‘Gently Tender’: the Incredible String Band's early albums

Extract

The monstrous machinations of the reissue CD market are reorganising our relations with ourselves, with our own and other peoples' pasts. This, in conjunction with the fact that baby-boomers have grown up, that pop music is no longer simply youth music, means that yesterday's and tomorrow's songs are not necessarily heard in that order, and that styles no longer grow and change in a linear fashion. In the simple act of repetition, thousands of albums, which, like Haydn's symphonies, were never intended for anything more than local consumption, are being underlined as worthy of recall, blessed with the glamorous radiance of digital sound. Musical nostalgia is highly seductive, but whilst it has resulted in considerable beauty and vigour in the hands of both Elgar and Stravinsky, it sounds predatory in the context of all those sixties music advertisements. More seriously – ‘lest we forget’ – political nostalgia, in the form of the search for the lost German Spirit, eventually proved genocidal. So, at a more personal level, I should be cautious about celebrating such a relic from my own past within the candy-coloured world of hippy psychedelia as the Incredible String Band.