MIND DE-CODER 55
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“I learnt a great deal – and the result of it all was a rebirth. A new assessment of life and myself”.
Cary Grant (discussing LSD)
THE DAMNED GRIMLY FIENDISH
The Damned were hardly a spent force in 1985, but their New Rose days were long behind them. I always had a soft spot for this single because it was written for them by The Doctor, of Doctor and the Medics fame. I think they’d met when The Damned were touring briefly as their alter egos Naz Nomad and the Nightmares and played a gig that I was lucky enough to see at Alice in Wonderland, the psychedelic night club that the Doctor run (Doctor and the Medics at this time were doing the odd appearance as Gwyllym and the Raspberry Flavoured Cat for reasons I can’t quite remember, what with it being a long time ago and all). Anyway, they obviously got on because once reformed as The Damned this was the single they released from their next album PHANTASMAGORIA. It’s either about the villainous character Grimly Feendish, who appeared in the British comics Wham! and, indeed, Smash!, in the 1960s, who sought to conquer the world using the kind of bizarre plot devices that would involve the likes of exploding treacle, or it’s an existentialist exploration on the nature of Being and free will. Or both.
THE MISTY WIZARDS IT’S LOVE
After some fairly exhaustive research I can confidently say that The Misty Wizards didn’t appear to be around long enough to have a group photo taken, just a left over from their previous band Spike Drivers. They released only the one single, 1967’s It's Love, a semi-classic slice of classic flower pop that takes in sitar, finger symbols and clattering tambourines, and which includes the line ‘coloured sights and sounds’, which just about sums up its vibe. It’s a deceptively slight record, very much of its time, but the composers saw themselves as at the forefront of the burgeoning avant gard, describing the single as an experiment in time and distortion, a cross between raga concepts and rhythm and blues.
CRANIUM PIE THE CONTINUING STORY OF BUNGALOW BILL
A pleasingly bizarre re-imagining of the Beatles' classic, in which they eschew anything so prosaic as actual choruses, or, indeed, the same words, which is just the sort of thing you’d expect from Cranium Pie, let’s face it. This is taken from the marvellous Fruits de Mer's WHITE EP, a 2 x 7" white vinyl (naturally) release with gatefold sleeve that includes covers from the likes of The Pretty Things, Anton Barbeau and The Bevis Frond, released in 2012. It’s the sort of artefact you don’t even want to play, just to hold it in your hands is enough.
THE KINKS LAZY OLD SUN
The Kinks weren’t a
band associated with psychedelia – Ray Davies quite famously couldn’t be doing
with it at all – but Lazy Old Sun, from their 1967 release SOMETHING ELSE, at
least flirts with the idea. Elsewhere the album contains such Kinks classics as
Waterloo Sunset, Death of a Clown and David Watts, suggesting that the focus of
the band was somewhere else, possibly Muswell Hill and far away from the
fripperies of King’s Road, say. This particular version of the track, an
alternate stereo mix, can be found tucked away on CD 3 of their 5 CD ANTHOLOGY
1964-1971, released in 2001.
THE LUCK OF EDEN HALL BANGALORE
First up – great name, chaps; The Luck of Eden Hall refers to an exceptionally fine and pristine example of a 14th century Islamic luxury drinking glass, elegantly decorated with arabesques in blue, green, red and white enamel with gilding; an image brought to mind during the swirling, dimension-shifting assault of Bangalore, taken from their 2012 release ALLIGATORS EAT GUMDROPS.
SAGITTARIUS THE TRUTH IS NOT REAL
Sagittarius were
essentially a studio band put together by songwriter and producer
extraordinaire Gary Usher to scratch a particular itch he had regarding the
release of a fantastic little single called My World Fell Down, which bridged
the gap somewhere between The Beach Boys' God Only Knows and Good Vibrations
(it featured Glenn Campbell on vocals and is much sought after by Pet Sound-era
Beach Boy fans – I really must include it in a further show). The single was
popular enough to encourage Usher to record a whole album under the name and so
Sagittarius were created from a number of top LA session musicians, friends and
fellow producers. The debut album, PRESENT TENSE, was released in 1968 and is a
gentle enough mix of folkish-rock, baroque pop and Summer of Love vibes, as
exemplified by the pleasantly trippy The Truth Is Not Real.
MANFRED MANN CUBIST TOWN
Another band not
particularly associated with psychedelia were Manfred Mann, a band more at home
to your jazz-blues when not releasing semi-novelty
records like Ha, Ha Said The Clown (which I've always quite liked). For their final
album, MIGHTY GARVEY!, released in 1968, they began moving in a more
self-conscious art-pop direction that featured multi-tracking, overlaying complex and
inventive textures of flutes, keyboards and vibraphones, while the group's
backing vocals, originally limited to a tribal unison, began to take on an
almost PET SOUNDS complexity. Cubist Town was possibly the most far out they
ever got - Doo Wah Diddy Diddy it certainly ain’t.
THE BALLROOM BABY, PLEASE DON’T GO
Deranged brilliance from The Ballroom, possibly the greatest unknown act of the flower power era, who’s only album was never released, and who’s only single barely got past the promo stage. But what a single – or rather, what a b-side! A relentless, psych-punk re-invention of Big Joe William’s classic blues shouter Baby, Please Don’t Go, complete with a wild, tribal drum loop of a rhythm and seemingly random intrusions of found sounds and broken glass. Mind-blowing. They
were actually put together by producer Curt Boettcher who jumped ship to work
alongside Gary Usher on his Sagittarius project (some of the songs on the
Sagittarius album are adapted from unreleased Ballroom sessions). A band ill-served by the record industry.
THE UNTHANKS FOR DAD
This track stopped me dead in a record shop recently, causing me to make my way to the counter and ask for MOUNT THE AIR, the new album by The Unthanks, please. It’s a lovely album – by turns epic, lush, melancholic and haunting, like the memory of someone you lost long ago when you can only remember the good bits. And stuff.
(EPISODES FROM) THE FIELD BAZAAR THE BANE TREE
So, if I’ve got this right, O Campo Bazar was a Portuguese Twilight Zone/Tales of the Unexpected style programme which had released a sampler of sinister synth led instrumental works created especially for the programme under the name of (episodios de) O Campo Bazar. Released in 1973, the performers are still a mystery. Several years later the cult status and mythos of the group/artist brought about the release of The Bane Tree. The artist(s) name had been translated into English - The Field Bazaar - and the (episodes from) bit, which was a clear indication of its TV series roots, had also been translated and kept. It has the feel of being demos and unused tracks from the original recordings although the music is more acoustic and pastoral sounding with greater use having been made of sound effects. The performers still remain unknown. Or maybe it's just a hauntological practical joke, played upon the willing.
JULIAN COPE THE EVERLASTING NO (VERSION)
I love this song in a way I haven’t really loved Julian Cope songs in ages. It’s available on the TRIP ADVIZER EP, a three-track download that accompanies his recent release, Trip Advizer – The Very Best Of Julian Cope 1999-2014. It has a melancholic vibe that wouldn't have been out of place on Jehovakill, and I wouldn’t be trying to get it played on the Breakfast Show, say, but I find it peculiarly affecting; it speaks to some lost part of me, like that verse in Pablo Neruda's Book of Questions when he asks:
Where's the boy I used to be,
Is he still within me or did he go away?
Does he know I never loved him and that he didn't either?
Why did we grow up together for so long
so as to be apart later?
Why didn't we die together
when my childhood died?
And if my soul fell apart why does my skeleton follow me?
Anyway, it's a track I'm able to take comfort from, like I used to all the time with his songs. You can download it from his Head heritage site.
Where's the boy I used to be,
Is he still within me or did he go away?
Does he know I never loved him and that he didn't either?
Why did we grow up together for so long
so as to be apart later?
Why didn't we die together
when my childhood died?
And if my soul fell apart why does my skeleton follow me?
Anyway, it's a track I'm able to take comfort from, like I used to all the time with his songs. You can download it from his Head heritage site.
JOUIS ALL THAT IS AND IS ONE
This is the opening track from the debut album DOJO, by Jouis, released last year. It’s a spacey mix of jazz, fusion, west coast psychedelia and prog rock that puts it somewhere near Canterbury circa 1970-72, although the band themselves formed and recorded in Brighton. It’s a transcendent affair, big on harmonies and complex, intricate compositions that don’t shy away from the jazz side of things, but as I get older, I find I quite like this sort of thing a lot more than I used to when everything used to start and end with the Velvet Underground. That’s good, right?
SKY PICNIC THE UNIVERSAL MIND DECODER
‘Nuff said. How could I not play this track? When I first came across the title I assumed it would be a cover of Roger McGuinn’s guitar wig-out of the same name that eventually became Change Is Now on The Notorious Byrd Brothers (and, incidentally, one of my favourite songs ever), but this is a different beast altogether. Taken from their 2011 release FARTHER IN THIS FAIRY TALE (it’s taken awhile, but I’m getting over that use of farther instead of further; is it an Americanism or something?) The Universal Mind Decoder is an 11 minute epic full of echoes, feedback and fuzz, that manages to deconstruct music and take you to the edge of the universe, only to bring everything back to where it began.
UNKNOWN MYSTERY TRACK
I found this on the very fine compilation album A HEAVY DOSE OF LYTE PSYCH: AUTHENIC WAY COOL SIXTIES ARTIFACTS, which pretty much does what it says on the cover. Despite extensive liner notes no one appears to know who recorded this track or what it’s called – it was cut sometime in 1968 in Boston, apparently for a low-budget exploitation film, but it don’t half sound like a lost Jefferson Airplane track circa After Bathing At Baxters. That being said, I’m putting my money on Ultimate Spinach, a Boston based band who were not above sounding like they wished they’d come from San Francisco. Not that it matters; this track does very nicely regardless of its provenance. It's not them on the cover, by the way.
MOON WIRING CLUB NOCTURNE
The full 21-minutes of side two of the vinyl version of LEPORINE PLEASURE GARDENS, the most recent release from Ian Hodgson’s enigmatic Moon Wiring Club. It’s the ambient/collage LP version of the more rhythm-driven CD edition, emulating a curiously distanced, detached perspective on the same scenes of a Victorian/Edwardian attraction experienced under a hallucinogenic influence. Nocturne enjoys a spacious, drifting quality, gently recalling the oily, abstracted erotica of Oren Ambarchi and Crys Cole's 'Sonja Henies Vei 31' (it says here). Snippets of speech come and go, themes are lost and found, ideas pop into existence like ghostly quarks and leptons in an old garden shed and are gone before they can be fully grasped or understood, creating an otherworldly patina on the surface of reality - or what we like to call hauntology, I suppose. You can lose yourself in this.
JANE WEAVER YOUR TIME IN THIS LIFE IS JUST TEMPORARY
Yes; yes it is. Gorgeous contemporary psychedelia from Jane Weaver and the closing track from her sixth album THE SILVER GLOBE, released last year, an exploration of the cosmos-gazing void of contemporary space rock. Your Time In This Life Is Just Temporary ends with everything receding into the distance as a piano is hammered into submission in some high-ceilinged celestial ballroom at the end of the universe and sounds simply marvellous.
THE ORB BATTERSEA BUNCHES ORIGINAL SOUNDTRACK
For this track, the opening track from their 2011 release C BATTERSEA C, The Orb find themselves mining a particularly hauntological seam for their samples and bit 'n' bobs. This is the soundtrack to a short 17-minute film based on Super 8 footage shot by Alex’s Aunt Lil of a 1956 family day out led by his father. Ducks are fed in Battersea Park (overseen by the still-billowing power station) as are the pigeons in Trafalgar Square; there’s a trip up the river to Greenwich and all the familiar landmarks – Big Ben, Tower Bridge and St. Paul’s - are captured for posterity, with the poignant soundtrack the perfect accompaniment to the images both on the screen and in your head.
THE FOURTH WAY THE FAR SIDE OF YOUR MOON
Gorgeous track, this. Not to be mistaken with those pioneers of electric jazz fusion with the same name, this band are so obscure that no one appears to be entirely certain as to whether this track is called The Far Side Of Your Mind or The Far Side Of Your Moon, but having tracked down a copy of the single, it does appear to be Moon. That being said, there’s not much else I can tell you about them – the track was released in 1968 and sounds as if it should be part of the Barbarella soundtrack, and I suspect it was made by studio musicians enjoying some psychedelic downtime, but nothing is known about them. This is very much a kaleidoscopic one-off, but about as tripped-out as you can go.
