Pink Floyd and The Incredible String Band.
The Incredible String Band.
In 1968 I finished my first year at the grammar school and started my second. It was also the year, I found out some time or times later, in which the ISB released two or three albums, depending entirely on how you choose to count them.
The previous year, after the release of “The 5000 Spirits…”, the ISB had done a series of small venue concerts all over the UK, mainly in London clubs. Amongst the most significant of these was a support for Pink Floyd [see current] and Fairport Convention [the Judy Dyble line-up; see way above] in October at the Saville Theatre, and later that month a double bill with Shirley & Dolly Collins [see way above] at the Queen Elizabeth Hall. This is a poster advertising it:
However, the manager of the ISB at that time, Joe Boyd, had the bright idea of booking big gigs for the band over the following 12 months, and as it turned out they were sell-outs. This had much to do with the band’s third LP.
As I have mentioned on several occasions, at school I was fortunate enough to have a pal who had a really cool elder brother, and he was the source of an immense amount of information to me in my early months of prog-rock. On learning early in 1971 that I had bought the ISB album “U” [to which we shall come in a month or three], he told me about two earlier albums they had released. both of which had titles that were pure magic to my ears; one was called “The Hangman’s Beautiful Daughter” and the other “Wee Tam and the Big Huge”. As I would learn much later, these were the 1968 records, and that was the order in which they were released.
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