The Incredible String Band

You either loved The Incredible String Band or you hated them. Me - I couldn't make my mind up.

Cro and I had a bunch of friends at college who thought that the sun shone out of their very arseholes. I still couldn't make my mind up.

There are still many people around the world who think than the sun did, indeed, illuminate the darkest recesses of their underwear, and I am sure that the two blokes who were the main-stays of the band exist quite comfortably on the royalties provided by these sun-worshipers.

Not so comfortably though, that both of them have not had to play in my local pub here in Bath on a number of occasions - albeit separately, since, like the Gallagher Brothers, they fell out of love long ago.

On one such afternoon, I was sitting in the Bell in Walcot street, when the phone rang. The young girl (too young to remember the String Band) answered, and shouted to the short Welshman who was setting up on the little stage, "Mike Heron?!"

Mr Heron came to the public phone, and eventually I heard him say, "I AM Mike Heron" to a fan who obviously was asking if it was true that he was playing in the pub that night. That caller must have been over 50, and over the moon.