This essay examines the roots of ‘world music’Footnote ¹ – one cultural manifestation of globalisationFootnote ² – within the sonic explorations of Morocco by perhaps the quintessential 1960s band, itself now a largely-silent cultural artefact, The Incredible String Band (ISB).Footnote ³ They had a heady late-1960s cult status, and engaged in many of the requisite practices of the period: psychedelic drugs, peacock fashions, communal living, the appearance of absolute spontaneity in performance and recording, rejection of the star-maker machine, addition of friends and non-musicians to the band, performance at Woodstock, final devotion to a cult, disastrous late attempt to go electric, and final dissolution in 1974, missing the ‘world music’ boom by a decade. They were largely defined in their late-60s heyday by their use of incredible, exotic elements of international music in their work, and they were one of the first 1960s bands to include multimedia folk forms, incorporating dance, mime and a type of musical theatre with elements of pantomime and mummery. The ISB embodied 1960s counter-culture and then new age idealism in approaching world culture. They influenced The Beatles, The Rolling Stones and Led Zeppelin, though their role has been all but forgotten, and they have never been a darling of the millennium nostalgia industry.Footnote ⁴ While drawing on Scottish roots, they mostly side-stepped folk/acoustic influences from both sides of the Atlantic. These influences included America's blues- and gospel-inflected protest folk tradition and Britain's ballad and music hall folk tradition. Well before Paul Simon and Peter Gabriel, for example, used a globalised marketplace to enable the West to sell the ‘world’'s reconstituted artefacts protected by international copyright law, the ISB appropriated the ‘world.’Footnote ⁵

In the growing field of popular music studies – much of it carried out by non-musicologists in a variety of interdisciplinary contexts – ethnomusicological perspectives have received little attention, as Fabian Holt and also Timothy Taylor have observed (Taylor Reference Taylor1997, p. xviii; Holt Reference Holt and Stobart2008, pp. 40–1). This study of the ISB responds to this concern and to ‘new ethnomusicology’'s ongoing project of de-exoticising and de-colonising the field (Stobart Reference Stobart and Stobart2008, pp. 1–20). It considers the cultural contexts of the ISB's encounter with North Africa and the band's uses of various international and especially Moroccan elements, with reference mainly to their two best known albums, The 5000 Spirits or the Layers of the Onion (1967) and The Hangman's Beautiful Daughter (1968). The ISB's aesthetic of appropriation veered from a type of fetishisation, and also homage and parody, to ritualised adaptation. While their 1960s appropriation was more innocent and certainly more naive than later activities, they involved listeners in a type of passive moral complicity and they may have enabled later ‘world music’ appropriation.

The ISB were in many ways the anti-Beatles, though they grew to cult status in the space the Beatles created after ‘the birth of Northern chic’ (Gould Reference Gould2007, pp. 37, 92). The Beatles showed how artistic authenticity could survive promotional fabrication by domesticating Elvis's white rock'n'roll and moving away from its ‘African-American creative-though-culturally-threatening source’ (Marshall Reference Marshall and Inglis2000, p. 170). The Beatles ended popular music's American hegemony, switching England's America envy into US Anglophilia. This 1960s trans-national, white Atlantic romance had been played out earlier in the sword-and-sandal epic Cleopatra, and in the Burton–Taylor marriages. However, the 1960s dialogue between Africa, Europe and the USA, as represented by 1960s rock and the music of the ISB, was to become an incursion into ‘contested spaces’ largely ignoring Africa (Gilroy Reference Gilroy, Chambers and Curti1996, p. 22). The Beatles' advances in recording as well as their fear of fans – from American Bible-Belt crazies to Imelda Marcos – rendered public performance virtually impossible.

The ISB, however, recorded their in-studio performances of songs without massive overdubbing, and they debunked show business convention, opening their concerts by quietly introducing themselves and, with a somewhat ecclesiastical directive, asking audience members to greet those beside them, a gesture designed to explode expectations while displaying the eccentricity of a cult-like ritual. The future Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, was a fan. Concerts ended, not with a RADA bow, but a virtual benediction: ‘May … the pure light within you / Guide you all the way on’. They refused requests to play even quasi-hits at concerts – including WoodstockFootnote ⁶ – keeping to their most recent compositions. They approached public performances as if they were playing in their own kitchen, thereby subscribing to the folk tradition's trope of absolute authenticity and spontaneity, and to its ethos that folk music could quietly transform consciousness and change society. The ISB de-emphasised their own virtuosity as musicians and the division between audience and performers. They democratised the band's structure (sometimes welcoming audience members on stage to accompany performances, at least once including a youthful Salman Rushdie), making the band itself an extension of their social lives with the entry and exit of girlfriends, actors and musicians, subscribing to a Do-It-Yourself aesthetic.

In the process, the ISB acquired an almost cult-like devotion from their fans who tended to be university students or university educated, white and middle-class, in many ways like their well travelled descendents with disposable income, who listen to ‘world music’ (Brusila Reference Brusila and Palmberg2001, p. 156). In the 1960s, merely possessing ISB vinyl, like The 5000 Spirits or The Layers of the Onion with a cover by The Fool – a Dutch duo who designed the Beatles' Apple boutique, John's Rolls Royce and Paul's piano – was a kind of counter-culture capital, and a marker of group identity.Footnote ⁷ Taste in music, as Pierre Bourdieu has demonstrated, is one of the clearest markers of class position (Bourdieu Reference Bourdieu and Nice1984, p. 18), a point not lost on advertisers, who even in the mid-1960s explored the potential of rock'n'roll and LSD as advertising tools (Frank Reference Frank1997, p. 114).Footnote ⁸

The journey to the East was one of the central 1960s counter-cultural myths. The Beats' odyssey led from New York to San Francisco, and later to the paradise of drugs and sexual tourism in Tangier, a pharmacopeia and homotopia. Another type of esoteric journey was permitted by psychedelic drugs. Aldous Huxley's The Doors of Perception, with its account of mescalin experience filtered through Eastern mysticism, was a highly influential text later bowdlerised by Timothy Leary. Huxley's work inflected the way 1960s drug experimenters framed their personal experiences with psychedelics. Huxley was an early member of the Theosophical Society whose avatar Krishnamurti would go on to write a range of spiritual works studied by a young devotee in Edinburgh, the ISB's Mike Heron. The non-psychedelic access to instant karma was a selling point of Transcendental Meditation which, when the Beatles tried it and followed its leader to India, was being marketed by Madison Avenue. The Beatles bristled at being flattered by the Mahareshi as ‘the blessed leaders of the world's youth’ (Gould Reference Gould2007, p. 466), resisting his attempt to make them into celebrity disciples. This strategy, however, was later adopted by the Church of Scientology's Celebrity Centers, who targeted even minor cult celebrities like the ISB to bring an aura of success and hipness to Scientology. This process was greatly accelerated by the acquisition of high voltage celebrities like Tom Cruise (Morton Reference Morton2008, pp. 101–3). The ISB bristled at TM's commercialism, but accepted Scientology lock, stock and barrel in late 1968, and one of their last concerts would be a Scientology event in praise of L. Ron Hubbard, available in a flawed video on YouTube.

The origin of the ISB's appropriation of ‘world’ music lies in the soft cultural imperialism of tourism (Huggan Reference Huggan2001, pp. 178–80). It was based on what Chris Bongie calls in a different context ‘a “travelogic” approach to the world – a fixation upon the merely picturesque and incidental that neglects, without contesting, its own attachment to the (hi)story of colonialism’ (Bongie Reference Bongie1991, p. 104). Robin Williamson travelled to Morocco in 1966, as he recounts in his autobiographical ‘Mirrorman Sequences’ (1977). He embarked on this trip shortly after the ISB's first recording. They posed with large zithers and lutes on that album's back cover to announce their incredible string qualities, though these instruments were not used in the recording. The ISB's name became almost a self-fulfilling prophecy impelling Williamson to go to North Africa for an incredible, exotic sound that in turn would become the aural signifier of the psychedelic. Williamson's first introduction to exotic instruments, however, may have been made via Mike Heron who had studied the sitar with Nazir Jairazbhoy, who eventually played on 5000 Spirits (Farrell Reference Farrell1997, pp. 175–6). When Williamson met the young Scottish guitarist, Heron was a sitar-playing accountant who performed Dylan covers. It was Heron who first began using incredible instruments and, as is evident on the ISB's first album, writing songs, though it is unclear exactly who wrote what on the first album. Williamson's trip to Morocco in 1966, and his return with gimbri and oud, may be a first instance of the creative clash Heron identified as central to their recording sessions (Turner Reference Turner1971).

Williamson planned never to return to the UK on his departure, but to find a lemon tree in Morocco and live under it. At the same time, original ISB member Clive Palmer departed for Afghanistan and did not rejoin the ISB on his return. Bert Jansch credits Palmer with informing him of the influx of hashish from North Africa – ‘the dope centre of the universe’ (Harper Reference Harper2000, p. 125) – in Edinburgh via Glasgow as early as 1961. Morocco's reputation for widely available hashish was another possible motive for Williamson's trip (Harper Reference Harper2000, pp. 92–3), Morocco serving, like present-day Ibiza, as Europe's decompression chamber. Williamson's was also a romantic search for the origin of the guitar; part of the Victorian quest for the sources of European instruments evolved from what some Victorians considered the unnecessary and hence wasteful diversity of international forms (Cumming Reference Cumming, Brown and Brown1891, pp. 527–39). In this respect, he appeared to regard Moroccan music as part of an archival pre-history of Western music.Footnote ⁹ Williamson's journey was also a utopian quest for cultural universals to replace both Victorian triumphalism and the bleak wasteland of post-war Britain. His ‘neo-exoticist’ quest was an attempt to recover ‘“elsewhere” values “lost” with the modernisation of European society’, a quest for ‘a retrograde ideological fiction’ of wholeness and meaning (Bongie Reference Bongie1991, p. 5). With an itinerary based on the travels of the Beat writers, the influence of James Frazer's The Golden Bough, and even the shapes of clouds and the flight of birds as well as the guidance of the hand of Fatima,Footnote ¹⁰ Williamson visited Fes, Essaouira and Marrakesh. Williamson was on the road to enlightenment and ecstasy, and he was much influenced by Kerouac's beatnik masterpiece. He was also very young and inexperienced and, as Bob Dylan has recently remarked, Kerouac's On the Road appealed for its virility and excess, but especially its relentless momentum, a distinctly youthful pleasure (Brinkley Reference Brinkley2009, p. 49).Footnote ¹¹ ‘Mirrorman’ ends with an ecstatic discovery of cultural integrity within ‘a world intact’ where people lead a ‘golden life’ (Williamson Reference Williamson1977, p. 41), and there is a synthesis of Arab and Celtic traditions, well before the mid-1990s Celtic boom in cross-over fusion like the Chieftans' Santiago (1996). Later, Williamson would explain this desire for musical synthesis as extending well beyond Morocco: ‘I had an interest in finding the threads that would link the music of the world. I was listening to Indian, African and Chinese music …’ (quoted in Nigel Williamson Reference Williamson1997, p. 39).

It is impossible to reconstruct the musical scene Williamson encountered as a hippy tourist in 1966, but today Morocco markets itself as an everyman's Arabian Nights fantasy, a globalised Euro tourist mecca, with some of Morocco's rich musical heritage relegated to expensive supper clubs. Williamson in ‘Mirrorman’ notes the ubiquitous tape recorders most likely playing the sounds of what Tejumola Olaniyan calls the ‘postcolonial incredible’, the beginnings of Fela Kuti's Afrobeat or funk (Olaniyan Reference Olaniyan2004, p. 2). Rock music of the 1960s appears never to have gained a foothold in Morocco, however (Baldassarre Reference Baldassarre and Plastino2003, p. 87). The birth of ‘world music’ in the 1980s was still 20 years away when Williamson heard the street musicians at Place Jemaa El Fna in Marrakesh.Footnote ¹² In each of the cities Williamson visited, festivals were established in the 1970s to promote national musical culture: the Fes Festival of Sacred Music, the Marrakesh Folk Festival and the Essaouira Gnawa Festival, the latter described in The Rough Guide to World Music as the ‘Moroccan Woodstock’ (Broughton et al. Reference Broughton, Ellingham, Lusk and Clark2006, p. 250). He encountered a culture in which all rituals – sacred or secular – and most markets feature live music, and though access to some ceremonies would have required an invitation, he would have witnessed events such as the loud all-night drumming and ghayta (oboe) celebrations that move through the old towns when a son is born.

There are three main streams of Moroccan music: the indigenous music of the Berbers in the south performed by singers, drummers and flute players; the classical music of the north, originating in the Andalusian period in Spain performed by oud players, singers and drummers; and Gnawa music, brought by Sub-Saharan African slaves in the 17th century, in which the gimbri, a long-necked strummed instrument, and hand-held metal garagab (cymbals or castanets) are central, the musicians performing quasi-therapeutic exorcisms. In addition, moreover, there are Sufi ritual traditions, Jewish sacred music, classical Arabic songs from Egypt, Algerian Raï, and pop synthesis in urban centres like Casablanca. Moroccan music was ‘cross-fertilised and multi-dimensional’ well before ‘world’ fusion (Njoku Reference Njoku2006, p. 125). Paul Bowles wrote in 1942 that ‘in Morocco [unlike Algeria and Tunisia] music is inescapable’. ‘This region's contact with Europe has been that of conqueror: in its decline it has been comparatively unmolested by industrial Europe’ (Bowles Reference Bowles, Mangan and Herrmann2003, p. 63). Music appears in nearly every Moroccan scene of Williamson's co-authored spy thriller The Glory Trap (1977), the first quarter of which is set in Fes: customers take turns plucking an oud in a café, Moroccan love ballads play on a radio, and the pipers of Joujouka appear.

Despite probably selecting the gimbri as the guitar's original, Williamson didn't try field recording in Morocco, unlike some of the Beats and, later, Rolling Stone Brian Jones. In 1959 Paul Bowles recorded Moroccan Sephardic liturgies in Essaouira and Meknes, and Brion Gysin recorded the Master Musicians of Joujouka in the Rif Mountains, being taken there by Bowles in 1950 (Gysin Reference Gysin and Weiss2001, pp. 122–4). Brian Jones heard Gysin's tapes in 1966; William Burroughs referred to the music of the Master Musicians as the ‘primordial sounds of a 4,000-year-old rock & roll band’ (quoted in Segalstad and Hunter Reference Segalstad and Hunter2008, p. 94). Jones' own recording, to which he added tape effects in London, was released posthumously in 1971 on the Rolling Stones' new label, to which the Stones wanted to sign the ISB (Boyd Reference Boyd2006, p. 185). In 1995 the Master Musicians recorded their tribute to Jones entitled ‘Brahim Jones Joujouka Very Stoned’. As Joe Ambrose writes in the liner notes to the group's 1995's release: ‘Jones was honourable in his dealings with Joujouka but, in the years since his death, much that is dishonourable has been said, written, and done. There has been the remorseless tokenism of “World Music”. There have been myriad attempts at cultural hegemony …’ (Ambrose Reference Ambrose2003, p. 3).

The ISB's incidental use of Moroccan elements in The 5000 Spirits or the Layers of the Onion and The Hangman's Beautiful Daughter domesticates the sometimes harsh, uncompromising, even overwhelming qualities of Moroccan music, much of it designed for open air performance with audience participation in trancing and dancing.Footnote ¹³ In the context of the often fairly simple if highly eccentric 1960s folk songs, the exotic Moroccan sounds of gimbri, oud and bendir (frame) drums signify the otherness or alterity of a distant world, an exotic, psychedelic landscape. To misuse Sara Suleri's evocative phrase, the gimbri in the ISB's hands becomes an ‘otherness machine’ manufacturing alterity for ready access (Lovesey Reference Lovesey1997, pp. 35–50). This usage is part of a reverse commodity fetishism whereby cultural objects lose their status within a meaningful productive and performative cultural context and assume the status of found objects (to which I will return). Such use hides the historical and social relations behind their creation, and the sounds become alienated cultural artefacts. Whether via albums or John Peel's pirate radio broadcasts (and Peel was an early and enthusiastic supporter of the ISB), the listener was involved in a type of complicity in appropriation. This complicity is a version of the total passivity and social conformity that Theodor Adorno deplored in connection with pop songs (Adorno Reference Adorno, Leppert and Gillespie2002b, pp. 437–69).Footnote ¹⁴ He was concerned with the psychological tyranny of radio plugging of songs in the late 1930s (Adorno Reference Adorno and Ashton1962, p. 34), acutely aware of the power of mass media and particularly Radio Hitler. Moreover, for Adorno, music is cognition and demands a critical listener who is an active, creative collaborator.Footnote ¹⁵ In effect, music is far too important and serious to enjoy, and popular music is moral opium. The ISB could never be accused of producing hit songs, like Graham Nash's ‘Marrakesh Express’ perhaps, according to a quasi-industrial model, but the phenomenological fantasy of global harmony that their music promoted, via their use of exotic elements, made listeners passive participants in a species of orientalist appropriation. Similarly and far more explicitly, ‘world music’ has been marketed to enable a double fantasy: turning on the music to tune out the world while simultaneously indulging in the delusion that the activity fosters global peace and understanding.Footnote ¹⁶

Moroccan elements are announced in 5000 Spirits' first song ‘Chinese White’, the title referring to white pigment, not heroin, as many thought at the time. The song was first called ‘Gimbri Song’ (Whittaker Reference Whittaker2003, p. 54). The lethargic prelude's core melody is plucked out on guitar and answered by a rapidly bowed gimbri, filling in for the Berber kamenjah (violin played on the knee). The gimbri slides into the background as Heron's singing announces a common theme: getting out of bed in a dreamy state to greet the day. The song begins in an arresting fashion with lines that are much admired though perhaps somewhat portentous and ungrammatical: ‘The bent twig of darkness / Grows the petals of the morning’, and soon ploughs are ‘dying’ and books ‘mouldering’. The lyric leads to the incongruous question: ‘Will your magic Christmas tree by shining / Gently all around?’ As the title suggests, the song announces a blank slate, a space for imagining and conjuring. The painting reference recurs in Heron's ‘Painting Box’, another aubade, on which Williamson heavily imposes his presence. The main melody is played on guitar and flute, with touches of sitar and a fast-plucked Andalusian oud-style guitar counterpoint by Williamson that elevates, then overwhelms. It appears Williamson wants to render Heron's simple sentiments – being ‘what you could be’ not ‘what you should be’ – and simple, memorable tunes incredible with an array of exotic tone colours. ‘Gently Tender’ is another song dressed up with Williamson playing tbila or taarija (clay) drums mixed into the foreground. Similarly, Williamson's jarring, dissonant violin beginning Heron's ‘A Very Cellular Song’ is almost sabotage.

Many of the ISB's songs, and especially their lyrics, on these recordings have a self-consciously or at least unapologetically unstudied, unedited or uncorrected quality. This quality may be partly an attempt to forestall expertise or virtuosity, or to put a psychedelic spin on the moon-in-June, boy-loves-girl lyrical conventions of the popular song and the polish of hit-making recording, but is more likely the result of haste of composition and recording, their youth and, of course, as with anything related to the 1960s, their consumption of psychedelics. What results is a musical and lyrical text with gaps and erasures that virtually demands the listener's participation. In addition, songs shift from the naive to the portentous. Heron's ‘A Very Cellular Song’, for example, may be about physiological reconstruction on LSD,Footnote ¹⁷ or Scientology's engrams or cellular memories, or an amoeba's erotic awakening. Another of Heron's great lyrical ‘fondnesses’, in addition to rainbows that are always crimson, dreams that are always crystal, and the recurring delight of being blissfully here now, is the affective fallacy: talking clouds, hedgehogs and later caterpillars. The band, however, never again achieved the success of 5000 Spirits or its successor. This decline in popularity accelerated despite an attempt by Joe Boyd to re-record some ISB songs with different players in more conventional, commercial settings (Whittaker Reference Whittaker2003, p. 258; Dann Reference Dann2006, pp. 146–7) and the occasional release of ISB songs as singles. A last, somewhat desperate attempt to regain their previous success included the early 1970s ISB's metamorphosis into an electric band that took somewhat pedestrian stabs at quasi-Celtic jazz–rock fusion on songs like ‘Ithkos’, redeemed by Williamson's virtuoso violin.

Some of Williamson's songs on these two central albums such as ‘The Eyes of Fate’ and ‘My Name is Death’ indicate what would eventually, long after the ISB's demise in 1974, overwhelm his interest in folk songs of any stripe, and their Moroccan influences: his attempt to write neo-traditional bardic tunes. One of these songs in particular may explain the ISB's justification of their fetishistic use of Moroccan and other international elements. Clearly a song of much importance for Williamson, ‘The Iron Stone’ was released by the ISB in three early versions: demo (Chelsea Sessions 1967); an alternate take with predominant sitar (2008's Tricks of the Senses); and master (1968's Wee Tam and The Big Huge). He re-recorded it on a 2006 solo album named The Iron Stone, with his now more weathered voice and jazz violin embellishments. The song contrasts bleak Britain with the colour and diversity of the world displayed in a meteorite fragment, an innocent ‘world in a grain of sand’. The speaker, an early incarnation of Williamson's later antiquarian persona as a self-acknowledged creative anachronism, addresses the stone, conjuring ancient Britain from the stance of late 1960's Cool Britannia, imagining the mythic history the stone has witnessed of dragons, Atlantis and Merlin. The stone then beckons him as its kin, although it is from outer space. As in another ISB song, a fondness is expressed for a Parton-esque ‘log cabin home’ although it is ‘in the sky’. The ISB version of ‘The Iron Stone’ on The Big Huge ends differently, making the lyric less a descriptive, philosophical ‘Ode on a Scottish Rock’ than a mini-autobiography. The speaker is a preposterous jester, ‘Sir Primal Form Magnifico’ with red nose, a hippy bard abandoned by time. James Frazer writes of a similar concept in The Golden Bough, a work Williamson knew well – a Victorian whole earth catalogue of culture in twelve volumes, the High Modernist Go-To Guide for Symbolism that as Malinowski wrote made the ‘exotic … familiar’ (Malinowski Reference Malinowski1936, p. 169).Footnote ¹⁸ Williamson may have been thinking of Frazer's account of the ‘soul-box’ or ‘soul-stone’, an external soul lying in a totemic object (Frazer Reference Frazer and Stocking1996, p. 815).Footnote ¹⁹

Williamson's approach to found objects was, he said, that of a ‘magpie’ (quoted in Whittaker Reference Whittaker2003, p. 424), sampling and pinching at will from whatever came to hand. Even some of the ISB's best-known songs use ‘pinched’ melodies, though it was standard practice in the folk tradition; as traditional folk singer Anne Briggs has said à propos the infamous ‘Blackwater Side’: ‘borrowing and influencing …[has] been done throughout history. It's how music develops. It only becomes a very large philosophical question when money enters into it …’ (quoted in Harper Reference Harper2000, p. 5). The ISB's ‘Black Jack Davy’ uses ‘Raggle Taggle Gypsies’, and ‘The Circle is Unbroken’ uses the Irish lament ‘Anach Cuain’. ‘Waltz of the New Moon’, Ed Baxter contends, ‘shares most of the melody of Anne Briggs’ “Living by the Water”' (Baxter Reference Baxter2000, p. 38). While reluctantly recognising the originality of the ISB's reinterpretation of parts of the traditional English folk canon, Baxter is critical of the ISB's methods:

Williamson enthusiastically embraced what he called ‘inspired amateurism’ (quoted in Whittaker Reference Whittaker2003, p. 10), and ignored conventional technique in favour of personal adaptation. He called this approach in connection with his Moroccan appropriations, ‘having a go at playing instruments that one couldn't play at all, to try and create a sort of naive music or an innocent music, like naive painting’ (quoted in Unterberger Reference Unterberger2003, p. 149). In the same vein, he referred to ‘that stoned 1960s notion of playing things that one couldn't really play. It was rags and patches but it was new and exciting’ (quoted in Nigel Williamson Reference Williamson1997, p. 39). Such an approach and open explanation may have been adopted for the freedom they allowed from the intimidating constraints of confronting a very ancient and unfamiliar Middle Eastern tradition. This was an indulgence he would not allow himself later in studying Celtic traditions. Williamson attacks this approach in his later historical studies such as The Wise and Foolish Tongue, in which he deplores the appropriation of ‘Celtic classics’ ‘without due credit or fidelity to the sources’ (Williamson Reference Williamson1989, p. ix). He would no doubt claim poetic or bardic licence for the ISB's reinterpretations, though he later acknowledged that to play the oud one must ‘grow up in an oud-playing culture’ where it is implanted in the ‘ancestral corpuscles’ (quoted in Whittaker Reference Whittaker2003, p. 424).

The ISB's songs come closest to homage in their use of Moroccan elements in Williamson's remarkable vocal virtuosity. ‘The Eyes of Fate’ (5000 Spirits), for example, features an Andalusian guitar melody, interrupted by a chorus of ‘Ory, Ory, Ory’, abrupt key changes, and what would become Williamson's distinctive North African vocal effects. Though his singing may sound like the muezzin's call to prayer, this call and the qiraah (recitations) of verses from the Koran are not considered to be a musical practice in Islamic tradition. The Hangman's ‘Waltz of the New Moon’ is a virtuoso vocal performance of rare depth. The origin of Williamson's technique here has been variously attributed to ‘a passing familiarity with classical Indian music’ (Ford Reference Ford1995, p. 179) and the ‘wavering vocal style of traditional English singer Anne Briggs’ (Baxter Reference Baxter2000, p. 38). Baxter regards Williamson's performance as self-consciously artificial: ‘far more theatrical, gleefully bombastic, even bordering on self-parody … Williamson sounds as though he is putting on an act. The gusto with which he delivers the song speaks of a larger than life appetite, a bearhug embrace of the material and the audience’ (Baxter Reference Baxter2000, p. 38). However, ‘Waltz of the New Moon’ uses distinctly Moroccan Andalusian vocalisations in quite a formal manner despite being undertaken in the ISB's version of the rigid confines of a pop song (Shiloah Reference Shiloah1995, p. 132).Footnote ²⁰ ‘Waltz of the New Moon’ begins in a melancholy mood: ‘I hear that the Emperor of China …’ with the word ‘that’ used as the phonetic basis for an extended melismatic arabesque. The word's semantic insignificance makes Williamson's virtuosity here resemble the Moroccan practice of improvising on nonsense syllables. The song continues: ‘Used to wear iron shoes with ease’, with the word ‘ease’ sung as an ascending, keening glissando. An accelerating tempo in the bass gimbri is followed by the introduction of a harp, while a slightly incongruous waltz rhythm begins on the harpsichord, played by Dolly Collins. The song's bridge introduces a series of injunctions in a droning monotone with dissonant modal accents, as if shifting into Gregorian chant: ‘Ask the snail beneath the stone, ask the stone beneath the wall … tell me if air is strong’. Extended melismatic arabesques on ‘tablecloth’, ‘victories’ and ‘palaces’ become increasingly flamboyant, demonstrating Williamson's skill in deviating as far as possible from the tune, like a falcon in flight, before returning to it. On the final, most extravagant ‘palaces’, Williamson's voice wobbles and nearly cracks, conjuring the sonic authenticity and fragility of live performance.

Williamson was the driving force behind many of the ISB's parodic experiments, partly due to his familiarity with British music hall traditions. These works, as Fredric Jameson writes of parody, engage in ‘the play of random stylistic allusion’ (Jameson Reference Jameson1991, pp. 17–18), a kind of depthless style, resting on artistic forms that are drained of their history or meaning. They display Williamson's creative fertility and allow some comic relief from the ISB's cosmic preoccupations, veering from being and nothingness to the kitchen sink. In ‘Waltz of the New Moon’, for example, Williamson sings, ‘We are the tablecloth and also the table’; another song also concerns tableware. ‘Willow Pattern’, recorded live in the early 1970s, as Williamson explains, is ‘a song we made up to tell the story of the willow pattern plate, a kind of English Chinese song’. The song trades on the vogue for Chinoiserie – a vogue in mass exoticism that generally did not extend to articles of Moroccan material culture.Footnote ²¹ It parodies the light operetta of Gilbert and Sullivan's Mikado – it's a parody of a parody – but overlooks the design's 18th century origin in English designer Thomas Minton's borrowing from the Chinese and the pattern's legend of a persecuted writer who aids the lovers’ escape. From the audience's gales of laughter (the song was recorded live), it is clear there was a theatrical component. The lyric mimics ‘Black Jack Davy’, exchanging a Scottish for a Chinese setting: a lover persuades his beloved, the emperor's imprisoned daughter, to elope. The lovers flee over the willow bridge and, though pursued, they finally fly away ‘like doves in the sky’. Likki McKechnie sings in her thin, reedy soprano, and the band joins in on the mock-Chinese chorus ‘Hi-Hiya-Ho’. The song is almost pastiche, and as glibly apolitical as another song about captivity, The Big Huge's ‘Lordly Nightshade’: ‘Captured by Hitler with/ Oliver Twist in the tower/ Guards say here's pens and paper just sit/ down and work for an hour/ O, Goodness, how can we escape? But it's/ not worthwhile/ All I can do is smile’.

Williamson covered ‘The Maharajah of Mogador’, a parodic song from 1948 by Lewis Harris and John Jacob Loeb, on his first major musical release following the ISB's demise, 1977's Journey's Edge, the Celtic mood of which is generally sombre. The song rehearses a number of oriental stereotypes in its account of a quasi-Indian basha in the colonial Moroccan port of Mogador, now Essaouira. The Maharajah is a ridiculous figure who puts an ad in Variety to recruit a rhumba teacher in exchange for all his camels, rubies and pearls, though not his girls. Recognising he is too fat to dance, a quick-witted ‘chick’ teaches him ‘the bliss of a half-promised kiss’. Scheherazade-like, she delays instruction in the rhumba until she can abscond with all his wealth, in the process liberating his harem. Like ‘Willow Pattern’, the song has a mock-Arabic chorus of ‘Ah-ha-ha’, but it ends in high-spirited, campy, scat-like yips and ‘biddley bops’. Williamson's approach to Morocco here becomes that of the heirs of late Victorian music hall high jinks and the aural theatricality of early British rock'n'roll. This early rock'n'roll began ‘as just another branch of the variety business’, performers appearing ‘on the same bill as stand-up comedians, dancers and even jugglers and animal acts’ (Sandbrook Reference Sandbrook2007, p. 219). Significantly, no Moroccan instruments are used. Williamson's encounter with the Middle East has been reduced to parodic comic relief.

Morocco and the ridiculous stereotype of the Maharajah are drawn into the theme of lost childhood and the dreamlike nature of reality that predominate in 5000 Spirits and The Hangman's. Both Williamson and Heron drew heavily on nostalgia for a lost childhood, a common theme in post-war popular music and perhaps, as Ian MacDonald (Reference MacDonald1995, p. 173) suggests, ‘the true subject of English psychedelia’. Williamson's songs like ‘Darling Belle’ and ‘The Mad Girl’ refer to traumatic childhood events, and ‘Way Back in the 1960s’ imagines Williamson's eccentric and youthful present from the perspective of an old man. Heron's songs, on the other hand, attempt to domesticate wild flights of fancy, or at least to place them in a narrative frame of childish innocence. His songs are faux nursery rhymes or nostalgia-ridden memories of parents advising the speaker, as in The Hangman's ‘Swift as the Wind’, to cease imagining ‘for your own good’ and get out and play with others. The lyrics of the songs on these albums are fragments of psychic travel amid a shifting collage of world images from the collective unconscious. In addition to the childhood references, we have faux-medievalism, white doves, Lazarus, golden flowers, Krishna, Merlin, Jesus, dragons, unicorns. The songs are a journey, a trance-like trip down a world river of sounds and images and shifting genres, celebrating the wonder of existence, while particularly in Williamson's songs ever returning to ‘The Half-Remarkable Question’: ‘What is it that we're part of and what is it that we are?’ The song includes the response: ‘Ask the stone beneath the wall’. The innocence or preposterousness of its naivety is part of its charm or the last straw in its insipidness. It is a slightly hare-brained or rabbit-chasing sociology of religion with polyglot references from Hinduism, Buddhism, Daoism and Christianity, though the absence of Islamic references is striking. The closest we get are Victoriana-style references to the ‘Arabian Nights’. In his songs, Williamson is not creating a new mythology so much as vacuuming up all others. Originally thinking of himself as a writer, Williamson borrowed the free-flowing, non-editing, Zen-like spontaneity of lyrical composition from his mentor Kerouac (Unterberger Reference Unterberger2003, p. 149). Allen Ginsberg – Beat poet as well as Beat archivist and apologist – had recognised immediately the ISB's kinship with the Beats (Whittaker Reference Whittaker2003, p. 337). However, after the band discovered Scientology following their two best known albums, their poetic universe contracted drastically.

The ISB's use of Moroccan elements was part of their Modernist trans-cultural outlook as was the search for synthesis especially apparent in their later ritualised, multimedia performance pieces. These pieces, aside from their diverse origins, were rapidly composed, performed and closed. The band cheerfully cherry-picked from a wide range of source material, leading to bewildering, silly, profound, profoundly silly and certainly over-determined songs. They sought in these works a type of global synthesis that found its focus and expression in ritual, and particularly ritualised sacrifice leading to rebirth. The inspiration behind this desire for global synthesis and its expression in ritual may lie in Williamson's reading of Frazer's The Golden Bough. For Frazer, the centrality of ritual in human culture, and in particular, ritualised sacrifice leading to rebirth, was what he called his work's ‘plot’ (Fraser Reference Fraser1990, p. 64), the key to all mythologies. Participants over time forgot rituals' original purpose, but they survived in ‘ossified and purposeless mumming plays, the folklore of the modern or industrial age’ (Fraser Reference Fraser and Frazer1994, p. xxii). Similarly, recorded music brackets the ritualised experience of musical performance. Listening to recorded music is a second-order aesthetic experience. As Adorno writes in ‘The Curves of the Needle’ (Reference Adorno, Leppert and Gillespie2002a, p. 271), the recording is privately experienced ‘rather than experienced intersubjectively and socially as may occur in musical ritual, whether ecclesiastical or secular’ (2002, p. 234). For Walter Benjamin, whose work influenced Adorno (Adorno Reference Adorno, Adorno, Benjamin, Bloch, Brecht, Lukács and Jameson1980, pp. 120–6), ‘the aura of the work of art’ is lost when detached ‘from the domain of tradition’ (Benjamin Reference Benjamin1955, p. 223) and particularly its origin in ritual.Footnote ²² The ISB came to reposition their work within this ‘secularised ritual’ (Benjamin Reference Benjamin1955, p. 226).

The ISB's two major performance pieces focus on rebirth or reincarnation. These experiments largely dispensed with plot. 1970's U was a pageant created by the ISB, their Scientology associates, and the dance/performance troupe Stone Monkey, made up of former members of Exploding Galaxy who were all living communally in Wales. In the opinion of their manager Joe Boyd, the piece emerged out of the zeal and supreme optimism of Scientology, though the songs' ‘lyrics were even more obscure than their opaque masterpieces of the past and the tunes weren't as good’ (Boyd Reference Boyd2006, pp. 223–34). The performance drew on Stone Monkey's expertise in ‘street happenings’ and ‘kinetic art’. Williamson remembers, ‘I liked the notion of everybody having a go, regardless of their particular abilities’. He recalls that the sources of inspiration were:

The show had fifteen performances, ten in London and five in New York, before running out of money, provoking universal rapture from audiences and uniform derision from theatre and dance critics.

Later in 1970, the ISB completed their film collage Be Glad for the Song Has No Ending, including a fable, filmed over a weekend, originating in the quasi-Miracle playlets the ISB had performed earlier on stage. Be Glad begins with a fragment from their ‘Noah’ play, followed by stills of the band's incredible instruments. In Be Glad's fable, a pirate tries to steal a crystal ball to command destiny. A hunter captures the pirate, who is judged by the Gods, Williamson and Heron in dressing gowns and harem pants, and sentenced to return to the wheel of rebirth, and reincarnated as a miller's son. The fable is a type of amateur Victorian theatrical made at a weekend house party, similar no doubt to those the ISB and friends performed for the Tennant family with guests like Princess Margaret at Glen Row.Footnote ²³ The BBC, who partly funded the project, considered the film, as the director recalls, too ‘ridiculous’ for broadcast. It saw limited independent release, then a DVD release in 2001. Again, contemporary critics were glad the song and the film had an ending, but more recent responses express nostalgic amusement (Whittaker Reference Whittaker2003). However, it also provoked dissatisfaction within the ISB. Mike Heron was irritated by the move into multimedia events, and Rose Simpson, who found the amateurishness of the entire undertaking increasingly embarrassing and a distraction from Williamson's and Heron's core strengths, left the ISB soon afterwards.

The ISB's naive appropriation of elements of international music, while trading on romantic, orientalist myths of the ‘other’, may well have tampered less with sources of indigenous cultural production than globalised ‘world music’'s opening of this domain to various types of musical fusion. Globalisation celebrates breaching boundaries, rationalised as a levelling of the international playing field, but in the cultural domain this has sometimes resulted in homogenisation and Disneyfication. The ISB's was a more naive, eccentric appropriation and belonged to a more innocent quest for a Modernist trans-historical, universalist cultural synthesis drawn from a potpourri of traces of indigenous cultures, though still trading on colonial, orientalist and exoticist assumptions. Williamson didn't formally study Moroccan music or, like George Harrison, employ expert musicians to record his compositions or, like Brian Jones, make quasi-ethnographic field recordings or, like Joni Mitchell, sample such field recordings as ‘jungle’ backing for her own tracks. The ISB's influence may be most clearly seen in Led Zeppelin, acknowledged by Robert Plant, and their postmodern successors The White Stripes on songs like Icky Thumps' ‘Conquest’. Led Zeppelin's link with the ISB could be reduced to Plant's vocal pyrotechnics on ‘Immigrant Song’ and the gargantuan, almost clichéd oriental riff in ‘Kashmir’ that wouldn't be out of place in Bob Hope's Road to Morocco. For Led Zeppelin, Arab influence signified doom, the barbarian invasion, or instant Valhalla. The ISB's certainly was cultural appropriation, but a kinder, gentler or more ‘gently tender’ 1960s cultural imperialism, a distant cousin of the Victorians' parlour orientalising, less exploitative because less influential, save for enforcing a certain moral complicity in 1960s listeners enjoying a ‘soft’ imperialist's, tourist's view of the Arab world drained of material culture. A similar stance would later enable some of these listeners as ‘upwardly-mobile boomers’ to be sonic armchair anthropologists enjoying ‘world music’.