MIND DE-CODER 82
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“I was dreaming I was awake, but I woke up and found myself fast asleep.”
Stan Laurel
DONOVAN SUNSHINE SUPERMAN (EXTENDED VERSION)
Donovan was so ahead of the game in the 1960s. The effervescent Sunshine Superman was recorded in 1965 - long before The Beatles recorded REVOLVER - and showcases many of the elements that would become part of the psychedelic paintbox, and yet, due to a record company blithering, the single and accompanying album were held up until after REVOLVER was released in the summer of 66 and Donovan is reduced to being caught up in their slipstream instead of being lauded as the visionary he clearly was. Part love song, and part celebration of LSD, Sunshine Superman has an unassailable optimism to it, capturing within its sound the pure, unalloyed joy of walking along sunny Goodge Street, tripping balls on a late summer’s morning, high and in love, with the whole of swinging London laid out before you like a gift. Of the song, Donovan wrote that he wanted to get to the invisible fourth dimension of transcendental superconscious vision, but then he would - that’s what I just said, but better. This is a previously unreleased longer version of the song that appears on a 2002 release SUNSHINE SUPERMAN: THE VERY BEST OF DONOVAN, a near perfect encapsulation of his splendid 60s output.
THE WHO I CAN SEE FOR MILES
The Who, of course, could never really be doing with psychedelia, so when he finally sat down to write what he thought would be the perfect psychedelic pop single in 1966, Pete Townshend was hugely disappointed when the record only reached number 11 in the charts. I think it was at this point that he turned his back on single releases and began to concentrate on concept albums. In truth, I don’t think the record-buying public were ready for it – this song is white hot; an explosion of unhinged paranoia, distorted bass, and taut, barely controlled anger offset by unbridled drums, a dizzying, one-note guitar and incandescent energy that trampled all over the Summer Of Love, but surely, this was the best thing The Who ever did.
YVONNE I’M SO YOUNG (PLANET L REMIX)
The movie ‘Smashing Time’, written by George Melly and starring Lynn Redgrave and Rita Tushingham, was a satirical swipe at the media-obsessed Swinging London which largely failed because Swinging London was over by the time the film hit the cinemas in 1967. That being said, I suspect it also failed because it’s simply not a great film – the first half irritates because it’s not nearly as funny as it thinks it is - but I have a genuine soft spot for the second half of the film which, despite itself, makes London look like a fab place to be. Lynn Redgrave’s Yvonne, looking like a great big blonde lovable cow in a succession of astonishing wigs, sings I’m So Young like an unstoppable force of nature, wielding her youth like an assault weapon – it never fails to put a smile on my face and makes me physically ache that I can’t be 20 again, and, even then, I suspect I would be too old. Back in the day, when they were still including covers by The Who and The Small Faces in their set, I think The Sex Pistols could have done this track justice; it both thrills and horrifies in equal measure. It was written for Redgrave by the late great John Addison, who was also responsible for scoring the likes of ‘A Taste Of Honey’ and ‘The Loneliness Of The Long-Distance Runner’, to name just two soundtracks from a long and illustrious career. It may not be the greatest film about 60s London, but it nevertheless catches a bright moment when England swung like a pendulum do, and I was two years old, a little boy growing up on a housing estate in Essex where the 60s never happened.
THE 23RD TURNOFF LEAVE ME HERE
By all accounts, The 23rd Turnoff ought to have been a lot bigger than they were, but due to a (frankly) misguided sense of parochialism, singer Jimmy Campbell refused to leave their hometown of Liverpool for London. He made something of a career by writing songs for other artists – Cliff Richard, Billy Fury, The Swinging Blue Jeans and Rolf Harris all sang songs penned by Campbell – but his own band found no success outside of their hometown. Leave Me Here is the b-side to their only single Michaelangelo, a bona fide psychedelic classic, released in 1967, that should have brought fame to their door and, who knows, maybe it did; it’s just the door in question belonged in Kirby and not, say, to a mews flat in Chelsea, and that was their lot.
MATT BERRY RAINBOW
The magnificently hirsute Matt Berry – star of The IT Crowd and, latterly, Toast Of London, not to mention Dark Place and The Mighty Boosh - has released an album of children’s TV themes from the 1960s to the ‘80s – that includes all those hidden verses and middle eights that time constraints removed from the perfect 30 second iconic intro music. It's a covers album, but also an appreciation of a time when the signature tune and title sequence were both important elements within the overall theme, atmosphere and tone of a television show. The theme to cult kids TV show, Rainbow, has just enough of the Stones’ She’s A Rainbow to it for me to find a home for it on this week’s show. And it made me laugh. Who knew it had a sad extra verse? TELEVISION THEMES was recorded on his own and with his regular band The Maypoles in his newly built studio. It includes favourites from the 60’, 70’s, and 80’s such as Are You Being Served? and Blankety Blank alongside lesser-known themes from Picture Box and Open University amidst those that transcend the decades, Doctor Who and Top Of The Pops.
GRIMM GRIMM CLIFFHANGER
Grimm Grimm is the moniker under which Tokyo-born sound artist Koichi Yamanoha explores fragile, otherworldly forays into baroque dream folk and electroacoustic oddities. His album, CLIFFHANGER, released earlier this year, exists somewhere between Barrett-esque whimsy and hauntological pastoral timelessness, exploring that liminal space taken by old nursery rhymes where people hum the melody, but no one really knows where it came from. On title track Cliffhanger, he floats through days passing by till the guest vocalist Dee Sada – formerly of post-apocalyptic goth triune An Experiment On A Bird In An Air Pump - sees ‘your reflection in my knife’. Yet this potentially threatening imagery feels more like a gentle butterknife spread, menace coated with a softly spoken comforting melody.
BAD DREAMS FANCY DRESS LEIGH-ON-SEA
Bad Dreams Fancy Dress were the brainchild of Mike Alway, founder of the semi-legendary él Records, who throughout the mid and late 80s released a dazzling array of fantastic pop records that were a wonderful stew of wit, flair, dazzling pop, gorgeous girls and a style aesthetic very much at home to The Avengers. Bad Dream Fancy Dress were two young women from Leigh-on-Sea, Essex, called Cally Davis and Catrin Rees, that got signed simply by turning up at the él office and demanding a record deal. Alway saw in them a raw indie version of Pepsi and Shirlie, and styled them as 60s shopgirls, with chiffon headscarves and fluffy jumpers, then set them up with another él act, The King of Luxembourg, who wrote and produced CHOIRBOYS GAS, one of the few truly unique albums in pop history, which was duly released in 1988. They weren’t great vocalists, but had in spades what the NME called “brilliant incompetence”. The whole concept can be condensed down to the opener, The Supremes, where over a Motown-esque beat the girls share their dreams of fame and fortune before descending into a barrage of caterwauling and screaming. Leigh-On-Sea is possibly the only song about the Essex coastal town that could ever possibly make you want to go there.
ANTHONY REYNOLDS NEW YORK OZONE MEMORY
This extraordinary piece by Welsh composer Anthony Reynolds features the words of English philosopher and novelist Anthony Wilson, of whom Reynolds is quite a fan. His album A WORLD OF COLIN WILSON, released in 2012, consists of a selection of recordings of Wilson reading his own texts, situated within a gliding ambient soundscape of distant pianos and synths. The recitations echo furtively through the aural space, with long expanses of largely obscured texts punctuated with fleeting moments of lucidity. New York Ozone Memory, is a spectral four minutes of music mixed by ex-Boo Radley Martin Carr and the Spanish group La Muneca De Sal which explores Wilson’s famous notion of “Faculty X” – the latent power human beings possess to reach beyond the present. Trippy as a hatstand.
DAVID CAIN AND RONALD DUNCAN SUMMER
Each passing day brings summer a little closer to Waiheke, and with it the jeremiads of local Facebook posters, so before the island is visited aplenty and us locals find ourselves grumbling away at the wrong of the queue in FourSquare, let us remind ourselves of Summer’s other gifts. This track is taken from the 1969 recording SEASONS, released by the BBC as part of the Drama Workshop educational project, made for the classroom as an aid to improvisation and dance. The album’s mix of harsh Radiophonic music by David Cain and austere, powerful poetry by Ronald Duncan may well have come across as a touch disturbing to any child really paying attention – the album contains a Dark Beauty; it is weird, spooky, unsettling; very British; has an unusual whiff of childhood to some, and it comes scattered with pregnant language and is full of unexpected metaphors, pagan oddness, folk cadences and insane noises. It has ‘cult’ written all over it and was a major influence on retro-futurism, and where you find retro-futurism you won’t find hauntology very far behind. None of this is a bad thing, of course, and I’ve been looking to include a track for quite some time: the turning of the seasons seems as apt an opportunity as any but, what with us living in the Southern hemisphere and all, all the months are the wrong way ‘round, but I’m sure you’ll pick up on the spirit of the thing. They don’t make them like this anymore.
JESSICA RISKER I SEE YOU AMONG THE STARS
The title track from Jessica Risker’s current album, released earlier this year, is an idyllic, wistful affair, wood-grained, amber-hued and ever so slightly askew with a sense of tell-tale lysergic wonder. I SEE YOU AMONG THE STARS is tender and delicate, creating a warm, watery, almost womblike space for Risker's gentle folk-pop. The introspective songwriting conjures the spirits of Sibylle Baier, Vashti Bunyan, and Joanna Newsom, and the subtly warped production gives a contemporary feel to Risker's tunes even as they hark back to the 60s. This really is quite lovely, but not for fans of Skunk Anansie, say (this would be by way of a gentle nod towards my wife).
GRAHAM FELLOWES WHAT LIES BEHIND THE SOFA
Graham Fellows – or the fairly wonderful Jilted John and/or John Shuttleworth – goes all whimsical and Syd-ish on What Lies Behind The Sofa, a track taken from his new album WEIRD TOWN – his first in 33 years. Recorded in his home studio in Lincolnshire, the album features inspired contributions from heavyweight folk musicians including Chris Wood and Niopha Keegan of the Unthanks whilst Fellows's bouncy acoustic guitar chops - ever present in this eclectic clutch of personal love songs - are held in check by the sophisticated percussion of the Bhangradelically-infused sounds of Keith Angel, and the album is infused with mournful pad chords thumped out on a gasping harmonium.
THE PLASTIC CLOUD CIVILIZATION MACHINE
The Plastic Cloud are a band with a story but it always goes like this: if only they’d come from L.A. or San Francisco, instead of Bay Ridges, Canada, then the band might well have become as famous as The Byrds, a band they were clearly influenced by and in love with. Formed in 1967, they only released the one album, simply called PLASTIC CLOUD (named after an Andy Warhol’s Exploding Plastic Inevitable light show effect, apparently). It’s a curious affair – on Side One they showcased their commercial side with pleasant soft flower power songs not dissimilar to what The Byrds were doing a year or two earlier, but on side Two they showed a much harder sound dominated by fuzztone guitar and other effects, for a much more spaced-out psychedelic listen, as evidenced by Civilization Machine. Sadly, they split the next year so we’ll never know just how good they might have become, another victim to the fickle psychedelic hand of fate.
ACID MOTHERS TEMPLE AND THE MELTING PARAISO UFO
PINK LADY LEMONADE (ELECTRIC DREAM ECSTASY)
In their quest for the perfect psychedelic riff Acid Mother’s Temple have returned to the glorious Pink Lady Lemonade some five or six times that I know of – there may be more. With a back catalogue of some 125 releases and counting (a new album has been released in the time it’s taken me to type this sentence), there are probably versions I haven’t dreamed of, but they all revolve around this one perfect, endlessly diverting riff. This is the Electric Dream Ecstasy version that takes up side three of their recent release of the same name – it’s an epic proto-disco composition held together by a spluttering krautrock groove that resembles nothing so much as a psyche-industrial tribal techno workout which delivers all the noise and cacophony that Acid Mothers can summon as it reaches a near- twenty-minute conclusion in a shower of feedback and percussive frenzy. Absolutely marvellous.
THE ORB SOUL PLANET
The Orb at their Orb-iest – Soul Planet is a 15-minute aural odyssey that reprises the epic spacey ambient house sound the group invented and is taken from their most recent release, NO SOUNDS ARE OUT OF BOUNDS, released earlier this year.
THE BOO RADLEYS JOEL
Not that it does them any good now, but I’ve become a huge fan of the Boo Radleys this past year, hoovering up their post-GIANT STEPS catalogue and playing them loud and proud in the car as I go about my business. Far from being the My-Bloody-Valentine-that-Creation-could-afford, the Boo Radleys never forgot that primarily they were a superb pop group who could knock off a summer anthem at the drop of a (John Lennon Polish fisherman’s type) hat, but I also love them at their most experimental. Joel is taken from WAKE UP!, a proper hit on the back of their breakfast-show-starting Wake Up, Boo! single, released in 1995. It features Beatles-esque reverse guitars, cellos and a distorted bass-driven groove with added ambient meanderings, which I find quite sublime.
THE FALL PAINT WORK
Where to start with The Fall? There’s simply too many versions of the band to have an out-and-out favourite album, but if push comes to shove then for me it’s 1985’s THIS NATION’S SAVING GRACE, possibly because it was produced by the great John Leckie, who could always bring out a band’s hidden psychedelic bent, even if that band would argue that they never particularly had one to begin with. Paint Work is a story in and of itself. Sectioned and quartered by tape-machine clicks, T.V.-as-background noise interludes, and fidelity shifts, the 7+ minute piece works beautifully as pages of a diary – this is Leckie writ large. Mark E Smith was content to go along with it for this album, probably because he was loved up with Brix and was feeling, on the whole, a warm feeling of generosity towards all and sundry. It didn’t last. I understand Leckie returned for another album by which time Smith had reverted to type and pissed Leckie off so much that the man downed tools and refused to work with the band ever again. A great pity. Not only is this my favourite Fall album, this is pretty much my favourite Fall line-up, although I will always have a great deal of affection for the Marc Riley HEX-ENDUCTION HOUR era of The Fall, although over the decades the distinction has become meaningless. As Mark E Smith said: ‘If it's me and yer granny on bongos, it's the Fall’ and there is a great deal of truth in this.
ROB GOULD feat. FIONA FORD THE SINGULARITY
The atmospheric soundscapes of Rob Gould provide moments of haunting beauty, serenity, light, drama & unease. He also knows his way around a good tune. I’m a fan of his psychedelic re-imaginings of wonky 60s classics – he always adds something to the mix that makes me laugh - but this track is one of his own and has a slinky, cinematic vibe, alluring and ever so slightly askew. I believe he has six or seven albums available but this track is made available on Soundcloud, or you can download it from his Facebook page here.
THE DOORS THE CRYSTAL SHIP
For me, The Crystal Ship is The Doors’ loveliest song; Morrison’s vocals, lost in narcotic bliss, speak of intoxicated yearning and dream-like loss in equal measure, capturing the amethyst visions of French symbolist poets Arthur Rimbaud and Charles Baudelaire, Morrison’s heroes, as much as they do love’s dull ache. I think this was originally made available as the b-side to Light My Fire, but I first came across it on the band’s classic debut album, released in 1967. The music of The Doors was stoned, artsy, pretentious, too in love with the blues and very often took itself far too seriously (no great fan, me, but, curiously enough, they have made some of my favourite songs ever) but their first album was all about expanding perceptions, and whilst not psychedelic in and of itself, was a hypnotic fusion of rock, blues, classical, jazz, and poetry that menaced and thrilled in equal measure.
RITA BRAGA A QUANTIC DREAM
The music of London based Portuguese songstress Rita Braga simultaneously summons the ghosts of synth pioneers such as Delia Derbyshire and Bruce Haack as well as that of eccentric performers like Vivian Stanshall and Carmen Miranda. Her universe is one of colours, exuding both the charm of a vintage cartoon character merrily bouncing along and the ominous melancholy of a lost kitten on a rooftop. The sci-fi minimal ukulele pop operetta A Quantic Dream is taken from her recent album BIRD ON THE MOON. Apparently, it was written as a result of a 2-month residency in Graz, Austria, in 2016. This show combined a dream sequence, astrophysics, burlesque, animation and light-hearted existentialism and things of that nature in general. I’m quite the fan.
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