Also from "the Sex Revolts" - it's almost enough to make me pull out my Incredible String Bands LPs and play them for the first time in 15 years- except that my turntable is broken. Another 15 years maybe... but in the meantime I can read about them and think of how wonderful they must be.

When it comes to pastoralism/infantilism, through, the group that did it first and took it furthest were the Incredible String Band. On the cover of their most famous album, The hangman's Beautiful Daughter, the duo of Robin Williamson and Mike Heron nestle amidst the moss covered trees of an English copse, surrounded by fellow members of their commune, adults and children dressed in raggle-taggle medieval garb. The Incredible String Band's music was as rag- and bobtail as their clothes, a blend of folk, blues and Indian raga. Albums...inhabit a strange and wonderful neverland where English folklore and children s fairy tales mingle with Zen Buddhism.

The Incredible String Band's world was pantheistic. In a 1967 interview, Williamson declared: “Everything is a miracle. It's all magic and we are really on earth to wonder at all these beautiful things. Our records are no more magical than a lump of earth” And so 'Air ' is a hymn to – you guessed it- air, Heron marveling at the intimate way it can penetrate his body and 'kiss my blood'. This mystical pantheism bleeds into a children s book anthropomorphism in 'The Hedgehog's Song' where Heron is educated in the heart by a creature of the field, or in the “little Cloud” where he befriends a cloud.
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In the present this wonderland can only be reached in dreams. The Incredible String Band took psychedelia s cult of slumber further than most in songs like 'Chinese White' (where Heron sings of laying down to sleep with a rainbow) and 'Nightfall' (in which Williamson longs for the embrace of nights daughters) In no sleep Blues he's agonized by 'delirium nosleepum'