<em><strong><b><a href="http://strangeattractor.co.uk/?attachment_id=6582" rel="attachment wp-att-6582"><img class="wp-image-6582 alignright" src="http://strangeattractor.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/MOHweb.jpg" alt="" width="322" height="473" /></a> A Girl's Life in The Incredible Strong Band
</b></strong></em><b></b><strong><b>by Rose Simpson</b></strong><em><strong><b>
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<strong><b>266pp, 154mm x 240mm
</b></strong><strong><b>Heavily illustrated in BW &amp; colour.</b></strong>

HB (edition of 500 copies) £25, with a bookplate signed by Rose Simpson

<em><strong>HB available 16 November 2020, with PB to follow. </strong></em>

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<div class="section"><em style="font-size: 16px;">Quietly revelatory... a beautifully written, thought-provoking account of a woman’s attempt to create a space for herself in a male-dominated musical world. </em><span style="font-size: 16px;">Alasdair Roberts</span></div>
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<em>What an extraordinary and intoxicating tale this is, that impossibly fabulous late‘60s world of wild creative adventure viewed from the inside by one of the very few women playing in a band at the time. A whole era seen from a new perspective: fascinating. </em>
Mark Ellen
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<em>In lucid, lovely, and lilting prose, Rose Simpson brings to life her experiences as a member of one of the greatest psychedelic folk bands... her book reveals to us what it means to live together and to co-create: to push at the boundaries of radical possibility, both in art and in life.</em> Dr Sophia Satchell-Baeza

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<div class="section"><span style="font-size: 16px;"><em>Perceptive and acute in its reflections... a moving story about encountering something astounding and transformative early in one’s life, and in the end needing to leave it for sanity’s sake. And how one lives honestly with all that early brightness. </em>
Andrew Greig</span></div>
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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 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 centre of Swinging London and at New York's 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.

Through a haze of incense and marijuana, they played out their Arcadian dreams on stages brilliant with the colours of clothes, light-shows, rugs, cushions, and exotic instruments. But like most utopias, the ISB’s imploded, leading from psychedelic dream-world to Scientology and celebrity.

Never seeing herself as a professional musician, Rose retained an outsider’s detachment even while living the life of a hippie chick. Her memoir gives a voice to those flower-wreathed girls whose photographs have become symbols of the psychedelic sixties.

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