Tuesday 30 July 2013

MIND DE-CODER 6

To listen to, or download, the show, click on the tab


MIND DE-CODER 6

"In the lazy water meadow I lay me down..."


THE DUKES OF STRATOSPHEAR     MY LOVE EXPLODES



What a marvelous way to get the show started - XTC's alter-egos, The Dukes Of Stratosphear and my favourite track from their brilliant little debut album 25 O'CLOCK, released back in 1987. It recently received a well-deserved re-release in a sumptuous gate-fold cover and extra disc featuring demos and extra tracks that deliver up a dizzyingly exuberant rush of dainty kaleidoscopic pop that is whimsical, bright and full of trippy psychedelic gems such as this one. It's one of my favourite trip albums and is absolutely worth saving up your pocket money for.


McGOUGH AND McGEAR     SO MUCH IN LOVE



Ah, a genuine 60's curio - Mike McGear and Roger McGough were part of the Liverpool comedy-poetry-music group The Scaffold, who found fame and fortune with such hits as, well, Lily The Pink, say. In 1968 McGear and Mcgough released McGOUGH AND McGEAR as a duo and, legend has it, got Paul McCartney, McGear's brother, in to produce it and possibly jam on a few tracks (McGear having changed his surname to avoid trading in on his brother's name). McCartney also brought along his mate Jimi Hendrix to play guitar and therefore, according to legend, it's the only collaboration between Paul McCartney and Jimi Hendrix officially released on record. Other guests include Dave Mason, Spencer Davis, John Mayall, Noel Redding, Mitch Mitchell and Jack Bruce - so when it grooved it did so quite nicely; unfortunately, there were only four songs on the album, the rest being taken up with Roger McGough's poems. You can see why it must have a seemed like a good idea at the time, but if So Much In Love is anything to go by, you just wish that Roger had spent more time making the tea, leaving everyone else to get on with it. A semi-legendary classic.


THE TOKENS     HOW NICE


    
And speaking of 60's curio's - The Tokens are most famous for their chart-topping 1961 hit The Lion Sleeps Tonight and pretty much remained a doo-wop group for their next six albums until the 60's finally caught up with them and they released a groovy album in 1967 called IT'S A HAPPENING WORLD from which this track is taken - a fine example of psychedelic pop that, sadly, what with The Beatles having just released Sgt. Pepper's and the rest of the world kinda caught up in the Summer Of Love, nobody was listening to - which is a pity, really, because this track is really rather delightful.


AMORPHOUS ANDROGYNOUS     THE PEPPERMINT TREE


More trippy beats from Amorphous Androgynous and yet another track I've plucked from their 2008 recording THE PEPPERMINT TREE AND THE SEEDS OF SUPERCONSCIOUSNESS - a psychedelic soul audio collage ethnic blues mash up of an album.


PETER BRODERICK     GAMES


HOME is the name of the debut album by 21 year old Peter Broderick, which he released in 2008, who records songs of often stunning choral majesty using his two favourite instruments - the voice and the guitar, although he's not opposed to the odd harmonium, glockenspiel organ, vibraphone, banjo and celeste joining the mix, although never all at the same time. Games is a multi-harmonic affair that sets the tone for the rest of the album and comes over like a beautiful vocal benediction. Exquisite.


IN GOWAN RING     ONCE TRUE LOVE


Games floats away and does its thing, so I have a little vocal track by In Gowan Ring drift gently in over it, the lovely Once True Love which seems to be a traditional re-working of Scarborough Fair. It doesn't hang around too long, just let's you recognise the tune and then fades away again. It can be found on COMPENDIUM: 1994-2000, released in 2000. In Gowan Ring, otherwise known as B'eirth (or possibly Bobin Jon Michael Eirth to his mum), makes music that is sublimely peaceful, vaguely medieval and generally unorthodox - there is more than a touch of the troubadour about him, yet despite releasing something like 22 albums a year he remains largely untouched by the world, and indeed, the world remains largely untouched by him. 


THE TIME AND SPACE MACHINE     THE TRIP


Richard Norris is one half of Beyond The Wizard's Sleeve, and formerly of The Grid, I think, but with The Time And Space Machine he satisfies his itch for cosmic psyche, mind-bending krautrock, lysergic acid folk and warped middle eastern freak beats so, as you can imagine, I think quite highly of him. The Trip is full of middle eastern vibes and can be found on the album VOL. 2, released in 2009.


PINK FLOYD     GRANTCHESTER MEADOWS


Classic Pink Floyd at their dreamiest and most pastoral, although strictly speaking, of course, it's performed entirely by Roger Walters and his contribution to the second disc of the UMMAGUMMA album, released in 1969, whereon each member of the band had half a side each to play with. Grantchester Meadows, in Cambridge, is where Syd Barrett lived and was no doubt the home of the odd acid trip. The track, like the meadows themselves, creates a blank canvas for the idle mind to explore. They've probably built a housing estate on it now.


THE COCTEAU TWINS     LAZY CALM


Remembering, out of the blue, the other day, how I used to spend a lot of evening's at home listening to The Cocteau Twins in my bedsit days, I recently re-discovered them and allowed myself to be seduced once again by their ethereal charms. Lazy Calm is taken from the album VICTORIALAND, released in 1986; an album made of snow and ghostly blank spaces so filled with beauty and wonder that it makes the heart ache to listen to them, which is why I listened to them so much in my bed-sit days, I imagine - and why I finally had to move on.


KEN NORDINE     ONCE UPON A YOU KNOW WHAT



Ken Nordine is an American voiceover artist who is best known for his series of word jazz albums, on which he narrates hip beat observations over cool jazz stylings provided by the Chico Hamilton jazz group. Even if this means nothing to you, you will have heard his voice on countless, indeed, thousands of adverts and movie trailers – he was possessed with something of a resonant voice, which guaranteed him a job on the radio, but in the 1950’s he was adopted by the beat generation who took to his unusual prose-poems because they presented whimsical word-play with slightly disturbing suggestions that showed a mind slightly out of sync with the rest of the world.
Once Upon A You Know What is taken from his 1979 album STARE WITH YOUR EARS on which he trades in his hipsters howlings with something more fleshed out and yet at the same time darker - great for listening to on headphones.  


THE JOKER'S DAUGHTER     JESSE THE GOAT



At first glance Joker's Daughter are an unlikely pairing that, on paper at least, you wouldn't expect to work - Helena Costas, a bucolic half-Greek folky with a head full of Fotheringay, Pentangle and Vashti Bunyan, and hip-hop producer Danger Mouse, the studio mastermind behind The Grey Album, Gnarls Barkley and the Gorillaz' Demon days - although from the moment I read about them I became unreasonably excited. It turns out I was right to be - between them they've created an album that sounds like a spacey, pastoral mushroom trip through misty Arthurian meadows. Danger Mouse's production is as light as a feather and never dominates the songs, whilst Costas's haunting fair-maiden delivery has the quality of a fresh folk-pop excursion to a Victorian fayre, although I have no idea what she's singing about on Jesse The Goat, or even in what language she's singing, but it sounds just right. The album, THE LAST LAUGH, released in 2009, has a beguiling, haunting charm - a rich harvest from a broad psychic landscape that's a sparkling debut for her, and one of his most interesting collaborations. I'm something of a fan, can you tell?


CREAM     TALES OF BRAVE ULYSSES



Classic album, classic cover – Cream’s second album, DISRAELI GEARS, released in 1967, was a move away from the blues based influences of their earlier work as the band embraced psychedelia and colourful pop songs. Tales of Brave Ulysses is a wah-wah freak-out with a pleasingly lysergic undercurrent that Clapton was never able to capture again. I’ve never been a fan of Clapton, or the blues, but Disraeli Gears is one of the defining psychedelic albums of the times.


MARISSA NADLER     MEXICAN SUMMER


 Or, the lovely Marissa Nadler as she's known round Mind De-Coder central. Mexican Summer is taken from her 2007 album SONGS III: BIRD ON THE WATER, an album that details her pensive loneliness and gorgeous isolation with songs that shiver with acoustic wonderment. She's joined by Mind De-Coder favourites Espers, who augment her acoustic vision with cello, percussion, mandolin and electric guitars - overall the effect is one of heart-broken desolation and soul-aching beauty, with the odd breath-taking desert sunset thrown in. Lovely, indeed.

Something of a psychedelic filler that uses, in part, various bits and bobs from the mash-up artist MP3J who seems to have made a career (well, perhaps not a career) out of re-mixing and otherwise mashing up The Beatles with whatever else he can get his hands on. Check out his website here



SAINT ETIENNE     AVENUE


St. Etienne's finest seven and a half minutes, the giddily psychedelic, ambitious and elegant, lemon-flavoured kiss of a song that comes over like a bright hazy morning captured on disc. This was St. Etienne's attempt at the perfect pop record and indeed it would have been were it not for the aforementioned seven and a half minutes of it, which resulted in it getting zero air play on the nation's radio waves. The album SO TOUGH, released in 1993, from which it is taken, shimmers like a faded English sea-side town, a wispy maze of memories coloured in with day-glo crayons - it is in many ways the pinnacle of pop perfection and 18 albums or so down the track, it's still the one I'm waiting for them to beat.


MOON WIRING CLUB     A MIND FULL OF MAGIC


To coincide with the release of his 2011 album, A SPARE TABBY AT THE CAT’S WEDDING, Ian Hodgson, in a completely hauntological fashion, released an accompanying vinyl version of the album that, whilst sharing some of the titles, was, in fact, and entirely different collection of music. Hodgson sees it as the dream version of the CD release – so by the end of listening to the CD you’ve fallen asleep, and in your sleep you’re trapped inside the vinyl version. Tripped out hauntological happenings await you there.


THE FOCUS GROUP     BROUHAHJA


One of three tracks included on a free release EP from the legendary Ghost Box record label, home to all things hauntological. It includes another track from The Focus Group and one track from The Advisory Circle and serves as a spooky bucolic sampler of the Ghost Box sound. To download the EP click here 


THE MEMORY BAND    THE WEARING OF THE HORNS (WEYHILL ON MY MIND)



This is the opening track to The Memory Band’s fantastic new album ON THE CHALK (OUR NAVIGATION OF THE LINE OF THE DOWN), an album that pretty much does what it says on the label – explores Britains’s oldest road, the mysterious Harrow Way; the Western part of The Old Way, a pre-historic track that leads from Kent across Southern England to the ancient site of Avebury in Wiltshire. In some ways it comes across as a cross between Adrian Corker’s soundtrack the documentary The Way Of The Morris, and the electronic folk of Tunng, especially on their most recent album Turbines, but the album has a more disorientating, hallucinogenic (I'm thinking of magic mushrooms here) feel to it than either of those two albums that, while its haunting horns, crackles, drones and spooky, disembodied voices puts it more in the hauntological camp.  It’s a lovely album that manages to be quite dark and imposing at times, more peaceful and serene at others, and is genuinely evocative in its psycho-geographical mapping of a semi-mythical part of Britain’s identity, withered in time and shrouded in mystery.


KELLI ALI     ONE DAY AT A TIME


ROCKING HORSE, Kelli Ali's third release, is an elongated lullaby of an album; steeped in medieval melodies and awash with bucolic charm and whispered, wispy wonder. One Day At A Time is the sound of someone simply lost in bliss. In a year that saw Goldfrapp release The Seventh Tree and The Joker's Daughter introduce themselves to the world, this album is my favourite.


CHIITRA NEOGY     KRISHNA AND THE LOVELY COWGIRLS


Aah,  THE PERFUMED GARDEN, released in 1968, on which the mysterious and frankly sexy-as-nobodies-business Chiitra Neogy intones Advice For The Lovelorn, reveals that a Woman Is Like A Fruit, and offers the Encouragement Of The Lusty Wife, all in a sultry and erotic voice awash with hints of a forbidden, oriental knowledge. The album itself is a spoken-word translation of Shaykh Umar ibn Muhammed al-Nefzawi's famous Arabic 15th century manual of erotic love, with added exotic string arrangements that lend an aura of depth and mystical allure to the pieces. An album absolutely of its time, it also features four classic Indian poems of a sensual and unabashed nature from which Krishna And The Lovely Cowgirls is taken.  Eagle-eared listeners will have noted by now that she’s all over this week’s show. We listen to this album all the time round our house.


REIKO IKE     MIDNIGHT WHISPER IN A CURVED AIR


Continuing our theme of erotic pleasure, Reiko Ike is a Japanese actress who starred in a number of soft porn/action movies in the early 1970s known as ‘pink films’ (her film career includes such legendary titles as ‘Hot Springs Mimizu Geisha’ and the semi-infamous ‘Modern Porno Tale: Inherited Sex Mania’). In 1971, aged 17,  she released her only album, KÔKOTSUE NO SEKAI, one of Japan’s rarest and erotic artifacts, in which she moans and groans her way through the album’s set-list of conventional covers and kayôkyoku melodies with golden-tongued ease. The entire album is suffused with a unique atmosphere of ecstatic pleasure, honeyed whispers and erotic incantations backed by the sound of a cheesy organ reminiscent of the sort of thing that Ennio Morricone or Serge Gainsbourg were up to at the same time. The track Midnight Whisper In A Curved Air is not quite representative of the whole album but offers a tantalizing glimpse into the previously forbidden world of erotic lounge music.


ACID MOTHERS TEMPLE     HYPNOTIC LIQUID MACHINE FROM THE GOLDEN UTOPIA


Just five minutes from this mind-warping track by Japan’s premier shamanic/psychic freak-out/ heavy psychedelic/ head-fucking/ space-rock band because the full 27 minutes and forty seconds, which sounds exactly like the first five minutes, would, I think, lose me even the most ardent Mind De-Coder fan (if indeed such a person exists). Anyway, if you are that person and you want to give it a go, you can find it on the album of the same name, released in 2004. It takes up all of side 1 and side 2 is considered a bonus track. It will blow your mind.  


HARMONIA     OHRWURM


Our only Krautrock offering, Ohrwurm, is buried beneath the Acid Mothers Temple assault and is short meditational piece on an album of short meditational pieces called MUSIK VON HARMONIA, released 1972.  I understand that the title translates as ‘earwig’, or ‘catchty tune’, and not, as you might think, ‘earworm’ - although if you were to combine those two meanings then exactly what you’d get, I suppose. 


JULIAN COPE     HUNG UP, AND HANGING OUT TO DRY


This track is taken from Cope’s epic paen to mother earth, 1991’s PEGGY SUICIDE. As Cope himself says on the liner notes – this is as loose as he gets, and it’s still tense.   


THE MONKEES     AS WE GO ALONG


One of the great lost songs by The Monkees, hidden away on the much unloved HEAD album, released in 1968 to accompany the surrealistic, psychedelic and the largely plotless mobius strip of a film that nobody went to see and finished off the band once and for all (which was largely the point, I think) - needless to say it's a big favourite of mine. The album is a trip in itself, edited and produced by Jack Nicholson, it includes six new songs and a collage of film dialogue and effects, and this particular track - one of Dolenz's finest moments.

And that was Mind De-Coder 6. Please mind your head on the way out.

To listen to the show click here
   


Tuesday 23 July 2013

MIND DE-CODER 39


   To listen to the show just scroll to the bottom of the page



“I lose myself in tones, circling, weaving. With unfathomable thanks and unnamed love, I happily surrender to the greater breath.”
                                                       Schoenberg’s String Quartet No. 2, 1908


The Finishing Line (Public Information Film, 1977)



Shamelessly pilfered from a mix that The Advisory Circle made for Fangoria magazine(here), The Finishing Line was one of the most disturbing Public Information films ever made, depicting playing on railway lines as a school sports event. Blood, limbs and brass bands abound.


THE TIME AND SPACE MACHINE     LITTLE BIRD



Mind De-Coder favourite Richard Norris covers the Beach Boys Little Bird (from their 1968 release FRIENDS) and gives it a Balearic vibe for Italian disco mix THE CRAZY WORLD OF ITALO ITALIANS, VOL. 1, released 2012 which pretty much brings you up to date with everything I know about this track, other than its loveliness is simple and profound.


STEVE MASON     THE OLD PROBLEM, LIE AWAKE, FLY OVER ‘98



The opening three tracks from the latest album by Steve Mason, formerly of the Beta Band, of course. Over the years he’s adopted many guises, including King Biscuit Time and Black Affair, in pursuance of his muse, but none have ever felt entirely satisfying (although I do have a soft spot for the first King Biscuit TIME EP) but with MONKEY MINDS IN THE DEVIL’S TIME, his second release under his own name, he seems to have recaptured some of the experimental cleverness that made the Beta band so good; this album radiates with beautiful piano refrains, dubby instrumentals, cryptic refrains and earthy grooves; wrapped up in a feminist ‘personal-is-political’ consciousness, righteous indignation and nocturnal self-analysis, What they call a ‘welcome return to form’.


THE FOOL     VOICE ON THE WIND



Psychedelic whimsy from the only album by the Dutch design collective known as The Fool, whose 1969 eponymous release was produced by The Hollies’ Graham Nash. Apparently they didn’t paint the psychedelic pattern on John Lennon’s Rolls-Royce - they merely suggested that he have it painted like a gypsy caravan; the rest was done by JP Fallon, gypsy caravan painter to the stars. Be sure to listen out for the psychedelic use of the bagpipes (although, they're not quite as psychedelic as you'd actually hope).


FUZZY LIGHTS      OBSCURA



Fuzzy Lights started off as a husband and wife folk duo, which, over the years, has grown into a five piece band that tread a fine line in pastoral folk and acid rock. The lovely Obscura featuring singing saw, wine glasses, glockenspiel, double bass and violin - is the opening track from their second album TWIN FEATHERS, released 2010, an album otherwise characterized by an acoustic folk vibe combined with unexpected bursts of guitar squalls and cymbal clashes.

Burst Pipe (Public Information Film)




JACCO GARDNER     CLEAR THE AIR



For his debut album CABINET OF CURIOSITIES, Dutch musician Jacco Gardner, draws heavily on his inner Syd Barrett and produces a variety of fairy-tale type songs, each full of whimsy and darkness that often belies their childlike nature. Clear The Air, the opening track on the album, fuses harpsichord, synths and huge, echoing drums in a way that just manages to steer clear of becoming a pastiche of the psychedelic sounds of the 60’s that he’s so clearly a fan of.


THE SIGN OF FOUR     TOPSY TURVY



Psychedelic jazz anyone? It’s a wonder no one’s tried it before. Who knows? Maybe they have – I wonder if it was as good as this, because this, the debut album by Miles Newbold’s The Sign Of Four, is very fine indeed. The album, HAMMER, ANVIL AND STIRRUPS, (2013) comes on two 10’’ vinyl pressings, beautifully packaged and contains a psychedelic mix of cosmic jazz, messed up electronica, sitars, marimbas, flutes and, as it says on the press release (without over-egging the cake in anyway), 'a throbbing palpitation of spaced-out vibes oscillating and reverberating chaotically through sonic orbs and polyphonic sound textures' – recorded live at the Chicken Shack studios in Nottingham.  Newbold has created one of the most out-there albums I’ve heard in ages, full of vibrant noises and textural extremes. Topsy-Turvy is the album’s opening track and sets the scene for what’s to follow – surreal, mind-bending and groovy.

Halloween is on the way so I've put together this little hauntological thriller from bit and pieces of films I’ve been watching lately – notably the Hammer classic DRACULA A.D. 1972 (yes, the one with Johnny Alucard in it).




THE FOCUS GROUP     ALBION FESTIVAL REPORT 



Evocative vibes from Julian House’s Focus Group and a track from his semi-legendary release WE ARE ALL PAN’S PEOPLE, released in 2007 and one of the most celebrated Ghostbox releases. Often, with your Hauntologically inclined, it’s all in the titles. Albion Festival Report brings with it a stream of unconscious images that have pretensions of memory but are, I suspect, beautiful yearnings; an unhinged feeling of nostalgia for something that you never actually had. 


THE CYMBALINE     MATRIMONIAL FEARS



Despite having seven single releases in them, there is little actually known about The Cymbaline and if you’ve heard of them at all it will be because of their 1967 single Matrimonial Fears, which appeared on RUBBLE VOL. 4 (THE 49 MINUTE TECHNICOLOUR DREAM), but it’s one of those tracks I’ve had knocking around on a tape cassette for years. I’ve always fancied looking up the singer, Stuart Claver, to see if he ever did, in fact, get married and whether he looks back on this song now with a kind of embarrassed, or indeed, rueful shrug of the shoulders. But, like I say, very little is known about them – they don’t even have a page on Wikipedia – so I guess I’ll never know. 

THE HOLLIES     LULLABY OF TIM



I don’t know about you, but this song makes me want to clear my throat. It’s taken from the first of two albums The Hollies released in 1967, namely EVOLUTION, the one sporting the brilliant cover by The Fool (see above), and the one on which the band embraced psychedelia – except that, apart from this track, they didn’t really. Evolution works best when it’s not trying to master psychedelia and focuses instead on the band’s ability to write classic 1965-style pop. The psychedelic embellishments were actually quite clumsy, as the warbling vocal effects on Lullaby Of Tim demonstrate. Still, it’s not the most awful track I’ve ever heard and sounds quite cool if you’re feeling particularly forgiving and, let’s face it, off your face. If I’m honest, I only included it because it gave me an excuse to show the cover. 


STEVE HILLAGE     GARDEN OF PARADISE



While the rest of the world was dealing with the fall-out of punk’s scorched-earth policy and moving into something of a post-punk heyday, Steve Hillage, ex-Gong guitarist, was quite happily minding his own business and creating the year-zero for what would one day become ambient chill-out music with his album RAINBOW DOME MUSICK, released 1979. It’s a truly lovely album, consisting of two 20 minute pieces – all meandering piano tinklings, shimmering sunshine synth washes, lush, intricate guitars, sliding sequencers and water noises that proved hugely influential to the Orb’s Dr. Alex Patterson who pretty much took this album for his template a decade later. Absolutely beautiful.


MELMOTH THE WANDERER     THE AFTER-SCHOOL CLUB (EXCERPT)



This is the last 10 minutes or so of a fantastic mix called The After-School Club by Mind De-Coder favourite MELMOTH THE WANDERER, a musical collage to reflect the influence of the cathode ray wet nurse that was TV from the 60's through to the 80's in all its Folk Horror/Sci-Fi wyrdness. These were the programmes and their themes tunes that had a profound effect on a generation and sowed the seeds for the music of the hauntology scene and shaped the minds of those behind all things retro-futuristic. Check out the whole mix here. 


DAVE DEE, DOZY, BEAKY, MITCH AND TITCH     THE LEGEND OF XANADU



 “… and we shall be called Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mitch and Titch’’, said Dave Dee, “because that will stress our distinct personalities in a climate that regards bands as collectives – especially mine”. Or something like that. They were, regardless of the name, fantastically popular – in fact, I read somewhere that at some point they spent more weeks in the charts than The Beatles. The Legend Of Xanadu, released in 1968, was a massive hit around the world and sold more than a million copies. At Alice in Wonderland, the semi-legendary psychedelic nightclub I frequented in the early 80’s (and where the seeds of Mind De-Coder were sown) it was the cue for people to reach up and snatch down the sheets of hanging toilet paper that decorated the ceilings and crack them in time to the whip like music (although ‘crack’ might be the wrong word I suppose – but they were innocent, happier days).  Trivia fans might be interested to learn that before he resigned his job to become a proper pop star, singer Dave Dee was a policeman and was present at the car accident that killed Eddie Cochran and injured gene Vincent in 1960.


PINK FLOYD     MATILDA MOTHER




Matilda Mother was the first song for Pink Floyd’s semi-mythical debut album PIPER AT THE GATES OF DAWN in 1967, and it is with this song that Syd Barrett more or less defines the psychic landscape of British psychedelia as a nostalgic longing for a childhood that can never be recaptured, but which lives on in the stories of Hilaire Belloc and Edwardian nursery rhymes. It’s actually sung by Rick Wright with Barrett joining in on choruses and singing the whole last verse, but it remains sublimely evocative of an age long past when faerie stories held you high on clouds of sunlight floating by, as it were.  

An excerpt from Enid Blyton’s Enchanted Wood



(Simply too good not to revisit)


ANTON BARBEAU     IN THE VILLAGE OF THE APPLE SUN



With nods to 1980’s Julian Cope, XTC and Robyn Hitchcock, Anton Barbeau -  Californian, but something of an anglophile by the sounds of it – creates oddball albums of swirling sonic pop. In the Village Of The Apple Sun is the title track to his 2007 album and states the case for fuzzed out guitar in all its guises.


STEVE MASON     OPERATION MASON 



The second track from Steve Mason’s superb new album MONKEY MINDS IN THE DEVIL’S TIME.  A messed up piece of dubby filler to be sure, but if only more artists took the time to play around with their sound like this.


JON BROOKS     …LITTLE APPLE…



Another filler, some might say inconsequential, this time taken from Jon Brooks SHAPWICK (2013), the album inspired by a wrong turning on the moors of Somerset – turns out it was as much of a psycho-geographical mis-location as it was a matter of turning left instead of right. (When in doubt, always turn left).


COUNTRY JOE AND THE FISH      GRACE



The release of ELECTRIC MUSIC FOR THE MIND AND BODY in 1967, was one of the defining moments in American counter-cultural history – the day that the underground went overground and presented straight society with a hippy mindset and manifesto. Not many albums do that. Grace, the album’s closing track, was written for Jefferson Airplane’s Grace Slick – all bells, chimes, water sound effects and studio trickery on album that out-psyched  that band and all their contemporaries. Tripped out and marvelous.


CLIFF WADE     LOOK AT ME, I’VE FALLEN INTO A TEAPOT



Sometimes it’s all in the title, but in truth, Cliff Wade was one of those individuals who passed through the 60’s without becoming a household name, despite working with The Who , Pink Floyd and Cream. Same thing happened in the 70’ and 80’s, too.  2004 saw a release of uncollected work from the late 60’s called THE POP-SIKE WORLD OF CLIFF WADE: LOOKING FOR SHIRLEY, from the weird and wonderful Look At Me, I’ve Fallen Into A Teapot is taken. 

Facebook