Traffic – Mr Fantasy
The first thing that strikes you about Traffic’s Mr. Fantasy is the album cover. A red-hued photograph of the band avoiding a hard day’s graft in the rustic Berkshire cottage where the album came to fruition, whilst watching a peculiar harlequin/marrionette figure sat before the fireplace. Presumably the Mr. Fantasy of the title.
It’s a cover that mixes the cosiness of a countryside cottage offering protection from the elements, with a suggestion of the hallucinatory uneasiness associated with the darker aspects of late 60s drug culture.
But that’s just the cover, what about the ruddy recording?
Mr. Fantasy was the Birmingham-born group’s debut album and just beats the follow-up Traffic to being their best.
Traffic came about when Steve Winwood – wanting away from the outfit that brought him fame,The Spencer Davis Group – teamed up with fellow Brummy music-types, Jim Capaldi, Dave Mason and Chris Wood. With Birmingham nightclub The Elbow Room – owned by ‘big’ Albert Chapman, who yours truly met a few years back – as their focal point, Traffic was born.
Mr. Fantasy is a fantastic piece of arty, psychedelic rock. Apart from the sitar-by-numbers of ‘Utterly Simple’ (George Harrison, it ain’t) and the instrumental ‘Giving to You’, everyone’s a winner. Even the bizarre, crowbarred-in psychedelic-pop of ‘House For Everyone’.
Produced by Rolling Stones regular, Jimmy Miller, Mr. Fantasy kicks off in fine style with the dramatic ‘Heaven is in Your Mind’ and then slips effortlessly into the knockabout music hall sing-along of ‘Berkshire Poppies’, featuring the Small Faces on backing vocal and general horsing about duties. Elsewhere, the aching loss of ‘No Face, No Name, No Number’, the titular phased and fuzzed-up freakout ‘Dear Mr. Fantasy’ and the sinister ‘Dealer’, all score top marks.
By the time the album was released in December of 1967, Mason had left the band following internal strife regarding the direction they were taking – He was for the more whimsical approach as apparent on his songs ‘House For Everyone’, ‘Utterly Simple’ and ‘Hope I Never Find Me There’, whereas the rest of the band were pursuing a much harder edged sound. He rejoined in time for the second album, which rejected psychedelia in favour of a more mainstream, slightly progressive feel. A progressive feel that would bear fruit on the following two albums, John Barleycorn Must Die and The Low Spark of High Heeled Boys.
The Island remastered release of Mr. Fantasy also features a mono version of the original album with a slightly amended track listing and the singles, ‘Paper Sun’ and the LSD spiked imagery of ‘Hole in my Shoe’ as bonus tracks.
All in all a solid blast of psychedelic rock, injected with a sense of a fun that was notably absent from later, more serious Traffic recordings.
Mr. Fantasy is released on Island Records and available from Amazon.co.uk
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