It's a credit to Abbey Road studio that EMI can release an album of psychedelia recorded at the studio -- a pretty restrictive criterium, you'd think -- and still produce probably the best available single CD introduction to the genre. And that's without anything here by either The Beatles or Pink Floyd. If you grab this CD and Deram's "Psychedelic Scene", you've pretty much got the perfect foundation for a collection of the giddiest, most head-swirling psychedelic pop ever released, on either side of the ocean.
Wow, that's high praise. This really is a superb collection, with hardly a single track I'd have swapped out for another (given that Beatles are seemingly off-limits -- The Gods' version of "Hey Bulldog" seemingly included as a nod in that direction). The first to go would probably be Syd Barrett's "Golden Hair", which is about as psychedelic as a bag of fish'n'chips, but which is placed at the end here, I would imagine, as a kind of salutory warning. "This is what went wrong." That's bull, of course, and it's annoying that people who should know better are still equating Barrett's decline with LSD, rather than the more likely pressures-of-fame explanation. Still, that's a different debate. Given half the chance, I would have swapped "Golden Hair" for Floyd's "Point Me At The Sky", a marvellous and truly psychedelic single which has remained lost in the vaults for far too long. (And incidentally, the two late-Syd-period tracks "Scream Thy Last Scream" and "Vegetable Man" are definitely not worth mention, whatever the rumours.)
The collection is arranged in chronological order of recording, a span of about four years, which surprisingly doesn't lead to as pronounced a development as you might imagine. You can't tell, listening to this CD, that psychedelia grew out of the beat/mod movement and turned into prog rock. Neither are there any stylistic constants -- even this small collection, pretty much the pick of the whole crop, covers everything from dreamy ballads to acid freak-outs, and every one of them is at the same time catchy enough to have been a hit -- except that in the late 1960s competition in the charts was amazingly fierce, so some of the finest examples of the genre (The Hollies' "King Midas In Reverse", say) were hardly the chart-topping bullets you'd expect. Not just different days, but a different world.
Those into the soft-psike, pop side of things will find much here to enjoy -- a couple of good Donovan tracks (but then, there's about twenty great Donovan tracks which could have been included), Simon Dupree's magnificent "Kites", Mark Wirtz's teeth-rottingly sweet "Teenage Opera" excerpt "Weatherman", and so on. But there are also some really great semi-obscurities, the best of which is Locomotive's truly classic "Mr Armageddon", a track which to my ears at least soars over all the others on this collection like some sky-swallowing mechanical bird. How this track works is beyond me -- on paper, you'd never believe the mixture of churning electric organ and speaker-swapping brass section could possibly gel -- but the results have a majesty and expansiveness which impresses even now. Only a short distance behind is Twink's original Aquarian Age reading of "10,000 Words In A Cardboard Box", an even more ascerbic reading of the song than on his solo album "Think Pink", and along with "King Midas" perhaps the finest example of the ultra-compressed choir-orchestra-kitchen-sink-and-all psychedelic production which is one third ludicrous and two thirds truly inspired. It's true to say that pop never recovered, and neither would it ever hit these heights again. Pure brilliance from start to finish.
It's a credit to Abbey Road studio that EMI can release an album of psychedelia recorded at the studio -- a pretty restrictive criterium, you'd think -- and still produce probably the best available single CD introduction to the genre. And that's without anything here by either The Beatles or Pink Floyd. If you grab this CD and Deram's "Psychedelic Scene", you've pretty much got the perfect foundation for a collection of the giddiest, most head-swirling psychedelic pop ever released, on either side of the ocean.
Wow, that's high praise. This really is a superb collection, with hardly a single track I'd have swapped out for another (given that Beatles are seemingly off-limits -- The Gods' version of "Hey Bulldog" seemingly included as a nod in that direction). The first to go would probably be Syd Barrett's "Golden Hair", which is about as psychedelic as a bag of fish'n'chips, but which is placed at the end here, I would imagine, as a kind of salutory warning. "This is what went wrong." That's bull, of course, and it's annoying that people who should know better are still equating Barrett's decline with LSD, rather than the more likely pressures-of-fame explanation. Still, that's a different debate. Given half the chance, I would have swapped "Golden Hair" for Floyd's "Point Me At The Sky", a marvellous and truly psychedelic single which has remained lost in the vaults for far too long. (And incidentally, the two late-Syd-period tracks "Scream Thy Last Scream" and "Vegetable Man" are definitely not worth mention, whatever the rumours.)
The collection is arranged in chronological order of recording, a span of about four years, which surprisingly doesn't lead to as pronounced a development as you might imagine. You can't tell, listening to this CD, that psychedelia grew out of the beat/mod movement and turned into prog rock. Neither are there any stylistic constants -- even this small collection, pretty much the pick of the whole crop, covers everything from dreamy ballads to acid freak-outs, and every one of them is at the same time catchy enough to have been a hit -- except that in the late 1960s competition in the charts was amazingly fierce, so some of the finest examples of the genre (The Hollies' "King Midas In Reverse", say) were hardly the chart-topping bullets you'd expect. Not just different days, but a different world.
Those into the soft-psike, pop side of things will find much here to enjoy -- a couple of good Donovan tracks (but then, there's about twenty great Donovan tracks which could have been included), Simon Dupree's magnificent "Kites", Mark Wirtz's teeth-rottingly sweet "Teenage Opera" excerpt "Weatherman", and so on. But there are also some really great semi-obscurities, the best of which is Locomotive's truly classic "Mr Armageddon", a track which to my ears at least soars over all the others on this collection like some sky-swallowing mechanical bird. How this track works is beyond me -- on paper, you'd never believe the mixture of churning electric organ and speaker-swapping brass section could possibly gel -- but the results have a majesty and expansiveness which impresses even now. Only a short distance behind is Twink's original Aquarian Age reading of "10,000 Words In A Cardboard Box", an even more ascerbic reading of the song than on his solo album "Think Pink", and along with "King Midas" perhaps the finest example of the ultra-compressed choir-orchestra-kitchen-sink-and-all psychedelic production which is one third ludicrous and two thirds truly inspired. It's true to say that pop never recovered, and neither would it ever hit these heights again. Pure brilliance from start to finish.