Andy Letcher

This is me piping at the hippy wedding of the year - Su and Bill. Photos by Kate Raworth.

I love the way rumours develop. A number of people have come up to me and said "is it true that you've done a PhD about magic mushrooms?" and I fear that no amount of vigorous denials will do anything to dislodge this particular rumour - people just want it to be true. For the record my second PhD was in Religious Studies, studying bardic performance in modern Druidry and Eco-Paganism. But hey, it's such a good rumour why bother to try and quash it?

I've just had a lovely email from Orriel Smith, the singer of 'Winds of Space' on the recent Trunk Records "Fuzzy Felt Folk' album. Seems like she's had a pretty interesting career - including working with the Ray Conniff singers - class! Check out her website:

www.orrielsmith.com

I went to see A Scanner Darkly on Monday - panned by the critics, but I thought it was pretty good. Standard Philip K. Dick fare in many ways, but a great story of paranoia and, somewhere, a sharp-edged critique of current drugs policy. Set fair to become a stoner cult classic. Nicely done.

Rufus Harley 1936-2006 R.I.P - jazz bagpiper extraordinaire.

There's a new, online research questionnaire, trying to determine people's mushrooming habits. Check it out here:

http://ccgi.earthship.plus.com/survey/

Folk music is back in fashion apparently, but these days, it seems, the appellation is stuck to anything that employs an acoustic guitar or flute, or that references the 70s: usual suspects being Bagpuss and The Wicker Man. I wonder if this cultural turn has anything to do with the generation of kids born in the sixties turning forty? Is the sudden interest in twisted, strange or acid folk just a nostalgia trip palliative to a collective mid-life crisis? Certainly the old boys and girls who bash out the jigs and reels or who sing from the heart in the pubs and clubs across these islands are totally bemused by all the sudden interest.

Whatever, the recent Folk-explosion (if that's not too much of an exaggeration) has produced some damned fine compilations. I'm thinking here of Sanctuary Records' 'Gather in the Mushrooms' and 'Early Morning Hush', and Albion Records' 'Strange Folk'.

Now comes Trunk Records 'Fuzzy Felt Folk' (www.trunkrecords.com), stretching the definition of 'folk' yet further to include the child-like outer-limits of easy listening. No matter - there are some gems here. Favourites include the frankly eye-poppingly peculiar 'The Elf' by The Barbara Moore Singers, the mesmeric 'Folk Guitar' of Claude Vasori and the Hawkwind-meets-the-Clangers 'Winds of Space' by Orriel Smith. The Piggleswick Folk (I kid you not) cover of 'Teddy Bear's Picnic' just has to be heard to be believed. Was everyone on Acid during the 70s?

Obviously the product of an obsessive completist, trunk records deserve a big slap on the back for this one. Nostalgia trip or no it does what it says on the tin. Highly recommended.

Cuckoo.

I went blackberrying today. Competition is intense: grandparents on childcare duty; some evil looking flies and, judging by the liberal dollops of purple poo, the birds have got the taste too. But as ever nature rewards those prepared to stray off the beaten path. I found a bush groaning with berries, plump as grapes. I paid my dues in scratches and nettle stings. Smoothies for breakfast.

It doesn't matter how bad the news is - war, terrorism, earthquakes, flood, a new Labour policy initiative - if Nick Clarke is in the chair you KNOW that it's all going to be OK.

Welcome back Nick - greatly missed.

It's about time we faced up to it and banned August. Don't get me wrong. I'm an August baby, can't think of a better time of the year to be born. It's just everything stops, everyone is away, there's nothing on telly - worse, there's nothing on the radio - it's impossible to get any work done, and there's that awful feeling of the summer dwindling away, the first tinge of autumn in the air. We should just hang a sign up in Dover - 'Everyone is out of the office right now but we'll be back in September'.

Earlier this year I was given the opportunity to sample some iboga, the psychoactive root-bark that forms the mainstay of the Bwiti religion in the African country of Gabon. A friend of mine has been living and working in Gabon for five years, and he returned home with a bottle of the dried and chopped root-bark together with the blessings of his teacher, or Ganga man, to distribute the contents as he saw fit.
Iboga, the root-bark of the small shrub, Tabernanthe iboga, contains ibogaine as its principle psychoactive ingredient, a complex molecule that belongs in the tryptamine family along with psilocybin, DMT and LSD. It is said that ibogaine has immense therapeutic potential: there is strong anecdotal evidence that it can help people wean themselves off opiate addiction, while a common experience is that it allows one to review one’s past actions, but from the point of view of how others were affected. The Bwiti religion has become famous as increasing numbers of Westerners travel to Gabon to take part in the ‘breaking open the head’ initiation ritual: over a four day period colossal doses of iboga are consumed which take the initiate close to death, at which point the mysteries of the Bwiti are revealed.
I took what, by any standards, was a very conservative dose – the dose that Gabonese routinely give to their children – about a heaped tablespoon full. There were four of us, holed up in a rural hideaway in Wiltshire – the setting was reverential. Our only instructions were that a flame should be lit at all times, that running water should be nearby, and that we should receive the iboga, literally or metaphorically, ‘on our knees’.
The root is extremely bitter but can easily be swallowed down with water. After about half an hour or so, the first effects became obvious – that loaded feeling in the stomach and body of having consumed an alkaloid. All was well until suddenly and unexpectedly I started feeling very unwell. Nauseous and dizzy my field of vision became disconnected from my eyes: whenever I moved my head the entire room kept moving, as if I were trying to watch a movie on a rolling ship. White sparkling lights glittered at the periphery of vision. So dizzy that I could barely walk I struggled outside and vomited, then lay on the kitchen floor like a corpse. Whenever I lifted my head I felt buffeted with giddiness, as if struck by a thousand hands: the only safe position was down.
Naturally I became quite alarmed at this point – my three fellow travellers were, at best, mildly affected. None were ill, all were tripping gently. I realised that I needed to get upstairs and into bed and with a monumental effort of will rose and staggered aloft. My internal sense of location – where my body was, its position and movement – was wholly disassociated from my vision, making walking virtually impossible. Somehow I made it to the bedroom, vomited again, and got into bed. There then followed a somewhat comedic moment as, needing a pee, I grappled with the mechanics of relieving myself into a bottle, like some incontinent man, bedridden and infirm. Only then did I settle back into the trip.
My friend decided at that point to play back field recordings of music collected in Gabon. Much of the music was iboga music – especially a song played on the mongongo mouth harp. Rhythmically complex the music is beautiful, haunting, ancient, baffling to Western ears, relentless. A Pygmy song, yodelling in the forest, left me in tears. The ‘rhythm’ of the iboga – a constant tschk tschk tschk tschk in my head – was mirrored perfectly by the music. I felt like I was witness to a great mystery, played out in the endless cycle of life and death in the forests of Africa (“Jim Morrison got it wrong, the Pygmies in the forest knew much more than they were letting on" ). Surely this is where we came from, where life in all its plenitude of forms springs from? I became aware of how in denial I/we are about Africa – it’s the fucking motherland! How long, I wondered, have the forests echoed with song? I saw how, for millennia, people lived there in circular time, a daily rhythm of hunting, eating, drinking then singing and dancing, shouting to the stars – “we are alive!!”. I saw how we have become imprisoned by linear time with no obvious way back. A fall from Eden (or just post-colonial Western fantasy, a small voice wondered)?
The trip was not visual in the mushroomic sense. Rather, it was as if my thoughts were augmented by the iboga so that they tumbled out in a delightfully logical succession. At one point (and preposterous as it sounds) I followed through a theory of consciousness, its tumbling axiomatic conclusion had me laughing out loud – imagine that! Close to death and given a theory of consciousness! It’ll take me ten years to work out if it has any merits! I had none of promised iboga psychotherapy, though some important insights into my family. And all the while I was lying prone, flat on my back, unable to move.
Three hours past, then four and five, and experience told me that I would be down soon. But the dawn came, the others got up and started cooking breakfast and still I was up, no sign of descent. In fact I was tripping for four days, stuck fast in bed, unable to move. The full effects of the iboga did not wear off for a month (every morning and evening I saw shimmering lights at the field of my vision). It need not be stated that this was pretty scary – I thought, “I’ve really done it this time, I’ll never walk again”.
Theories as to quite why I was so strongly affected abound. My friends all agreed I had been ‘chosen’ by the Bwiti. A phone call to our Ganga man in Gabon reassured me that I would be OK, but that my body was evidently full of toxins which the iboga was clearing out. “You can’t walk? So don’t walk!”. As for myself, when the moments of panic kicked in, I found all pretentions to a shamanic worldview fall away. I groped for science. I must lack an enzyme, I thought, it’s hard for me to break the ibogaine down. A dim notion that I too, might one day go through the breaking open the head ritual was quietly quashed – forty times the dose I took would almost certainly kill me.
I’m not sure whether this is a cautionary tale, or just another trip report filed away on the internet. All I can say is that it was powerful, revealing, terrifying, strangely reassuring, and very, very hard on the body. It will take a long long time before I will even entertain the idea of taking iboga again. And if you’re thinking about doing it my advice would be to make sure you leave a clear week...

9 million people on the make?

It's been an idle, delightful summer for me so far. I whirled and twirled in the bagpipe frenzy that is the Saint Chartier festival, deep in the heart of France. Highlights include wandering through the baking midnight village streets, watching two hundred pogo to the shaved muscularity of a Portuguese pipe and drum band; the acoustic space-rock jam in the village church during the intolerable heat of the Sunday afternoon; playing glorious music with old friends till 4 in the morning, two nights running.

Then to a male-bonding-in-the-woods sort of a stag night and on to the English Acoustic Collective Summer School, which left me musically filled, inspired and brimming with ideas. And finally to a Druid camp, to reconnect with old friends (and enemies), drink endless cups of tea round the fire, and to sing under the stars.

Romantic fantasies have been played out and now it's back to earth with a bump, work to do and pennies to be earned. The carnival is over.