Lightning The .357 String Band

Be Glad for the Song Has No Ending is the eighth album by the Scottish psychedelic folk group, the Incredible String Band, featuring Mike Heron, Robin Williamson, Licorice McKechnie and Rose Simpson. It is the soundtrack for a film of the same name, and was released on Island Records in March 1971, failing to chart in either the UK or US. It would be the first album from the band on the Island label, and the last to feature Joe Boyd as the producer. Recording of the album and soundtrack came during a transitional period for the band. Tracks were completed during Wee Tam and the Big Huge and I Looked Up sessions. As a result, the girlfriends Licorice McKechnie and Rose Simpson are more involved in some tracks in comparison to others.

In the liner notes to these carefully packaged reissues, all four of the Incredible String Band principals– co-founder Clive Palmer, core duo Mike Heron and Robin Williamson, and Elektra records executive Joe Boyd– offer their insights in separate essays. Three of them mention the smell of patchouli. Such were the times, certainly, but the ISB are loved equally by avant-garde musicians, psychedelia enthusiasts, and those slightly dweeby young gentlemen who hang around music shops on college campuses. The reissue of their first four albums probably put to rest any notion that the ISB were a properly great band, releasing just one true classic, but they were rarely anything less than brave, inspired, and profoundly weird.

Described as one of the most engaging groups to emerge from the esoteric 1960s, The Incredible String Band was essentially the duo of Mike Heron and Robin Williamson. Their sound was comprised of haunting Celtic folk melodies augmented by a variety of Middle Eastern and Asian instruments. During the summer of 1968, The Incredible String Band played a remarkable concert at the legendary Fillmore East venue in New York. The concert was recorded by the venue's sound desk. This is a 24-bit remaster, approved by the band, taken from that original 1968 concert tape.

The sixteenth-century madrigal, a deceptively simple, whimsical poetic form of no fixed structure, had an elusive quality that was to prove inspirational to generations of musicians; madrigal settings came to form the core of many composers’ outputs and quickly evolved a musical identity independent of their poetic origins.