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“They drank his health in orangeade”
TRAFFIC HOUSE FOR EVERYONE
Traffic released their debut album, MR FANTASY, in 1967 following a sojourn to the Berkshire countryside. It contains an eclectic mix of whimsical psychedelic pop and soulful rock, with elements of folk, jazz, and Indian instrumentation thrown in for good measure. Guitarist Dave Mason provided the album with its more playfully psychedelic flourishes, such as the acid-drenched House For Everyone, which has the mad kinetic energy of an overwound Victorian toy, chattering playfully over the nursery floor before unwinding itself to a halt, its clockwork energy spent. There are about four different versions of this album, featuring mono and stereo mixes as well as different track listings depending upon the market, but the irresistibly trippy House For Everyone is on all of them - a Toytown classic to get the show underway.
PINK FLOYD MATHILDA MOTHER
Syd Barrett unwittingly created the template for much of British psychedelia when he drew upon his childhood influences - the tales of Lewis Carroll and Kenneth Grahame, alongside the poetry of Edward Lear and Hilaire Belloc - and fed them into his songs for Pink Floyd’s debut album, PIPER AT THE GATES OF DAWN. Inspired by Belloc’s slyly subversive ‘Cautionary Tales For Children’, Mathilda Mother exemplifies a certain strain of Edwardiana which threads its way through British psychedelia, in which a yearning for a return to the lost innocence of childhood is unmistakably redolent, possibly just in time for a slice of cake and a nice cup of tea, albeit one served up with LSD-laced sugarcubes. Everything that follows starts here.
THE ALAN BOWN! TOYLAND
PETER LEE STIRLING GOODBYE
THIMBLE MILL LANE
There’s a bittersweet moment in the Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais scripted British film ‘The Likely Lads’, in which the protagonists, Bob and Terry, witness the demolition of their local pub and the surrounding streets in which they grew up. The middle-class Bob feels great sentimentality for this loss, whereas the working-class Terry, who is now living in a high-rise council flat, is more optimistic about the city's redevelopment, pointing out that he now has a "modern kitchen, a lovely view and an inside lavatory". Peter Lee Stirling, previously known as Peter Green, but later to be known as one-hit-wonder Daniel Boone whose single Beautiful Sunday sold millions of records around the world in 1972, captures perfectly this mood of social change with his 1967 single Goodbye Thimble Mill Lane. The record-buying public remained unmoved by this poignant recording, but Beautiful Sunday remained number one on the Japanese charts for four months – reportedly becoming one of the top selling records in Japanese pop history.
KEITH WEST SAM
THE HOLLIES YE OLDE TOFFEE
SHOPPE
Every Toytown needs an Olde Toffee Shoppe, but you wouldn’t have necessarily expected The Hollies to deliver the goods. Although they were more than capable of delivering sugary-pop confections, you always got the impression that they would more at home with a pint of bitter than a tab of Owsley’s finest. But 1967 saw them at least flirt with psychedelia - although, in truth, the most psychedelic thing about their album EVOLUTION is the tripped-out cover art, designed by the switched-on Dutch art collective the Fool. I think at this point, The Hollies were playing with psychedelia, rather than fully committing to psychedelic experimentation, but Ye Olde Toffee Shoppe, written by Graham Nash, who was possibly a bit more committed than the rest of the band, say, remains a charming period piece.
PERSIMMON’S PECULIAR SHADES
WATCHMAKER
Likewise, every Toytown also requires a watchmaker or two. Persimmon’s Peculiar Shades, a British army band stationed in Detmold, Germany, who were originally called Shades of Blue but had to change their name due to the conflict with the other, more famous Shades of Blue (an American blue-eyed soul vocal group about whom I know nothing) provide one of them. Another will be along shortly. They only managed the one single, Watchmaker, released in 1968, but what a fantastic single it is - Toytown whimsy, complete with clock tick rhythm, clock winding, and cuckoo sound effects, although I added a few of my own, right at the end.
TOMORROW AUNTIE MARY’S DRESS SHOP
Tomorrow are one of my favourite lost bands of the 60s, but their only album, the eponymously titled TOMORROW, is something of a mixed bag and a lost opportunity to compete with the likes of Pink Floyd or The Soft Machine on vinyl - nevertheless, if I had a time machine, I would be traveling back to their psychedelic heyday to see them perform at UFO where, according to Joe Boyd, they were the apotheosis of the psychedelic Summer of Love (and he would know). They never really survived singer Keith West’s involvement in their producer Mark Wirtz’s TEENAGE OPERA project. Character vignettes about villagers like Grocer Jack and engine driver Sam seemed to rub off on West’s songwriting for the band, and when Tomorrow’s album belatedly emerged in 1968, it contained two or three whimsical, Opera-friendly songs, including Auntie Mary’s Dress Shop - still, every Toytown needs a dress shop.
THE BUNCH LOOKING GLASS ALICE
WORLD OF
OZ PETER’S BIRTHDAY (BLACK AND WHITE
RAINBOWS)
In which the birthday boy overdoses on cake and has a nightmare in which his limbs are cut off by gingerbread men. Released in 1969, THE WORLD OF OZ, the only album by World Of Oz, is a little too whimsical, even by Toytown standards, but Peter’s Birthday at least attempts to shine a light into the darkness at the heart of Toytown. Actually, there is no darkness at the heart of Toytown. And the band split up shortly thereafter.
THE PICADILLY
LINE EMILY SMALL (THE HUGE WORLD
THEREOF)
Period charm from The Picadilly Line - deliberately misspelled in the mistaken belief that they might have been sued by the London Transport system - a regular attraction on the burgeoning underground scene, appearing regularly the likes of UFO, Middle Earth, and The Marquee. They started off life as a London-based Simon and Garfunkel-type folk duo, but even with the addition of two more permanent band members, their sound could hardly be said to have hardened up. The delightfully precious Emily Small (The Huge World Thereof), released at the peak of flower power in the summer of 1967, can be found on their only album THE HUGE WORLD OF EMILY SMALL. Sadly, neither the record-buying public nor the London Transport system were paying attention, and the band reformed under the name Edward’s Hand, who were notably produced by George Martin, taking time off from producing the White Album.
GILBERT O’SULLIVAN MR MOODY’S GARDEN
There was always something about the hair with Gilbert O’Sullivan, wasn’t there? He had, and for all I know still has, deeply unpsychedelic hair. Released in 1969, Mr. Moody’s Garden - which, rather than featuring a banker sitting waiting for a trim or a barber shaving another customer, found the central character ‘waiting for the barber to arrive’ - showcased O’Sullivan’s combination of Paul McCartney and George Formby influences. Despite being promoted as ‘the comedy record of the year’, it failed to find favour with the fickle record-buying public, which I’ve always suspected had as much to do with the hair as anything else.
KIDROCK ICE CREAM MAN (ALTERNATIVE VERSION)
One is duty-bound to confirm at this point: Not that Kidrock.
This Kidrock is otherwise known as Tony Taylor.
Clearly inspired by Mark Wirtz, Taylor envisaged a children’s-themed concept
album of his own, and under the name Kidrock recorded Ice Cream Man, although
given this was now 1973, some might say that it was five years too late and
nobody was buying. Quite shamelessly, children’s sing-a-long voices, a la Mark Wirtz, abound. Do say: ‘Would you
like a 99 with that?’
If you have a watchmaker then, no doubt, you need a watch-repairer - it stands to reason. Kaleidoscope, a band who really ought to have been more successful than they were, provide us with Mr. Small, The Watch-Repairer Man on their debut album TANGERINE DREAM, an album replete with technicolour psychedelic tropes and fairytale wistfulness, released in 1967. Elsewhere the album is very much at home to The Beatles, Procol Harum, and Donovan, and it’s very unlikely that the lonely watch-repairer himself would have seen the light of day without a nudge from Syd Barrett, but this album is perhaps the most 1967-ish of all the albums on this evening’s show, which I hope stands for something.
Jigsaw’s day was to come in the mid-1970s when they penned the hugely successful Sky High for the George Lazenby martial arts film ‘The Man from Hong Kong’. Before this time they were a jobbing band with a penchant for wild stage antics which included fire-eating, exploding amps, and burning drum kits. Mr. Job, released in 1968, was originally written by The Alan Bown Set in response to their guitarist being refused entry into a civic hall-type venue in Bristol, where they were due to play that evening, by a jobsworth doorman, which explains the slightly acerbic lyrics, although the song evolved into an observation about an unfortunate man with an underdeveloped mental age who obsesses with making things from wood while his life passes him by, making it a suitable subject for Toytown whimsy. Jigsaw ran with it and turned it into a minor psych-pop classic.
MARK WIRTZ (HE’S OUR DEAR OLD) WEATHERMAN
While Excerpt From ‘A Teenage Opera’ had been a huge hit, the equally grandiose Sam, sung by Keith West, of course, was a relative flop. With West withdrawing to concentrate on his day job with Tomorrow, Wirtz recorded and sang lead vocal on the third single from his proposed Teenage Opera himself. Issued in February 1968, and thus coinciding with the release of Tomorrow’s album, which he also produced, (He’s Our Dear Old) Weatherman is another gloriously bonkers production that, sadly, failed to find a home in the charts. Wirtz suffered a loss of artistic nerve and the Teenage Opera was abandoned - at least until 1996 when Wirtz released a CD with every track recorded over the years intended for use in A TEENAGE OPERA, but that’s another story.
THE
SWEETSHOP BAREFOOT AND TIPTOE
Possibly the
most Toytown name of all, The Sweetshop was another project by Mark Wirtz,
recorded with his then-wife, Ross Hannaman, named "face" of
the year in 1968 by the Evening Standard. Whilst not necessarily written for A
TEENAGE OPERA, it was written and released as a single roundabout that time and
included in the above-mentioned CD release. An exuberant slice of sunshine
psych-pop, the carefree and jaunty Barefoot And Tiptoe was another of
Wirtz’s kitchen sink productions which featured the Band of the Irish Guards.
As with most of the other songs featured on this evening’s show, it sank
without a trace.
BLOSSOM
TOES MRS MURPHY’S BUDGERIGAR
Blossom Toes made their live debut at the International Love-In Festival at Alexandra Palace (sometimes it causes my body to ache with loss that I wasn’t there), and their subsequent album, WE ARE EVER SO CLEAN, is a perfect example of what British psychedelia sounded like in 1967. In debt to SGT PEPPERS, of course, as so many albums were at the time, if it failed to soar to the same giddy heights as those reached by The Beatles then at least it sounds as if everyone had a good time trying. Mrs. Murphy’s Budgerigar, the tale of a runaway budgie, is perhaps the most Toytown title in this evening’s show.
TURQUOISE TALES OF FLOSSIE
FILLETT
The effervescent The Tales Of Flossie Fillett was actually the b-side of the debut single by North London band, Turquoise, previously known as The Brood. The less commercial a-side, 53 Summer Street, released in 1968, failed to set the charts alight, and one wonders whether the two tracks ought to have been switched. Clearly influenced by The Kinks’ glorious Autumn Almanac and other bucolic village green narratives from their fellow Muswell Hillbillies, the singalong fade includes a list of characters who were part of the Turquoise world, including Keith Moon, Tom Keylock, The Rolling Stones’ fixer, and the Davies brothers themselves.
JOHN CARTER AND MICKEY KEEN MR
LIGHT
THE PANDAMONIUM CHOCOLATE
BUSTER DAN
JUDE MORNING MORGANTOWN
Jude is the
stage name adopted by Judy Willey, a folk/rock singer from Yorkshire, active
around 1970. In the studio she was backed by the band Fickle Pickle, an early
'70s band that was part of the semi-mythical Morgan Bluetown label, along with
such bands as Mind De-Coder stalwarts Orange Bicycle and the Smoke - indeed,
much of Fickle Pickle's lineup was filled out by ex-members of both of those
bands. Perhaps she was encouraged to cover Joni Mitchell’s Morning
Morgantown as a sort of calling card for the label, but despite being
almost transcendentally pretty - she paints a peaceful portrait of a town at
dawn: milk trucks and merchants rise with the sun, while tea and lemonade are
sipped in the shade - it was never released at the time, but can be found on a
number of compilations, the best of which is the very fine TRULY THIS MUST BE
HEAVEN!: AN INTRODUCTION TO MORGAN BLUE TOWN, released in 2009.
THE IDLE
RACE THE SKELTON AND THE ROUNDABOUT
(MONO SINGLE MIX)
In which an emaciated Mr. Rusty-type figure makes so little money operating the roundabout at a fairground that he wastes away, only to be employed as a skeleton on the ghost train elsewhere at the fair until, prospering in the guise, he puts on weight, and is returned to the roundabout. Truly, they don’t write them like this anymore. Recorded in 1968 by Jeff Lynne’s pre-ELO outfit The Idle Race, the bizarre vaudeville psych-pop of Skeleton And The Roundabout should have been a hit, but despite strong support from Radio 1, it failed to chart. Taken from their debut album THE BIRTHDAY PARTY, chart success was a mere ten years away.
WEST COAST
CONSORTIUM COLOUR SERGEANT
LILLYWHITE
One of many examples of late sixties psych-pop’s fascination with the military (Pink Floyd’s Corporal Clegg, Tomorrow’s Colonel Brown, Bowie’s Little Bombardier, The Kinks’ Tin Soldier Man, SGT PEPPER, and so on, and so forth), Colour Sergeant Lillywhite was recorded in 1968 by North London’s West Coast Consortium to little acclaim. Rather surprisingly, they turned down the offer to record an album as they didn’t think it would have much chance of selling without a single to promote it, which is a pity, perhaps, as surviving songs from this period suggest a sound recalling Beach Boys-style psychedelia.
THE
BEATLES LUCY IN THE SKY WITH DIAMONDS
In his introduction to the very fine Grapefruit compilation David Wells argues that The Beatles, like so much else, were responsible for the proliferation of Toytown pop following the success of Penny Lane, in which the lives of mundane characters - barbers, bankers, firemen, and nurses - going about their mundane lives on a mildly hallucinogenic autumnal day, are celebrated by a phalanx of session musicians on a variety of brass and woodwind instrumentation bolstered by George Martin’s widescreen production. Rightly, or wrongly, he writes, a whole host of songwriters, musicians and arrangers thought “I can do that too”, resulting in a surfeit of expansive, kitchen-sink productions that utilised orchestration and brass bands on newly-minted fairy tales and character vignettes based around the grey everyday lives of ordinary working-class people. It’s not that I disagree with him, but I think that Toytown imagery grew into something else quite quickly, so rather than play Penny Lane, I thought Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds was a far more apposite track to include in the show, featuring, as it does, the lysergic sense of wonder I associate with a trip around Trumptonshire, say. Anyway, it’s my show, so that’s what you get.
THE HERD OUR FAIRY TALE
The Herd, featuring a teenage Peter Frampton, had a good run of singles in the late sixties, which helped elevate a reluctant Frampton to ‘Face of ‘68’ pin-up status, which he couldn’t be doing with at all. Tired of the band’s overtly pop approach, Frampton, of course, jumped ship to form Humble Pie with Steve Marriot, but not before penning the highly commercial Our FairyTale, the b-side to their 1968 single I Don’t Want Our Loving To Die.
THE NEAT
CHANGE I LIED TO AUNTIE MAY
The Neat Change were, in fact, Britain's first mod/skinhead group who built up a fanatical following playing heavy Motown covers at The Marquee in 1966. However, times were a-changing and come 1968 their management had them record the psych-groover I Lied To Auntie May, written for them by Peter Frampton and Andy Bown of The Herd, for their debut single. Actually, it’s debatable whether I Lied To Auntie May is by The Neat Change at all, given that Frampton, Bown, and The Syn’s Chris Squire all feature in the line-up, leaving singer Jimmy Edwards more or less fronting a different band. Nevertheless, I Lied To Auntie May is a killer single that sadly went nowhere and the band split up shortly thereafter.
THE SYN THE LAST PERFORMANCE OF THE ROYAL
REGIMENTAL VERY VICTORIOUS
AND
VALIANT BAND
Like The Neat
Change before them, The Syn had built up quite a following playing Tamla covers
to Marquee regulars before embracing flower power and psychedelia. The band
developed an extremely theatrical stage act, dressing as flowers and
brandishing various horticultural props, but the novelty soon wore thin and in
1968 guitarist Peter Banks and bassist Chris Squire peeled away from the group
to form a nascent version of Yes. The remaining band members carried on and in
1969 recorded the very Toytown Last Performance Of The Royal and Regimental
Very Victorious And Valiant Band. Although it was never released it has
since appeared on the anthology FLOWERMEN: RARE BLOOMS FROM THE SYN, released
in 2021 by the very fine Cherry Red
label.
MARK WIRTZ THE SAD STORY OF SIMON AND HIS BUGLE
(CORRECT VERSION)
The Beatles may have inspired Toytown-psych, and Pink Floyd may have given it an Edwardian conceptual framework, but it was Mark Wirtz who took both these premises and created the definitive Toytown sound. Like the ‘lost’ Beach Boys album SMILE, there are numerous works-in-progress and instrumental sections surviving from his grand folly A TEENAGE OPERA. However, according to the late Wirtz, there were only four genuine OPERA songs: the three singles - Excerpt From ‘A Teenage Opera’ featuring Grocer Jack, Sam, and (Our dear Old) Weatherman, all of which feature mundane characters going about their mundane lives in a faintly Edwardian setting - and a fourth track that sadly never progressed beyond this embryonic stage. Featuring Mark on piano The Sad Story Of Simon And His Bugle was meant to tell the story of a young bugler who died on a battlefield, leading to a statue in his memory being erected in the village square. The 2007 anthology THE FANTASTIC STORY OF MARK WIRTZ AND THE TEENAGE OPERA did include a track under this name, but this was a different misnamed recording that wasn’t part of the intended OPERA. This version, which concludes CLIMB ABOARD MY ROUNDABOUT: THE BRITISH TOYTOWN POP SOUND 1967-1974, is, I’m told, the correct version. Enjoy.
PINK FLOYD BIKE
…and how better to conclude the show other than with Bike, the closing track on Pink Floyd’s PIPER AT THE GATES OF DAWN? By turns playful, wistful, and childlike, it captures completely the spirit of Toytown psych and is as trippy as a hatstand to boot.
But for now,
let’s leave them there, safe in Toyland, as we tiptoe away to bed, our heads
full of dancing sugarcanes and giant polka-dotted toadstools, and promise
ourselves we’ll return soon.
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