Psychedelic survival Chris Hill

The Sixties were not all rosy in the world of hippie music, says

Muse, Odalisque, Handmaiden

A Girl’s Life In The Incredible String Band

Rose Simpson

Strange Attractor Press 2021

Pb, 264pp, £17.50, ISBN 9781907222672

The Incredible String Band’s short career, 1966-1971, saw the release of eight albums and a unique performance legacy. Combining the exemplary musicianship of Mike Heron and Robin Williamson, music hall histrionics and outlandish theatre, the band embodied the sound and look of British hippie culture.

Rose

Simpson’s frank account of her life in the band may disappoint readers seeing lost opportunities in the “flower power” past; any nostalgia is tempered by the reality of touring and her role as housekeeper to Heron and Williamson’s psychedelic lifestyle. Her commitment to the band remains, however, profoundly endearing and it seems the early days were full of joy, yet she pulls no punches in discussing the alienation she experienced as their countercultural status grew. This is very much a memoir that reads as a survival manual.

Encountering the band in 1967, Simpson soon abandons her student life at York University becoming enamoured with the romance of mystical questing and the psychedelic lifestyle on offer. Her early days with ISB see her carried along in the wake of Heron as they embark on communal life in Wales and Scotland and venture into the kaleidoscopic world of groovy London under the tutelage of their manager, the unrepentantly hip Joe Boyd. As Heron and Williamson’s reputation grows and touring and recording schedules become increasingly demanding, Simpson remains grounded in the everyday. It is difficult to ignore the drudgery that counterpoints Simpson’s life as her role in the band as a player along with Williamson’s girlfriend Licorice McKechnie – unpaid, of course – becomes more demanding. An appearance at Woodstock in 1969 becomes a logistical nightmare.

Enter Scientology! First contact came about in America, with McKechnie looking into its spiritual promises. Heron and Williamson followed suit in London. Introducing order and purpose to their lives, Heron, Williamson and McKechnie embraced this new conformity and began to realign the band to its philosophy and ideals. The theatre project “U” they envisaged would carry the message to their fans met a very mixed reaction, with their core following understandably sceptical of this new direction. Unwilling to follow the proscriptions of an authoritarian groupmind and having enjoyed a glimpse of another type of life in the company of Joe Boyd and the Laurel Canyon set, Simpson describes her own epiphany with a visceral glee. By 1970 she declares Scientology “facile and superficial” and her departure from the band a foregone conclusion. With no regrets she describes her return to the “real” world and its rewards and hardships with an admirable candour, her post-band life in no way a compromise or disappointment.

This memoir is a fantastic document of the whirlwind of ideas, ambitions and delusions that characterise the late 1960s and its movement into a more melancholic and harsher decade when the casualties were counted.

★★★★★