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
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
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
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.
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music vid, psych-pop, psychedelic rock, song reviews
There are dark places within the human psyche some are fortunate enough never to visit. Then there are others that can never escape. Syd Barrett was one such casualty of the human mind’s vociferous self-destructive capability. It can’t be said when first Barrett took his initial tentative steps into the darkness of this windowless room of despair, whether there was always something lurking just beneath the surface awaiting the right set of circumstances to free it or if it was simply excess that took its toll, but what seems certain is that too much LSD definitely played a part in closing the door behind him.
Photograph: Dezo Hoffmann/Rex Features
‘Jugband Blues’ was Barrett’s final song for the band he’d fronted and given the name to, psychedelic space-rockers Pink Floyd, and appeared on their second album, 1968′s A Saucerful of Secrets.
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psychedelic rock, song reviews
The story behind the rather radio-unfriendly Rolling Stones song, ‘Cocksucker Blues’ – sometimes referred to as ‘Schoolboy Blues’ – is slightly more interesting than the purposely offensive curio itself.
In 1970, between the releases of Let it Bleed and Sticky Fingers, the Rolling Stones, looking to go it alone and handle their own business affairs, finished with both their record company Decca and their manager Allen Klein. The contract with Decca required the band to deliver one more single.
‘Cocksucker Blues’ was the result.
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classic rock, song reviews, the blues
When it came to psychedelic and acid rock, Country Joe and the Fish were one of the foremost acts on the American circuit. As was the case with many of the American bands they were steeped in folk roots and this naturally gave their music a more political edge, making them prime movers on the protest scene.
That’s no better demonstrated than on the anti-Vietnam war anthem, ‘I-Feel-Like-I’m-Fixin’-To-Die’, taken from the sincere but patchy 1967 album of the same name. Unlike many of his peers, Country Joe McDonald wasn’t just content to spout crypto-revolutionary soundbites from the comfort of whatever mansion he was staying in that week; he actually made the effort to get involved at the grass roots level of the protest movement, a move that would see him placed on Richard Nixon’s infamous ‘enemy list’ alongside the likes of Paul Newman, Jane Fonda and John Lennon.
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psychedelic rock, song reviews
Photo by: Mick Rock
Psychedelic music, be it of the rock or slightly more flowery pop variety, is thoroughly adept when it comes to throwing out a haunting tune. For example, just take Pink Floyd’s ‘Julia Dream’, John Wonderling’s ‘Man of Straw’, H.P. Lovecraft’s ‘White Ship’ or Peter Thorogood’s aptly named ‘Haunted’ – mere examples of a musical genre that often excelled in sending a shiver up the old spine. Syd Barrett’s ‘Golden Hair’, based on a poem by James Joyce, is two minutes worth of ethereal eeriness that for me evokes images of a twilight cottage at the edge of a dark, dark wood, sometime in 1969. Don’t ask.
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psych-folk, song reviews
As is inevitably the case with a human race as shallow and self-obsessed as our own, sometimes a song will come along that either speaks directly to us, or we think, “Ay up, lad. They’ve surely written this about me and me alone”.
For some, this uninvited intrusion into our very souls may manifest itself in Led Zeppelin’s majestic ‘Stairway to Heaven’. For others it could be Black Lace’s ‘Agadoo’. For me there is a particular Who song that I believe Pete Townsend pilfered from my conscious, even though it was written four years before I was born. And now I have discovered another, one that ticks all the boxes.
‘Good Times’ by Eric Burdon and the Animals was released in 1967 but could well be reading my mind 42 years down the line.
“… When I think of all the good time that I’ve wasted, Having Good Times…”
Indeed so. There’s some serious regret going on here. A lament for time flittered away in the pursuit of hedonistic activities. “… All that boozin’, I was really losin’ …” And as is the nature of regret, it comes too late as the ongoing list of things done is countered by the now redundant things that should’ve been done, becoming ever more desperate to the point that this relentless melancholy builds to what can only be an outpouring of the bitterness that is eating away inside.
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psychedelic rock, song reviews
I suppose that in 1971 the acid-laced, space rock stylings of the mighty, albeit notoriously hedonistic Hawkwind, might’ve made sense to some people. Possibly those on the same diet of LSD and assorted other substances, legal or otherwise, that is often associated with the band.
This was a time when the naivety of the hippy dream encapsulated in the done-to-death slogan “Peace and Love” had long since shuffled off its mortal coil; trampled beneath heavy boots ideal for cracking skulls, in a mire of mud, unwashed denim, motorcycle grease, and the wild thrust of a Hells Angel’s switchblade at the Altamont Speedway Circuit during the infamous and ill-advised Rolling Stones free concert of 1968. Psychedelic music was no longer the soup de jour, slipping away from the consciousness of the greater public and into the ether like a phased drumbeat. Progressive rock (psych’s heir apparent) was on its steady ascent.
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prog rock, psychedelic rock, song reviews
Bring on the kazoos, indeed!
Tis a sad fact in the affairs of all things musical that there isn’t enough use of the kazoo in songs, either nowadays or in times gone by (which is what we’re more interested in, no?).
Image from: The Purple Gang website
There are pretenders to this coveted crown such as Jimi Hendrix playing the paper and comb on ‘Crosstown Traffic’, or the use of nose guitar on Jefferson Airplane’s hypnotic ‘Lather’; both emulating a kazoo-type sound, but sadly lacking when it comes to the actual kazoo litmus test.
As far as the real deal is concerned, I can think of only two songs off of the top of my head that feature real kazoo playing. One is the Bonzo Dog Doodah Band’s ‘Urban Spaceman’; the other is this rare gem – 1967′s ‘Granny Takes a Trip’ by The Purple Gang. 2.36 minutes of psychedelic, jug-band jauntiness from a Stockport band all but forgotten in these modern times.
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psych-pop, song reviews
“… My god, the spiders are everywhere…” Words to send a shiver down the spine of anyone with the slightest aversion to those eight-legged, scuttling terrors.
Image from: Chelsea Records UK
And that is evidently Kaleidoscope’s intention in the eerily folkish, pop-psych of ‘(Further Reflections) In the Room of Percussion’, employing imagery that wouldn’t feel out of place in a 1970′s BBC adaptation of an M.R. James ghost story.
Just what is the room of percussion, where shadowy friends climb the walls?
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psych-folk, psych-pop, song reviews
Well well! Who’d have thought a group harbouring the future Prince of Darkness™ could’ve produced something as breathtakingly evocative – and yes, beautiful – as this?
Image from: Black Sabbath Fans
‘Planet Caravan’ is for anybody who at sometime in their life has closed their eyes and wished they were someplace else, far away. It’s for all the dreamers and those that live in hope that one day there might just be something better than what they’ve presently got.
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psychedelic rock, song reviews
‘Porpoise Song’ was a single released by The Monkees in 1968 and taken from the soundtrack album to their psychedelic film, HEAD.
The very mention of The Monkees may bring to mind the ugly spectre of manufactured bubblegum pop, nowadays typified by the sub-lounge-room crooner boyband circuit or whatever annual horror X-Factor sees fit to vomit upon us. But although they were indeed assembled solely for the sake of a chirpy TV series – and thus ‘musical snobbery’ decrees they’d normally have no place on these here pages – the band lost the plot spectacularly during their self-destructive final years and managed to bang out a few memorable and inventive tunes. The sort of stuff Head Full of Snow likes.
This change in direction came with the desire to be taken seriously as musicians (both the critics and their peers were disparaging of the ‘Prefab Four’s’ musical credentials) and manifested itself in the teenybopper fanbase-alienating, cinematic excursion, HEAD.
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psych-pop, song reviews
Taking their name from the renowned American writer of sci-fi dipped horror fiction and enthusiastic racist, H.P. Lovecraft were a Chicago-formed, psychedelic rock band who decamped to San Francisco and became entrenched in its underground scene for the brief period of time (1967 – 1968) they remained together as a unit.
In the time that H.P. Lovecraft existed in their original form they released two albums; the imaginatively titled H.P. Lovecraft and H.P. Lovecraft II. It is from the second album that ‘Electrallentando’ is taken.
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psychedelic rock, song reviews
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