) burst at the seams with far-flung influences: Balkan, Indian, and North African rhythms and tonalities from a trunkful of drums, flutes, and stringed instruments; Bahamian hymns, Dylanesque rants, ragtime, and Delta blues; country-and-western laments, English madrigals, and good old-fashioned music-hall schmaltz; and of course the Celtic jigs and ballads that provide the fabric for the band's songs. For a brief moment they were the toast of the counterculture -- they played at Woodstock, and the Stones even paid tribute on Their Satanic Majesties Request . But the band broke up in 1974, and soon they were being held up as an example of everything that'd been wrong with hippies: even their good stuff was pretty fey, if not outright goofy, and the lyrics were often naive or preachy. Were it not for the reverence afforded the group by the current generation of outsider folkies (Devendra Banhart has been particularly vocal), it might still be hard to admit to liking the Incredible String Band. All three original members -- Clive Palmer, Robin Williamson, and Mike Heron -- reunited to tour the UK in 2000, but these days only Palmer and Heron are still aboard. Williamson's playful mysticism is conspicuously absent on the new Nebulous Nearnesses (Amoeba), a live-in-the-studio collection of vintage material, but Heron's audibly delighted to be singing his old songs. Those old songs will be the main course at this show; Palmer will also sing a couple tunes from his new album, All Roads Lead to Land (Communion) [back to top]

Jay Babcock : LA Weekly 10/15
“We’ve been waiting around a long time for a tribute group — we thought we’d just do it ourselves,” chuckled Mike Heron, the guileless 61-year-old Scottish co-founder of the Incredible String Band, before launching into another song from the ISB’s heydaze, that sparkling period of 1967 through ’69 when they released six albums of boldly expansionist, fantastically charming psychedelic folk music to fair commercial success and open awe from other musicians (including the Stones, Hendrix, the Who, the Beatles and soon-to-be members of Led Zeppelin). While some bands from that period were so far ahead of their time that it took years for their accomplishments to be fully appreciated — the Velvet Underground, the MC5, etc. — the ISB seemed to stand outside time altogether, in that non-electric utopia of communal exploration that always exists but is rarely well-documented. Multi-instrumentalists all, they had different channels open, and their songs still work an intoxicating, timeless magic. Tonight, after a lovely set of chamber folk by the Philadelphia six-piece Espers that wowed a sold-out audience that included Will Oldham, we got all the stuff that made ISB so incredible, though from an incomplete lineup. (Co-founder Robin Williamson is currently doing solo work; the trio now includes banjoist Clive Palmer, a co-founder who departed after the very first album, and an up-for-it Lawson Dando doing yeoman’s service.) The potion: pan-cultural instrumentation, sweet music-hall/folk ditties (especially Heron’s “The Hedgehog Song” and “Painting Box”), Palmer’s wry blues-folk country rambles, and the 12-minute reality survey that is “A Very Cellular Song.” On the last, Heron sang, “Oh ah ee oo there’s absolutely no strife/living the timeless life,” with a smile that seemed a simple expression of joy — the joy of singing something that was still so fundamentally true. [back to top]

Jason Gross : Village Voice 10/5/04
Once upon a time, their music embellished with exotic instruments, witches, and a Minotaur, the Incredible String Band (initially Robin Williamson, Mike Heron, and Clive Palmer) traveled in rock circles even though, unlike Fairport Convention, they spurned drum kits and electric guitars. The Hangman's Beautiful Daughter (1968) garnered highbrow praise, poising them for sainthood; they followed up further ancient tales and ambitious concepts with a largely forgotten Woodstock appearance, Scientology, girlfriend bandmates, and then an inevitable breakup in 1974. Despite props from McCartney, Dylan, Robert Plant, Johnny Marr, Neil Tennant, and the archbishop of Canterbury, they sired almost no progeny—at least till lately, if Devendra Banhart or Animal Collective count. "We've been waiting so long for a tribute band that we've given up and become our own," Heron said recently. After decades of solo careers (including jug bands, Yiddish music, soundtracks, and kiddie LPs), the original trio tried a 1997 reunion and then a 2000 U.K. tour, adding guitarist Lawson Dando. With ISB commitments cutting into solo work, Williamson couldn't stick around long. So on the heels of their recent live-in-studio Nebulous Nearness, two sold-out September 26 Joe's Pub shows concentrated on their first six albums and Heron's songs. Incredibly, the Heron-Palmer-Dando trio pulled off a gentle, cheery set, sounding even funnier and livelier than they used to with Williamson—Dando's kazoo solos were pure Spike Jones. Living up to their multi-instrument rep, they strummed, blew, and banged on guitars, keyboards, banjos, percussion, and harmonica. Palmer's thin voice was perfect for the pre-war pop he slipped in, Leon Redbone–style. But it was Heron's joy and confidence—running through jaunty sing-alongs, Gregorian chants, booze-hungry and happy-go-lucky stuff—that put these guys miles ahead of confessional coffeehouse folkies. Their climax, the 10-minute-plus crowd-pleaser "A Very Cellular Song," had Heron emitting New Testament imagery over the traditional "We Bid You Goodnight" and then leading a rousing chorus about "pure light within you." Pretty naive, but ISB meant such sentiments decades ago, and they mean them now—they've managed to keep their innocence, but who knows when we'll have ours again? [back to top]

Ben Ratliff : New York Times 9/15
Forefathers of the weird experimental folk now being played by Devendra Banhart and Joanna Newsom, the Incredible String Band, from London, made albums in the 60's and 70's that were loved or reviled, probably depending on how you felt at the time about traditional mainstream folk. Two of its founding members, Mike Heron and Clive Palmer, are taking the band out on its first American tour in 30 years… [back to top]

Mike Joyce : Washington Post 9/24
"Nebulous Nearnesses" …documents a welcome reunion -- a cozy and acoustic celebration of the British group's sprouting growth in the late '60s. The ISB reunited a few years ago after a 25-year sabbatical, but Williamson has since moved on to other projects, leaving band stalwarts Mike Heron and Clive Palmer, plus a few talented friends, to carry on. They go about it the old-fashioned, pre-electric ISB way on "Nebulous Nearnesses," playing an odd and wonderfully colorful assortment of instruments -- everything from guitar, banjo, mandolin and fiddle to Lawson Dando's Indian harmonium and thumb piano and Steini Gudmundsson's tabla, tambourine and shakers. Williamson isn't entirely absent from the picture: He's represented by some tunes, including "The Water Song," that zen paean to nature's wonders ("O, wizard of changes, teach me the lesson of flowing"). But the real pleasures here flow from Heron's pen, with "The Hedgehog's Song," "Chinese White" and "A Very Cellular Song" all ranking high. Recorded for a small audience of friends in a chummy atmosphere, "Nebulous Nearnesses" is devoted to these and other period pieces -- reminders of the patchouli-scented '60s, back when ISB embraced folk revival trends, blossoming psychedelia and the sound of world beat to come. Yet it doesn't take long for Heron, Palmer and company to prove that much of this music remains as charming, whimsical and mystical as ever. [back to top]

Scott Thill : AOLCityGuide.com 10/7/04
Back in the mid-'60s and onward into the '70s, the Incredible String Band took the progressive sounds of psychedelia and transformed them into what has come to be known as world music. Although they can't take credit for the genre's moniker, they can take credit for expanding the parameters of American folk music convention by incorporating everything from Celtic melodies, Middle Eastern rhythms, bluegrass standards, classic rock and onward, way before the words "O Brother, Where Art Thou" were uttered.
Woodstock Warriors: The recent interest in '60s psychedelia and cultural mash-ups like "newgrass" and world music has reinvigorated plenty of bands, and the Incredibles have accordingly put their "band" back on the wagon, touring for the first time in 30 years. Which is ironic, considering that there aren't too many outfits left alive from the Woodstock generation at all, let alone one that is more or less touring for the first time since the music festival changed music -- and the world -- for good. Look for a trimmed roster this time around, however, as the Incredibles will only be fronting lifetime members Clive Palmer and Mike Heron, along with Lawson Dando.
'Nebulous' Future: Although the Incredible String Band has been around almost as long as the Rolling Stones, it's staying busy in the new millennium. In 2004 alone, the band has released a new album, 'Nebulous Nearness,' and reissued two from the '70s, 'Be Glad For the Song Has No Ending' and 'Liquid Acrobat as Regards the Air.'[back to top]

Tucker Petertil : Sitting Duck
I don’t usually talk about shows coming to Seattle, but when there is a chance to see something really incredible I’ll let you know. We have just that opportunity on Tuesday, Oct. 12 when The Incredible String Band, on their first tour of the U.S. in some thirty years, comes to Seattle’s Triple Door for two shows at 7 & 10pm. Founded in Edinburgh, Scotland in 1965, by Mike Heron, Clive Palmer and Robin Williamson, The Incredible String Band began as traditional folk singers who could write their own quirky material. After their first record they went traveling to India and points east and must have smoked a load of hash for they began to experiment by combining traditional English roots music with ethnic instruments and influences from around the world. While their contemporaries in the USA and UK were experimenting with psychedelic influences in rock the Incredible String Band brought those same far out influences to acoustic music and had folk purists in a snit. Over the years they’ve influenced many artists and are lauded as an inspiration for today’s resurgence of Wyrd Folk music and the increasing popularity of new artists such as Devendra Banhart, Faun Fables, PG Six, Vetiver, The Espers, Amps For Christ, Black Forest/Black Sea, Sharron Kraus, Little Wings, White Magic, Six Organs Of Admittance and Joanna Newsom. On their new CD, "Nebulous Nearnesses," multi-instrumentalists Mike Heron, Clive Palmer are joined by new member Lawson Dando, Robin Williamson declined to tour as he has his own solo career in LA. They revisit some of the best of their old material, making music on guitar, banjo, mandolin, Indian harmonium, thumb piano, tabla, tambourine, shakers and fiddle. Their combination of whimsy, musical magic and other-worldliness puts them on the short list of my all-time favorite bands. [back to top]

Mark Jenkins : Washington Post 9/29
Mike Heron and Clive Palmer, who are undertaking with Lawson Dando a U.S. tour as the Incredible String Band, both appeared on the Scottish group's 1967 debut album. But Palmer departed after that, leaving Heron and Robin Williamson as the core of the band that endured till 1974. They expanded the original trio's rough-hewn folk music to encompass ethereal melodies, Asian instruments and a decidedly psychedelic worldview. With the support of multi-instrumentalist Dando, Heron conjured some of the sound and spirit of the group's classic late-'60s albums. Such tunes as "Painting Box" and the epic "A Very Cellular Song" sounded a bit cracked with age, but retained much of their original charm… The outgoing, upbeat Heron was still a reasonable facsimile of his younger self ... [back to top]

Ethan Brown : New York Magazine 9/20/04
They may have played Woodstock and helped turn Robert Plant on to mysticism, but don’t lump the Incredible String Band in with their Age of Aquarius brethren: The scope of their music—which encompasses pop, folk, country, and psychedelia—is just too wide for such easy categorization. The String Band’s sprawling, ambitious albums, like 1968’s The Hangman’s Beautiful Daughter, have had a huge influence on everyone from Mick Jagger to Neil Tennant of eighties synth-pop icons the Pet Shop Boys. They broke up in the mid-seventies, but record collectors’ interest in their exquisitely strange back catalogue inspired core members Mike Heron, Clive Palmer, and Lawson Dando to reunite recently for their first U.S. tour in nearly 30 years. Fortunately for local fans of their pastoral pop, the Incredible String Band touches down twice this week. [back to top]

Jon Takiff : Philadelphia Daily News 9/24
The Swinging Sixties produced some amazing sonic experiments, as musicians dropped out of the pop mainstream, turned on to the wonders of other musical worlds and dabbled in whatever instruments and mind-altering alchemies they could find. One of the most daring and creative groups of the time was the Incredible String Band, founded in Edinburgh, Scotland, in 1965 by three talents with diverse backgrounds: Robin Williamson, a dexterous guitarist and lilting singer devoted to traditional Scot ballads, heady rock guitarist Mike Heron and virtuoso banjo player Clive Palmer, a devotee of old-timey and ragtime music. While Palmer left after the first album, ISB continued to grow as one of the first and most intriguing of "psychedelic" folk bands, with childlike (and hookah smoking) fantasies of "Alice In Wonderland" and the "om-sweet-om," just-be philosophy of Alan Watts, blended with thorny Celtic airs, jaunty hurdy gurdy licks and minor-keyed African and Middle Eastern modalties. Yes, ISB played Woodstock and inspired the likes of Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young and the Rolling Stones (in their "Satanic Majesties" phase). But the eccentric charms of albums like "The 5000 Spirits or the Layers of the Onion" and "The Hangman's Beautiful Daughter" escaped most ears, and the group broke up in 1974. With the dawning (appropriately) of the new millennium, though, the three original players decided to reunite for a tour. Now Heron and Palmer are leading a U.S. march that could rekindle interest in their still vital and one-of-a-kind merry melodies. Sans the absent Williamson (sigh), they won't be able to do up their biggest hit "First Girl I Loved" (later covered by Judy Collins and Jackson Browne, among others). But alive and well in their repertoire are charmers like "Cousin Caterpillar" and "Painting Box," and haunting spell-casters like "Chinese White" and "A Very Cellular Song." [back to top]

Michael Fremer : Musicangle.com 8/10/04
A version of the Incredible String Band, featuring original founders Mike Heron and Clive Palmer and augmented by female multi-instrumentalist and vocalist Fluff and bassist Gavin Dickie, but minus Robin Williamson, will tour America beginning September 22nd, in Northampton, MA at the Iron Horse. The repertoire will be culled from the group's first six albums… Nebulous Nearness, a live in the studio album recorded by the group at Peter Gabriel's Real World studios last fall featuring 13 classic ISB tunes has been issued. [back to top]

David Pescovitz : Boingboing.net 8/27
Seminal UK avant-folk group the Incredible String Band is preparing to tour the US for the first time in three decades. The group melds sitars, guitars, banjos, and ouds with bluegrass, Celtic melodies, and classic 1960s psychedelia. Founding members Mike Heron are leading the band stateside. From publicist Howard Wuelfing's email list Many of the artists that comprise the current wave of “experimental folk” consider the Incredible String Band as a crucial inspiration and influence. Devendra Banhart says (in typically Banhartian fashion) “Happy Birthday! not noodlemisters but Epic lizard man songs traversing the new universe holding sarods, our old hopes tightly, fiddles, chimes, udes, bagpipes, baby boars, banjos, mead, invisible ropes and on and on OH in this sweetcheese pond lies a perfect reflection of trueTRUE love! Happy Birthday Old Baby!" [back to top]

Jennifer Kelly : Neumu.com [Monday, October 18, 2004]
This fall, almost exactly 30 years after their September 1974 breakup, the Incredible String Band reunited to tour the U.S., Britain and Europe with a lineup that features original members Mike Heron and Clive Palmer (but not Robin Williamson), and keyboardist Lawson Dando. Heron, interviewed by phone in Atlanta recently, said that concerts have focused on what he calls "the strong core material" from the band's first six albums, for the first time ever.

The reunion kicked off at a New Year's celebration in Edinburgh in 2000, when festival promoters signed up Williamson and Palmer for a show, then asked Heron to join them so that the band could be billed as the Incredible String Band. Heron agreed, and the concert was scheduled. However, when the three played the traditional country and jug band music that brought them together, fans hungered for classic Incredible String Band tunes like "Chinese White," "Ducks on a Pond" and "A Very Cellular Song," all tracks that hadn't been played consistently since their heyday in the 1960s. Heron began adding his older songs into the set lists during a series of UK concerts that spanned 2000 to 2002, but bandmate Williamson refused. "In the latter stages, it got to the point where I was doing all my old songs, and he was doing all new songs," remembered Heron. "So it was kind of hard, when people would travel hundreds of miles to hear 'The First Girl I Loved' and we just wouldn't do it."

Because of that difference in direction, coupled with Williamson's family obligations, Williamson left the tour in 2002, and Heron and Palmer continued. While Heron admits that he misses Williamson's contribution, he says that the experience of performing older Incredible String Band songs has been uplifting — and novel. "In the nine years we were going, we made 13 albums. It wasn't unusual then. People did that kind of thing," he explained. "So every time we played, we were doing the new material from the new album on Warner Bros. or Elektra or whoever we were signed to at that time. So the strong stuff didn't get played that much, maybe five or six times. So it's been great to be playing the strong stuff in a chunk. A solid hour and a half." All of the songs in the set have been rearranged for the current, smaller configuration of the Incredible String Band, with just Heron, Palmer and Dando touring (for UK dates and the upcoming record Nebulous Nearness, the band expands to include a violinist and a bass player). In addition, they've been slightly adapted to avoid the staleness that sometimes comes from revisiting old songs. "It Could Be," for instance, now strides a banjo cadence, which serves as the rhythmic underpinning of the song; other familiar songs have been similarly reinterpreted. "We play what the fans want to hear, plus a little bit more," Heron said. "It's the material they want to hear that could have been done in a kind of churned-out way, but it's done in a fresh way with new ideas in there." These core songs were mostly written in the mid-to-late 1960s, during a fruitful and exceptionally experimental period in psychedelic music.

The Incredible String Band began with roots in traditional country and jug band music, and their first album, 1966’s The Incredible String Band, was heavily influenced by these styles. The band broke up briefly afterwards, as banjoist Clive Palmer traveled to Afghanistan and Williamson to Morocco. Williamson returned with a collection of exotic instruments and a fascination with world music, and when the Incredible String Band resumed, they became far more experimental. "At that time, the climate was such that adventure in music was really expected," Heron recalled. "Our manager ran UFO, a club in London, and they had bands like Pink Floyd and the Move and sitar players and modern classical quartets — all kinds of music were accepted. And out of this climate came Sergeant Pepper and Her Majesty's Request and Pink Floyd. We were right in the middle of that whole psychedelic thing...which was great for creativity and for trying new things." Heron says that he and Williamson, fresh from the country, were once invited to an apartment in London, where several young men sat playing guitars. One musician asked them to jam, and attempting to be "cool," Heron turned them down. "It was Eric Clapton," said Heron. "We felt a bit silly about that later." With their second album, 5000 Spirits, the Incredible String Band began to explore the fantastical childhood narratives and subtle mood shifts that became their signature style. "I was interested in creating the kind of journey when you took acid...'Cellular Song' is like that, where it goes through these slightly dark moods and comes out at the end with a goodwill prayer to the world."

During this period, the Incredible String Band shared stages with bands like Pink Floyd, Cream, and many others. They appeared at Woodstock in 1969, a performance many fans found disappointing. "By the time we got to Woodstock, we were doing fairly obscure tracks from our later albums, and we didn't do anything from our first six albums at Woodstock." In the late 1960s, both Heron and Williamson — and their respective girlfriends — became involved in Scientology, a shift that many people believe signaled the end of the band's most creative period. Also, as the music industry became dominated by large-scale stadium tours, the Incredible String Band found themselves an increasingly poor fit with the zeitgeist. On their last tour, they opened for Three Dog Night in a series of football arenas, a setting that neutralized their traditionally strong communication and connection with fans. Yet long after their breakup in 1974, the Incredible String Band continued to influence musicians, and today many of the people involved in the psychedelic folk movement — Devendra Banhart, Joanna Newsom, Espers, Jack Rose and the members of the Animal Collective — draw inspiration from it.

Bobby Matador of the band Oneida, which once named a song "Rose & Liquorice" after two female members of the Incredible String Band, says "No band has more failed imitators than ISB in the indie world. I mean, they really invented the world of psychedelic folk, and originally pulled it off in a way that nobody has approached in 35 years, except maybe Animal Collective or Tower Recordings." He added, "Personally, I discovered them by buying a bunch of one-dollar LPs at a library book sale, just out of curiosity, and having my mind blown. I immediately went on an ISB rampage, and fortunately this was at a time when it was easy to find their records for cheap in any record store. I got obsessed, turned my bandmates on to them, and we went ahead and wrote/recorded our Anthem of the Moon album under a serious ISB haze. They're basically responsible for all the weird acoustic songs that have cropped up on our albums since then, as well as for my growing collection of odd acoustic instruments." More cryptically, but with enthusiasm, Devendra Banhart added this tribute to the Incredible String Band, "Happy Birthday! not noodlemisters but Epic lizard man songs traversing the new universe holding sarods, our old hopes tightly, fiddles, chimes, udes, bagpipes, baby boars, banjos, mead, invisible ropes and on and on OH in this sweetcheese pond lies a perfect reflection of trueTRUE love! Happy Birthday Old Baby!"

The Incredible String Band are touring the U.S. through the end of October, before moving to the UK in November and Spain in December (for a complete list of dates and venues, see www.incrediblestringband.com). In conjunction with their tour, the Incredible String Band have released Nebulous Nearness, their first official live album ever, on Amoeba Recordings. Recorded in Peter Gabriel's Real World Studio in front of a live audience of 200 people, the album — like the current show — pulls together many of the band's most popular songs. In addition, Clive Palmer just released a new solo album called All Roads Lead to Land on Communion Records on October 12. [back to top]