Idly leafing through one of those glossy magazines for rock fans over the age of 40 — it may have been called Bald Patch Monthly or perhaps Hernia! — last week I came upon the startling intelligence that the foreword for a new book on the Incredible String Band has been written by no less a personage than Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury.

You remember the Incredible String Band (ISB), of course. Hailing from the folk clubs of Edinburgh, they brightened the late 1960s with their singular blend of hippie whimsy and . . . well, hippie whimsy was pretty much the extent of it. Perhaps the only group in musical history to make unstinting use of kazoo and recorder, ISB generally sounded like a cat being tuned with pliers but nonetheless they were often quite splendid, particularly on A Very Cellular Song, in which they considered the enviable ability of worms to self-replicate. “Who rides the backwards giraffe?” the song asked, illustrating the band’s uncanny insight into hippiedom’s most pressing cares and concerns.

Essentially a nucleus comprising Mike Heron and Robin Williamson, ISB welcomed everybody they met, making their album covers panoramas of wan women in ponchos and children wearing witches’ hats. Famously, the band were scheduled to play at Woodstock but missed their shot at immortality because, in a superbly Scottish fashion, they boarded the wrong helicopter and were taken somewhere else entirely, perhaps Narnia. They addressed this cock-up with terrifying fury in Waltz of the New Moon: “Oh wizard of changes,” they sneered, “teach me the lesson of flowing.” Ouch.

The viciousness of their temper, however, has not deterred the archbish in his appreciation of the Incredibles. We all know now, of course, that Robert Runcie was secretly a huge fan of the Stranglers, just as George Carey never missed an Iggy Pop gig, but no Archbishop of Canterbury has ever been so forthright in their appreciation of the devil’s music. “If you listen to the ISB’s songs,” the archbish writes in Be Glad: An Incredible String Band Compendium, “ you realise rapidly that they correspond to the requirements of poetry. Forget the cliches about psychedelic vagueness: this was work of extraordinary emotional clarity and metaphorical rigour.” Hey, this guy is really sending me! “Risking the embarrassment that so regularly goes with my vocation,” he adds, as 600m Anglicans clutch their foreheads in despair, “I’d have to say that the ISB was a discovery of the holy; not the solemn, not the saintly, but the holy, which makes you silent.” Huh, if only.

I’ve no doubt the archbish is sincere in his appreciation of these wispy musical lunatics but it’s the thin end of the trendy-vicar wedge: before we know it, respected ecclesiastical figures like Richard Holloway will be presenting radio programmes, appearing on Never Mind the Buzzcocks and turning up in pantomimes (what do you mean he already has?). The archbish’s strictures on the high solemnity of the church lose some of their force if you suspect he once floated round the Aylesbury Corn Exchange with miniature cymbals on his fingers, booing Marc Bolan. Perhaps, though, the Incredibles said it best: “Lay me in the floating pan-pipe visions/of the golden harvest,” they warbled. I think we all know what they were getting at.

• As if living in the Gorbals wasn’t difficult enough already, a cabal of considerate arts bodies has ganged up to erect a scaffolding construction there which displays a photograph of the surface of Mars three storeys high. It’s a challenge to accepted notions of public art, apparently, and a departure point in the role that culture plays in regeneration.

  Doesn’t talk of this type engender in you the urge to visit the nearest art school and bang a few heads together? It certainly does to me. Justifying his use of interstellar imagery, the culprit, artist Calum Stirling, said: “It is perhaps no coincidence that the golden age of space exploration was also a significant period of new urban building in Scotland.”

  Yes it is, it’s nothing but a coincidence. Or is he seriously suggesting that Nasa heard rumours that Glasgow council was planning to throw up a few new Barratt homes and launched the Apollo programme to save face? “I wanted to create something that harked back to the past,” added Stirling, as a train of small boys walked behind him, laughing at his ergonomic kagoule, “something that represented the passage of time and symbolised the present.” Well, a picture of Mars says it all, doesn’t it? Lesser mortals like you and I might have plumped for a snap of Cliff Richard or Peter Ustinov to represent the passage of time but it takes an artistic temperament like Stirling’s to see that a scattering of rocks on a lifeless planet 63m miles away makes the same point much more effectively.

  Do you, like me, dear reader, suspect that Mr Stirling doesn’t have a thought in his head beyond the arid theoretical nonsense pumped into him at art school? “I hope the work will make people stop and talk about it in relation to the new Gorbals,” he said, pondering the wisdom of perhaps growing a pointy little beard.

  “Looking at it you might wonder whether we are looking at a building site of the future.” We might be, I suppose, if human beings learn to breathe nitrogen, see in ultra-violet light and live without water.

  Otherwise we’re stuck on Earth, listening to patronising Tefal-heads like him, bent on fouling up the world with smug, cryptic twaddle that means nothing to the unfortunates obliged to live with it.

  Let’s hope the Heaven’s Gate cult were right and the spaceships are coming for us very soon.

  The Scottish Socialist Party: “We believe that unless everybody celebrates Christmas nobody should,” said the party spokesman, Big Stevie.

  “We’re aware that Muslims, Jehovah’s Witnesses and Zoroastrians do not celebrate Christmas because they believe it’s a festival of crass capitalist greed. In sympathy with them, we will be visiting Tommy Sheridan’s house to sit in the dark and eat dry Ryvita. And perhaps play Buckaroo, if ratified by majority vote.”

  The Scottish Arts Council: “This year,” said the chief executive, James Lounge-Suit, “our Christmas party will be a themed tribute to imprisoned Hebridean basket-weavers, with readings from James Kelman, fig and bracken cocktails prepared by Alasdair Gray and an enjoyable game of Pass the Whalebone.”

  The Free Presbyterian Church, Stornoway: “Christmas is the time of year we remember our unworthiness in the shade of the glorious infant Christ,” said the Reverend Dougal McDougal-Dougal, “so we’ll probably just do the usual: tarts and vicars, 500 Aftershocks, the naked tug-of-war — maybe even a trip to Satan’s Stationery Cupboard if I’m lucky!”

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