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Forty years ago this month, the Incredible String Band released their benchmark double album Wee Tam & The Big Huge, just one of many milestones in a year that saw them become the counterculture's most unlikely pop stars. Pete Paphides recalls the entire adventure. -- Barney Hoskyns, Editorial Director, Rock's Backpages

POST-SGT. PEPPER, London may have been swinging, but in the suburbs bordering Edinburgh, the evenings were silent. As Mr. and Mrs. Heron were getting ready for bed, their son Mike removed a tab of acid from an envelope and waited to see what might happen. In the center of town, this sort of activity was commonplace. Robin Williamson--Heron's accomplice in the Incredible String Band--lived in a squat where the humdrum routines of post-war life had long been left behind. However, there was little about what Heron calls "the sad suburban houses" of Portobello, to suggest that--behind red-brick terraces--hallucinogenic epiphanies were taking place.
 
Mike Heron knelt on the floor in the corridor by his parent's bedroom and listened to the radio. And then? Well, what happened next is a matter of public record. The centerpiece of The Hangman's Beautiful Daughter, "A Very Cellular Song" chronicles the dramatic undulations of Heron's 12-hour trip in sublime detail. The warm waltz-time oscillations of the small organ that Heron kept upstairs--that's where he knelt to tap out a tune as, in the background, Radio 4 play piped out of a transistor. "See the line, 'Oh mother, what shall I do?' That came from there. All sorts of things were feeding in, like, 'Lay down my dear sister"--that was from Music of the Bahamas by the Pindar Family."
 
As the sun started to rise and Heron gradually returned to his natural state, 5 am ruminations such as, "Amoebas are very small," gave way to a sense of beatific resolution. You can hear that, too, on the song's coda adapted from a Sikh spiritual: "May the long time sun shine upon you/All love surround you/And the pure light within you/Guide you all the way on." Then, Mike Heron padded downstairs and ate the breakfast his mother had cooked for him. "My parents had probably realized [what happened] as they listened to things unfold. But nothing was mentioned."

At the eye of this lysergic folk storm, Williamson and Heron remember not stopping to consider their rapidly expanding success. In the year that the Beatles made Sgt. Pepper, Paul McCartney hailed The 5000 Spirits Or The Layers Of The Onion as a comparable achievement. Mick Jagger must have agreed because he tried and failed to poach the String Band for his label. But if songs like "My Name Is Death" and "The Eyes Of Fate" sketched out their intentions, the events of 1968 constituted a full-on aesthetic assault, compressing more activity in a year than some bands manage in entire careers.
 
In April, The Hangman's Beautiful Daughter commenced the first of its 21 weeks in the chart, peaking at number five. By contrast, 1968's other seminal stoner album Astral Weeks--released eight months later--failed to trouble the charts at all. In return for their 30 shillings, ISB disciples would have wasted no time in replicating the conditions in which "A Very Cellular Song" was written, before immersing themselves in acid-folk fantasias like "The Water Song" and "Koeeoaddi There"--songs which saw their creators meshing the temple-throbbing drone of the psych-geist to the primordial modal hum from which all music was evolved.

Adrian Whittaker, editor of beGlad: An Incredible String Band Compendium remembers borrowing the newly-released Hangman's Beautiful Daughter from Blackheath library and "being seduced by this thing... Four or five of us fifth formers having devotional evenings around a turntable, burning incense and just listening, imagining that the people making this music lived communally, with their girlfriends. I remember thinking that this was what I wanted to aspire to."

As with any artist who has ever sought to capture the essence of the times in which they had come of age, it was difficult to imagine an era in which Incredible String Band's music might one day flourish again. But as generic indie music has found itself being co-opted into the mainstream, countless other bands have sprung up to fill the void with a new kind of outsider music. And, to anyone who owns those early String Band albums, much of it will seem awfully familiar. It's inconceivable that the likes of Espers, Six Organs Of Admittance, Tunng and Joanna Newsom don't have at least one Incredible String Band album in their collections. In the ISB fanzine beGlad, one contributor pays tribute to a late-60s oeuvre "rich exultant Earth-scenes of hazard-free spiritual abundance."

It occurs to you that such a phrase could have just as easily been invented for 21st century freak-folk icon Devendra Banhart.

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