Subject: Review:Incredible String band
From:
GUEST,Roger the skiffler
Date: 23 Aug 00 - 05:35 AM
I only saw the Williamson/Heron ISB once live in the late '60s and wasn't overly impressed except by their instrumental versatility. Other 'Catters have reported disappointed by the revived 3-piece at recent festivals. Today's London Times sems to agree.
Incredible String Band Bloomsbury Theatre, London WC1 BACK in the late 1960s the Incredible String Band made a series of whimsical and quite magical wide-eyed hippy albums with titles such as The 5000 Spirits and The Hangman's Beautiful Daughter. Using all manner of strange instruments and drawing upon a patchwork of mystical theories and esoteric philosophies, there was nobody else quite like them.
By the middle of the 1970s the high tide of hippydom had ebbed and the band broke up. Now they are back and the classic line-up of Robin Williamson and Mike Heron has been augmented by Clive Palmer, who quit in 1966, before their Top Ten album success and Woodstock slot.
But the years have not been kind to the Incredibles and this was a creaky old show. Palmer limped around the stage suffering from lumbago and strummed a lifeless banjo. Heron was even more retiring, hidden behind a keyboard which he played only sporadically. This left Williamson to carry the evening as he switched between guitar, fiddle, mandolin, whistle and flute. You could see he was trying not to hog the limelight, but the lack of energy elsewhere meant that he really couldn't do much else.
The post-ISB material was a rag-bag of banjo solos, jug band tunes and Scottish jigs. It was standard folk club fare - and deadly dull. But they knew we had come to relive past glories and they weren't going to let us down. Heron gave us Painting Box, You Know What You Could Be and This Moment, in a reedy, sometimes inaudible voice. It hardly mattered, as the entire audience sang along to every word.
Williamson has endured better. His Eyes of Fate and Waltz of the New Moon sounded as evocative as ever, although you have to wonder about lines such as "We are the table cloth and also the table". Strangely, when he first sang it back in 1968 we all thought it was perfectly normal.
Then he did his party trick, inviting ten members of the audience to accompany him on tin whistles and cow bells. The sight of a bunch of balding fiftysomethings trying to recapture the spontaneous innocence of their hippy youth was bizarre indeed.
Once upon a time such antics seemed charming. Now they appear merely sloppy and anybody under 45 who didn't share the memories would conclude that the Incredible String Band 2000 really aren't very good. But as we sung along to such memorable lines as "The angels are washing their windows above the years whose jumble sale goes spinning on below", we weren't going to let a minor detail like that spoil our fun.
NIGEL WILLIAMSON
RtS (A balding fifty-something but never a hippy!)
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