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Post by petrolino on Jun 12, 2020 15:40:28 GMT
Pearly Spencer
Welsh wizard Spencer Davis played 12-string guitar in a folk band with Christine Perfect (Fleetwood Mac) before forming his own rhythm and blues quartet named the Spencer Davis Group. To do this, he recruited the Winwood brothers from jazz outfit Muff Woody, and enlisted gifted jazz drummer Pete York. Songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Steve Winwood (Traffic) departed following the recording of the band's third studio album, 'Autumn '66' (1966), as did his older brother, bassist and record producer Muff Winwood.
A new line-up recorded the group's first foray into psychedelia, 'With Their New Face On' (1968). For this album, Davis and York were joined by guitarist Phil Sawyer (The Fleur De Lys), guitarist Ray Fenwick (The Syndicats), bassist Charlie McCracken (Taste & Stud) and keyboardist Eddie Hardin (The Wild Uncertainty).
"Jimmy Miller was brought in by Chris Blackwell to produce the Spencer Davis Group, and we just knocked around in the studio. We'd all write and cut 3 or 4 songs in a day's work. Back then, if you only completed 2 tunes in a single session, you were screwing off. As for Chris, I met him in 1964 at Digbeth Civic Hall in Birmingham, which has always been a big center for Jamaicans in England; they used to hold their dances there, and naturally Chris was in on the ground floor in terms of Jamaican ska and rocksteady. Business-wise, he and Island were the ground floor.
Anyhow, I'd been playing at Digbeth since I was 14 with the Muff Woody Jazz Band, my brother's group. And that was where I met Spencer Davis, too. But my own Jamaican connection goes back to Digbeth Hall in 1961, when I jammed there with Rico, the trombonist who had worked with the Skatalites and all the other great early Jamaican acts. I was just 13 but I used to go there and play with Owen Grey, Tony Washington, and Wilfred "Jackie" Edwards. Jackie, you'll recall, wrote the Spencer Davis Group's first number 1 hit in England, "Keep on Running", and a followup, "Somebody Help Me". I wrote "When I Come Home" with him for the group."
- Steve Winwood, Winwood.com
The Spencer Davis Group perform in Finland in 1967 | Super Session with Hardin & York at the 1970 Essener Pop & Blues Festival in Germany
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While the band were preparing to undertake recording sessions for their fifth studio album, 'Funky' (1969), York exited with Hardin to form the duo Hardin & York. Into the band came bassist Dee Murray and drummer Nigel Olsson (Plastic Penny) who'd soon become Elton John's trusted rhythm section.
Steve Winwood loved his time playing with Pete York who could lay down beats with the best of them. York and Winwood were also members of Eric Clapton's Powerhouse in the mid-1960s, with harmonica player Paul Jones (Manfred Mann) and bassist Jack Bruce (Cream). York's played with a wide range of musical artists over the years and he's hosted top drummers in the elite 'Superdrumming' series. "Spencer always says he came up with the band name. But, as Muff and I remember it, we were sitting around one afternoon trying to think of something, coming up with things like the Blatant Aardvaarks, the Kneetremblers, the What, Why and Wherefore. None of them sounded right so eventually Muff just said: “Let’s call it the Spencer Davis Group.” Spencer had brought us all together and his name sounded quite hip, so we all agreed and zoomed off to the pub.
After Running, we had another hit with a Jackie Edwards track, Somebody Help Me. Although his stuff had a strong West Indian feel, it fitted perfectly on top of our straightahead R&B grooves. As for the young Steve Winwood, he was a joy to play with. He had a great feel for jazz, the music I really loved, and I looked forward to every afternoon jam session with him. We drifted apart when he became involved with the guys who became Traffic. The decision to break up our happy combination was, to my mind at least, ridiculous and irresponsible – because for those two years in the mid-60s, the Spencer Davis Group were among the best of the British beat revolution ..."
- Pete York, The Guardian
'On The Green Light'
'Alice In Transit Land'
'After Tea'
'And The Gods Came Down'
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Post by petrolino on Jun 12, 2020 22:23:05 GMT
English Chimera : The Nucleus
I think all the English bands I've posted about separately so far, were officially formed (and named) between 1958 and 1964. A seismic shift occurred in 1965 that saw a more progressive type of band emerge. This caused the best of the beat pop bands to up their game considerably, while others fell to the wayside. Psychedelic rock became the quickening pulse of the underground, birthing several new rock 'n' roll subgenres in the process, while baroque pop positively flourished within the nation's cultivated songwriting houses.
The Nice perform 'Hang On To A Dream' in Norway in 1970
Here's some electrifying odds and sods from the top drawer of English psychedelica ...
Baker's Dozen
'Pictures Of Matchstick Men' - Status Quo
'To Samuel A Son' - The Gods
'Sitting In My Tree' - The Idle Race
'(Here We Go Round) The Lemon Tree' - The Move
'Wake Up Cherylina' - The Smoke
'The Girls Are Naked' - The Creation
'Jesus Smith (The Other Side Of)' - Skip Bifferty
'When The Alarm Clock Rings' - Blossom Toes
'Another Game' - Grapefruit
'Dive Into Yesterday' - Kaleidoscope
'Laura's Garden' - Orange Bicycle
'Gone, Gone, Gone' - Picadilly Line
'My White Bicycle' - Tomorrow
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Post by petrolino on Jun 20, 2020 16:07:22 GMT
Pink Droids
Pink Floyd are psychedelic pioneers who changed the face of English pop music in the mid-1960s. Formed in 1965, they became one of the house bands at the UFO Club when it was launched the following year, with Soft Machine also holding down a residency. This influential underground venue was located in the basement of 31 Tottenham Court Road, under the Gala Berkeley Cinema, and became the essential haunt for night trippers.
"By 1963, author Aldous Huxey, actor Cary Grant, musician George Clinton of Parliament-Funkadelic, author Anais Nin, 'TIME' magazine editor Henry Booth-Luce, Stanley Kubrick and John Coltrane had all tried LSD. Even, some say, American President John F. Kennedy. Michael Hollingshead dosed jazz musicians Thelonious Monk and Charles Mingus. The effect of LSD on jazz created a sudden surge of extreme free jazz, as radical a shift as bebop had been from swing. Before psychedelia exploded sonic boundaries, free jazz was a minor-scale lysergic eruption.
The use of LSD by the avant-garde paralleled the great change in the arts. The bold expansiveness of pop art, followed by op art and kinetic art, superseded the explosive density of abstract expressionism. The arts turned inside out, focused on action over production. Happenings and performance art took a leaf from 1920s Dadaism and interpreted 'art' as an all-encompassing experience where there were no observers, only participants.
A visual, auditory and tactile drug, with unique synaesthesia, LSD cataylsed music and the visual arts. Film followed fitfully, though literature remained ill suited, with singularly dire poetry ensuing. A radical sythesis of typography, graphics, and poetry surfaced in the print media.
Hollingshead, urged by Timothy Leary to 'turn on' British youth, returned to London in September. The ever-enterprising Hollingshead set up his World Psychedelic Centre in Kinghtsbridge, arranging sessions with a dozen or so people to drop acid, reading from the Tibetan Book of the Dead and listening to raga, bossa nova and Alexander Scriabin.
Such a visual drug demanded images to ponder, so Hollingshead outfitted a slide projector to project Tantric yantras, Vedic gods, and Tibetan mandalas onto the ceiling. Energy spilled from sessions, with young Chelsea aristocrats Julian and Victoria Ormsby-Gore lounged on Asian pillows next to writer Alex Trocchi, singer Julie Felix, director Romand Polanski and his doomed wife Sharon Tate. William Burroughs and Ian Sommerville talked with painter Sir Roland Penrose, or Donovan and Paul McCartney. All were dosed with LSD or exposed to the literature and philosophy surrounding acid."
- Julian Palacios, 'Syd Barrett & Pink Floyd : Dark Globe'
"The music I first listened to that made me decide that I wanted to be a musician was back in the days of Coltrane, Miles Davis and Eric Dolphy. If you like, they are my heroes, funnily enough, and not keyboard players."
- Richard Wright speaking with Karl Dallas, article published November 4, 1978
Cary Grant in 'Singapore Sue' (1932) / Interview with Paul McCartney broadcast on June 19, 1967
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In their earliest incarnation, Pink Floyd's music was lyrically complex (Syd Barrett was a pure psychedelic poet) and musically adventurous (multi-instrumentalist Richard Wright was a psychedelic jazz improviser of extraordinary range), with an adaptable rhythm section (conceptual bassist Roger Waters & mechanical drummer Nick Mason) to underpin their flavourful flights of fancy. Barrett's departure led to Pink Floyd becoming a more progressive rock 'n' roll unit, with David Gilmour's emotive guitar pyrotechnics moving to the forefront.
"The Pink Floyd live show has set a standard for rock shows. They turned live shows into events. In the late 1960’s when most rock bands were happy to stand on stage and let the music speak, Pink Floyd also wanted to make a visual impact.
As well as being one of the first acts to play at a free concert in Hyde Park in London which set a precedence for years to come, and also being the first band to use quadraphonic sound, they were one of the first bands to have a dedicated light show traveling from gig to gig with them. Psychedelic lights were projected onto a backdrop while the band played. Mike Leonard, worked with Pink Floyd during this time. He was also the band’s live in landlord and friend.
In 1967, Pink Floyd appeared on BBC’s The Look of The Week TV show, showing off their lighting show to a television audience for the first time. What is also fascinating now is that Mike Leonard and the band appeared on Tomorrow’s World, while Leonard showed off his light projector, the band provided improvised music. This is one of Pink Floyd’s first truly multimedia projects. As the band developed, they strived for all round audio visual perfection. Props, Pyrotechnics and inflatables all became common place in a Pink Floyd Live show."
- Vanessa Monaghan, 'Pink Floyd - Multimedia Pioneers'
"I remember around Dark Side of the Moon, when we had a couple of risers with lights on it built by Arthur Max, who was a lighting guy we stole from Bill Graham and the Fillmore East. And he sort of invented the circular screen we used. I thought, “How can we fill these spaces with theater?” That’s when I started working with people who made inflatables and thinking more about projecting images and firing fireworks that turn into parachuting sheep into the air and flying planes, all that crap. [Pauses] It’s not crap, actually. It’s perfectly reasonable.
To have a Stuka [plane] coming out of the audience, like I did in The Wall, even again a few years ago, it’s actually a perfectly legitimate theatrical device. I remember when we did The Wall [in 1979] being criticized by Bono. U2 were a very young band, and they’re going [affects Irish accent], “Oh, we can’t stand all that theatrical nonsense that Pink Floyd do. We just play our music and the songs unto themselves and blah, blah, blah.” Oh really? All they did for the rest of their f*cking career was copy what I’d been doing and continue to do. So good luck to them, but what a load of bullshit. If you lead them, people will follow.
I remember [Mick] Jagger coming to the Nassau Coliseum gigs in late 1979 and seeing The Wall. He came backstage, trying to find out how he could get that. “I want that.” Somebody pointed to [illustrator] Gerald Scarfe, who was sitting on the sofa chatting with Nick Mason and said, “He’s the one you should see.” And Jagger didn’t see. He thought it was Nick. So he went up to Nick and said [in a Jagger impression], “I gather you’ve done all the visuals and all that.” And Nick, of course being Nick, said, “Well, yes. I did. I do that in my spare time when I’m not practicing my drumming.” And Jagger sat and talked to him, wasted half an hour of his life thinking that. Bless Nick. How cool.
And not that I’ve got anything against Mick. Well, I haven’t. Well, not a lot. He’s just a bit old for me."
- Roger Waters, Rolling Stone
Pink Floyd perform in France in 1968
In 1970, the band embarked upon a series of concerts that came to be known as 'The Weird Shows', which included celebrated performances at Fairfield Halls in Croydon and the Paris Theatre in London. The band weaved compositions written for Barbet Schroeder's experimental film 'More' (1969) and Michelangelo Antonioni's counterculture study 'Zabriskie Point' (1970) with spacebound songs from their exisiting repertoire, including 'A Saucerful Of Secrets', 'Astronomy Domine' and 'Set The Controls For The Heart Of The Sun', to create a transitional template for British space rock to relaunch itself as a new decade commenced.
Experimental filmmakers from Spaniard Jesus Franco (an accomplished jazz musician himself, who tried to commision a score from the band) and Frenchman Jean Rollin (who commissioned a score from Acanthus that included a nod to Pink Floyd), to Italian friends and collaborators Lucio Fulci and Umberto Lenzi, found themselves utterly enthralled by the cinematic potential of Pink Floyd's music.
"Pink Floyd may be the only rock band that can credibly be compared to both the Beatles and Spinal Tap. Its mid-’70s sonic triumphs — including The Dark Side of the Moon and Wish You Were Here — are both aural delights and meaningful works of art whose message is conveyed through sound. The members of the band — Roger Waters, David Gilmour, Nick Mason, and Richard Wright — approached their work seriously and blew minds in the process.
And it’s possible this perennially popular band has had its popularity underestimated. Over the years, I’ve become extremely impressed with an amateur music-industry analyst who lives in France, Guillaume Vieira. He obsessively collects worldwide sales data. Not sales claims; sales data. You can read his 51 pages of Pink Floyd sales data. The upshot: Pink Floyd has sold more albums worldwide than the Beatles. Floyd recorded over a longer period, of course, but both groups have released about the same number of albums, and had about the same span of decades to sell their work to new generations — and in new configurations.
And yet … the band’s famous works were recorded over an extremely short period, in a recording career that has now stretched nearly to five decades. Much of the rest of it was filled by wildly veering musical approaches, big misfires, aesthetic excesses, pratfalls, and wide-ranging acts of buffoonery you wouldn’t find surprising in a This Is Spinal Tap outtake reel."
- Bill Wyman, Vulture
"After Bob Dylan we all thought we could change the world with pop music, make the world a better place. And what has become of that? Not very much. The human nature is a very stubborn thing. If something has to change, for example in getting rid of racist prejudices, it takes at least three generations."
- David Gilmour, Neptune Pink Floyd
'See Emily Play'
'Take Up Thy Stethoscope And Walk'
'Remember A Day'
'Sysyphus'
'Alan's Psychedelic Breakfast'
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Post by petrolino on Jun 20, 2020 17:27:22 GMT
Caravandegraff Machine
Soft Machine took their name from a novel by William Burroughs published in 1961. Formed in 1966, they secured a residency at the UFO Club, where Pink Floyd were also a resident house band. Their roots were in the Canterbury Scene, where guitarist Kevin Ayers, bassist Hugh Hopper (The Daevid Allen Trio) and drummer Robert Wyatt (Matching Mole) played together in the Wilde Flowers, a group that also featured guitarist Pye Hastings (Caravan), guitarist Richard Sinclair (Caravan), keyboardist Dave Sinclair (Caravan) and drummer Richard Coughlan (Caravan) at various stages of their evolution. Wilde Flowers' other guitarist, Brian Hopper, contributed saxophone parts to Soft Machine's second album.
'Feelin' Reelin' Squeelin'
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Kevin Ayers and Robert Wyatt co-founded Soft Machine with guitarist Daevid Allen (Gong) and organ player Mike Ratledge, with Hugh Hopper also contributing to their debut album. The mercurial Ayers departed soon afterwards, releasing his first solo album in 1969.
'Why Are We Sleeping'
'Out Of Tunes'
'Out-Bloody-Rageous'
Caravan were co-founded in 1968 by David Sinclair and Richard Sinclair who were cousins, Pye Hastings and Richard Coughlan. The band originally worked in Whitstable in Kent, later relocating to London to record albums for Decca Records (they began under the Verve imprint in the United States of America).
'Ride'
'And I Wish I Were Stoned / Don't Worry'
'Winter Wine'
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Post by petrolino on Jun 20, 2020 18:59:38 GMT
Whipped Cream
“Cream was a shambling circus of diverse personalities who happened to find that catalyst together. Any one of us could have played unaccompanied for a good length of time. So you put the three of us together in front of an audience willing to dig it limitlessly, we could have gone on forever… And we did… just going for the moon every time we played.”
- Eric Clapton
'I Feel Free'
"I think the first time I met Pete Brown, he was living in a cupboard in North London. Yeah, he was kind of a Beat poet. There was this poetry and jazz movement going on at the time in the very early Sixties. And he was involved in that and I was vaguely involved in that – poetry and jazz. And we just started working together when Cream happened. We had the idea of writing some songs with him, so he came up with the bulk of the work of Cream, the songs of Cream."
- Jack Bruce
'SWLABR'
"At the start, Cream was mine. I took a drop in salary to start Cream, whereas Jack and Eric took a step up. Cream was always my baby.
I was very bitter after the US tour with Blind Faith. You know, I was so shattered I had to go away for two months’ rest. When I came back I had been led to expect that we’d tour Britain with Delaney and Bonnie second on the bill – which is where they belong. I’m afraid I have no respect for a band that has to resort to good old rock’n’roll to get an audience interested. Anyway, instead of that, I came back to find that Eric had got into the D&B thing and there was no tour and no Blind Faith."
- Ginger Baker
'White Room'
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Post by petrolino on Jun 20, 2020 20:30:11 GMT
Crosstown Traffic
The birth of Traffic followed a long gestation period in which the core members of the group found cover in tall grass. Guitarist Dave Mason and drummer Jim Capaldi were members of the Hellions. Jackie DeShannon went to see the Hellions in concert in London and was so impressed she offered them her song 'Daydreaming Of You', which they recorded and released as a single produced by Kim Fowley. Multi-instrumentalist Steve Winwood was a member of the Spencer Davis Group, a Birmingham band who'd shared local bills and hotel landings with the Hellions who were from nearby Worcestershire. Multi-instrumentalist Chris Wood was from Birmingham and had played with Christine Perfect (Fleetwood Mac) in Shades Of Blue and Mike Kellie (Spooky Tooth) in Locomotive (Kellie plays drums on Traffic's song 'Rainmaker').
"'Dear Mr. Fantasy' (Mr. Fantasy, 1967), the first true flowering of Traffic’s vast potential offers an index of possibilities, from blues and soul to prog and psychedelia. Steve Winwood’s vocal lines, lower in the mix, exude a certain trippiness, before a digressive guitar solo ushers in Jim Capaldi’s pounding drums and a great biker riff. Hendrix, The Grateful Dead and CSNY recorded their own versions later."
- Rob Hughes, Louder
'Dear Mr. Fantasy'
As this enigmatic ensemble evolved, their numbers grew considerably, with bassist Ric Grech (Family), bassist Rosko Gee (Go), percussionist Rebop Kwaku Baah (Can) and drummer Jim Gordon (Derek And The Dominos) augmenting an undulating line-up, as well as multiple members of the Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section (bassist David Hood, drummer Roger Hawkins, keyboardist Barry Beckett, clarinetist Jimmy Johnson). Steve Winwood and Ric Grech also performed together in Blind Faith with Eric Clapton (Cream) and Ginger Baker (Cream).
"For all of the buzz surrounding frontman Steve Winwood when he helped form Traffic in 1967, the band's not-so-secret weapon was its genre-jumping music. Like many of its contemporaries, the quartet played around with a variety of sounds on its albums: pop, rock, jazz, psychedelic, R&B, folk, blues, prog and even a form of world music. But few groups brought these disparate sounds together as warmly and as fully as Traffic, a troubled group that broke up after their first two albums, reunited, broke up again and took a 20-year break before releasing 1994's 'Far From Home.'"
- Michael Gallucci, Ultimate Classic Rock
'Paper Sun' / 'Shanghai Noodle Factory'
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Traffic were instrumental in bringing the key British pop and rock scenes of 1967 together and melding aspects of these different musical styles into a cohesive whole. Their fluid, individual playing styles and free-flowing musical interplay combined to merge elements of psychedelic pop, heavy rock, hard rhythm & blues, soft soul, acid folk, free jazz and (what's come to be known as) world music, the band whipping up a potent medicinal concoction they administered intravenously via progressive melodies and layered studio dynamics.
This ability to bring so many different styles together, in an instinctive manner, while retaining elements of rural folk music and drawing directly from the traditional English songbook, have contributed to earning Steve Winwood a permanent seat at the table of annual English folk celebration, the Cropredy Festival.
"In his 2007 memoir, Eric Clapton vividly recalls hearing Steve Winwood for the first time. The guitarist was in the early flush of his career playing in The Yardbirds when he encountered the Spencer Davis Group in clubland in 1963. Winwood, SDG’s precocious singer/organist, may have been just 15 but, Clapton notes: “If you closed your eyes you would swear it was Ray Charles. Musically he was like an old man in a boy’s skin.”
Bob Dylan was gripped by a Spencer Davis Group gig three years later, midway through his UK tour. Afterwards, as seen on the Eat The Document film, an open-mouthed Dylan asks of Davis: “How’d he learn to sing like that?” To which Davis, appearing lost for an answer, merely replies: “Well, since the day we found him.”
Steve Winwood always seemed fully formed from the start. He was still in his teens when he quit the Spencer Davis Group and formed Traffic in 1967, leaving behind a trail of huge-selling hits, among them Keep On Running, Gimme Some Lovin’ and the somewhat ironically titled I’m A Man.
At 21 he was in Blind Faith, the band that came to embody the late-60s ideal of the mercurial supergroup. Winwood was so much in demand as a musical ally – helping out Jimi Hendrix, Lou Reed, George Harrison, Leon Russell, Muddy Waters, Joe Cocker and Howlin’ Wolf, to name but a few – that he was an industry veteran by the time he finally got around to a solo career in the latter half of the 70s. “I came into music from a slightly different direction than some of my contemporaries,” he tells Classic Rock today. “I started off playing with my dad, learning thirties and forties dance music and American classics, which wasn’t particularly easy stuff. And I was a chorister in the High Anglican church. That music got under my skin somehow. Then along came skiffle and early rock’n’roll and Buddy Holly. And later on came Ray Charles, who introduced me to this crossover from bebop and jazz into rock and R&B. I was so engrossed with learning all these different kinds of music, and trying to play them all, that being on stage was just part of it. It didn’t occur to me that there was anything I should shy away from.”
If there’s one prime directive in all of Winwood’s work, it’s an inclusive approach to music making; there’s very little that’s off limits to his imagination. “With Traffic we made a conscious decision that we would try to incorporate a lot more elements – folk, jazz, ethnic music and even bits of classical music and different forms,” he explains. “I’d probably say that I’ve been trying to do that ever since.”
- Rob Hughes, Louder
'Heaven Is In Your Mind'
'No Time To Live'
'Sittin' Here Thinkin' Of My Love'
'Light Up Or Leave Me Alone'
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Post by petrolino on Jun 20, 2020 22:13:11 GMT
Middle-Earth Trex
Marc Bolan played guitar in the band John's Children who recorded a single in 1967 called 'Desdemona' that aroused some controversy at the time of its release. He left John's Children and formed Tyrannosaurus Rex with multi-instrumentalist Steve Peregrin Took (Shagrat), the group that morphed into T-Rex at the turn of the decade (having added multi-instrumentalist Mickey Finn to the line-up following Peregrin Took's departure). In their folk days, the band epitomised the sounds of childrens' fantasy stories, fashioning delicate pieces of music swimming in popular English whimsy.
"Before T. Rex assaulted the world with their glam rock party in the early '70s, there was the folk duo Tyrannosaurus Rex. Although both bands were fronted by flamboyant singer/guitarist/songwriter Marc Bolan, the earlier outfit was the polar opposite of the style of music that would later become synonymous with Bolan. Tyrannosaurus Rex originally formed in September of 1967 as a duo after Bolan split from his previous band, John's Children. Joining Bolan in the band was percussionist/bongo player Steve Peregrin Took, a gentleman that Bolan named after a character in The Lord of the Rings novel series. Bolan was so infatuated with Rings that most of the subject matter in Tyrannosaurus Rex songs came directly from the books as well.
The same month that the duo began, a fledgling producer by the name of Tony Visconti caught a show of their's at the UFO club in England, signing them right away to a subsidiary of EMI Records (in the U.S., Tyrannosaurus Rex's albums would issued via A&M) and producing their subsequent albums. The band enjoyed success straight away, with their debut single, "Debora," hitting the U.K. Top 40 as their debut full-length, My People Were Fair & Had Sky In Their Hair...But Now They're Content to Wear Stars on their Brows, hit number 15 on the U.K. charts in July of 1968."
- Greg Prato, AllMusic
'Chateau In Virginia Waters'
I believe the majority of Tyrannosaurus Rex / T-Rex's studio albums were produced by Tony Visconti. Some of David Bowie's albums were produced by Visconti. Gus Dudgeon, who produced ten of Elton John's albums released between 1970 and 1976, also produced Bowie's iconic single 'Space Oddity' in its elaborately arranged and fully orchestrated version, a track laid down in June 1969 (the original studio take is surprisingly flat in comparison). This was seven months before Dudgeon entered a studio with John to record 'Take Me To The Pilot', in January 1970.
If you take two early tracks by David Bowie and Elton John with a religious angle, one outwardly psychedelic (Bowie), the other with psychedelic instrumental trimmings (John), I think you can hear a bit of Marc Bolan shining through ... though just a tiny bit as these two independent, strong-willed, singular artists were very much their own men. I've read that Bowie supported Tyrannosaurus Rex on tour in 1969 and performed as a mime, but I don't know if this is true.
"They keep recycling all of us. Roxy, me, Gary Glitter, Marc Bolan. I guess those four were the big ones from England, the champions of the early seventies and all that. But it really seems to have permeated every area of rock now - something that one of us did is somewhere in all modern music. Which is great. I think that's fabulous."
- David Bowie
"I didn't play any instruments. I had no concept of a bridge or a chorus. I wrote some sort of nonsensical psychedelic lyrics that were plagiarized from a conglomerate of things in vogue, and actually got a reply. So I went to London and this guy said, "I've got this kid. He wants to write songs, but he doesn't write lyrics. He's auditioned for us, and everyone said no. Maybe you two guys should hook up." That's how it is. Mick Jagger meets Keith Richards at a train station and says something like, "What's that album? Can I hear it?" It's kismet. Elton had answered the same ad. I sat very properly in the control room. Elton walked in and said, "Are you the guy who writes the lyrics?" I said, "That would be me." He said, "Let's go have a cup of coffee." That was it."
- Bernie Taupin
David Bowie - 'Saviour Machine' | 'Where To Now St. Peter?' - Elton John
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T-Rex developed into a powerful rock 'n' roll attraction in the 1970s though they continued to embellish their sound though the addition of new instruments. Drummer Ringo Starr (The Beatles) directed the band in the musical semi-documentary 'Born To Boogie' (1972) which mixes raw concert footage (some reels shot by Marc Bolan) with staged sequences.
"I think I am a child. Everything blows my mind."
- Marc Bolan
'Conesuala'
'Warlord Of The Royal Crocodiles'
'Woodland Bop'
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Post by cypher on Jun 21, 2020 13:30:24 GMT
Oriental Boo - Boo & The Boo Boos
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Post by petrolino on Jun 22, 2020 14:40:31 GMT
Harum Scarum
Procol Harum emerged from the ashes of the Paramounts, a school-aged beat group based in Southend-On-Sea in Essex. Members included guitarists Chris Copping and Robin Trower, pianist Gary Brooker and drummer B.J. Wilson. The Paramounts released a cover version of 'Poison Ivy' produced by Ron Richards who encouraged the band to start writing their own material on the basis they could earn more money. They began this process by writing the song 'It Won't Be Long'. Subsequent singles failed to impact upon the charts but the recording process taught them a lot, allowing them to mature as studio musicians while completing their secondary education.
"The Paramounts had disbanded as a group, and I went off and met Keith Reid and we started writing songs together. And that’s how Procol Harum got started. I had become a new person, really. I’d never written any songs in The Paramounts apart from a couple of B-sides. When we needed a new guitarist and drummer I got in touch with Robin and BJ and put their names on the audition list. But I’m not sure anyone else turned up."
- Gary Brooker, Louder
Procol Harum was started by Gary Brooker when he was 21 years of age. They made a massive splash with their first single released in 1967, the landmark recording 'A Whiter Shade Of Pale', which became one of the anthems of the anti-authoritarian social movement known as the Summer of Love. Former Paramounts Robin Trower and B.J. Wilson joined up with ex-bandmate Brooker to record the band's follow-up single 'Homburg'. Chris Copping returned to the fold in 1970 when the Harum recorded their fourth studio album, bringing the original Paramounts full circle. The band also composed music for experimental filmmakers Jane Arden and Jack Bond.
"Fifty years ago this spring, a then unknown British rock group called Procol Harum released its very first single, “A Whiter Shade Of Pale.” The distinctive recording went to No. 1 in the United Kingdom and hit the top 10 in the United States, casting the mold somewhat for “progressive rock” on its way to becoming one of the enduring classics of the 1960s and of the entire rock era — the most-played song ever in public in the U.K.; a staple of classic-rock radio, and one of only a few dozen singles to sell over 10 million copies worldwide.
The song’s most innovative feature is its unique pairing of musical source material from Baroque composer Johann Sebastian Bach and from soul singer Percy Sledge’s hit, “When A Man Loves A Woman.” The music was originally credited to bandleader Gary Brooker, although decades later, keyboardist Matthew Fisher would be added officially as a co-composer for his signature organ solo. The trippy lyrics — “We skipped the light fandango… .“Her face, at first just ghostly, turned a whiter shade of pale” — were the product of the band’s co-founder and poet-in-residence, Keith Reid, one of only a handful of nonperforming members of rock bands.
Both Reid and Brooker were born in heavily Jewish East London, Brooker in Hackney and Reid in Mile End Road. Like many residents of the heavily bombed-out area, Brooker’s family moved out to the suburbs. But Reid’s family stayed put — perhaps as immigrants they were most comfortable living among their own people.
Reid’s father, Irwin Reid, a Viennese lawyer fluent in a half-dozen languages, was one of over 6,000 Jews arrested in Vienna during Kristallnacht on November 9 and 10, 1938. Like most Viennese Jews, he was transported to Dachau. He was, however, released several months later after promising to leave the country; with his younger brother, he promptly immigrated to England, leaving behind his parents, whom he would never see or hear from again and whose fate remains a mystery. Keith Reid’s mother was born in England, to Polish-Jewish parents. While she raised Keith and his older brother, Michael, in an observant home, Keith rebelled against the traditional rite of passage, once telling an interviewer that having had his fill of Holocaust stories and having suffered anti-Semitism in primary school, a bar mitzvah was out of the question. “The last thing you wanted to do as a kid was to stick out, but I just stuck out,” Reid told “Stars of David” author Scott Bernarde. Judaism, he added, “only has negative associations for me. It goes back to my dad and what happened to him and the events of those times.”
- Seth Rogovoy, 'The Secret Jewish History Of Procol Harum'
'Salad Days (Are Here Again)'
'Magdalene (My Regal Zonophone)'
'Crucifiction Lane'
'The Dead Man's Dream'
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Post by petrolino on Jun 22, 2020 16:15:32 GMT
Deviant Behaviour
The Social Deviants were formed by Mick Farren in 1967 as an underground musical collective. They shortened their name to the Deviants and started cutting records with the backing of a wealthy benefactor, only to be picked up by Decca Records for distribution. Their abrasive lyrical content and drug-fuelled manifesto prevented them from getting serious airplay but they maintained a loyal following.
"Sure the underground was elitist: we were an elite. We were the cutting edge of ongoing bohemianism at that point."
- Mick Farren, 'Days In The Life'
The Deviants perform in England in 1969 | Pink Fairies perform in France in 1973
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The Deviants became Pink Fairies in 1970, having ousted Mick Farren from his own band (Farren would go on to become a successful author). Musicians caught within the Deviants & the Fairies' spiralling orbits included Trevor Burton (The Move), Dick Heckstall-Smith (The Graham Bond Organisation), Steve Peregrin Took (Tyrannosaurus Rex), John 'Twink' Alder (The Pretty Things) and Larry Wallis (Motorhead).
The Deviants crossed paths frequently with Hawkwind whose self-titled debut album was produced by the band with Dick Taylor (The Pretty Things). Pink Fairies wrote the song 'The Pigs Of Uranus' with American underground comix writer Gilbert Shelton.
"Mick Farren, the legendary counterculture rabble-rouser, rocker, music journalist, TV columnist, poet, sci-fi novelist, etc., etc. ... could drink. A lot. And he could drink it very, very quickly. Out of, I guess respect, or at the very least wanting to synch up our respectives buzzes, whenever Mick was on the other end of the phone line suggesting a “refreshing beverage or two” — 20 refreshing beverages was far more likely — I would always say yes, knowing full well that the next day wasn’t gonna be pretty. Mick was good company and as you might expect, quite the barstool raconteur. He and I got along great. Our political leanings were very similar. Mick had no qualms about stating his belief that certain people could be improved with a bullet and I don’t disagree. His aggressive polemic in the NME and Trouser Press had a huge influence on me during my formative years. I never got tired of hearing his stories and I was a good audience for him. I really adored Mick. He was my kinda guy.
We’d almost always meet at the Farmer’s Market on Fairfax — within walking distance for Mick, who did not drive thank god — smoke a joint in the parking lot and then head for the bar in the middle of the older section of the market. In my entire life I have never seen anyone neck a pint faster than Mick Farren. It was impressive. I never attempted to seriously keep up with him. That would have been foolhardy, if not simply impossible and anyway I really wasn’t interested in achieving real-time liver damage. If on average we’d meet and hang out for around three hours, Mick would drink about eight beers every 60 minutes. And he’d have to take a piss constantly. Luckily (?) my own bladder is ill-equipped for heavy drinking, so we’d carry on conversing at the urinals and walking back and forth from the men’s room. That would happen at least three times an hour. Anyone reading this now who’s ever met Mick for a drink knows this drill well."
- Richard Metzger, Dangerous Minds
'I'm Coming Home'
'Fire In The City'
'Death Of A Dream Machine'
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Post by petrolino on Jun 22, 2020 20:39:48 GMT
English Chimera : The Endgame
'Octopus' - Syd Barrett
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Thoughts
I've been posting about English bands formed between 1965 and 1967. Some of the rock 'n' roll subgenres that took hold in 1968 were inextricably linked to what had come before and fully enmeshed within the psychedelic cycle. I think acid folk, progressive rock and heavy metal were musical subgenres firmly rooted in psychedelic fusions and they bled into eachother with deep textures and vivid colours.
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High Load
Deep Purple perform in Belgium in 1969
Led Zeppelin perform in Denmark in 1969
Black Sabbath perform in France in 1970
Atomic Rooster perform in Germany in 1971
'Man We Was Lonely' - Paul McCartney
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Pilgrim's Progess
Yes perform in Germany in 1969
King Crimson perform in Germany in 1973
'Better Days' - Graham Nash
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Rural Utopia
Pentangle perform in Norway in 1968
Fairport Convention perform in France in 1968
The Strawbs perform at a secret location, possibly in 1969, or possibly in 1970
Third Ear Band perform in France in 1970
Comus perform in England in 2008
'Baby Get Your Head Screwed On' - Cat Stevens
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Post by cypher on Jun 28, 2020 13:12:50 GMT
The Factory - Path Through The Forest
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Post by petrolino on Jul 3, 2020 22:04:35 GMT
Welsh Wizardry : Clouded Valleys Of The Mushroom Foragers
'High In The Sky' - Amen Corner
'Ghost Town' - Meic Stevens
'Erotica' - Man
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Post by petrolino on Jul 3, 2020 22:42:55 GMT
Scottish Seasonals : Forbidden Foothills Of The Psilocybin Clan
"Allow us to introduce the Kelburn Castle, a 13th century building located 35 miles outside Glasgow. As you may notice, it has quite the unusual facade. The royal housing unit was revamped by Brazilian street artists in 2007, when the Earl of Glasgow, Patrick Boyle, learned he had to remove a cement render that had been added to the building in the 1950s. At the request of his son, he resolved to paint the render prior to its removal. He enlisted artists Nina Pandolfo, Nunca and Os Gêmeos to cover the castle in cartoonish and chromatic designs that could make many a head spin.
It was an unprecedented artistic move that fused the ephemeral, urban culture of street art with the traditional, permanent and rural character of the castle, creating a timeless paradox of visual beauty. "It is a project of contrasts and collaboration that bridges between cultures, rural and urban realms and unites two proud and very different cultures," explains the Kelburn Estate."
- Priscilla Frank, Huffington Post
'Get Thy Bearings' - Donovan
'Job's Tears' - The Incredible String Band
'Can You Help Me' - Marmalade
"A trippy psychedelic club experience is coming to Glasgow this summer. The event will harness visual technology and electronic music to create an alternative reality which assaults the senses as clubbers go on a "mind-bending" journey. There will be a host of DJs, live performers and surreal installations. Clubbers can also look forward to UV face and bodypainting to further immerse themselves in the dreamlike adventure.
Organisers behind the Psychedelic Funhouse said: "Once inside, you can explore a range of mind-bending areas and sensory installations occupied by our character actors. Drink, dance and explore the story."
- Christina O'Neill, Glasgow Live
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Post by cypher on Jul 4, 2020 19:46:05 GMT
Medicine Head - Rising Sun
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Post by petrolino on Jul 4, 2020 22:04:23 GMT
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Post by petrolino on Jul 4, 2020 22:19:34 GMT
Northern Souls & Irish Druids : Votive Wheels Of Celtic Thunder
 'Square Room' - Them
'The Way Young Lovers Do' - Van Morrison
'Cocaine' - Andwella's Dream
'Captive In The Sun' - Eire Apparent
'The Mutant' - Trader Horne
'Silversong' - Mellow Candle
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Post by cypher on Jul 5, 2020 2:29:01 GMT
Them - Black Widow Spider
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Post by cypher on Jul 9, 2020 13:32:27 GMT
Timebox - Baked Jam Roll In Your Eye
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Post by petrolino on Jul 12, 2020 0:14:03 GMT
Timebox - Baked Jam Roll In Your Eye Wow, what a great tune. I thought it would be a novelty tune due to the title but it's really strong on melody, harmony, arrangement, and catchy too.
Just reading up now on Timebox on Wikipedia. Thanks. |
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