Remember the days when your brand loyalty to a certain comic, week in and week out, come rain, snow or shine, was rewarded around the festive season with a bumper hardback edition? Commonly known as an Annual, it would feature all your favourite strips, as well as a gala of supplementary fluff, slipped in as low-rent filler.
Fruits de Mer Records have taken this idea on board – minus the supplementary fluff – and are releasing their Fruits de Mer Annual 2011 at the end of November. Just in time, as is the case with all good annuals, for Christmas.
Gathered here, in a double 7″ coloured vinyl pack, are four tracks from four bands, which stick to the label’s remit of reinterpreting songs from the swirly eras of psychedelia and prog.
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album reviews, prog rock, progressive folk, psychedelic rock
If I had my way, everybody would have at least one song by Rodney Bewes in their record collection.
“Rodney Bewes?” I hear you say. “He of Bob Ferris/Likely Lads fame?” The one and same, I retort. The man with the helmet hairdo and sad eyes. It’s true that the singing talents of Bewes may not be what he’s primarily known for, but 1969 did see him make an assault on the charts with ‘Dear Mother, Love Albert’, the theme tune to his post-Likely Lad sitcom of the same name. The B-side was called ‘Meter Maid’, and it’s that song that features here on We All Live on Candy Green.
As this is a compilation of obscure and arcane psychedelic/power pop from the late sixties, the aforementioned ‘Meter Maid’ slots in perfectly. It’s a sub-Beatles, child-friendly interpretation of psychedelia, of course, with shades of Keith West whimsy thrown in for good measure, and, to be quite frank, it’s bloody awful. But that’s awful in a quite wonderful way. It’s like the bumblebee; it shouldn’t be able to fly but it does. Rodney Bewes’s ‘Meter Maid’ is terrible but endearing at the same time. His camp “oohs” towards the end are a particular joy.
But that’s just one song on a collection of 25, and we’ve spent more than enough time on it, so how’s about the rest?
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album reviews, psych-pop, psychedelic rock
To echo the press release that came with this – the latest in the wintry flurry of Fruits de Mer releases – why would HFoS, a blog purporting to specialise in psych, folk and prog, give airtime to an Eddie Cochran covers EP?
Well, as can be expected from the FdM label, these are no straightforward cover versions.
Anybody who remembers the interview conducted with Andy Bracken - one of the two disembodied brains that run the label from their flying saucer orbiting somewhere above 1967 – may recall he said Eddie Cochran was his all-time favourite and if it were possible to pull anybody from history into the studio, dead or alive, then Cochran would be the one.
Well, even for a disembodied cerebral cortex trapped on a Heath-Robinson spacecraft that draws its power from the psychedelic energy generated by swinging London, that’s an impossibility. So FdM have opted for the next best option.
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album reviews, prog rock, psychedelic rock
One of the UK’s great unsung psychedelic bands (in the wider scheme of things) has to be Kaleidoscope. Not to be confused with the American psychedelic band of the same name, Kaleidoscope released two albums before changing their name to Fairfield Parlour and pursuing a more progressive, yet equally excellent, path. Their 1967 debut, Tangerine Dream, is one of the classics of the era and deserving of a place in the collection of any psych nut.
Songwriter and keyboardist Peter Daltrey provides the often elegantly wraithlike vocals that place the listener within the dreamworld of his imagining, populated by not only the fairytale waifs and strays of children’s stories but also something occasionally darker – the grimmest of Brothers Grimm.
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acid-folk, album reviews, psychedelic rock
The inevitable run up to Christmas brings a flurry of releases from Fruits de Mer Records, just in time for the festive season. The first of these is a return to more familiar territory for the label, following the electro-mischief of The Hausfrauen Experiment, with some psychedelic stylings and a reworking of a Velvet Underground standard.
Sendelica are the latest band to sign up for some fishy frolicking in the past, with the crabby claws of Fruits de Mer releasing A Nice Pear, their take on The Velvet Underground’s ‘Venus in Furs’ and Funkadelic’s ‘Maggot Brain’; two bands you might be excused for thinking could never find any common ground.
Now, I’m not particularly a fan of The Velvet Underground; I found their The Velvet Underground & Nico album quite dull, and Nico’s tuneless drone, however sporadic, quite irritating. However, if there’s one redeeming feature the album has, it’s ‘Venus in Furs’. Die-hard fans of the group would probably be horrified by such an admission, dismissing the track as “commercial” – as far as a song about a bondage mistress can be deemed “commercial” – or populist, especially as it was chosen to soundtrack an advert for tyres a few years back. But I likes it. Especially when taken in contrast to the turgid noise that makes up the rest of the album. Each to their own and all that.
Of course, this isn’t about The Velvet Underground, or my opinions on their proto-punk garage dealings in despair. It’s about ‘Venus in Furs’… and ‘Maggot Brain’… Oh, and most importantly, Sendelica.
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psychedelic rock, song reviews
A popular support act for some of the biggest names in the underground music scene of the late 1960s, Blonde on Blonde were no shrinking violets when it came to holding their own beneath the staccato glare of the polychromatic liquid lights.
Signed to Pye Records, they released their debut Contrasts in 1969 – a collection of psychedelic proto-prog songs, with a couple of souped up cover versions thrown in for good measure.
In doing so, they perfected a blend of guitars, sitars, abstract percussion, flute and the ever-faithful keyboard contingent.
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prog rock, psychedelic rock
One look at the track titles on The Lick on the Tip of an Envelope Yet to be Sent, the 2005 debut album from Circulus, reveals some pretty fertile ground upon which to sew next season’s crop. There’ll be no need to set light to Edward Woodward, or to give a rousing chorus of ‘Sumer is Incumen In’ (not until their third album, anyway); Circulus have it all in hand.
Existing in one form or another for longer than I’d care to mention, the constant factor that has kept Circulus going all this time is Michael Tyack; songwriter, vocalist and medieval throwback. It is him we have to thank for the unique brand of psychedelic, progressive folk rock that Circulus purvey, like the troupe of wandering minstrels given access to electricity that they are.
The Lick on the Tip of an Envelope Yet to be Sent may not be their first release, but it is their first album and it sets out the Circulus manifesto very nicely indeed.
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acid-folk, album reviews, prog rock, psych-folk, psychedelic rock
This day will never happen again. There’s no disputing that, but so what? Stating the bleeding obvious doesn’t impress me or anybody else unfortunate enough to be reading this…
Wait though. This Day Will Never Happen Again is, in fact, the name of the new album from veterans of the late 1980′s UK neo-psychedelic boom, The Chemistry Set. Those in command of a memory unaddled by booze and other such substances may well remember that The Chemistry Set were the band I singled out for particular praise in Head Full of Snow’s review of the A Phase We’re Going Through compilation album.
Their epically atmospheric version of Del Shannon’s psychedelic sojourn ‘Silver Birch’ was the best track on the album and one that gets many a hard-earned repeat play on the HFoS sound system. If you managed to get a hold of A Phase We’re Going Through via fair means or foul, you’ll be pleased to know that ‘Silver Birch’ makes an appearance on This Day Will Never Happen Again, this time minus the phasing, in all its original glory.
Both versions are exceptional and modern classics as far as HFoS is concerned. Indeed, the best track here as well. But that’s not said lightly, considering some of the stiff competition this album has to offer.
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album reviews, psychedelic rock
Even the grunts at HFoS Towers – the ones who put this poor excuse for a website together on a weekly basis – deserve a holiday once in a while; hence the lack of activity for the past week.
Never fear, all is well, and what better way to return than with the final release from what, for many, will be the sorely missed Bracken Records. The label ran by Andy Bracken, one half of the team behind Fruits de Mer Records – and, incidentally, a very erudite interviewee, as witnessed here and here – is calling it a day.
What better way for the label to go out than to enlist the aid of FdM favourites Cranium Pie (their version of ‘Madman Running Through the Fields‘ is a particular highlight in the Fruits de Mer canon), whose blend of psychedelic progginess keeps the flag flying in 2010 and beyond.
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prog rock, psychedelic rock, song reviews
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.
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music vid, psych-pop, psychedelic rock
Meanwhile, over at, rock writer and critic, Sid Smith’s excellent Postcards From The Yellow Room blog, a recent extended podcast featured a discussion and reminisces of the latter day Soft Machine albums.
Unfortunately – for me, anyways – the latter day Soft Machine albums fall largely into the unholy bracket that is jazz-fusion. Man alive! Jazz, and all its derivatives, one of the few musical genres with the potency to send us at HFoS Towers into a prolonged sleep, one from which we’re often too afraid to stir, for fear it might still be playing. Very often it is; such is the nature of a beast notorious for getting permanently stuck in the neutral gear of tedium.
Nevertheless, the talk was a hugely entertaining one, as are all of Mister Smith’s podcasts (as well as a great source for some obscure musical finds) and can be heard right here. Don’t forget to subscribe.
Talk of The Soft Machine’s later releases inspired me to dust off the band’s first two albums for a well deserved airing. This was before the unsavoury jazz-element had taken a grip and the debut album, called The Soft Machine but later known as Volume One, is, for me, the best thing these onetime pioneers of the British underground put out.
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album reviews, prog rock, psychedelic rock
Some thought it impossible. Some said I was insane to even try. Others thought I had to be joking. But I ignored the naysayers… these “glass half empty” merchants of very little faith, and I achieved the unthinkable. The long sought after grail of the delusional writer everywhere, and that’s to crowbar the words “German”, “delectation”, “Swiss”, “Belgian”, “Krautrock”, “genesis”, “Brainticket” and “Vandroogenbroeck” into a single sentence.
Allow me to present it to you in all its splendour:
The genesis of Brainticket was a collective of Belgian, German and Swiss musicians, headed by multi-instrumentalist Joel – wait for it – Vandroogenbroeck, who pedalled a strain of experimental Krautrock, for the delectation of anybody willing to listen.
There, worth the wait, wasn’t it?
Brainticket’s second album Psychonaut, released in 1972 and recorded by a completely different line-up to that of their debut Cottonwoodhill (Vandroogenbroeck aside), eschewed the overt electronic experimentation of the first album for a more grounded (something of a misnomer perhaps) psychedelic approach. So what we have is an album of psychedelic progressive rock that looks back three or so years and borrows heavily from the sound that was prevalent then. No bad thing, at all.
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album reviews, krautrock, prog rock, psychedelic rock
Mention Greece and what springs to mind? Nana Mouskouri’s NHS specs? Anthony Quinn cutting a rug against an Ocean backdrop in Zorba the Greek? The very mad husband of our very own Her Majesty the Queen (God bless ‘er)? Maybe even a bag of chips and a jumbo sausage, please?
Bone idle stereotyping aside, maybe the answer is three portly blokes banging out their very own brand of psychedelia and prog? If this be the case then we’re on the same wavelength. Welcome to the club.
Yes, Aphrodite’s Child features a pre-Chariots of Fire Vangelis, flexing his musically inventive muscles on keyboards and whatever else comes to hand, and Demis Roussos in the days before he took to wearing a glittery dress and became a global superstar. There’s also some bloke called Loukas Sideras on drums, but he must’ve drawn the short straw when it came to divvy up the post-Aphrodite success.
Their 1968 debut, End of the World, is a splendid piece of often eerie psychedelia, which hints at the progressive road down which they’d soon be travelling.
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album reviews, psychedelic rock
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.
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album reviews, freak rock, prog rock, psychedelic rock
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.
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album reviews, freak rock, prog rock, psychedelic rock
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.
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album reviews, freak rock, psychedelic rock
Some things are deserving of greatness, whilst other things aren’t. Ergo, Pink Floyd’s Piper at the Gates of Dawn deserves every plaudit it inevitably gets, whereas their The Wall doesn’t. Some may not agree with that. Possibly every man that has ever caught wind of the fragrant odour universally recognised as progressive rock, will now be tutting and shaking their head in a display of passive disapproval at this carefree dismissal of The Wall, what some consider to be beyond reproach because of who recorded it, but the truth is there for all to see. I may well be dancing about architecture, but at the same time The Wall is aggrandised over nothing.
The Emperor’s new clothes are revealed and what is the mighty Floyd’s last album (at least as far as listenability goes) is shown up for what it is. Nevertheless, would you take the word of an unproven critic, yet time and again proven eejut, on this? Of course not. To do so would be foolish. So acquire a copy of Pink Floyd’s The Wall and experience the big fuss about nothing for yourself. Draw your own conclusions. On a pomposity scale it’s up there with Yes’s Tales From Topographical Oceans, yet lacks the charm of ELP’s ‘Karn Evil 9′.
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album reviews, psychedelic rock
If asked to pick a favourite month of the year then I’d probably dump for December; it’s dark, cold and host to that festival of swag acquisition and drunken debasement, Christmas. July would never enter into the reckoning. It’s hot. Too hot.
However, if the question were to pick my favourite psychedelic band named after a month of the year, then without a doubt July would be victorious.
July were one of the many British Psych bands that came, saw, yet failed to conquer and fizzled out with less than a year notched up on their collective belts. In this short time they did manage to put out one album, its rarity ensuring original pressings have gone on to attain near-Grail status amongst psych collectors.
The self-titled July was released in 1968, and really is a must-hear for anybody with a passing interest in psychedelic obscurities.
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album reviews, psychedelic rock
If you’re a glutton for punishment, visiting here on a somewhat regular basis, but find that two or so posts a week are not quite enough, then you could do worse than rushing out and purchasing a copy of this month’s Record Collector magazine.
That would be the June 2010 issue. The one with a photo of Keith Richards at the height of his powers on the cover.
Along with an extensive feature on the making of The Rolling Stones’ Exile on Main Street (Not, as most would have you believe, their best album ever), there’s also a three and a half page article on Zoot Money’s psychedelic troupe, Dantalian’s Chariot, written by, of all people, yours truly.
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news, psychedelic rock
It’s easy to laugh at Donovan. So often painted as a bandwagon-jumping, wide-eyed innocent, he was initially marketed, somewhat wrongly, as the British answer to Bob Dylan, before he embraced the flower power movement, turned all trippy and started hanging around with John Lennon. The fact that he took his dad on the road with him didn’t really help matters.
Despite the ridicule fired in his direction back then and in the intervening years, Donovan was nonetheless responsible for some of the gentler and more memorable songs of the psychedelic era. His blend of acid-folk flavoured psychedelic pop/rock first found an outlet on his third album release, 1966′s Sunshine Superman.
Originally denied a release in the UK due to contractual disputes, Sunshine Superman finally saw the light of day over here in 1967, although with an amended track-listing that threw in some songs from the follow-up, Mellow Yellow, and omitted others. The 2005 EMI reissue reinstates the original line-up, as well as a further 6 bonus tracks.
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acid-folk, album reviews, psych-folk, psychedelic rock
Those purveyors of the multicoloured 7″ single and EP, Fruits de Mer Records, have visited the vinyl clinic and chosen to undergo the extension, returning with a smile on their face and a full 12 inches in their hand. It might just be A Phase We’re Going Through.
For those that don’t already know, Fruits de Mer Records, to quote co-founder Andy Bracken from our recent interview with the label, “release limited edition vinyl records of songs originating in the late 1960s/early 1970s, in a psych, kraut, folk, prog vein, covered and reinterpreted by contemporary artists.”
A Phase We’re Going Through is their first foray into the album market and hopefully, on this evidence anyway, it won’t be the last.
Described in the press tackle as “… an album of songs that were drenched in phasing when first recorded, or have been now, or would if only we and the bands had been paying proper attention …” A Phase We’re Going Through lives up to its remit with 11 trippy tracks plucked from the ether of the late sixties and given a thoroughly phased seeing to by an assortment of bands still living the psychedelic dream.
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album reviews, psychedelic rock
In the second part of our interview with one half of Fruits de Mer Records, Andy Bracken, we find out, among other things, what keeps them doing what they do and what the future holds for this truly unique, yet slightly demented, label.
HFoS – You only release the singles on limited edition, coloured vinyl (which, incidentally, look good enough to eat). What made you choose this particular format over, say, a compilation CD?
AB – Now, now, don’t get me started. I’m not a fan of CDs, and downloads don’t actually exist.
Thanks for liking our vinyl – that’s grand. We just choose colour combinations that feel right at the time. You never really know what they’re going to look like till they arrive at the door.
7” vinyl is what us “over 35s” grew up with, so I suppose there’s a certain nostalgic affection there from our viewpoint. But aurally and aesthetically, there’s no comparison between a CD and a vinyl record.
Essentially, though, we’re releasing music in a format that we like to buy in.
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feature, prog rock, psychedelic rock, psychedelic spotlight
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