If the phrase 'Renaissance Man' were copyright it would be an expensive business writing about Robin Williamson. It's hard to think of anyone else on the contemporary music scene who can demonstrate such a dizzying range of accomplishments. Besides being a musician whose instrumental inventory runs to over forty plucked, blown, bowed and struck devices drawn from all over the planet, Robin is a songwriter of undisputed stature, a distinctive interpreter of traditional song, a published poet and novelist and author of instructional works for the fiddle and penny whistle, a leading light in the recent revival of storytelling, and...well, you get the idea. Nor, after such a prolific output in so many different fields, is he inclined to rest on his laurels. He still tours widely with his repertoire of songs and stories, both in the UK and abroad.
Born in Edinburgh in 1943, Robin spent much of his childhood and adolescence in the Home Counties and in France. Returning to 'Auld Reekie' to finish his schooling. he promptly became a professional musician at the age of 16, eking out his meagre earnings with a spot of house-painting and landscape gardening on the side. In the early Sixties he and Bert Jansch took the overnight bus to London and spent a winter playing the metropolitan folk circuit. By 1965 he’d fallen in with Clive Palmer, a laconic Londoner and banjo wizard; as Robin and Clive, the duo specialised in Old Timey fiddle and banjo arrangements of Scots and Irish songs. Their practice, according to Joe Boyd, was 'to take songs that hadn’t necessarily made the trip over to the Appalachians and play them as if they had'. Boyd, who was to be a central figure in the British Folk-Rock explosion of the late Sixties and early Seventies, signed them to Elektra Records in 1966, by which time they'd recruited Mike Heron as guitarist, cannily concluding from the chart success of Peter, Paul And Mary that trios were more marketable. Declaring their fealty to Clive's Incredible Folk Club in Glasgow, where they were the resident turn, they called themselves with appealing immodesty The Incredible String Band.
The threesome's well-received debut album was especially notable for the originality and maturity of Robin's compositions (the traditional songs had largely been displaced by this time by Robin’s and Mike's own songs). Most notable among them was the timeless October Song , which Bob Dylan himself in breathless admiration pronounced 'quite good'. (Calm down, Bob!)
When the album was released Clive Palmer immediately left for Afghanistan; Robin for his part headed for Morocco, returning to Scotland a few months later with a sackload of strange Arab instruments and a head full of oud, kanun and Berber flute music. He and Mike reformed the ISB as a duo and in 1967 put out the extraordinary 5000 Spirits Or The Layers Of The Onion. It was the great psychedelic-folk classic of the Summer Of Love, fusing contemporary folk with North African street music, Indian ragas, Bahamian balladry, Chicago blues and more in a global musical vision. At a stroke, they invented 'world music' some two decades before the marketing moguls of the Eighties appropriated the term. This was followed by The Hangman's Beautiful Daughter and the double-album Wee Tam And The Big Huge . Hangman's rocketed into the top 5 of the British album charts within days of release, and with their pastoral songs and acoustic instrumentation the ISB became the standard bearers of the hippy back-to-nature movement. They even played Woodstock a little-known fact, since they didn’t make it onto either the film or the album.
The ISB were recently described in a work of rock journalism as 'now all-but- forgotten'. It's true that they have been largely ignored by the rock nostalgia industry that has cast its cyclopean shadow over the Nineties music scene, but their influence in the development of popular music is ungainsayable and a number of rock luminaries have recently stepped forward to acknowledge that fact, including Neil Tennant, Bill Drummond of KLF, The Cure's Porl Thompson, and Robert Plant. 'The Incredible String Band were an inspiration and a sign,' said Planty, who also remarked of Robin's unique vocal style 'If you don't sing like Robin Williamson when you're 19, you're never going to sing like Robin Williamson.
The ISB split in 1974, and Robin moved from the Scottish Borders to Los Angeles. Disenchanted by the growing corporatism of the music business, he turned his attention to writing. One of his first published pieces was the picaresque Mirrorman's Sequences, a rollicking and ribald account of his misadventures in early Sixties Edinburgh (of which more anon). A stylish espionage novel, The Glory Trap, co- written with Dan Sherman, quickly followed; but music had reasserted itself, and in 1976 Robin assembled a new line-up, the Merry Band, with a manifesto to 'write a contemporary Celtic music using the old instruments in a new way'.
The result was an electrifying combination of old and new, with Robin increasingly exploring a more autobiographical vein in his songwriting. The Merry Band made three unforgettable albums Journey's Edge, American Stonehenge and A Glint At The Kindling during their brief career; a live recording of their final performance in 1979 has only just been released. Better late than never, for sure. Glint 's centrepiece was the mighty Five Denials On Merlin’s Grave, which laid the foundations for Robin's later 'Bardic' style, combining music and the spoken word in a potent distillation of the Celtic soul.
Since the ending of the Merry Band Robin has worked almost exclusively as a soloist, settling again in Britain in the mid-Eighties. Over this period he has released 41 recordings of songs, instrumental music and spoken word pieces. Latterly, he has come to excel in a form of music that cunningly blends all three elements, and in which the Celtic harp is the principal instrument. This has led to his being dubbed a 20th Century Bard; in fact, this is a pretty serviceable description, for all its air of Victorian romanticism, as he has drawn consistently on ancient Celtic poetry and stories throughout his career. Perhaps more than any other contemporary musician, he has achieved a graceful synthesis of ancient and modern, in which each complements and infuses the other. His most recent album of original songs, The Island Of The Strong Door, shows this to stunning effect.
During the past five years, Robin has been looking anew at his days with the Incredible String Band. Two CDs, Mirrorman's Sequences and Dream Journal's 1966-76, comprise new and brilliant settings of prose and poetry from that period. Simultaneously, long-lost ISB recordings from 1967 - The Chelsea Sessions 1967 - have finally been released, and, to the delight of thousands of still-devoted Stringheads, he and Mike Heron took to the stage together at the backend of 1997 for the first time in 23 years. Other releases from Robin include The Merry Band's Farewell At McCabe's, Memories/Erinerungen a limited edition release funded by the car manufacturer Opel & a live album of his recent concert with Mike Heron titled Bloomsbury 1997. During 1998 Robin released Gems Of Celtic Story One and Gems Of Celtic Story Two, the superb album Ring Dance + a limited edition release of Music For The Newly Born as well as an album of traditional songs titled A Job Of Journey Work. In 1999 Robin reunited with Clive Palmer to record the critically acclaimed At The Pure Fountain and to play a 9 date concert tour in October with him. Other releases this year include The Old Fangled Tone recorded live with a traditional brass band, Music For Macbeth, a collaboration with the director Geoff Moore, as well as reissuing Songs For Children Of All Ages and Winter's Turning on one CD.
With the start of the new Millennium Robin emerged with even more energy and in the past two years he has performed regularly with the reformed Incredible String Band and still found time to release "Carmina" a revisitation of sacred texts set to his own music and premiered in Llandaff Cathedral featuring Robin And Bina Williamson, "The Seed at Zero" an album for the German label ECM featuring the words of Dylan Thomas, and groundbreaking collaborations with free form improviserss culminating in performances of "Dream Journals" and "Carmina" at the MAC Theatre in December 2001.
2002 has seen no let up with dates already pencilled in with Martin Carthy. As the title of his forthcoming performance at the Cardiff Bay Literature Festival says he surely is a "True Bard and Troubadour".
Raymond Greenoaken/Michael Fitzgerald
Robin Williamson History
On the English folk scene back in the benighted mid '70s, someone had a Big Idea. It was an idea that was to start a quiet revolution in the way recorded music was mediated to the public. This unsung genius discovered that you could actually knit your own LPs-that is to say, record them at a tiny studio in somebody's coalshed, master them and press them in modest quantities at the nearest pressing plant, and sell them at gigs or through mail order at (ding-ding!) 100% profit. At a stroke, you had cut out the despised middle man and liberated yourself from the whims and restrictive clauses of the record companies; you were the sole owner of your own music. All you needed was a grand or so to cover the recording and production costs, and you were away. The more popular you were, the quicker you'd make it back. By the end of the decade, the humble cassette tape had emerged as an even more economical way of getting your music to the ears of your admiring public. Much cheaper to produce than the vinyl LP, and a lot easier to carry about with you in quantity. It was a genuine democratisation of the recording process.
The nature of the folk scene made such an operation feasible. Artists have direct contact with their audiences in small and fairly informal venues, and can hawk their wares personally at the end of a gig. Such an arrangement would be largely unworkable on the rock scene, where even third division bands are presented as distant Olympian figures, cut off from any meaningful contact with concert-goers by palisades of PA equipment and phalanxes of frowning security personnel.
With hindsight, it comes as no surprise that Robin Williamson has taken this particular route in his post-ISB career. By the time he prised himself out of the ISB in 1974, the band had become virtual prisoners of rock's corporate culture. They were being pushed remorselessly towards stadium-scale venues, and were under pressure to record more "accessible" material. The men in suits, it seems, were calling all the shots.
When Robin returned to recording three years later with the Merry Band, he was clearly determined to exercise more control over things. Instead of being bankrolled by a record company, Robin stumped up personally for the recording sessions that produced the Journey's Edge album, and licensed the finished product to the Chicago roots label Flying Fish. This arrangement seems to have proved congenial to both parties, and was repeated for American Stonehenge and A Glint At The Kindling. A deal was struck with Max Hole's Criminal Records (memorable motto: "the label you can't trust") for distribution in the UK. Regrettably, Max didn't pick up the option on Journey's Edge, which never had an official UK release until the Demon CD reissue.
For the remainder of the '80s Robin licensed his work out to Plant Life and Claddagh in the UK, with Flying Fish continuing to distribute in the States. (The sole exception was The Dragon Has Two Tongues, which was commissioned by Channel 4 and released under its auspices on the Towerbell label; as a result, Robin doesn't actually own these recordings, and they won't be featuring in the planned programme of CD reissues.) At the same time, however, he was branching out into spoken word performance-storytelling, Bardic verse and the like. This class of thing may have seemed a bit too esoteric for mainstream vinyl release; and so it was that Pig's Whisker Music, conjured up a couple of years earlier as the publishing imprint for the Five Denials book, became the recording arm of Robin Williamson Productions.
By this time, Robin was operating as a sort of transatlantic cottage industry: RW Prods had an office in L.A., run by his then-wife Janet, and another in London in the care of Rose Verge, and acted as an information service and mail order operation. In the course of the '80s and early '90s Robin produced a series of delightful cassettes of traditional Celtic tales and Bardic material, as well as a couple given over to songs and instrumental pieces. Each bore the Pig's Whisker imprint and came with a cheap 'n' cheerful two colour insert featuring drawings and calligraphy by Robin and Janet. By the time of Music For The Newly Born in 1990, one of these wee drawings-of a pig valiantly inflating a set of bagpipes-had been adopted as the Pig's Whisker logo.
These cassettes have been unavailable for several years-though Selected Writings (1982) and Five Bardic Mysteries (1984) were incorporated into the CD reissues of A Glint At The Kindling and Songs Of Love And Parting respectively. Their rarity has made them highly prized in String circles, so there will be much popping of corks at the news that all are earmarked for reissue.
Raymond Greenoaken/Editor
Source: http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~uniqgrav/biograph.htm
