MIND DE-CODER 75
To listen to the the show jusr scroll to the bottom of the page
To listen to the the show jusr scroll to the bottom of the page
LSD is known to have caused psychosis, in people who have never used it
- Timothy Leary
ATTILIO MINEO WELCOME TO
TOMORROW
I recently read an article which argued that a distinct line can be drawn
from the French impressionist composers all the way through to the early Pink
Floyd albums and the Rolling Stones’ 2000 Light Years From Home. Along the way
that line will take in the early Exotica recordings of Martin Denny and Les
Baxter, which are antecedents of psychedelia by virtue of their projection of
an alternate reality that is almost real, and, more particularly, the sub-genre
of Space Exotica, which provide a multi-layered, cinematic sense of wide-eyed
wonder and escapism that has an almost-real quality today, what with space
stations circling the Earth and our probes reaching further and further into
the galaxy. With this in mind I borrow from the album MAN IN SPACE WITH SOUNDS
outrageously throughout the show. Recorded in 1961 by space-age pop composer
and arranger Attilio Mineo, it was released as a novelty item to commemorate
the 1962 Seattle World’s Fair and seamlessly combines modernistic impressionist
compositions with alien-sounding effects laboriously produced on pre-Moog
electronic instruments.
And while that itself blends seamlessly into the next track I play an
excerpt from Allen Ginsberg reading his LSD poem Wales Visitation to host
William Buckley, live on TV in 1968. I return to the poem several times
throughout the show.
YATHA SIDHRA MEDITATION MASS
PT. 1
Yatha Sidhra remain one of the lesser known krautrock acts, possibly
because they only released the one record which, in itself, only contained one
track – the aptly titled A MEDITATION MASS, released in 1974 - a pastoral, eastern
jazz-influenced instrumental, stretched over four parts that segue almost seamlessly
into one another. It’s a strange mystical experience , very dreamy and hypnotic,
that slowly ebbs and flows through a strange cosmic drift of sounds: washes of
cymbals, vaguely ethnic percussions, a flute, vibes, and other sounds, even
some group chanting with electronically treated voices, while the guitar weaves
steadily to keep it together as it slowly builds up. It’s a beautiful and
ecstatic musical journey, taking in acid folk, space rock and a discreet jazzy
vibe that you can lose yourself in. At over 17 minutes long, Part 1 presents a marvellous start to
the show.
THE ATTACK MAGIC IN THE AIR
The Attack were freak-beat mods who would possibly have had more success
if vocalist Richard Sherman hadn’t had to regroup the band from scratch 3
times. What should have been their breakthrough single, Hi-Ho-Silver-Lining, was co-opted by the newly formed Jeff Beck
Group who took it to the top of the charts a week after The Attack’s own
release, although, in fairness, Jeff Beck’s version probably had the edge (what
with The Attack’s version featuring a clarinet solo for the middle eight in contrast
to the brief burn of a Jeff Beck guitar solo). The record company wouldn’t even
release Magic In The Air, an
otherwise perfect track for 1967, because it was deemed too heavy for the
charts, and a proposed album never made it off the ground, so that was pretty
much that for the band, doomed to be a footnote in the history of psychedelic
music – early guitarist Davy O’List went off to join The Nice. All of those
tracks recorded for their only album have since been collected, however, and
can be found on the album ‘ABOUT TIME: THE DEFINITIVE MOD-POP COLLECTION
1967-1968’, released in 2006.
THE CHEMISTRY SET A LOVELY
CUPPA PHASE
This marvellous track – all vintage phasers, a binson echorec echo
machine and backwards oscillations – is the bonus track made available for
everyone who bought the band’s 2017 release, the A LOVELY CUPPA TEA EP,
released by the ever reliable Fruits De Mer record
label.
This is by no means my favourite version of this scintillating record
(that would be the version recorded by Les Fluer De Lys fronted by Sharon Tandy
in 1967, the one which virtually invented The Primitives and all girl-fronted
indie bands thereafter), but little known Ipsissimus, a psych-rock band from
Barking, Essex, of all places, pull out all the fuzz and wah-wah pedals on this
blistering 1969 single. John Peel gave the record plenty of exposure on his
Perfumed Garden radio show but the single sold poorly and Ipsissimus never set
foot in a recording studio again.
PINK FLOYD SET THE CONTROLS
FOR THE HEART OF THE SUN
A SAUCERFUL OF SECRETS, released in 1968, was Pink Floyd’s transitional
album following Syd Barrett’s mental unravelling from the band, and, indeed,
reality. Recorded during a difficult transition
period between the recruiting of David Gilmour and eviction of Barrett, this is
the sound of a band finding their way ahead – they try their hand at a couple
of Syd-like songs (Corporal Clegg and
See-Saw, say) but also begin to
develop their experimental space-rock direction suggested by Interstellar Overdrive from their debut
album, which would come to dominate their sound over the next few years. Set The Controls For The Heart Of The Sun
is, in fact, the only recording of all five band members playing together.
After this, all routes eventually lead to DARK SIDE OF THE MOON.
I follow this with an ambient found-sound piece I created which is
essentially the sound of me driving to the shops. The song playing on the radio
is the Fun Boy Three’s brilliant cover of The Door’s The End, recorded live in 1983 for the largely forgotten TV show
Switch which briefly replaced The Tube on Friday evenings.
JEFFERSON AIRPLANE REJOYCE
Jefferson Airplane opened 1967 with SURREALISTIC PILLOW and finished it
with AFTER BATHING AT BAXTERS. In between they’d taken a huge amount of LSD and
pushed their sound about as far out as it was possible to go. Grace Slick's
gorgeous Rejoyce is a hauntingly
beautiful excursion into literary psychedelia, a protest-cabaret adaptation of
James Joyce's Ulysses carrying the Lewis Carroll literary allusions of the
previous album's White Rabbit into
startlingly new and wonderful (if discursive) directions and depths. It also
features one of my favourite lines from any Jefferson Airplane song – “war’s good business, so give your sons, but
I’d rather have my country die for me”, a righteous fuck-you to consumerism
and the military-industrial complex, which pretty much sums up the hippie
disillusion with the day-glo life promised at the beginning of the year.
BARCLAY JAMES HARVEST DARK NOW
MY SKY
A fantastic bit of pastoral chamber-prog at its most pastoraly and chamber-progiest
– the 12 minute Dark Now My Sky, taken
from their eponymous debut album released in 1970, ticks all the right boxes: pompous
poetry reading, an isolated overture-like orchestral passage, hymnal vocals, a barrage of guitars,
and swelling Mellotron flourishes. Barclay James Harvest never received the
critical recognition of the Moody Blues or Procol Harum – possibly because they
were never too ashamed to borrow from them – and the record buying public never
really seems to have taken them to their hearts, but they had a knack for
writing hook-laden songs built on pretty melodies, they harmonized like the
Beatles and weren’t afraid to rock out. I’ve not heard any of their later stuff
but all fans of your psych-prog should check out their first album. It bombed
at the time, of course.
LOTHAR AND THE HAND PEOPLE IT
COMES ON ANYHOW
If this track sounds familiar at all, it’s because The Chemical Brothers
sampled it in It Doesn't Matter on
their album DIG YOUR OWN HOLE. Other than that, Lothar and The Hand People are
one of the more pleasantly obscure groups I’ve played on Mind De-Coder. Lothar
was the nickname for their Theremin, an instrument they pioneered along with
the Moog Modular synthesiser, thus paving the way for much of the electronic
experimentalism in music that was to follow. Their debut album PRESENTING…LOTHAR
AND THE HAND PEOPLE, released in 1968, is a curious combination of primitive
electronica, blue-eyed psychedelic soul, freak-out Appalachian weirdness,
Lovin’ Spoonful pop catchiness, folk, and tripped-out beatnik comedy music.
Despite coming from New York they were too light-hearted for the Velvet
Underground crowd, and too weird for the folk clubs, so they struggled to find
an audience. Cult status beckoned.
GONG FLYING TEAPOT
On the face of it, the story of flying teapots, gnomes and pixies could
be taken as evidence of doped-out hippie excess, but Gong’s third album FLYING
TEAPOT (RADIO GNOME INVISIBLE PT. 1), released in 1973, appears to have been
inspired by an observation from Bertrand Russell, who argued that, if he were
to suggest that between the Earth and Mars there was a china teapot revolving
around the sun in an elliptical orbit, nobody would be able to disprove his
assertion. Gong founder Daevid Allen took this concept and wove it into a
trilogy of albums that take in all sorts of concepts from sexual liberation to
Freudian self-analysis, Zen Buddhism, and, it must be said, the adventures of pot
head pixies from the Planet Gong. The album is an exotic mix of synth effects,
odd timings, sublime weirdness, wigged-out free form space jazz, American
TV jazz with funky bass, syncopated drum breaks and children’s entertainers
with adult story lines. It was a magical combination that laid out the Gong
credentials space-psych-jazz prog overlords and there’s never been anything
else quite like it.
MOON WIRING CLUB CRUMBLING
TOFFEE TOWN
On his most recent vinyl release (as opposed to his most recent CD
release) CATEARED CHOCOLATIERS, Moon Wiring Club’s Ian Hodgson rolls the dice
on a thoroughly elusive sequence of eldritch sound, using the PS1’s FX to
emulate melted shellac, gaggles of ghosts and the imagined environmental sounds
of an eerie parallel dimension that lies just behind our own reality.
I use this track as a springboard into a spacey tripped-out excursion
that includes…
ACID MOTHERS TEMPLE & THE MELTING PARAISO UFO THE TARGETED PLANET
While putting the show together The Fall’s Mark E Smith sadly passed
beyond the veil leaving a trail of some 70 or so studio albums behind him (not
to mention some 40 compilation albums, 13 EPs and 46 singles) which by any
standards is quite a haul. It pales in comparison, however, when compared to
the mighty Acid Mothers Temple and the Melting Paraiso UFO who, since 1995,
have released over 200 albums of fucked-up anthems from outer space. The
credits for their most recent release, last year’s WANDERING THE OUTER SPACE,
include a midnight whistler, speed guru, noodle god and ‘another dimension’,
all of which seem to appear in The
Targeted Planet, which is full of SETI-like going’s on from the fifth
dimension, arcade sound effects, and vocalist Jyonson Tsu’s extemporaneous Yoko
Ono-isms that sound like we’re being visited by a sister from another planet.
We probably are. There will never be another Mark E Smith, but I can’t imagine
there being another Acid Mothers Temple either. Probably just as well.
CREATION REBEL STARSHIP AFRICA
SECTION 5/SPACE MOVEMENT SECTION 1
Creation Rebel’s STARSHIP AFRICA, released in 1980, is dub’s fabled
psychedelic album - an album compared to releases by the likes of Tangerine
Dream and the Grateful Dead - and a
sci-fi dub soundtrack for a film that was never made. Conceived by dub legend
Adrian Sherwood, its gestation comes with a convoluted back story concerning
highly regarded reggae artists I’ve never heard of and the semi-mythical lost
tapes taken from the original recording session that have disappeared into the
mists of time. Produced and arranged by Sherwood, the album employs some truly
wild phasing and echo. Indeed, his 4D Rhythms partner Chris Garland allegedly
spent most of the session encouraging Sherwood to take the effects as far from
the norm as he could, to the ultimate extent of mixing the tracks blind. The
result is a truly spaced-out dub experience that, spread over just two tracks
(albeit broken down into five and four movements apiece), stands among the most
intriguing of all Sherwood's earliest creations.
THE BOO RADLEYS LAZARUS
The Boo Radleys were one of Creation’s most cruelly under-rated bands,
consistently over-looked when compared to the likes of Primal Scream, My Bloody
Valentine or Ride, and yet responsible for one of Creation’s greatest releases,
1994’s GIANT STEPS - a melting pot of dub, noise rock, sixties psychedelia,
jazz, ambient and dance combined to form the quintessential eclectic 90s album.
This is the 12” version of Lazarus, a gorgeous sprawling dub epic that explodes
into forlorn psych-noise loveliness.
THE SPECTRUM MUSIC SOOTHES THE
SAVAGE BEAST
The Spectrum were a relatively unknown British act who couldn’t get
arrested in England despite producing the music for the closing credits of the
Gerry Anderson-produced series Captain Scarlet & the Mysterons. They even
had a weekly comic strip based on their ‘adventures’ running in Lady Penelope,
a tie-in with Gerry Anderson’s Thunderbirds, but none of their singles charted
(they had success with one single in Spain in 1967). Music Soothes The Savage Breast is the b-side to their rather
opportunistic cover of The Beatles’ Ob La
Di Ob La Da, which shows how desperate they were getting for a hit in 1968.
No one knows why some bands fail and others succeed, but The Spectrum were
doomed to fail. Drummer Keith Forsey met
with considerably more success later when he wrote Don’t You Forget About Me for Simple Minds, and the theme to
Flashdance, as well as being Giorgio Moroder's drummer of choice during his
groundbreaking Donna Summer period.
DORU BELU ATTRACTION 2 (excerpt)
Legendary producer Joe Boyd always fancied the idea of Nick Drake and
Vashti Bunyan working together, but it was not to be. This lovely cover of
Drake’s Thoughts Of Mary Jane, recorded
with Gareth Dickson, a Scottish singer whose timeless folk gems are steeped in the
ethereal sound worlds of ambient and drone flourishes, can be found on the
recent CD GREEN LEAVES – NICK DRAKE COVERED, that accompanied the Mach 2018
issue of Mojo magazine.
