Scotland

The Incredible String Band on German TV’s Beat Club

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By Johnny Foreigner

Here’s a three song playlist from The Incredible String Band’s performance on the German TV show Beat Club, recorded September 1970 but not broadcast.

Beat Club was a German music program that ran from September 1965 to December 1972. Co-created by Gerhard Augustin and Mike Leckebusch, the show premiered in 1965 with Augustin and Uschi Nerke hosting.

By the time the Incredible String Band performed, the series was known for incorporating psychedelic (read: cheesy) visual effects during the taped performances. This one is no exception.

The band is in fine form here, still having fun  -despite being recently introduced to Scientology and the crooked music business. As the Scotsman will toast, “To honest men and bonnie lassies!” Well, the lassies were bonnie, anyway.

In these clips, the band plays “Empty Pocket Blues,” “Everything’s Fine Right Now,” and “Irish Jigs.” The singing, particularly Mike and Robin’s respective hi and lo, is fantastic. Both guys were also great pickers, and by this time Rose Simpson, had learned to play a competent guitar.

The “Irish Jigs” clip is terrific, though it sounds more Scot than Irish,. The clip includes some wonderfully kooky dancing (less Riverdance, more Deadhead spinner footwork) from the lovely Licorice McKechnie. I’m a really sucker for Scottish Highland dance. Love it – especially  when the dancer holds hands above his/her head (see Licky at 02:30) with the thumb touching the middle finger, the other three fingers extended in the air. This signifies something important to the Scots, perhaps, “My clan is planning to slaughter your family tonight, Campbell.” With The Incredible String Band, it may have meant something more Boudin Noir en Francais than Scottish haggis: “Okay, so who is sleeping with who, tonight?”

Where are the band members today? Both Heron and Williamson still perform. Rose Simpson left the music biz and lives quietly with her family in Wales. Christina ‘Licorice’ McKechnie was last seen in 1987 hitchhiking across the Arizona desert in 1987.

The Kingston Coffeehouse: Katie Cruel

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Originally broadcast September 9, 2025, on WRIU 90.3 FM.


By Michael Stevenson, host The Kingston Coffeehouse

PLAYLIST
“Katie Cruel” (traditional) – Karen Dalton
“Bashed Out” (K. Stables) – This Is the Kit , 2015 Bashed Out
“God Loves a Drunk” (R Thompson) – Norma Waterson, 1996 

“I’m Waiting For You to Smile” – Katell Keineg, 1994 O Seasons O Castles 
“Love Will Tear Us Apart” (Ian Curtis) June Tabor & Oysterband, 2011 Ragged Kingdom
“People’s Faces” – Kae Tempest, 2019 The Book of Traps and Lessons
“Train Song” – Vashti Bunyan, r. 1966, Some Things Just Stick in Your Mind
“Anachie Gordon” (traditional) The Unthanks, 2010 Here’s the Tender Coming
“Henry Lee” (traditional) Nick Cave & PJ Harvey, 2011 Murder Ballads
“The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face” (Ewan MacColl) – Offa Rex, 2017 The Queen of Hearts
“She Moved through the Fair” (traditional) – Anne Briggs, 1963 Edinburgh Folk Festival Vol. 1
“Banjo Player of Aleph One” – Gwenifer Raymond 2025 Last Night I Heard the Dog Star Bark
“Wheely Down” (R. Thompson) – Ivor Cutler, 1993 The World is a Wonderful Place
“Roundabout” – Ryley Walker, 2017 Golden Sings That Have Been Sung
“Brighter than the Blues” – Joan Shelly, 2016 Over and Even
“Three Ravens” (traditional) – Jake Xerxes Fussell, 2019 Out of Sight
“Lullaby” (from the film Wicker Man) – Magnet (Paul Giovanni) 1972
“Rivers Run Red” (Ella Oona Russell) – The New Eves, 2025 The New Eve is Rising
“Witches Reel” (traditional) – Starheid Gossip, 2015 Step Sisters
“Entertaining of a Shy Girl” – Donovan 1968 Hurdy Gurdy Man
“The Hedgehog Song”(Heron/Williamson) – Incredible String Band, 1966 The 5000 Spirits or Layers of an Onion
“Lay it Down” (G. Thomas) – Bonny Prince Billy with The Trembling Bells, 2014 New Trip On Old Wine
“Conch Shell” Katell Keineg, 1994 O Seasons O Castle
“Into My Arms” – Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds, 1997 Boatman’s Call
“Place to Be” – Nick Drake, Pink Moon
“How Wild the Wind Blows” – Molly Lee, 2018 The Tides Magnificence
“The Sweetest Decline” – Beth Orton Central Reservation
“The Wagoner’s Lad” (Traditional) – Bert Jansch, 1966 Jack Orion
“Nottamun Town” (traditional)- Fairport Convention, 1969 What We Did on Our Holidays
“Masters of War” – Bob Dylan, 1963 The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan
“Needle of Death” – Bert Jansch, 1965 Bert Jansch
“Golden Brown” – The Stranglers 1982
“Meet On the Ledge” (R.Thompson) – Fairport Convention, 1969 What We Did on Our Holidays
“Anji” – Davy Graham
“Green Are Your Eyes” (b.Jansch) – Marianne Faithul, 1966 North Country Maid
“The Water” – Johnny Flynn & Laura Marling, 2010 Been Listening
“The Parting Glass” (traditional) – James Elkington 2017 Wintres Woma
“Katie Cruel” (traditional) – Agnes Obel
“Blues Run the Game” – Jackson C. Frank, 1965 Jackson C. Frank
“Home Sweet Home” (Bishop /Payne)- The King’s Singers 1993 Folk Songs of the British Isles
“A Heart Needs a Home” – Linda & Richard Thompson, 1975 Hokey Pokey
“Goodnight World” – Lisa O’Neil, 2023 All This Is Chance

The Musician Bringing the Bagpipes Into the Avant-Garde

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Brìghde Chaimbeul frees her instrument from the confines of kitsch.

The 27-year-old Scottish musician Brìghde Chaimbeul is considered one of the most skillful and interesting bagpipe players in the world. Chaimbeul grew up a native Gaelic speaker on Skye, an island in Scotland’s Inner Hebrides, in a family of artists. Since pivoting, as a teen-ager, from the Great Highland pipes to focus on the smallpipes, she’s won national folk competitions and released three solo albums (the latest, “Sunwise,” in June), but also made pilgrimages to places such as Bulgaria, where other pipe traditions have flourished; collaborated with the indie singer-songwriter Caroline Polachek; and played for a Dior runway show. “In doing so, she has redrawn the bounds of her instrument,” Elena Saavedra Buckley writes.

The Scottish smallpipe, which has roots that go at least as far back as the 15th century, was nearly lost to history. “These bagpipes had mostly been hidden away in the backs of cupboards,” the Lowland and Border Pipers’ Society journal explained in 1989, “or they had found their way, as curiosities of a former age, into museums, where they would lie dead and silent in display cases.” But, over the years, Scottish musicians advocated for smallpipes as a cultural corrective: something that could revive a lost, jubilant character of communal Scottish music, and that could help disrupt not only the regimented Highland piping culture but the kitschy idea of Scotland forged by English imperialism. Chaimbeul, lauded as a “musical genius” by her peers, is part of this lineage of bagpipe players who are luring tradition into the present. “It all stems from her tacit understanding of the tradition. It’s a kind of focus on the depth in our music, in which the layers of virtuosity are stripped away,” one of her collaborators said.

Read the full story by Elena Saavedra Buckley: The Musician Bringing the Bagpipes Into the Avant-Garde | The New Yorker