Rose Simpson - Muse, Odalisque, Handmaiden: A Girl’s Life in the Incredible String Band

MUSE , ODALISQUE , HANDMAIDEN : A Girl's Life In The Incredible String Band

by Rose Simpson

First published by Strange Attractor Press 2020.

Text Rose Simpson 2020.

ISBN: 9781907222672

Cover Design by Tihana are.

Book Design / Layout by Maa Gaffney-Hyde.

Set in Bembo and Tremolo.

Rose Simpson has asserted her moral right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the written permission of the publishers. A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

STRANGE ATTRACTOR PRESS

BM SAP , London,

WC 1 N 3 XX , UK

www.strangeattractor.co.uk

Distributed by The MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts.

And London, England.

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Without Adrian Whittaker's ongoing encouragement, patient advice and encyclopaedic knowledge of all things ISB I couldn't have written this memoir. Dropping in on the ISB world for his showing of the re-edited U film in 2018 persuaded me it was worthwhile to try.

As I began to look again at that time it was Wolfgang Rostek's diligent archival work and his vast collection of ISB ephemera and concert reviews that coloured and dated memories of performances.

Thanks to both and to all those whose enthusiasm for the music of Mike Heron and Robin Williamson is undiminished despite the years that have passed since we walked out on stages together.

In general I believe that people already talk and write too much, dissipating useful and hard-earned energy. My Yorkshire legacy seems taciturn but sensible: Do something rather than talk about it. So I never wanted to write a book. But when my story is being narrated and sold, in the process becoming a public commodity embedded in a monolithic history, I'm not content any more to let it be entirely out of my hands.

The story could be that of any of the girls on the psychedelic album covers and posters of 1968, these deluded or exploited air-heads, as they're now often seen. We seemed so wilfully to be ignoring the enlightenment of the more political feminists and so can be dismissed from the public gaze.

We hear plenty from the men whose names appear on the same records, sitting on the platforms of literary festivals and TV studios, hoping we don't notice their thinning hair and the stooped frailty of the age they conceal.

Political women and academic ladies, radical female artists and thrusting businesswomen have all demanded their voices be heard but most of us just stroll along the path that time is taking, doing the ordinary things of ordinary lives. But we too were claiming equalities, on the terms that mattered to us more erratic and physical perhaps than ideological and that story also needs telling.

A woman's story is often less strident than the narratives of the men surrounding her, more visceral, sometimes more homely and aware of its own vulnerability. My Incredible String Band years are rooted in domestic detail, but such detail runs behind all exciting lives it's how we recognise that the poets and prophets we looked up to are human too. I can only tell here how it seemed to me, as an intimate observer of the lives lived so close to mine. It has been important to me not to retell others stories. Over the years I have avoided reading, watching or listening to anything at all about ISB, mostly because it hurt to be reminded of what was for me, in many ways, Paradise Lost. So while any resemblance to other accounts simply confirms mine, divergence paints my own picture of how it was.

Memory makes individual meshes of significance, overriding frameworks of time and place. I am choosing to follow mine down its own meandering paths. The resulting picture is, I believe, truer than if I forced reminiscences into a straitjacket of dates and facts. The timeline at the beginning of each chapter strings the beads of events according to an outsider's vision of how it all happened. I didn't live according to that chronology. Some days were a fog of yesterdays, others a bright view of the days ahead and the memories are shaped by that internal ordering. We never thought that there was only one Truth amongst the 5000 layers of our onion lives, as they carried all of us forward into the shared future.

My cave was bright with sulky gemsThat paled the stars like diademsSilver lost and buried goldSuch was my home in days of old.

Robin Williamson, The Iron Stone

Rose, far right, on The Hangman's Beautiful Daughter album cover, 1967

5000 Spirits or The Layers of the Onion is released, establishing the Incredible String Band as the UK's answer to Flower Power in the US. In October, ISB consisting of Robin Williamson and Mike Heron, plays the Royal Festival Hall, on a bill with Shirley and Dolly Collins. In Temple Cottage outside Edinburgh Licorice mostly lives with Robin. She also contributes to the recording of The Hangman's Beautiful Daughter, trilling and whispering on some of its songs. I am a twenty-year-old English student at York University, though I prefer mountains to lecture theatres. Temple Cottage is also a haven for mountaineers, and I find my way there.

My introduction to The Incredible String Band was entirely by chance and extremely unlikely. I had never read a music magazine or been to a pop concert. I had heard of Bob Dylan, the Beatles and the Rolling Stones but had no idea of the two Scottish musicians later said to have influenced them.

With its iconic psychedelic cover, their second LP, 5000 Spirits or the Layers of the Onion, had just come out and my personal metamorphosis began. Within months I changed from an unmusical working-class student into a member of a band of international reputation, complete with photoshoots for American Vogue and ultimately an appearance at the Woodstock Festival. I was at the centre of the back-cover photograph of the next album. The transformation was startling, and a new creature emerged to stagger, uneasily at first, into the bright lights of 1968.

Rose, another wet day in the mountains, 1967

While Mike and Robin were taking LSD in hip London clubs, developing a psychedelic British answer to Haight Ashbury, I was reading English at York University. Yorkshire's bleak moors and harsh industrial valleys were my playground, its austere faces and dour ways teaching me how life was going to be. The university environment bore little relationship to any real life I could imagine. An academic formalism I couldn't understand was spoiling literature for me. Afraid to question it, I lost interest. The freedoms offered by the Mountaineering Club were comprehensible and, more by accident than design, I became its President.