There was a lot of slithering and squelching going on, living in primitive cottages in Scotland in the late 1960s, when Mike Heron was writing A Very Cellular Song and Robin Williamson playing impromptu arrangements. And that was it. Their music sang their lives and I was lucky enough to share them for a while.

Songwriting was never a task, to fill up minutes on a stage or a record track. It was how they contacted the rainbow-cosmos beyond their grasp. Whether a god or a girl was the object of their thoughts, they could sing the story with a depth and intimacy that plain words never achieved.

You only had to see their rapt faces onstage to know the music came from hearts and souls. It carried us all along into new lands and we took the audience along with us for the ride.

Licorice wrote too, telling about her fairy places, but Mike and Robin ranged the heavens as well as the earth.

Robin would dream whole detailed stories and tell them in the morning with perfect recall. The Earth, Water, Fire and Air which, we believed, shaped us all, had met before in those timeless gardens fair. We visited them again, together, through his songs. Mike gloried in warm suns, the innocence of animals, and pretty faces. He sang infinity in the homely phrases of a Scottish upbringing as well as those of esoteric philosophies.

And the words staggered onto the page from stubby pencils, in cars, kitchens, on hillsides, wherever a new idea seized their wandering minds. Each new song was an adventure, a trip into the unknown with no limits and no advance planning, just the delight of a world remade. Very soon, when instruments and harmonies had added their voices, it became a track and part of our work. Mike and Robin s improvisations and the girls spontaneity ensured each performance was a unique experience.

Now, the joys and sorrows which first bore those songs are shadows.

But, the music still shines with all the brilliance of those mornings, when Robin, or Mike, appeared at the door, guitar around the neck, scraps of notebook in hand, with I ve just written this song...

Rose Simpson

Incredible String Band 1967-1971