 | | Reviews | | |  beGLAD: AN INCREDIBLE STRING BAND COMPENDIUM
Edited by Adrian Whittaker
2003 Helter Skelter Publishing
ISBN 1-900924-64-1
Paperback £16.99
Way back in the 1960s (cue mass String Fan vocal) The Incredible String Band enchanted a generation with their wildly arcane, literary and genre-defying Celtic/psychedelic/world music (long before the latter term was coined) and forever changed the musical landscape before the magic somehow leaked away in the harsher light of the mid-seventies.
Some two decades later, beGLAD emerged – a class-act fanzine toting articles and reminiscences, anecdotes and insights culled from some of those dedicated aficionados; people who'd felt themselves more friends than fans, such was the accessibility and open spirit of the early ISB. Lovingly tended by three co-editors during its ten-year run from 1992 to 2002, the magazine became a running archive for all things String, a repository of information, opinion and analysis from which has sprung this satisfyingly chunky tome.
In voices ranging from the academic to the demotic, beGLAD tells the Incredibles' story from 1965 to 1974, leaving the reborn 21st-century ISB for other scribes. Through chapters such as The Edinburgh Years; Woodstock and the U show; Mike, Scientology and Zen; Life at Glen Row, it draws the reader into a densely-detailed world simultaneously nostalgic and vital. Major players such as Billy Connolly, Wizz Jones, Joe Boyd and Rose Simpson contribute, each album and era is definitively discussed and along the way you'll find engrossing discourse on comparative religion, folk mythology, sacred architecture ... and that's just in a single piece by erudite beGLAD co-editor Raymond Greenoaken!
Chock-full of insider knowledge and liberally strewn with photos and illustrated ephemera, it's as comprehensive and zestful a history as any Stringhead or interested bystander could wish for. Read it cover-to-cover (the material is ranged as chronologically as such a rich subject allows) or dip into specific periods or albums as mood dictates but be warned – it's hard to put it down but also almost impossible to resist leaping up to play whichever album is currently under scrutiny! File under Essential Reading.
Mel McClellan - December 2003
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Folk & Acoustic
