Ladbroke Grove: in the late sixties and early seventies, home to some of the hairiest bastards ever to draw breath. Had a barber set up shop in this particular part of Notting Hill in the belief that there was plenty of unkempt trade milling about, he’d have gone under within the month, for these hairies* were not for shorning.
Like Samson, the hair maketh the man, bestowing its bearer with superhuman powers and the ability to extract the most vindictive of riffs from a Fender Strat, while simultaneously protecting them from the ravages of hard drugs, hard booze and even harder women.
It’s widely known that Edgar Broughton used his barnet to avert the destruction of California, when nuclear rockets were fired into the San Andreas Fault by a rogue businessman. That Mick Farren managed to stop the nefarious actions of an alien emperor, determined to obliterate the earth through a series of seemingly natural disasters. And who can forget certain members of The Pink Fairies foiling a fearsome foursome who’d dehydrated and kidnapped members of the United World Organisation’s Security Council?
Happy days. And you’ll be pleased to hear that the aforementioned left-leaning, heroes of hirsute hedonism are all represented on Cries From the Midnight Circus – Ladbroke Grove 1967-78, along with a roll call of similarly tuned hairy heathens. All of whom inhabited this enclave of the English counterculture back when it was acceptable for “the fuzz” to unleash their truncheons upon anybody merely suspected of growing their hair in public.
Clark-Hutchinson were two hirsute hippies so stoned they thought the recording studio was a field somewhere in deepest Somerset. God bless ‘em.
That can be the only the reason they saw fit to put out albums as though they were playing at a festival. And you could do worse than getting stoned yourself prior to listening to this. I didn’t and still enjoyed it. Imagine what it would be like having smoked half a kilo of Dutchman’s fancy, or even tripping on an acid-soaked Yellow Pages.
Heavy, man. REAL heavy.
Free to be Stoned – The Complete Decca Recordings Anthology is a two disc affair, collecting together the lion’s share of these fabulous furry freak brothers’ Decca output, recorded between 1969 and 1971. I say lion’s share as there’s no inclusion of the tracks from debut album Clark-Hutchinson, which Decca refused to release on the grounds that the track ‘Make You’ was obscene. But that’s a very different sounding album and not really missed when you tot up what we’ve got here.
What’s that? A joke? Well… I don’t usually but… Here’s one for ya. What do you get when you cross Ian Fraser Kilmister (known to the world as 190% proof hairy warthog, Lemmy) and a Malaysian born tabla player?
Sam Gopal’s Escalator, that’s what you get.
I didn’t say it was funny. I don’t think I actually said it was a joke. And neither is this album. Sam Gopal’s Escalator is serious stuff. Serious, acid-induced psychedelic rock, chiselled from a slab of blackest granite.
Travelling on a subsonic undercurrent, 1969′s Escalator menaces and petrifies in turn, and the very presence of future Hawkwind and Motorhead bassist Lemmy, should be enough to ward off the faint of heart. Probably for the best as I fear they wouldn’t survive the trip.
Here’s a rare treat. Some live footage of the Edgar Broughton Band taken from the early ’70s (well until Warner Bros. buy up the Broughton back catalogue and demand it’s taken down, that is).
‘Love in the Rain’ is taken from the debut album Wasa Wasa and is presented here in a shorter version – the original running for just shy of four minutes.
The Edgar Broughton Bands’ debut album, Wasa Wasa, laid down the blueprint of progressive-anarcho-agit-freakrock for which this criminally underrated band would become known.
The then trio of Rob ‘Edgar’ Broughton, Steve Broughton and Arthur Grant – who had built up a following in their hometown of Warwick (just down the road from the HFoS hub) with a fourth member, Victor Unitt, under the name the Edgar Broughton Blues Band – had signed to EMI’s prog rock label Harvest in December of 1968, following a move to the Notting Hill Gate area of London. It was here that they became a part of the Ladbroke Grove scene, a frantic haze of underground rock, left-wing and anarchist politics, illicit substances, and incredible hairiness. In July of 1969, Wasa Wasa was unleashed.
During the late sixties and early seventies, each and every rockstar worth their salt considered themselves to be the new Che Guevara. They communicated with the masses via soundbites of revolutionary rhetoric -- more often than not from the comfort of their three storey mansion or tax exile in the South of France -- and once the imminent uprising that had been promised burned itself out, they retired to count their money.
Revolution was, after all, big business.
So in honour of some of these Che charlatons who turned tail and fled as soon as the going got tough, Head Full of Snow brings you 5 songs with which to spark a revolution (or not).
The Rolling Stones -- Street Fighting Man
An absolute stormer of a track and one that was written at a time when the anti-Vietnam war protests had spread as far afield as London, sparking riots and encouraging Mick Jagger himself to take to the streets and… stand on the sidelines taking photos of the ensuing chaos. Jagger was perhaps the biggest pretender to the revolutionary throne, toying with the imagery during the era of Beggars Banquet and Let It Bleed, but soon getting bored and leaving it all behind to concentrate on becoming the mucky little devil we all know today. ‘Street Fighting Man’ appears on 1968′s Beggars Banquet. Read more…
The Edgar Broughton Band’s third, self-titled, album kicks off with such a majestic, barnstorming track that it’s impossible for anything else on the album to follow it. ‘Evening Over Rooftops’ is that track and it takes a firm hold on your most sensitive parts, throws you against the nearest wall and refuses to relinquish its grip until you have succumbed to its five minutes and two seconds of brilliance.
Indeed, nothing else on “The Meat Album”* lives up to this starter for ten, but that’s not to say the rest isn’t any cop. Quite the opposite in fact. It keeps you pinned against the wall throughout, just in case you were entertaining ideas of slipping quietly away.
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