MIND DE-CODER 91

MIND DE-CODER 91
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Reality gives people what they think they want; LSD gives them what they need.

THE BEATLES     BECAUSE

Because was John Lennon’s parting gift to The Beatles, a three-part vocal harmony (overdubbed twice making nine voices in all) inspired by hearing Yoko play Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata, if Ian MacDonald is to be believed. The last song recorded for ABBEY ROAD, and therefore the last song they ever recorded together, Because captures The Beatles singing together, standing around the microphone one final time, harmonizing beautifully – a psychedelic ballad for what, in 1969, were effectively post-psychedelic times. Lennon never wrote a song like this again – in truth, no one has ever written a song like this again. This version is taken from the recent Giles Martin re-master I was lucky enough to get for Christmas, in which everything, the harpsichord, the bass, the harmonies are just all turned up to ‘more’.

PINK FLOYD     LET’S ROLL ANOTHER ONE

Recorded in 1967, this is the early, infamous version of the song which would become Candy And A Currant Bun, rejected by the record company for containing the lyric: “I’m high – don’t try to spoil my fun”. Never released, what few recordings there were only existed on acetate. It has a stripped-back urgency to it; more tense, less playful and more in tune, I suspect, with their live show than the version that would eventually find its way to the B-side of their debut single, Arnold Layne – but its very discordance is what gives it such an electrifying edge. Syd was forced to rewrite the lyrics but got his own back with some sly obfuscation by also replacing the lines: “Oh, don’t talk to me – please just walk with me” in this version, to :”Oh, don’t talk to me – please just fuck with me” in the version that somehow slipped by the censors and onto vinyl.

CIRCUS    DO YOU DREAM

As lovely a piece of whimsical psych-pop as you’re ever likely to hear, Do You Dream, was the debut single from Circus, a short-lived group who, following a brief flirtation with psychedelia, developed into a sort of jazz-prog fusion group not dissimilar to The Nice, or The Soft Machine, say, but without either of those two bands’ level of success. Produced by Manfred Mann’s Mike d’Abo, this 1968 release, sadly sunk without a trace.

JONNA GAULT AND HER SYMPHONOPOP SCENE     WONDER WHY, I GUESS

The splendidly quirky Wonder Why, I Guess is taken from the only album by the marvelously monikered Jonna Gault And Her Symphonopop Scene. In her short time in the music business, Gault had performed under a number of different names to little or no response from the record-buying public before escaping meddling record company interference to become, at 21, pop’s first self-styled sincompreneer (a combination of singer, composer, performer and engineer) which formed the basis of her symphonopop vision - guitarless pop with unusual combinations of orchestral instruments, which largely eschews the strings that characterized the era. Alas, WATCH ME, released in 1968, was greeted with the same indifference as her previous iterations, and Gault retreated back to her real name – Roberta Mae Silvanoff - and was never heard of again (more or less). In truth, this is the best thing on an album that tried and failed to bridge the generation gap by bringing a flower child sensibility to squaresville MOR but I quite like to play it: it always goes down well at dinner parties, that’s all I’m saying.

JULIAN COPE     IMMORTAL

A marvelous track from SELF CIVIL WAR, the newest release by the prolific arch-drude, Immortal celebrates the ambition of a love-struck suitor who aims to considerably up the ante on his drug-taking in order to impress the object of his devotion. It really is quite lovely; Cope at his most playful on an album that brims with sound FX, enormous orchestral arrangements, timeless uprisings of Ur-folk and hefty near-Krautrock anthems. I understand it’s the first release in a new ‘Our Troubled Times’ series, so there’s plenty to look forward to this year from a man who appears to be emitting again.

THE MOVE     CHERRY BLOSSOM CLINIC (REMIX)/CHERRY BLOSSOM CLINIC REVISITED

This is the altogether better, more expansive version of the track Cherry Blossom Clinic that you can find as a bonus track on the 1998 reissue of the 1967 debut album. Originally conceived as a single, the idea was withdrawn when some members in the band considered that the subject material, mental health, might be in bad taste – and, what with them being in trouble at the time with the Prime Minister Harold Wilson, they thought it best to just quietly drop the idea and released the brilliant Fire Brigade instead. The band hadn’t finished with the song, however, and returned to it in 1970 on their second album SHAZAM, in which they extend the track a further five minutes or so and somehow manage to include Bach's Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring, Paul Dukas' The Sorcerer's Apprentice and Tchaikovsky's Thé (the Chinese dance) from THE NUTCRACKER. Marvelous.

BIT’A SWEET     A SECOND TIME

A terrible, terrible name for a band, formerly called The Satisfactions, sadly foisted upon them by producer-arranger Steve Duboff who signed them up as a vehicle for his songs in early 1968. Their sole album, HYPNOTIC 1, was released later that year, but despite featuring beautifully arranged instrumentation, exotic flourishes and small dollops of experimentation - notably quite a bit of electric sitar, occasional oscillators, phasing, various studio effects and the gasps and gurgles of an early synthesizer – the album failed to provoke any interest at all and the band split shortly after. A Second Time is very typical of the album (if you enjoy switched-on, hippie philosophizing of a whimsical nature, then this is the album for you), but nothing can prepare you for just how good their cover of The Beatles’ If I Needed Someone is – I’ll play it next time.

PAUL WELLER    SUBMERGED

Well, this is very fine – Submerged is taken from Weller’s debut release on Ghostbox, a four-track EP rather fittingly entitled IN ANOTHER ROOM. Fans of Weller’s more experimental leanings, a direction he’s been pursuing since 2008’s 22 DREAMS, won’t be surprised to learn that he’s been a fan of Ghostbox’s hauntological explorations for some time, but it was his 2017 score for Thomas Q Snapper’s film ‘Jawbone’, and in particular the opening 21-minute track, Jimmy/Blackout - in which treated pianos, ambient drones, music concrète found sounds, cellos and guitar feedback combine to paint mindscapes that led Weller to Ghostbox’s doors, the perfect home to explore his interest in experimental tape music and early electronics. The four tracks here, though, are more than just experiments; tape manipulation, field recordings, and instrumental passages are artfully arranged to create a gently uncanny and psychedelic atmosphere. I’ve also included the trailer for the EP that I found online as a taster for the whole.

BRAVE NEW WORLD     LENINA

Obscure krautrock, even by the standards of the genre, from Brave New World, whose debut album, IMPRESSSIONS ON READING ALDOUS HUXLEY, was released in 1972 to little or no fanfare and immediately became something of a rarity, if not entirely a lost gem. This is not an album you’ll find in Copey’s ‘Krautrocksampler’, or even any other books that mine the increasingly exhausted seams of krautrock, but it’s still a frequently trippy affair, peppered with weird incantations and deeply hallucinogenic effects. The album, supposedly inspired by Huxley’s mystical writings, owes more to prog than the truly kosmiche explorations of your Ash Ra Temple’s or your Tangerine Dream’s, say, but it nevertheless enjoys a spacey, flute-driven vibe. Lenina is simply gorgeous - an enigmatic, fragile, celestial song for the flute, with moody bass lines and a beautiful air.

THE CRAZY WORLD OF ARTHUR BROWN     GIVE HIM A FLOWER

Comic hippie satire or flower-power anthem? Give Him A Flower was the B-side to The Crazy World Of Arthur Brown’s debut single, Devil’s Grip, released in 1967, and whilst Brown was drawn to the more esoteric side of the counter culture, this track was always a favourite with the freaks who would all sing along with the chorus. The recorded version only had the three verses but onstage it could go on for 20 minutes or so with extra verses improvised on the spot. One gets the impression, though, that the first verse, in which sixty policemen burst in through the door whilst poor Arthur Brown was enjoying a quiet bath, probably has some basis in truth about it.

FIRE     REASON FOR EVERYTHING

Fire, or possibly The Fire (the definitive article appears to have dropped at some point), released a couple of psych-pop singles of the whimsical toytown variety before public indifference led to a retreat to the Home Counties where song-writer Dave Lambert (later of The Strawbs) spent a year licking his wounds, writing and demo-ing the songs for what would become the band’s only LP, a concept album based around a whimsical children’s bedtime story called THE MAGIC SHOEMAKER, released in 1970, in which a shoemaker cobbles together a pair of shoes that unexpectedly allow the wearer to fly. These are loaned to a king whose country is threatened with war by a neighbouring state; when the king confronts his opposite number from the sky the latter’s army are spooked and a peace treaty is forthcoming. The album’s principle conceit has Lambert telling the story to a group of kids on a coach trip (real kids’ voices, overdubbed travel noises) in short pieces of the narrative which occur between and within the songs whose lyrics broadly parallel episodes in the tale, some closely, others in more abstract fashion. TOMMY it isn’t, and, at best it sounds like a cross between OGDEN’S NUT GONE FLAKE and the few avuncular spoken word vignettes on The End’s INTROSPECTION. The record buying public weren’t buying it, possibly because it was too late for psych and too lightweight for prog, and that was that, but these days, of course, it’s considered a lost classic, and is not without a tripped-out thrill or two. I particularly care for Reason For Everything which burns with a fierce intensity (no pun intended, but now that I’ve noticed it, I’m quite pleased with it).

THE HOLLIES     MAKER

The Hollies could never really be doing with psychedelia, what with being beer drinking Mancunians an’ all, but Graham Nash was feeling the call – the lovely Maker, written by him, was probably as overtly psychedelic the band ever got and appears on their 1967 release BUTTERFLY, the album on which they flirted, briefly, with a few psychedelic tropes. It was never a direction they were happy with and shortly hereafter Nash was off to America, stardom and a wholehearted embrace of hippie culture. Fact fans will be thrilled to note that the sitar played on this track was ‘borrowed’ from George Harrison, who had left it lying around the studio after the SGT. PEPPER sessions.

LIAM GALLAGHER     MEADOW

Gallagher Jnr manifests his inner Beatles (again) in this fairly gorgeous track from last years’ WHY ME? WHY NOT.

MOON WIRING CLUB     MAGPIE TAKES ENCHANTER’S HAT

For his most recent release, CAVITY SLABS, released last year, Moon Wiring Club’s Ian Hodgson has doubled down on his Northern Edwardian-Neo-Elizabethan Psychedelic Hallucinatory Occult Landscape Breakbeat chops in a nod to classic, darkbeat, rave music. I usually enjoy his more hypnagogic ambient excursions but these propulsive, cackling spectres of sound are exceptionally ideal for traversing ancient moorland, rounded hills, plateaus, valleys, burial mounds, gritstone escarpments and potentially edifying home-ritual requirements.

MAPPE OF     ESTUARY II

A lovely, tremulous, acoustic interlude courtesy of Canadian avant-folk artist Tom Meikle, who creates a fever dream of orchestral pop, electronica, and pastoral folk under the moniker of Mappes Of. On his second album, THE ISLE OF AILYNN, he sets out to document a fantasy world that draws parallels between a mythological space and everyday conflicts, concerns and struggles within our lives. It sounds like it a bloated prog-opus but, in fact it evokes Radiohead’s more ethereal noodling’s.

OPEL     WICKER HYMNS

Wicker Hymns' is a new collaboration between Future Wizards Records and Opel, who were originally active as an acid-folk rock band active in the mid to late '90s. Dubbing their music 'Wicker Rock' in homage to the 1973 cult horror movie classic 'The Wicker Man', and incorporating a blend of acid-folk, jazz and late '60's US West Coast rock sounds, they disbanded in 1999 to work on other projects, but now appear to have reformed as a duo. Their music remains very much inspired by British Folk Horror films of the late '60s/early '70s and Wicker Hymns is something of an acid folk epic taking in three parts. I’ve included parts 1 and 2 – Dance Of The Fire-Blower and The Witch, but the whole piece appears to be something of a taster for a forthcoming album to be released later this year.

ACID MOTHERS TEMPLE AND THE MELTING PARAISO U.F.O.     PINK LADY LEMONADE

We’re already a month into 2020 and the mighty Acid Mothers don’t appear to have released anything this year yet – they must be on some sort of hiatus. Usually by now I’d have expected two or three mind-bending lysergic excursions in the nether regions of the psychedelic void, so to tied us over, here is the original recording of the much-loved Pink Lady Lemonade, from their eponymous debut album released back in 1997. It’s a track that they’ve returned to (literally) countless times in their astral career, and it’s certainly my favourite recording – endlessly mesmerising and almost overwhelmingly intoxicating in its narcotic allure.

ELEPHANT STONE     WE CRY FOR HARMONIA

The irritatingly named Elephant Stone’s most recent release is a post-apocalyptic, sci-fi concept album which takes place immediately after mankind’s catastrophic destruction of the Earth and explores what happens when the same elite responsible for the first world-destroying climate disaster touch down on New Earth, a recently-discovered planet sold with the same life of prosperity as the one they’ve just destroyed. The frankly gorgeous We Cry For Harmonia, far from being a repine for the krautrock supergroup, is actually a lament for the spaceship which brought them to New Earth in this dystopian odyssey. To find out more you’ll just have to listen to the album, but Montreal’s sitar-powered space cadets are a lysergic, expansive treat.

PREMIATA FORNERIA MARCONI     APPENA UN PO

Fantastic prog loveliness from Milan’s Premiata Forneria Marconi, which I believe translates as Award-Winning Marconi Bakery, although I might be wrong, and the opening track from their 1972 release PER UN AMICO (‘For A Friend’, Google Translate fans). Appena Un Po (at this point, I suggest looking it up yourself) is something of a pastoral tapestry, emerging from a cloud of celestial mellotron, before a delicate guitar arpeggio takes over, soon to be joined by a flute and a harpsichord, before the group intervenes in what can only be described as a fairly muscular fashion. This album is generally considered a defining masterpiece in Italian prog history, and one which propelled them onto the world stage, albeit a world stage defined by people who like King Crimson, Jethro Tull and early Genesis.

MATTHEW HERBERT     A DEVOTION UPON EMERGENT OCCASIONS

As I write these very words England has just left Europe and enters a post-truth world where the likes of Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage are inexplicably free to inflict their bad trip on everyone. Former crowd-pleasing DJ Matthew Herbert’s most recent release, THE STATE BETWEEN US, released last year is something of a Brexit counter-narrative, made in collaboration with over a thousand musicians and singers from across the EU. Two minutes into album opener, A Devotion Upon Emergent Occasions, a medieval chant gets ambushed by a roaring motor and mighty crash: the sound of a 180-year-old German pine tree being felled with a chainsaw during Brexit. He’s also recorded a companion album documenting every second of the tree’s final week, reasoning he’d rather listen to a tree than Boris Johnson. Amen to that.

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