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.
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. Fantasywould 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 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. Read more…
The opener to the album Grand Hotel, and one of Procol harum’s finest.
Released in 1973, ‘Grand Hotel’ cements Procol Harum’s place as one the finest progressive/symphonic rock bands the genre had to offer. I don’t think anything else needs saying.
As reviewed yesterday as part of Procol Harum Week, here’s the barnstorming opener from 1971’s Broken Barricades album, entitled ‘Simple Sister’.
Well most of it anyway, as this video seems to be a sawn-off version, running at two minutes shy of the album original. Nevertheless, it gives a good feel for the harder rock edge that was heard on the Broken Barricades album.
‘A Salty Dog’ is widely regarded as one of Procol Harum’s finest songs, and you wouldn’t get any arguments from Head Full of Snow on that count.
Taken from the 1969 album of the same name, it marked vocalist and songwriter Gary Brooker’s first attempt at an orchestral score, and the lavish result places ‘A Salty Dog’ in the bracket of all-time great progressive rock compositions. It can also be regarded as quite a feat, considering Brooker had no classical training whatsoever.
Head Full of Snow’s 100th post coincides with the launch of Procol Harum Week. It’s almost as though I planned it that way. And where else would one kick off a Procol Harum Week than at the moment in time where it all began? The debut single that has gone on to be named the UK’s “most played record ever”.
Whether you love or hate it, there’s no denying that if at some point over the last 42 years you’ve heard a bit of music, there’s more chance of it being ‘A Whiter Shade of Pale’ than anything else.
Though not their best song, it managed to capture a moment in the summer of 1967 when, if you were fortunate enough not to have to work for a living and bought into the whole flower power freedom movement, anything seemed possible. The fact it caught on with the mainstream too, quickly elevated AWSoP to the legendary stature it enjoys today.
We shall end this impromptu celebration of the 1980’s psychedelic throwbacks with a bit of jaunty, music-hall, roll-out-the-bloomin-barrel psych-pop in the guise of ‘You’re a Good Man Albert Brown (Curse You Red Barrel)’.
Following on from posting The Dukes of Stratosphear’s ‘The Mole From the Ministry’ earlier today, I thought it would be nice to throw down the Beatles’ ‘I Am the Walrus’, so comparisons can be made.
Musically, ‘The Mole From the Ministry’ borrows elements of both ‘I Am the Walrus’ and ‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds’, whilst the video is clearly an affectionate pastiche of this and the ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ promo.
Bob on! Some psychedelic throwback music from 1985 – The wonderful Dukes of Stratosphear with the immaculate ‘The Mole From the Ministry’.
Taken from the EP 25 O’Clock, musically and visually the influence of The Beatles’ ‘I Am the Walrus’ is hugely evident, right down to the slightly creepy animal masks, and it’s well worth six minutes of anybody’s time.
Circulus are a rather excellent modern-day psychedelic-folk act, who look as though they’ve taken one double-dip of lysergic acid diethylamide too many and woken up in the late sixties/early seventies – a better time for music, when this type of thing was the norm.
Fusing Elizabethan elements into their witch’s cauldron of evocative and pastoral psychedelia, Circulus are quite unlike anything else doing the rounds today. HFoS applauds this non-conformity and a sound that reaches out from the perfumed gardens and Jostick-scented abodes of 1971.
To my mind, ‘The Words of Aaron’ from 1971’s Message From the Country, is one of The Move’s finest compositions. With Jeff Lynne at the helm it sounds very much like early ELO, which is understandable as this song came out during the drawn out disintegration of The Move, at the overlap point between the the old band becoming the new.
‘The Words of Aaron’ blends progressive rock, psychedelia and Beatlesesque harmonies with the dense, grinding sound prevalent on previous Move album, the exceptional Looking On, and comes out the other end completely unscathed. More of this, please!
Jeff Lynne and the Idle Race boys react to the news HFoS is one year old
Image courtesy Capitol/EMI Archive
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