Fire: The Magic Shoemaker featured Dave Lambert, not Dave Cousins. I think it was pre-Strawbs. The spoken word parts suck, but I enjoy Dave's singing and he has a rather distinctive guitar style that I love. It's a quirky album to get into and I can understand why you weren't impressed.
That Deja Fou album has a couple of nice tunes, Cold Steel and If being my favourites. Strawbs is quite a different band in that the majority of their albums, including the later ones, have songs that are distinctly them, but still sound different to stuff they've done before. They also are very consistent in quality imo.
