Sunday Night is...The Incredible String Band X 4

A Very Cellular Song, 1968

A rather extraordinary long track by one my favourite bands of the time, The Incredible String Band. What would you say about them? Folk-mystic-acid-commune-travellers music? Some of it is deeply fey, some monstrously self-indulgent, other parts - most parts perhaps - wonderfully inventive. We saw them in Leeds in about 1970, a whole great 'family' of them. There wasn't anything like them then, probably still isn't (not that I'd know). I suppose the Sixties was always likely to cumulate in something like this before the Seventies descended.

Should we add medieval-Buddhist-Middle Earthism too? We probably should.


Water Song, 1969

And a good old sing song, Mike Heron and Robin Williamson playing lovely guitar behind not very great singing. But, hey, that's how it goes. Or went:


Empty Pocket Blues, 1970

And lastly this lovely thing that I learned to play and sing after a fashion. The best of them as a single song. This is pretty well what I thought would be a proper life aged 17/18. 'I want you to know I just had to go'. To go was the most important, most beautiful thing.


First Girl I loved, 1967