Inspired, unique but ill-matched, THE INCREDIBLE STRING BAND were the hippy-folk harlequins whose spellbinding music touched the ineffable, skirting the edge of disintegration. A new box set states their case for inclusion among the '60s' true greats. If only its creators could feel the love. "It would be nice to be able to talk," they tell FIM WIRTH.

Portrait by GUY WEBSTER.

Prophets of bloom: The Incredible String Band’s Robin Williamson (left) and Mike Heron in Frank Zappa’s garden, Los Angeles, for the cover shoot of 1968’s Wee Tam And The Big Huge .

Guy Webster

IT WAS WITH A SENSE OF TREPIDATION that Mike Heron and his then-girlfriend Rose Simpson came, in the summer of 1968, to join their Incredible String Bandmates at a dilapidated dwelling in the wilds of Pembrokeshire. Penwern farmhouse, though, was to be every bit as wretched as they had feared.

Years later, Williamson saw plenty of positives about his spell there. “The local people were very tolerant of us,” he said. “We must have been quite exotic… but they were frightfully nice.”

However, not everyone was quite so prepared for the privations that came with his pursuit of freedom.

“You never had a meal that was anything but brown rice,” Rose Simpson tells MOJO with not the tiniest hint of a smile. “And it was so cold. And everything was damp. And it was miserable. I remember it with total horror.”

Abandoned decades previously, the farmhouse was barely habitable. No one lit the fire in the morning, and half-starved communards undermined the in-it-together vibe by sneaking off to the shop at nearby Velindre, scoffing packets of Jaffa Cakes on their way back.

Meanwhile, The Pirate And The Crystal Ball – the mixed media piece ISB and Stone Monkey put together, which was filmed for a proposed BBC Omnibus documentary – ended up being a bizarre, galumphing mess which proved way too weird to broadcast.

“None of them knew what they were doing,” Simpson says sadly. “We’d all been so carried away by this vision: ‘If we all live together, how great and how harmonious would it be!’ And it was such a huge failure for all of us. Just the sheer incompetence of it all.”

On-stage and on record, the ISB presented a beatific vision of prelapsarian togetherness. However, when it came down to it, Heron and Williamson just couldn’t live with each other.

WHEN THE POWERS OF THE INCREDIBLE STRING Band were at their absolute pinnacle, Robin Williamson was wont to introduce himself and Mike Heron on-stage with the words: “We’re prophets from the North and seers extraordinary, by appointment to the Wonders of the Universe.”

For a time, this did not seem like an idle boast. As Rough Trade’s new boxed set of their early works confirms, from 1966-68 the twin songwriters struck a series of stunning blows for inspired amateurism while seemingly barely talking to each other. “They play and sing together as if music has just been discovered and its possibilities are being explored for the first time,” the Daily Telegraph wrote.

The band’s original MO as a ragtag, old timey acoustic group telescoped into wilder and wilder places as they became darlings of the British counterculture. 1967’s impish The 5000 Spirits Or The Layers Of The Onion was greeted by the Guardian as “the most sophisticated piece of experimenting that the British pop world has seen for some time”. Wintry follow-up The Hangman’s Beautiful Daughter is quite the weirdest album to make the UK Top 5, while Wee Tam And The Big Huge – a double set, released in November 1968 – completed one of the most miraculous 18-month periods of sustained creativity in the history of anything, ever.