If you’ve checked out the ‘Groovy Cats’ tab on this site, you may have already tried out the recommendations thereon. Each one, naturally, is a winner, else they wouldn’t be listed at this altar to outstanding quality.
Trip Inside This House, is one such site. A cornucopia of psychedelic goodness, taking its name from The 13th Floor Elevators track ‘Slip Inside This House’ and overseen by the encyclopaedic mind gone high that is valis Hertel. A fairly regular series on the Trip Inside This House site is Ten Questions, where valis grills someone currently active on the psych music scene (playing, writing, bloody great fan), so the rest of us can discover what makes these polychromatic peoples tick.
Being the crusading force of originality that HFoS is, we decided to nick this idea wholesale and turn the technicolour tables on the man who poses the questions, valis himself.
The man knows his stuff and isn’t afraid to wax lyrical on all things mind-expandingly musical. One of the many thoroughly interesting, kaleidoscopic troubadours writing on the genre today.
Those adverse to infectious enthusiasm and the desire to share it with others need not apply.
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feature, psychedelic rock, psychedelic spotlight
In an alternate universe, Chris Squire and Jon Anderson never met, and Yes never formed following the collapse of psychedelic band, Mabel Greer’s Toyshop. Filling the space-prog vacuum left in their non-existent wake was Flash, who went on to rule the world during the seventies before turning a bit shit in the eighties.
Of course, that’s an alternate universe and the one you’re reading this in already had Yes ready and willing to do all of the above. At the same time, we also had Flash.
Flash was formed when Peter Banks, the original Yes guitarist, left the band under a cloud following their second album, Time and a Word. He teamed up with three likeminded spirits and even hauled in Yes’s pre-Wakeman keyboard-noodler, Tony Kaye, to guest on their 1972 self-titled debut, Flash. The result is Yes, in all but name.
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album reviews, prog rock
Jethro Tull are one of the few groups to have thus far recorded at least one studio album in each decade since the sixties. Even in the realms of prog rock, where numerous bands have made the oft embarrassing mistake of outstaying their welcome, that’s quite an achievement.
But even if Jethro Tull stretch it out to the sixth decade, releasing their 5000th or so studio album, sorting through what has gone before can be like pogoing through a minefield of earache. Pretty much anything studio-bound beyond 1978’s Heavy Horses should be approached with the utmost of caution, and the albums that came to light during that darkest decade of them all, the 1980s, can probably be dismissed outright, dependent upon the individual listener’s pain threshold.
But for a time, namely the ten years following 1968’s debut, This Was, Jethro Tull were nigh on untouchable, laying low all that dared to stand before them.
So with no further ado, here’s five must-hears from the considerable Tull canon:
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album reviews, feature, prog rock
Here’s a rarity for you.
‘Losing You’ is a psychedelic-edged track from little known rock act Blue Beard, who are so arcane, in fact, that their album never got beyond test pressings.
It’s taken from the recently released compilation Looking Towards the Sky, which collects together the psychedelic, prog and folk rock output of the UK’s indie label, Ember Records, between 1969 and 1972. Needless to say it’s obscurity heaven with acts so deep underground, you’ll need Steve Austin implants to hear them.
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news, psychedelic rock
How about a wee drop of finest acid-folk from Pentangle, the folk-rock/jazz-folk pioneers formed by legends of the scene, Bert Jansch and John Renbourn?
Thankfully, ‘House Carpenter’ is a jazz-free zone, instead incorporating Renbourn’s sitar and Jansch’s banjo to produce one soothing psychedelic folk ensemble. Singer Jacqui McShee and Jansch share vocal duties on the unique arrangement of this traditional folk song, which, in turn, is based upon ye olde ballad, ‘The Daemon Lover’.
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acid-folk, music vid, psych-folk
Occasional Hawkwind frontman and co-writer of the band’s best known commercial hit, ‘Silver Machine’, Robert Calvert was an all-rounder of the 70s underground scene, knocking out poetry, musical plays and even a novel. He also found time to pursue a solo career, prior to his dying from a heart attack at the age of 43.
Released in 1974, Captain Lockheed and the Starfighters is a concept album based around the American Lockheed Starfighter F-104 aircraft, a modified version of which was sold abroad and proved to be hugely unreliable, claiming the lives of 115 pilots in Germany alone.
Captain Lockheed and the Starfighters is also a collection of cracking Hawkwind-style sonic excursions, threaded throughout by a satirical weave of Pythonesque spoken interludes.
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album reviews, prog rock
Anybody who reads this nonsense on a reasonably regular basis may recall at the start of the year I said I would be covering newer bands, as well as the usual stuff from the 60s and 70s, reissues, and so on. So long as they slotted in to the relevant genres (ie. prog rock, psychedelic rock, etc.) these Johnny-come-latelies and acid-rock apologists would be welcome here.
Well, as I’m never less than a man of my word, I shall be featuring some new stuff in the not too distant future, possibly under a big, flowery banner bearing a self-assuring title such as “New-Psych” or “New-Prog”, just so that I remain fully aware we’re not wandering too far from my original remit and I can continue to sleep at night.
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music vid, psych-pop
It would seem that Head Full of Snow is one year old this very day. That makes us six months older than my own shouty daughter.
Jeff Lynne and the Idle Race boys react to the news HFoS is one year old
365 days may have passed since the first proper posting here, but as I promised at the start of the year, we shan’t be doing anything to celebrate.
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music vid, news, psych-pop
Following his departure from the Small Faces, the late Steve Marriott formed hard/blues-rock combo and supergroup of sorts, Humble Pie.
Although known primarily as practitioners of no-nonsense blues-rock boogie, Humble Pie’s second album, Town and Country, did depart to greener pastures, with an almost entirely acoustic and altogether more pastoral sound demonstrated thereon.
It yielded this psychedelic gem, ‘The Light of Love’, easily the best thing Steve Marriot recorded post Ogden’s Nut Gone Flake.
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music vid, psychedelic rock, song reviews
Good news for anybody taken by the psychedelic stylings and off-the-wall showmanship of mad-as-a-shrews-hatbox Arthur Brown, as February 22nd 2010 sees the release of a 2-disc deluxe edition of 1968’s self-titled The Crazy World of Arthur Brown.
Yes, the good people at Esoteric have given the one and only album by this iconic, psycho-delic rock band the royal treatment, delivering a remastered version of the original album and a host of extras, such as alternate mixes, a BBC session from 1968 and rare single tracks, including the wonderfully anarchic piss-take of the peace and love movement, ‘Give Him a Flower’ – “Don’t ‘it ‘im wiv a bottle, Give him a flower”
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news, prog rock, psychedelic rock
Perhaps fitting of a band calling themselves Made in Sweden, the trio of Georg Wadenius, Bo Haggstrom and Tommy Borgudd were, in fact, Swedish.
Equally as fitting for an album entitled Made in England, it was indeed made in England, produced by Colosseum bassist Tony Reeves, and, perhaps more importantly, performed in the Queen’s own tongue.
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album reviews, prog rock
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