A1 Maya   9:24 A2 Greatest Friend   3:30 A3 The Son of Noah's Brother   0:16 A4 Lordly Nightshade   5:54 A5 The Mountain of God   1:51 B1 Cousin Caterpillar   5:15 B2 The Iron Stone   6:33 B3 Douglas Traherne Harding   6:15 B4 The Circle Is Unbroken   4:47

To capture a musical group on the leeward-side of their mountain of inestimable genius is a two-edged sword. You get the glory of Empire remembered, and all the magical essence that make up great and glorious beauty, but you can't taste it without getting a hint of that sadness that this beauty and perfection cannot be eternal. So to listen to The Big Huge, knowing full well that it represents the very last of the pure genius of Robin Williamson and Mike Heron, before their art was corrupted by the greasy palms of Scientology and mediocrity, is tinged with sadness for me. It's already got the stink of death upon it, a smear of exhaution on the fringes of the voices, in the suggestion of slightly tired arrangements.

Good thing, then, that Joe Boyd captured The Big Huge when he did. A few months later and it might have been a different album altogether. On The Big Huge you have the truly sublime Maya, which winds and winnows through the sort of glorious hippie spirituality that made the late 60s simultaneously so irritating and so wonderful. Maya is almost perfect from the opening bars to the closing sighs, and lyrically it takes your breath away. Williamson's voice weaves around towering stacks of illusion and imagery, bending time signatures, introducing and exorcising elements of folk and world music which are so effortlessly gorgeous that this should stand as one of the greatest songs of the 20th Century, not a footnote of the 60s.

But it doesn't stop there. The mysticism continues with The Mountain Of God, The Circle Is Unbroken and The Iron Stone, all of which are elegantly instrumented, underproduced, and sound collectively better than anything the Beatles, Stones or Donovan ever produced from this period. The raga-folk switchback of The Iron Stone is beautifully crafted. Williamson was a consumate talent with this sort of feather-lite construction of ancient English mysticism and eastern folk traditions. You have to hear it to understand what I'm getting at. And you really should. Mike Heron's contributions are good, but much less creative. His Dylanesque My Greatest Friend is always worth a listen, and it's a great performance, but alongside Williamson's towering psychedelica it cannot help but take second prize.

I love this album - it's one of the few examples in modern music of the Great Crumbling Empire Ideal - wonder and elegance, imagination and flaws, all wrapped up in a sweet, incense-cloaked package that shames any previous or future attempts at the genre by any other band