It’s a psychedelic frenzy that informs Cranium Pie’s 2009 eccentric cover of the 1967 Dantalian’s Chariot classic ‘Madman Running Through the Fields’.
Recorded for the now OOP Fruits de Mer Vol. Seven, Cranium Pie take the psychedelic-pop oddness of the original and turns up the insanity factor.
Suddenly appearing in 1969, prior to disappearing with equal haste not long after, Dr. Z was a part-time project undertaken by three learned gents from Swansea University.
Their one and only 1971 concept album, Three Parts to My Soul, was released on the Vertigo label to the sound of one hand clapping and underwhelming critical indifference and is said to have sold as few as 100 copies. In the intervening years it has been touted as one of the rarest albums to have been put out by Vertigo and original vinyl copies are priced in the three figure bracket among collectors of obscure prog.
When you leave five or so pounds of Semtex in the crawlspace beneath a stage, then tell whoever’s booked to play, mid-set, that you’ll detonate it unless they crank up the pace a touch, it probably sounds a little something like this.
Beggar’s Opera, playing as though their lives depend on it.
To accompany our review of the excellent Morning Way by Trader Horne, here’s one of its crowning glories, the short but sweet ‘Velvet to Atone’.
With its haunting piano melody and Judy Dyble’s spectral vocal, it lingers in the memory far beyond the two and a half minute running time.
‘Velvet to Atone’ also appears on the Pye and Dawn Records compilation box set Cave of Clear Light, available from Amazon.co.uk
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Trawling the ever-deeper depths of the undulating oceans of obscure sound, Fruits de Mer’s latest release pulls together a sonic potpourri of songs originally recorded by Silver Apples, Hawkwind, Brian Eno and Cockney Rebel.
Performing the dastardly deed are three fragrant fraulines* from somewhere in the UK, who go by the name of the Hausfrauen Experiment.
The World of Oz were four Brummie lads who took it upon themselves to stage an onslaught on the charts during the efflorescent days of 1968 and early 1969.
Their brand of flowery-pop tickled the underskirts of psychedelia but never managed to make an impact on their home shore. However, the brightly-attired troupe did manage a minor hit in Holland with the Toytown psych of ‘Muffin Man’.
‘The Hum-Gum Tree’ is a slightly harder-edged example of their output, and an absolutely splendid one at that.
To tie in with our two-part interview with Andy Bracken of Fruits de Mer Records (part one of which can be found right, ruddy here), here’s one of the songs that’s been covered on the forthcoming Fruits venture into 12″ albumdom, A Phase We’re Going Through (more on, next week).
A Pink Floyd rarity of sorts, ‘Point Me At the Sky’ was the band’s fifth UK single, released in December 1968. A poor showing in the charts meant Pink Floyd didn’t release another UK single until 1979′s ‘Another Brick in the Wall’, by which time their sound had changed somewhat considerably.
For those of you who visit here regularly (yes, both of you), expecting a weekly mixture of nonsense, clear bias and unconstructive criticism, I can only apologise for the threadbareness of the site of late.
Illness has struck at HFoS Towers, rendering the principle scribe bereft of what little faculties he had remaining.
Possibly my favourite of all Caravan songs. ‘Ride’ is a thoroughly psychedelic piece taken from their self-titled 1968 debut album, when the soon-to-be prog faves were still in the grips of psychedelia.
The Canterbury scene stalwarts sprang from the Wilde Flowers, the band that went on to split its membership between Caravan and Soft Machine, and ‘Ride’ is a gentle breeze floating on the warm summer air of a lush pastoral setting, somewhere in England, 1968.
Edit: I am reliably informed by the good people at Fruits de Mer Records that this is the first review of this forthcoming Vibravoid release anywhere.
Following on from Us & Them’s splendid ‘Julia Dream’ reworking for the previous Fruits de Mer release, the record label that shouldn’t work but bloody well does, have tapped the Pink Floyd psychedelic vein once more to bring us mere mortals the deity-like splendour that is Vibravoid’s What Colour is Pink? EP.
Vibravoid, the German psychedelic rock outfit, are no strangers to the Fruits de Mer experience, having already appeared on the Krautrock Sensation EP. This time around the likes of Can and Kraftwerk are replaced solely by acid rock’s highest profile exponents, Pink Floyd.
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’.
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.
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.
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.
Such was the nature of a musical genre taking its name from the mind-altering effects of acid intake that psychedelia was inevitably going to produce thinly veiled references to the drug’s popular acronym within song titles.
Probably the most famous example of authority-baiting via the medium of song is The Beatles’ ‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds’, although John Lennon dismissed such speculation as mere coincidence. Billy Nicholls was another such artist willing to nail his colours to the mast, penning ‘London Social Degree’, taken from his 1968 album Would You Believe.
If one were to make a list of songs by Traffic worthy of covering, ‘Utterly Simple’ from Mr. Fantasy would surely be somewhere near the bottom. However, in 1968 it seems nobody had shown this list to The Smoke, as they recorded Dave Mason’s sitar-by-numbers ode to flower power-induced, pseudo-philosophical bollocks, just prior to splitting up.
In doing so, The Smoke improved on the original tenfold.
Within the never-ending, idyllic summer days of perhaps the strangest – and very much uniquely English – of all musical sub-genres, Toytown Psychedelia, ‘Grocer Jack (Excerpt from a Teenage Opera)’ surely remains its most successful export.
Taken from a proposed, yet aborted, rock opera by Mark Wirtz, ‘Grocer Jack’ is possibly the only song featuring a man suffering and dying from a heart attack to reach No. 2 in the UK charts (Madness’s ‘Cardiac Arrest’ having peaked at No. 14). Typifying a good deal of the Toytown psych pop genre, ‘Grocer Jack’ harks back to a bygone era that probably never existed. Keith West of short-lived, but long remembered, Brit-psychedelic band Tomorrow, sings the poignant tale of Jack, a forgotten relic in a world of apathy, who frets about how the unappreciative town will function if he can’t make his deliveries, even as he breathes his last.
The Nice take on West Side Story with their rendition of Leonard Bernstein’s ‘America’.
Progressive acid -folk at its darkest. Comus’s ‘Drip Drip’ darts out of the shadows of a tangled wood and stabs you in both ears.
Taken from the 1971 album First Utterance, it’s the stuff bad dreams are made of, here in almost all of its ten minute glory*
The BBC reports that rare footage of a Syd Barrett-led Pink Floyd, playing on Top of the Pops, has been unearthed and will be shown for the first the time in 42 years.
Image courtesy Capitol/EMI Archive
The damaged film stock, on 1 inch, reel to reel tape, was discovered in a private collection and has been restored to a state where it can once again be viewed.
Inspired Dutch lunacy from Thijs van Leer. Jan Akkerman and the rest of Focus, with a 1973 live version of their barmier than a badger’s stag-do track, ‘Hocus Pocus’.
To bring Head Full of Snow’s Procol Harum Week to a close, we list our five favourite tunes from the erudite songsmiths of psychedelic and progressive rock grandiose.
Actually, following a ruddy great trawl through what’s on offer, this may be retitled our “five favourite Procol Harum tunes available on YouTube.” They’re all absolute stonkers, nonetheless. ‘A Salty Dog‘, ‘Grand Hotel‘ and ‘A Whiter Shade of Pale’ are absent from this list as they were posted earlier this week.
So with no further nonsense, let’s get stuck in.
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