This year marks the 50th Anniversary of the revolutionary Summer of Love. To mark the occasion Glasgow’s psych rock cosmonauts Trembling Bells hook up with original trailblazers Mike Heron and Ed Askew for a magic carpet ride of musical adventure. See dates below.
Few bands could be said to embody the spirit of the 1960s more comprehensively than the Incredible String Band. On albums such as ‘The Hangman’s Beautiful Daughter’ or ‘Wee Tam and the Big Huge’- with their epic perspectives, pantheistic lyrics and visionary synthesis of musical forms- ISB gave the hippy generation some of their most emblematic anthems. This is not the first time Mike has teamed up with Trembling Bells. One notable collaboration coincided with the Hux Records’ release of Incredible String Band ‘Live at Fillmore East, 1968’, an album that found Mike and Robin [Williamson] at the peak of their creativity. In our interview with Mike Heron and Alex Neilson of Trembling Bells, they revealed how they first met:
“We met at a Joe Boyd curated Incredible String Band tribute event at the Barbican in 2009 and recognised each other as kindred spirits” recalls Alex. “Trembling Bells had only recorded one album at that point but ISB were so much a part of our shared musical diet that it had informed the aesthetic of the band in many ways. For example, the omnivorous appropriation of folk musics from throughout the world and colliding them with a more expansive conception of song writing. Retaining the elemental pulse at the heart of folk music but warping it by combining it with interests in art, gnostic writing, psychedelics etc etc etc.” You can read the full interview here.
Watch this rare clip of October Song being performed on Dutch TV by the Incredible String Band in 1967:
Ed Askew is a painter and singer-songwriter who resides in New York City. His acid-folk masterpiece Ask the Unicorn, originally released on the ‘staunchly underground and subversive New York indie label ESP-Disk’, was re-released in autumn 2016. Ed has just toured Europe with his trio in September in support of this release and in anticipation of his forthcoming second studio album of new songs, featuring Josephine Foster, on Tin Angel Records. He is also due to perform at this tears Fanø Free Folk Festival. Here he is performing for a La Blogothèque session with Diane Cluck:
Regular followers of Folk Radio UK should need no introduction to Trembling Bells, one of Britain’s most distinctive and exciting groups that formed in 2008, born from Glasgow’s close-knit scene, united by shared tastes, passions and imagination. “We all like music on a forensic level,” says Alex Neilson. “We’re all obsessive, pedantic, maladjusted, unemployable nerds.” They feature throughout this website.
SUMMER OF LOVE 50th ANNIVERSARY TOUR
Featuring; Trembling Bells/ Mike Heron/ Ed Askew
2nd August, Sage, Newcastle
3rd August, Colchester Arts Centre
5th August, The Phoenix, Exeter
6th August, Supernormal Festival, Braziers Estate, Oxfordshire (Plague Dogs/ Ed Askew)
7th August, Cafe Oto, London (Trembling Bells/ Ed Askew/ Amy Cutler)
8th August, Cafe Oto, London (Mike Heron/ Alasdair Roberts/ Jeff Hilson)
9th August, Hare and Hounds, Birmingham
The Summer of Love – From San Francisco to Cornwall
Whilst The Summer of Love became synonymous with a generation and city called San Francisco, the LOVE vibe ran far beyond the famous gathering at San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury.
In the UK the short-lived UFO Club in London’s Tottenham Court Road was in full swing, run by Joe Boyd and John ‘Hoppy’ Hopkins. Every Friday, the club introduced London to the likes of Pink Floyd, the Soft Machine, the Crazy World of Arthur Brown. In Joe Boyd’s autobiographical White Bicycles he recalled the owner of the premises, a Mr. Gannon, calling him aside one evening and saying that although he wasn’t sure and didn’t want to jump to any conclusions he had a feeling “there’s a few people smokin’ dope in here”. Mr Ganon suggested he might want to turn the fan on just in case.
May 1967 also marked the start of John Peel’s short-lived Perfumed Garden radio show (May 1967 – August 1967) on pirate radio station Radio London from midnight to 2 am. The unpopular slot (with DJs and advertisers at least) meant he was able to quietly shift away from Radio London’s commercial pop playlists to a mixture of folk, blues, psychedelic and progressive rock tracks. The radio station management were unaware of what he was playing until the show began cropping up in music press reviews and they received a letter of praise from The Beatles’ manager Brian Epstein. It attracted a surprising number of listeners, unfortunately, the station was shut down under anti-pirate legislation in August 1967. Two months later John Peel began co-presenting BBC Radio 1’s Top Gear from 2-5pm on a Sunday. It wouldn’t be until the following year that he became the sole presenter. His first solo show featured Tyrannosaurus Rex in session with Marc Bolan in the studio – a man he was once instructed by the head of BBC Radio 1 to stop playing as ‘he’ll never be popular’.
There was also plenty happening in Cornwall. Rupert White, in his book Folk in Cornwall, described the emergence of the Cornish folk-scene and the part that the clubs such as the Folk Cottage played attracting the likes of Michael Chapman, Ralph McTell, Clive Palmer, Pete Stanley & Wizz Jones. In one interview with Ralph McTell and Wizz Jones, they both refer to the summer of 1967 as a boom year for Folk Cottage when all-nighters attracted surfers, beatniks and the Soho-hippies.
Watch this old documentary that Ralph McTell shared:
In July 1967, a Legalise Pot Rally was held at Speakers’ Corner in Hyde Park, led by activist Stephen Abrams, featuring the Beat Poet Allen Ginsberg. Allen was seen by many at the time as a father figure of the hippie movement who was also pretty busy introducing a younger generation to Eastern Spiritual practices.
San Francisco Human Be-In:
Allen was also the MC at one of the landmark assemblies at the beginning of the year – a gathering of the tribes at Golden Gate Park on January 14th, 1967 which included Gary Snyder and Timothy Leary. It was billed as a ‘Human Be-In’ which focused on the San Francisco music scene of the time, the acid experience, and the Eastern spiritual movement. Among the bands that that performed were Jefferson Airplane, The Grateful Dead, Big Brother and the Holding Company, and Quicksilver Messenger Service. “Underground chemist” Owsley Stanley also provided massive amounts of his “White Lightning” LSD, specially produced for the event (wiki). It was to be the introductory event for the “Summer of Love” in San Francisco.
We could do with some positivity and LOVE today, to counteract all the negativity, so try and make those dates….
Featuring; Trembling Bells/ Mike Heron/ Ed Askew
2nd August, Sage, Newcastle
3rd August, Colchester Arts Centre
5th August, The Phoenix, Exeter
6th August, Supernormal Festival, Braziers Estate, Oxfordshire (Plague Dogs/ Ed Askew)
7th August, Cafe Oto, London (Trembling Bells/ Ed Askew/ Amy Cutler)
8th August, Cafe Oto, London (Mike Heron/ Alasdair Roberts/ Jeff Hilson)
9th August, Hare and Hounds, Birmingham