“They Were A Band Trying To Explore”

RICHARD THOMPSON was a fan and a friend of Mighty Baby and eventually joined their spiritual search.

“I’D SEEN The Action while still at school, 1965 at the Marquee Club. Reg was a good singer and I was always impressed by Roger Powell as a drummer. Then when Fairport Convention started playing the underground scene we were on a few bills together at Middle Earth in 1967. I shared a flat with some Fairports, and somehow an acetate of The Action’s album [Rolled Gold] ended up there. I don’t know where it came from, or where it went, but that was a really good pop record.

When I left Fairport, I had an empty diary but it filled up pretty quickly with sessions and I bumped into them all the time doing those. The first was Gary Farr’s record Strange

[1970] which was just me, Ian Whiteman, Mick Evans and Roger as a quartet and that went well. Later on, I booked Ian and Roger to play on Sandy Denny’s albums. Mick and Roger together made a great rhythm section. Ian was a really accomplished musician, a child prodigy on the oboe, a Bill Evans kind of pianist and he also played sax and flute very well. Martin Stone always seemed to be at the centre of the music, he was in the zone, and I thought that was impressive. Mighty Baby were a band trying to explore. Like the Grateful Dead, they liked the idea of not having any barriers, of things unfolding in a different way every night. I’d been reading about Zen and theosophy, Gurdjieff and heaven knows what since I was 15, and around 1972, when I was 23, my researches led me to decide that the Sufis were the people who had the knowledge. That seemed the clearest spiritual path to take. I read in Time Out that there was a Sufi meeting in a church hall about 200 yards from my house in Belsize Park, so I went along. There were about 30 people there chanting and singing and I began to recognise faces. It was Ian and Roger and Mick and they said, ‘You must come to our centre,’ so I did, and it all kind of made sense to me. At that point we became very close. We were following the same path. Martin, who had started them all towards it, had already dropped Islam by then. In fact, I think the band was already over.

Their community squatted half a street in Bristol Gardens in London and then moved to Norwich, and Linda and I lived there for a while. I didn’t meet Ian Dallas for several months, and when I did I found him manipulative. Eventually he overstepped his authority. But I felt a real purity coming from the Moroccan teachers.

Sufism is the spiritual, inner dimension of Islam, the prayers and the social thing is the outer dimension, like the Kabbalah is the inside of Judaism. In some ways you can’t have one without the other, you have to balance the outside and inside.

There was a generational feeling in the ’70s asking, ‘Should we be looking for more sustainable buildings and lifestyles, more traditional ways of running communities?’ We tried that in our little community, but we failed to come up with real solutions. It was very cult-like and it shouldn’t have been. We were very inspired by the great Moroccan saints, but the UK version didn’t pan out. I stuck it until about 1976 and then decided I couldn’t live that way. I’m still a Muslim. I still pray. I’m a bit of a lazy Sufi, but it keeps me connected and sane, with a spiritual overview.”

“Martin Stone always seemed to be at the centre of the music. He was in the zone.”