A memoir by a member of the Incredible String Band that charts a journey from hippie utopia to post-Woodstock implosion. Between 1967 and 1971 Rose Simpson lived with the Incredible String Band (Mike Heron, Robin Williamson and Licorice McKechnie), morphing from English student to West Coast hippie and, finally, bassist in leathers. The band's image adorned psychedelic posters and its music was the theme song for an alternative lifestyle. Rose and partner Mike Heron believed in, and lived, a naive vision of utopia in Scotland. But they were also a band on tour, enjoying the thrills of that life. They were at the center of "Swinging London" and at the Chelsea Hotel with Andy Warhol's superstars. They shared stages with rock idols and played at Woodstock in 1969. Rose and fellow ISB member Licorice were hippie pin-ups, while Heron and Robin Williamson the seers and prophets of a new world.

A crime and a six-decade cover-up: the death of a fashion designer in the cesspit of vice and violence that was 1950s London. In 1954, Jean Mary Townsend was strangled with her own scarf and stripped of her underwear but not sexually assaulted. The subsequent police investigation was bungled, leading to a six-decade cover-up, ensuring that this twenty-one-year-old fashion designer was effectively killed twice: first bodily, and then as her significance and her memory were erased. Fred Vermorel's forensic, troubling (and trouble-making) investigation digs deep into Jean Townsend's life and times, and her transgressive bohemian milieu. It disentangles the lies and bluffs that have obscured this puzzling case for over half a century and offers a compelling solution to her murder and the official secrecy surrounding it. More than just a true crime story, Vermorel's investigation deploys Townsend's death as a wild card methodology for probing the 1950s: a cesspit of vice and violence, from coprophiles to bombsite gangs and flick knives in the cinema. Densely illustrated with archival material, Dead Fashion Girl is a heavily researched, darkly curious exposé of London's 1950s society that touches on celebrity, royalty, the postwar establishment, and ultimately, tragedy.

'Mike Heron, as part of the Incredible String Band, changed the way I looked at music. Read it!' Billy Connolly 'Mike Heron's lyrics always sparkled with wit and warmth and his prose is a delightful continuation. The book evokes a smoky, unheated eccentric Edinburgh that was a crucible for so much creativity.' Joe Boyd, author of White Bicycles This singular book offers two harmonising memoirs of music making in the 1960s. Mike Heron for the first time writes vividly of his formative years in dour, Presbyterian Edinburgh. Armed with a love of Buddy Holly, Fats Domino and Hungarian folk music, he plays in school cloakrooms, graduates to rock, discovers the joy of a folk audience, starts writing songs, tries to talk to girls, wishes he was a Beatnik all while training as a reluctant accountant. When asked to join Robin Williamson and Clive Palmer, the Incredible String Band are formed - and their wildly innovative, astounding music became indelibly linked with the latter Sixties. Andrew Greig was a frustrated provincial schoolboy when he heard their songs. It changed everything. Undaunted by a lack of experience and ability, he formed a band in their image. Fate & Ferret populated back-country Fife with Pan, nymphs and Apollo, met the String Band and caught the fish lorry to London to hang around Joe Boyd's Witchseason office, watching at the fringes of the blooming Underground scene. It was forty years later that he and Mike became friends. These entwined stories will delight anyone who has loved the Incredible String Band; and their differing portraits of that hopeful, erratic and stubborn stumble towards the life that is ours will strike a chord with everyone.

How design collaboration, networks, and narratives contributed to the establishment of a recognized English couture industry in the 1930s and 1940s. In the 1930s and 1940s, English fashion houses, spurred by economic and wartime crises, put London on the map as a major fashion city. In this book, Michelle Jones examines the creation of a London-based couture industry during these years, exploring how designer collaboration and the construction of specific networks and narratives supported and shaped the English fashion economy. Haute couture—the practice of creative made-to-measure womenswear—was widely regarded as inherently French. Jones shows how an English version emerged during a period of economic turbulence, when a group of designers banded together in a collective effort to shift power within the international fashion system. Jones considers the establishment of this form of English design practice, analyzing the commercial, social, and political factors that shaped the professional identity of the London couturiers. She focuses on collaborative activity that supported this form of elite, craft-based fashion production—from the prewar efforts of the Fashion Group of Great Britain to the wartime establishment of the Incorporated Society of London Fashion Designers, modeled loosely after French fashion’s governing body, the Chambre Syndicale de la Couture Parisienne. It was these collective efforts by couturiers that established and sustained London’s place as an internationally recognized center for creative fashion.

First ever book on The Incredible String Band a key inspiration for Led Zeppelin.

Consumers guide to the music of the string band 'Smiling Men With Bad Reputations'

The history of India’s first electronic music studio founded in 1969 at the National Institute of Design in Ahmedabad by David Tudor. Subcontinental Synthesis explores the history of India’s first electronic music studio, founded in 1969 at the National Institute of Design in Ahmedabad with the support of the composer David Tudor. The essays and writings unravel the narrative and context surrounding the studio as well as the work of the Indian composers who created groundbreaking recordings during its four years of activity. The texts reflect on the role of electronic music within a post-independence India, considering its interconnections with experimental design, radical pedagogies, and the international avant-garde, as well as the encircling conditions of Western ideological soft power within the global expansion of Modernism. Contributors Geeta Dayal, Alannah Chance, Matt Williams, Shilpa Das, Jinraj Joshipura, You Nakai, Rahila Haque, and Paul Purgas

The secind installment of the acclaimed new anthology series. Includes 24 articles exploring the outer edges of anthropology, psychology, magick, literature, art, history, science and religion. This journal has become a true product of London's undergound and this new edition opens the gates to a parallel sultural universe that few knew existed a little further.

Now in paperback, this first oral history of the most nihilistic of all pop movements brings the sound of the punk generation chillingly to life with 50 new pages of depraved testimony. "Please Kill Me" reads like a fast-paced novel, but the tragedies it contains are all too human and all too real. photos.