MIND DE-CODER 87

MIND DE-CODER 87

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To me, the psychedelic experience is the experience of trying to make sense of reality.

                                                           Terrence McKenna 

THE TRANSPERSONALS     GOING OUT

 While this may not be their best track, it is, indubitably, the best track to start the show with (I’ll play their best track during the next show). In truth, I’ve only just discovered The Transpersonals but they are the psychedelic business (although sometimes they sound like The Pixies filtered through The Who’s SELL OUT). I believe they come from Bristol and this track is taken from their debut album KISS GOODBYE TO FREE WILL (THE PERILS OF CHEERLEADING), released in 2011. Singer Tim Hurford had his mind blown and then took an interest in that sort of thing, developing a sound that’s equally at home to Plato, Aleister Crowley, Noam Chomsky, David Icke, the odd conspiracy theory, hallucinogenic drugs, UFOs and aliens as it is to garage-tinged psychedelic finery. Fortunately, they manage to do this without sounding like Kula Shaker. I am a fan.

CATHERINE HOWE     PROLOGUE

A trifle - the prologue to the album WHAT A BEAUTIFUL PLACE, the debut album by Catherine Howe, one of the great unrecognized voices of British folk, who was England’s Kate Bush before Kate Bush came along. She would go on to become only the second female artist to win an Ivor Novello award, but it all began with this 1971 release.

ACID MOTHERS TEMPLE AND THE MELTING PARAISO U.F.O.     DARK STAR BLUES

For their 548th release (I’m joking, of course - I believe that this is actually their 133rd album) the mighty Acid Mothers Temple and the Melting Paraiso U.F.O. have re-booted the band with only two original members remaining. Founding member Kawabata Makoto sees the first 20 years of the band’s existence as merely chapter one of their pineal-gland stroking story, with the new line-up representing chapter two of their journey into the sonic worm-holes of your mind. On their last release of 2018, REVERSE OF REBIRTH IN UNIVERSE, Acid Mothers Temple Next Generation set about re-recording some old classics from their extended repertoire - fans of the band might recognize Dark Star Blues from their 2004  release DOES THE COSMIC SHEPHERD DREAM OF ELECTRIC TAPIRS, but the song is very much its own beast, transformed far away from its original version. Jump on board the mothership and enjoy the ride - it’s going to be one cosmic head-fuck of a journey.

MIGHTY BABY     EGYPTIAN TOMB

Mighty Baby grew from the ashes of The Action, North London mods who, despite an electrifying live set, couldn’t get arrested by the record buying public. These days, of course, they’re regarded as one of the great lost bands of the 60s (Paul Weller was a fan and so, bizarrely, was Phil Collins, who performed with a reunited version of the band in 2000). Might Baby were slightly more successful and had a couple of albums in them - the first an eponymously titled psychedelic soaked affair released in 1969. After this several of the band members converted to Islam and they took on a Wishbone Ash/Grateful Dead element which led to a number of freeform jamming sessions. Egyptian Tomb, however, is a stone-cold classic single, released in 1969, a wonderful blend of jazz, rock and melody that confused any mods left in their audience, but sent the hippies off into patchouli-ridden raptures.

PURSON     THE WINDOW CLEANER

Purson are the sort of psychedelic rock band that draws in the indie crowd alongside seasoned heavy metal kids, each of whom find something to enjoy in the band’s lysergic tendencies, gothic horror tropes and sturdy riffing. Their second album, 2016’s DESIRE’S MAGIC WINDOW (or DMT, which pretty much tells you all you need to know about the contents therein) is less of a band affair and more of a solo album in the way of Kevin Parker, with guitarist/vocalist/songwriter Rosalie Cunningham pretty much writing and playing everything save the drums and a few guitar solos. The band have said that the album is a tribute of sorts to “our good friends Sarge Pepper and Zig Stardust”, although The Window Cleaner has a sensuous, narcotic vibe that puts me in mind of a 90s tribute band - Khruangbin covering a late-period Lush b-side, perhaps. This, of course, is no bad thing at all.

BIFF BANG POW     FIVE MINUTES IN THE LIFE OF GREENWOOD GOULDING

Biff Bang Pow was the band formed by Alan McGee before he came to realise that he was better at discovering new bands than he was as being in one. Nevertheless, all the reference points that would come to define a nascent Creation Records can be found in Biff Bang Pow - a jingly-jangly guitar sound indebted to The Byrds, played by earnest white boys in stripey tee-shirts. This, of course, is also no bad thing at all. Five Minutes In The Life Of Greenwood Goulding, taken from their 1987 release THE GIRL WHO RUNS THE BEAT HOTEL, shimmers beneath a shambling lysergic haze - all backwards guitars, reverbed vocals and a neo-psychedelic sensibility that lacks the ambition of the band’s reference points (Love, The Byrds, Buffalo Springfield) but which nevertheless suggests a lovely way to spend an idle afternoon.

THE BEAU BRUMMELS     MAGIC HOLLOW

There’s a legend surrounding The Beau Brummels that suggests that they chose to name their band after the Regency English dandy so that their records would follow the Beatles in the LP racks; unfortunately, it’s a story they all deny. Apparently, they just liked the sound of the name. Still - never let the truth get in the way of a good story, that’s what I say. The rather pulchritudinous Magic Hollow is taken from their fourth album TRIANGLE, released in 1967, an album described by principle songwriter Ron Elliot as a ‘mythological cartoon about love written from some weird spaces’. The wispy and wistful single failed to chart but remains one of the loveliest things the band ever did, capturing in its essence something of a lysergically-enhanced stroll through a woodland glade, and is rightfully considered as something of a psychedelic classic.

THE HONEY POT     AWAIT YOU HERE

Bucolic loveliness from The Honey Pot - a band that appears to be made of two solo artists, the engagingly monikered Icarus Peel and Crystal Jacqueline, with various attendant musicians - with a track from their latest release, the marvellously titled BEWILDERED JANE. Between the two of them, this is a band well steeped in psyche history and the lush harmonies in Await You Here owe much to a certain West Coast charm. The album is a hugely enjoyable listen, combining pop melodies with understated prog influences and occasional touches of surreal experimentation. It really is quite gorgeous.

DANA GILLESPIE     LONDON SOCIAL DEGREE

Although known these days as a blues singer of some repute, Dana Gillespie’s career began in the sixties as a folk singer where she flirted with pop/rock, folk-rock, and mildly psychedelic baroque pop, all of which can be heard on her wildly obscure 1968 debut album, FOOLISH SEASONS which, for some reason or other, was only issued in America, and not the U.K., despite featuring several key figures of the British counter-cultural scene - Donovan, Jimmy Page and Billy Nicholls for starters - on production and arrangements. Whilst not quite the psychpop/Swinging London/Folk Rock masterpiece it's sometimes made out to be, it is, nevertheless, an exhilarating slice of late-'60s Swinging London-tinged sunshine pop, with Nicholls’ London Social Degree a particular stand-out. Gillespie would go onto record with Bowie, work with Dylan and star in the stage production of Tommy and Jesus Christ Superstar,  but she would never be quite this groovy again.

THE BEATLES     SEA OF TIME

It’s not The Beatles, of course; it’s George Martin conducting a 41-piece orchestra at Abbey Road for the soundtrack to the YELLOW SUBMARINE. His contributions make up side two of the original album, which some people got quite sniffy about at the time - John Lennon was particularly unkind - but I’ve always enjoyed them and these days I find I’m more inclined to play this side than the other, which features The Beatles’ last dalliances with psychedelia (and is not to be sniffed at by any means).

THE WILSON MALONE VOICE BAND     PENNY LANE

One of the more curious records I own (and I hope that still means something) is FUNNYSAD MUSIC by The Wilson Malone Voice Band, essentially Wilson Malone, in-house producer at the semi-legendary Morgan Sound Recording Studios and one-time member of Mind De-Coder favourites Orange Bicycle. The album, released in 1968, is a true oddity: a kind of strangely strange- but oddly-normal - collection of spacey pop instrumentals which succeed in muddying the waters between MOR and the avant-garde. What is one to make of this cover of Penny Lane? One is meant to be simply grateful that it doesn’t last any longer than it actually does. The rest of the album makes for a superb accompaniment for any swish, psychedelic soirees you may be thinking of hosting.

40 WATT BANANA    NIRVANA

Deep vibes from New Zealand’s 40 Watt Banana, one of the more experimentally esoteric bands of the country’s psychedelic period. Formed 1968 as a jazz combo playing in restaurants, they underwent a period of soul searching and spiritual experiences (a euphemism if ever I heard one) and soon began incorporating elements of Indian and African music to their sound. The result was an atmospheric, spacey, improvised sound which culminated in the release of their only single in 1971, the sitar-drenched Nirvana, a psyched-out cool mantra of a song, aimed straight at the third eye.

MOON EXPRESS     WILDERNESS, OCEAN AND SPACE

...as is this, taken from the album PROPHETIC SPIRIT, recorded some 50 years ago but only released earlier this year, by Moon Express, essentially a tripped-out project by Paul Arnold, the mastermind - if that’s the right word - behind THE INNER SOUNDS OF THE ID. Known only in legend from their appearance in ‘33 1/3 Revolutions Per Monkee’, the Moon Express weave music that ebbs and flows with unusual time signatures, sonic baths of wild, exotic percussion, echoey voices and weird hypnotic sounds of the Eastern variety, all of which documents a period when the hippie dream of West Coast America reached its very apex, and just before it begun the slippery slope that would culminate very shortly with its nadir. By turns spooky and groovy, this is very much a lost 60s treasure that should accompany your next trip.

THE ID     THE INNER SOUNDS OF THE ID

Beings as I just name-checked the album, I thought I’d include the title track from The Id’s only alum, 1967’s THE INNER SOUND OF THE ID, essentially a studio creation from Paul Arnold and surf guitar hero, and session man, Jerry Cole, whose chops include playing on The Byrd’s Mr. Tambourine Man when the band were too inexperienced for the studio, and PET SOUNDS. Sadly, Cole’s hip credentials and legendary skill in the studio couldn’t elevate this album beyond the psychsploitation project it clearly was, designed more as a quick cash-in on a fad rather than a sincerely ambitious musical endeavor. Some strange guitar reverb and distortion, along with dashes of sitar and pseudo-Eastern musical and mystical influences, can’t disguise the shortage of good songs and ideas and the overall aura of a strained attempt to be freaky. That being said - I don’t think any truly psychedelic radio show could really refer to itself as such without including this track in a show, and under your fully enhanced conditions (as it were) it is not without a certain disorientating charm all of its own.

That was the intro to the classic children’s TV adaptation of the classic children’s book The Owl Service, back when children’s TV was more in touch with its avant-garde side.

HARMONIA     KEKSE

Gorgeous electronica from krautrock supergroup Harmonia. Kekse features a charming piano melody and possibly the psychedelic use of a duck pond to create a bucolic, ambient vibe that provides a sedate closer to their 1975 release, DELUXE - an album that pretty much does for a blissful stroll through the countryside what Kraftwerk did for a quick day out on the motorway.

VANISHING TWIN     EGGS

More than any other band, Vanishing Twin provide the missing link between Stereolab and Broadcast, which makes them all the more precious given Broadcast’s untimely demise following the tragic death of Trish Keenan eight years ago, and the lack of any new material from Stereolab since 2010 (their current welcome re-issue of a brace of albums from their imperial phase notwithstanding). Drawn to many of the same influences and hauntological reference points (outsider jazz, Italian library music, ethnographic field recordings and things of that nature) the band use forgotten drum machines, home-made electronics, vibraphones, tablas, and harp to invoke the esoteric psychedelia of lost soundtracks, radiophonic experiments and minimal music orchestras. Their album, CHOOSE YOUR OWN ADVENTURE, released in 2016, marries oblique English pop with a palette of arkestral sounds that are both experimental and haunted by loss - founder Cathy Lucas named the group after her vanishing twin, an identical sister absorbed in utero, when they were both still a cluster of cells. 

MOON WIRING CLUB     OLD WATER GARDEN WORLD

For his latest release, Ian Hodgson’s Moon Wiring Club picks up on a latent oddness and hauntological nostalgia associated with GHASTLY GARDEN CENTRES, released earlier this year, and in doing so provides 70 minutes of clumpy, dubbed-out trip hop and wyrd soul musick to soundtrack your next visit to Placemakers. Prim voices-in-your-head and ghostly sales assistants trying to flog you shatterproof greenhouses dominate the creepy Ballardian drowned world feel of Old Water Garden World, elsewhere well-mulched ghostly-beat slammers from the top 40 c1993 Quagmire Dimension abound.

KING GIZZARD AND THE LIZARD WIZARD     ACARINE

FISHING FOR FISHIES is the fourteenth release from King Gizzard And The Wizard Lizard since forming in 2012 and for this outing the band explore a short-lived moment in rock history - namely boogie rock, a genre dominated by the likes of Canned Heat, Status Quo and possibly Suzi Quatro. What it lacks, then, in zany, mind-bending, sonic experimentation, it more than makes up for in its chug-a-lug adherence to the groove and some unabashed boogie-oogie-woogieing. Stand-out track Acarine takes a slightly different route, imagining a world where Giorgio Moroder meets The Who’s Baba O’Riley and takes it to the disco to give Donna Summer’s I Feel Love a good listen to. Marvellous.

AMON DÜÜL II     HAWKNOSE HARLEQUIN

Compared to their three earlier albums, Amon Düül’s fourth album, CARNIVAL IN BABYLON,released in 1972, is a chilled-out gem, replacing the wild side-long improvisations and sonic explorations of inner and outer space of their previous recordings with, well, proper songs, with an emphasis on song-craft and structure - at some point they even have a go at melody. The acid freak-outs may be gone, but what you get instead is acid folk pastoralism reminiscent of the flower-powered sixties. Hawknose Harlequin, edited down from a 33-minute jam session to a mere 10 minutes, closes the album with one toe in the improvized psych-explorations of former releases, with another in the more progressive albums to come.

MARTIN NEWELL     THE GREEN-GOLD GIRL OF SUMMER/AN ENGLISHMAN’S HOME

Martin Newell, former member of the glam-rock band Plod, enjoys the sort of obscurity that befits an English psychedelic eccentric who crafts perfect little toffee-sweets of pop and then willfully releases them on tape cassette. His first vinyl release was the now semi-legendary THE GREATEST LIVING ENGLISHMEN, recorded in 1993 and otherwise produced, engineered and mastered by XTC’s Andy Partridge in his shed. It’s a bucolic collection of whimsical pop that, as you might expect from the title, basks in the intrinsic qualities of Englishness in a way that suggests a fondness for both Elgar and The Kinks. The brilliant Green-Gold Girl Of Summer transforms from a pastoral folk ballad into an electric shred-fest that evokes both Albion pagan ritual and the aerial bombardments of World War II. It drifts away into the following track, An English Man’s Home to close the album and, alas the show.

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