EVENSONG NARCOLEPTIQUE. Le plus noble perspective .The Incredible String Band - Painting box

The finger cymbals  of the Incredible String Band jingle through these lines of mine; through my  sometimes  wet blanket  of a life they are woven and they sing and sparkle; a tiny joyous ping-a-ling of punctuation, a note of completion, affirming a sentence here, a paragraph there, a stitch in time;   they survive every please-rinse-and-return, every personal and cultural de-cluttering;  they are God's nifty percussion section, keeping His mellifluous, cosmic time. There is scarcely a post here which does not reverberate to these six or eight hours of music, listened-to, always fresh,  over a lifetime.

If I could sing only one song, this would be it. Had I a new child to dandle on my knee, this would be its happy, gurgling  tune.  If  I knew my time was nigh, yet I could squander a little of it on music, this would be what I sought. Strings of silver, words of love.

We  all collect so much stuff, so much treasure, we have so much, albeit framed by  the awareness that it will mostly die with us; all our fractured fragments of knowledge, all our tiny personal jewels of understanding, our myriad connections, junctioned through art and science and faith,  they do not survive us, the universe dies with me.  

 But in the meantime I have my treasures,  their fires breathed upon occasionally by my enconia - we all do it, that lemme tellya  about.... thing - their spark handed-on, to such few wise hands and heads as now abide in  the darknesses of Cruelty TeeVee, MediaMinster, HMP Britain and GlobaCorp's decreed Infotainment. Frightening, how the indivualised enslaving  engines of social media have all but banished the practise of listening together, each entombed in the highly personalised impersonality of his list of i-tunes, each his tastes monitored,  captive and collated to be used against him in the endless retail war, not so much a purchase, more a way of life; each whistling, as it were, in the dark.

 Way back in the nineteen-sixties and 'seventies the Incredible String Band were adored by  and influential upon everyone from the Beatles downwards and outwards; every inferior ragbag of plagiarising junkie strummers from the Rolling Stones to Led Zeppelin ripped them off blind, like the great ones do; fragments of their output formed the bedrock of others' lucrative careers;  when supergroups retired to a country cottage to get their shit together, man,  it was shorthand for hiding away and plundering the Incredible String Band canon.  More significant, though, than the kleptocratic embrace of Plant and Page, Jagger and Richards, Lennon and McCartney is  the fact that Mike Heron and Robin Williamson are admired and loved, treasured from before,  by multi-generations of  really nice, really proper, non-hysterical  people.  I have seen them, on the sole ISB reunion tour, been them, Stringies and Stringies' children grinning, yet,  at  the very first, alchemical  globalising of popular music, at riffs, reels and ragas; bardic, benevolent and beautiful, a mystical music hall of wondrous delights.

That people ignorant of this unique treasure nevertheless call themselves musicologists or cultural historians demonstrates their shitting-in-the-face-of-Truth,  their perjured critical view,  their own ascent of their own greasy pole, their self exaltation,  the gushing  We-Know-Besters, superstars themselves, PotatoHead Lawson,  Alan Groupie Yentob,  Kirsty Wark, may peace and blessings not be upon her shrivelled, warty, cackling head. 

The Incredible String Band, originally sharing manager/producer Joe Boyd with Richard Thompson's Fairport Convention, Pink Floyd, Nick Drake and a young Eric Clapton obviously didn't refine the skills necessary to please the mainstream music  critics.  Boyd, who had recorded Muddy Waters and overseen the Infamous Electrification of Bob Dylan at the Newport Folk Festival, probably felt that merit was all that was required, didn't bung drugs and groupies at nitwit journalists, in exchange for exaggerated praise in Melody Maker or the New Musical Express, never got them a gig on Jimmy Savile's Top Of The Pops show,  they remained, anyway, a cult band,  a band, rather, with a cult following;  people like me.

That Bonny Scotland has not raised a statue to her most eclectically, comprehensively  gifted, most compassionate, spirited and erudite musical sons is, somehow, just as it should be;  it is what we would expect from an Establishment of crooked lawyers, bent bankers and thieving politicians, it's arse encrusted  with greedy, talentless kulturista warts.

  Jock, poor and  angry, malnourished and inebriate, cross-dressing, wife-beating, ginger tribesman, must not be agitated out of his misery by the wistful, the contrary, the uplifting, the magical  and  is told, instead,  that the howling, ranting,  atonal Everly Brothers from Hell, the Proclaimers, are what is good about his culture;  is told that folkmusicPLC's offensive armpit, Ms Eddie Reader, whining the dreary, melancholy doggerel of Robbie Burns, is their proud musical heritage;  that Sir Sean Connery, hailing them, Och Aye,  from the gold-plated, bonny, bonny  banks of Lake Geneva, is their national hero, when in fact, he is nobody's hero, not even his own, the hulking old bitch-slapping moron.

Why should I worry, then, why should I take on, so, about a lack of discourse on my wee blog, when accidental, unforced, natural  genius such as theirs is so  easily and widely disregarded? Well, it's not for unrequited  narcissism or vanity, for, as some have opined - mr tdg, mr vincent -  I would - I have - written all this and much else without a thought for others reading it;   mr mongoose would know what I mean when I say it levels my head and eases my mind;  that others enjoy it is by no means secondary but separate, running on a parallel line,  I have said often, here, that without the audience no performance happens, y'know that one, a tree falling in the forest, with no-one to hear, is its fall silent?  Whichever it is, the tree will have fallen;  whatever it is, as mr vincent says, this - these - will still be written, will lead me to pastures green, the quiet waters by.

And it's not that I'm ill, although I am.  Mr Skip James had a song, Sickbed Blues - heard the doctor, speakin' soft and low, said he might get better but he'll never be well no more..... It's like that, I'll get better, I won't get well.  But that's alright, when I was well, I was weller than most, even though even then I was ill. Now that I'm not well, even so, I am weller than most of the people who are not well and some of those who are. Sounds facetious, to say it's all just a state of mind but I think that up to a point it is. It's not illness or pain that bugs me.

No, what pisses me off, is, just for instance,  that  MediaMinster is such a well-struck coinage and yet so few use it. It's what happens here, in the frustrating absence of  le mot juste, one arrives, I couldn't keep on saying the busy two-way thoroughfare between parliament and the press, couldn't, should't continue pointing-out  that so many legislators were formerly or subsequently and in some  cases - as with Hizonner the Mayor of London  - simultaneously  Fleet Street or BBC hacks and the word arrived, MediaMinster.  It does what words are supposed to do -  it delivers meaning; it combines the supposed dutiful pious monasticism of  the minster - monasterium - with the whoredom of showbusiness - telly, radio, print journalism, film, Internet - combines them into  the Great Knocking Shop of Self Interest which they so clearly - and to such national vexation -  are.  MediaMinster, a temple of thieves, pimps, killers, extortionists, war-for-profitmongers, tarts, copraphiliacs, ladymen,  pornographers and child molesters. Why is the concept of - and the word for - MediaMinster not prominent in the Lexicon of Mistrust and Discontent? That's what bugs me.

If Mr Nigel Fruitcake, bless his starched brown shirt, hanging in the wardrobe, were to start talking about MediaMinster, tomorrow, it would be in general usage within a fortnight.  All the confused, angry bitter ones, all those already frustrated by age, by their own  cancerous miserliness, by the Otherness of others and affronted by the inescapable  criminal corruption of the whole fucking shebang - Old Queen Brenda and her scrounging Ruritanian beggars, cheats and bullies; the Lords,  the Commons, the beasting bishops, the noncing monsignors,  the lying 'papers, the predatory vileness of Cruelty TeeVee;  the greedy ennoblement of thieving banksters, Christ AlfuckingMighty,  you could go on all day,  the elite inhabit the biggest, costliest whorehouse in history.  But if all the Mr & Mrs Angrys  had a phrase which summed it all up, how so cool would that be? That's what bugs me; it's not lack of acclaim; it's not a lack of what I believe are called, by the New People, likes; it is a lack of rippling-outward influence which is troubling.

That is what has been on my mind, being a busy fool, pissing in the wind, wringing blood from a stone, blogging a dead horse.
Still, managed my whole life without influencing anything, probably too late to stop now.

But somewhere, in my mind, there is a painting box and I have every colour there, it's true......

This is with mrs narcolept in mind,  on her cemetery walks; ms lilith down on the wetlands, hostage to floods and the Grateful Dead;  for mr the noblest prospect, midnight-savouring every note of Mr Jackson Browne's big, booming piano - Jackson, too, is a Stringie; for my veteran comrade in motherfuckerism, mr dick, dudeing his way to Heaven; for mrs woman on a raft, tugging at Reality's mooring lines.  But no moreso for these than it is for all those who have here found something  of comfort and value. 
 The pleasure  is all mine. 
With thanks for all your kind thoughts.

The Incredible String Band, The 5000 Spirits or the Layers of the Onion, Electra Records, 1967