The Incredible String Band - The Hangman's Beautiful Daughter

Released - March 1968

Genre - Psychedelic Folk

Producer - Joe Boyd

Selected Personnel - Robin Williamson (Vocals/Guitar/Whistles/Percussion/Harmonica); Mike Heron (Vocals/Sitar/Organ/Keyboards/Guitar); Dolly Organs (Organ/Piano); David Snell (Harp); Licorice McKechnie (Vocals/Percussion); Richard Thompson (Vocals); Judy Dyble (Vocals)

Standout Track - A Very Cellular Song

The thing about spending many years developing an obsession with prog rock is it really inures your ear to weirdness. You spend so long getting into music that's full of bizarre theatrics and lengthy, pompous solos or weird arrangements and instrumentation that when you encounter a rock song that features any such eccentricities, they tend to wash over you rather than challenge you. It was a refreshing surprise, then, earlier this year to finally encounter music that genuinely made me sit up and pay attention to how incredibly weird it is. One of the major providers of such an experience was Frank Zappa, whose stuff I've got into in the last six months and was surprisingly different even with a decent schooling in jazz fusion and psychedelic rock. We'll get to Zappa later, though. The other massive surprise this year came in the form of the Incredible String Band, whose landmark 1968 record The Hangman's Incredible Daughter is one of the most brilliantly bizarre albums I've ever heard. 

Of course, with all such things it's probably just a case of familiarity breeding apathy - perhaps the Incredible String Band aren't objectively weirder than any of the big prog bands like King Crimson or Jethro Tull, and somebody really well-schooled in psychedelic folk would be surprised by the eccentricities of prog. But to me, I think the big shock coming to The Hangman's Beautiful Daughter was the fact that I'd never heard musicians favour experimentalism to such a degree within the specific constraints of folk music. There's presumably a huge swathe of bizarre, theatrical psychedelic folk out there that I've not heard, but in my listening habits folk music was largely a genre defined by its traditionalism, and its adherence to pastoral, rustic formulas of how to compose and perform music. Even the folk music I knew that was a part of the late-60s psychedelic folk music, like the Pentangle's Basket Of Light, sounds deeply conservative in comparison to what the Incredible String Band serve up here.

The band had originated in Edinburgh as a trio consisting of folk musicians Robin Williamson and Clive Palmer, later joined by rock musician Mike Heron after an audition. They became a fixture of the Scottish folk scene alongside the likes of Bert Jansch, later to be one of the founding members of the Pentangle. After the release of their first album as a trio, however, Palmer left to travel to India, and Williamson similarly departed the UK to travel to Morocco with his girlfriend, Licorice McKechnie. He returned after running out of money, bringing with him a number of exotic African instruments he had picked up on his travels. Williamson and Heron reunited and forged on with the Incredible String Band as a duo, and The Hangman's Beautiful Daughter was the second album they recorded together without Palmer (the album does feature a few guest musicians in addition to the duo, including backing vocals from Richard Thompson, a frequent collaborator with John Martyn). On its predecessor, The 5000 Spirits Or The Layers Of The Onion, they had begun to incorporate more exotic instruments, but on The Hangman's Beautiful Daughter they went all-out via multi-tracking, being one of the earliest folk bands to use multiple overdubs. As such, it gave both Williamson and Heron the opportunity to showcase their talents on a whole host of instruments.

The sound is, frankly, cluttered, but that's all part of its unique charm and bewildering strange-ness. Within a few seconds there'll be buzzing kazoos, sawing violins, recorders, percussion, harpsichords, sitars, the twang of jaw-harps, all sorts of total nonsense going on around the melody itself. Interestingly, it's on record that Williamson and Heron really didn't get on, and that the band had only come together in its early days thanks to Palmer's role as a sort of intermediary between the two. Whether that's due to Heron's rock background clashing with Williamson's folk interests isn't clear, but apparently neither would agree to one of the other's songs being included on the record unless they were allowed to hugely overstuff it with their own instrumental arrangements and contributions, hence why the majority of the record sounds totally overstuffed with weird sounds, but that tension lends to a brilliantly chaotic, anarchic mood only just kept on the rails by the tunes underpinning everything.

Even the songs themselves are hardly particularly familiar, easily digestible things. It's hardly as though Williamson and Heron took very simple, conventional folk songs and then threw loads of weird instruments at them, rather that from the moment of composition onwards, the aim was to be as weird and unpredictable as possible. The opening "Koeeoaddi There" feels like about four different songs in one, leaping from more upbeat passages with twanging guitars to slower, sotto vocce passages of quiet intensity. Then there's the album's wonderful centrepiece, the 13-minute epic "A Very Cellular Song" (one of only three songs Heron contributes to the album, though its length means the running time of his three songs is only a few minutes behind the 7 of Williamson's). "A Very Cellular Song" is a bewildering, brilliant mess of a song, one that really struggles to find any central recurring musical motif or melody or theme - it's just a progression of strange ideas thrown together, just like the album as a whole. Its stand-out moments, by and large, are actually its more restrained ones. The gorgeous rendition of the Bahamian spiritual "I Bid You Goodnight" is my favourite moment on the whole record, where harmonised vocals are accompanied only by handclaps and organ as Heron recites "I remember quite well, I remember quite well, goodnight, goodnight, I was walking in Jerusalem just like John, goodnight, goodnight." Later there's the brilliant, hushed, whispered section where Heron sings from the perspective of an amoeba ("I just give a wriggle, and when I look there's two of me, just as handsome as can be") over a muted organ part. Then there's the song's closing section, the jubilant, recorder-laden celebration of "May The Long Time Sun Shine Upon You," which is one of the album's most joyous moments.

The album veers so frequently between obviously silly, tongue-in-cheek moments like the amoeba monologue, to more sincerely-felt spiritual moments like "I Bid You Goodnight" with such regularity that it's difficult to pin down exactly what its intended tone is. In this respect I feel like there's a certain significance to the album's producer, Joe Boyd. Boyd had been the Incredible String Band's manager and producer since their formation in 1966, and by the onset of the 70s would have become a veteran of producing oddly eccentric, whimsical pastoral folk albums after helming the likes of Nick Drake's Five Leaves Left (all three of his studio albums, in fact) and Vashti Bunyan's Just Another Diamond Day. On my Nick Drake reviews I was a little dismissive of Boyd due to his decision to impose unnecessary orchestral arrangements onto Drake's songs, and I still stand by that, but the realisation that the same guy was behind The Hangman's Beautiful Daughter and Just Another Diamond Day has caused me to re-evaluate him as a producer.

On my review of Just Another Diamond Day I mentioned Vashti's uncanny ability to make music that seems to tap into some sort of pastoral, nostalgic timelessness that's more in tune with nature and the earth and the ground than it is with any sense of specificity or cynicism, where even the fey oddities of some of her music (the potentially absurdly twee "Rainbow River," for instance) dissolve in a greater sense of the rustic power and magic of the music itself. I get a similar feeling with Paul Giovanni's soundtrack for The Wicker Man - there's a certain style of psychedelic folk that feels very much tied to paganistic traditions and the worship of the land, the renewal of harvests and the like. It's obviously a world Joe Boyd feels very at home with, as that strange magical sensation is all over The Hangman's Beautiful Daughter - even apparent nonsense like "The Minotaur's Song," a piano-led music-hall parody in which Williamson takes on the role of the titular mythical beast, self-importantly intoning ludicrous lyrics like "I'm the original, discriminating buffalo man, and I'll do what's wrong as long as I can," somehow feels like there's something of greater significance going on, and of greater beauty.

The most startlingly beautiful moment on the record is the album closer, "Nightfall," which builds to a finale involving a soaringly beautiful sitar solo that twines in the air over the accompaniment and finishes the album on an achingly beautiful, contemplative note that we might have only occasionally seen coming during all the nonsense that preceded it. Not everything on the record is quite so captivating, mind - "Water Song" is a little too directionless for my liking, consisting of little more than sounds of water being poured, a reedy vocal and the occasional bashing at some obscure stringed instrument. "Three Is A Green Crown," meanwhile, is an extended workout on sitar, violin and tablas so starts with wonderfully diverse and exciting ingredients but just grinds on too long without ever really finding a tune or a really captivating musical idea. Other than these two missteps, though, this album is by turns uplifting, hilarious, totally impenetrable and occasionally deeply affecting. It became a landmark record cited as hugely influential by the likes of Led Zeppelin's Robert Plant, and even achieved chart success thanks to its being championed on the radio by John Peel. The Incredible String Band continued as a cult band of great significance in the psychedelic folk scene for the rest of the 60s before their output began to see diminishing returns in the early 70s and they disbanded in 1974 to pursue solo careers.

Track Listing:

All songs written by Robin Williamson except where noted.

1. Koeeoaddi There

2. The Minotaur's Song

3. Witches Hat

4. A Very Cellular Song (Mike Heron)

5. Mercy I Cry City (Mike Heron)

6. Waltz Of The New Moon

7. The Water Song

8. Three Is A Green Crown

9. Swift As The Wind (Mike Heron)

10. Nightfall