MIND
DE-CODER 91
To listen to the show just scroll to the bottom of the page
To listen to the show just scroll to the bottom of the page
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.
