From Robyn on Patreon in 2023
It was in the hallowed month of September in the sacred year of 1967 that I was leafing through the LPs in my local record shop in Winchester, Hampshire when my 14-year old fingers - on this very hand that I’m writing with now - pulled out an LP sleeve of brilliant colours. I eased it from the rack and traced the lettering on the multicoloured mountain range on the front: THE INCREDIBLE STRING BAND spelled itself out in jagged candy-stripes, beneath an all-seeing eye that peered out below a female/male figure caught midway between day and night. Of course: The Incredible String Band!
I’d been listening to their first album that summer - my mum had given a copy to my dad for Christmas but it wasn’t quite his kind of folk music…

The cover alone of this new record summed up everything I loved about how 1967 was going so far. The shapes, the colours, the intricacy: everything seemed to be turning into something else when you looked at it closely: which, for me, is what defines psychedelia. That, and the euphoria that poured out of so many eyes that year. I was getting a contact high, having no access to the drugs themselves. And looking at that sleeve was the highest I ever got, looking back…

I took the record back to my lair at school and poured it onto the record player. The music was like the cover: teeming with joy and a mysterious darkness that underpinned it. Mike Heron and Robin Williamson alternate as composers and lead vocalists track for track, which makes it their most satisfying record to my ears. Mike’s voice, sometimes baying, sometimes crooning is so different from Robin’s liquid incantations - yet they compliment each other like Lennon’s and McCartney’s. Mike’s songs are perhaps more conventionally pretty, Robin’s more mysterious - but on The 5000 Spirits they weave out of each other like ferns and ivy. The sense of magic, in that magic year, was overpowering: and, like Sgt Pepper, the album seemed even then like a time-capsule from its era. The colours began to drain away from our culture almost as soon as 1967 ended, when Bob Dylan released his defiantly monochrome John Wesley Harding album. But that’s another story…

I’ve recorded four songs from The 5000 Spirits for Patreon this month, as a sketchy homage to the originals.

FIRST GIRL I LOVED

Robin wrote this typically meandering song about his first full relationship, with a red-haired girl when he was 17. It veers between being lyrical: “In the wide hills, and beside many a long water/you have gathered flowers, and they do not smell for me” and matter of fact: “You’re probably married now - kids and all.” I was only 14 when I came to love this one: my first love was yet to happen. But the regret and nostalgia captivated me, even though I had nothing yet to feel nostalgic about. Now I’m 70, and Robin is 79, living with his wife Bina in Cardiff. This song is another example of how the 5000 Spirits album seems to look back on itself even as it unfurls before your ears…