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IN WHICH… I DISCOVER PSYCHEDELIA & ACID ROCK… MAN!

I’ll always have a soft spot for him, but I rapidly moved on from Duane Eddy’s twangy geetar sounds once Ray Davies had kickstarted my love of rather noisier, discordant guitars. Not that far on, to be honest… screechy, sweet-sounding, very loud guitaring still does it for me, if not for the other, long-suffering members of my household. Number One son, Steeven, does value heavy metal guitars, and has spent much of his teenage and adult years following Metallica around the world. Number Two (in age only!), Paul, is a Green Day loyalist.

Although my own social life as a teenager involved playing football most evenings of the week and, more competitively, in Sunday league teams, as I worked on Saturdays, there was plenty of room for music. As well as my football mates, there was another group of acquaintances who were more concerned with growing their hair even longer than was fashionable and, so it was whispered, smoking cigarettes containing substances other than tobacco. This seemed to render them incapable of conversing sensibly about any subject other than music – and about how marvellous groups were of which I had never then heard, and which usually hailed from the States.

One night two or three of them – Steve Searle, Dick ‘Strick’ (he worked in Stricklands record shop), Ian French, perhaps – invited me round to the home of one of them in Herga Road in Wealdstone. (‘Wanna hear some sounds, man?’) I’ve no idea why they did so, as, being a year or two older than me, they were entitled to ignore me or, had they been of a tougher variety, to beat me up whenever they fancied. They did no such thing. When I turned up at the house, they all seemed to be lying around, smoking, drinking and listening. There were no in-charge adults to be spotted anywhere. The smoking – even the sweet-smelling variety – and drinking did not remotely appeal to me… but the listening, wow, that did. I didn’t know what or who I was listening to, but the sounds, particularly those wrung out of guitars, were like nothing I’d heard, even from the Stones and The Beatles. I was hooked.

This change of musical emphasis, whilst psychedelia was swirling unchecked on to the airwaves, was to blame for one of the most embarrassing moments of my life. The 1967 ‘summer of love’ saw even we suburban grammar school kids feeling we had something in common with groovy hippies, and one of the easier ways of demonstrating that was through clothes. I acquired a loud, paisley-style kaftan-type shirt, teamed it with low-slung, possibly white, hipsters, held up by a wide, white leather belt, set off by some kind of moccasin-like sub-trainer style footwear, worn with a wonderful brown velvet jacket and a very small, ahem, bell, around my neck. Yes, yes, OK. Guilty. Hands held up, etc.

This, I recall, was the ‘gear’ I was wearing to chill out in down by Poulter’s chip shop in trendy downtown Wealdstone one evening, where a few friends were sitting about, listening to a pirate station on a transistor radio and just discussing, probably, football, girls, and music. We were rudely interrupted by ‘The Man’, otherwise known as a couple of the local ‘bobbies’ or ‘fuzz’ in the vernacular of the day. They clearly had little to do and weren’t in sympathy with our musical tastes. They stopped for a friendly chat, inviting us to ‘Fuck off out of it.’ For sure we weren’t ‘out of it’ in any serious sense but when we didn’t immediately leap to our feet and clear off, one of the cops leaned over to tell me that he meant what he said and if I didn’t leg it asap he’d ‘stuff that fucking bell down your fucking mouth, son.’ Police brutality, man! But, objective achieved. The bell was immediately retired from active duty.

Poulter’s chip shop was run by John and Alan of that ilk. I lived next door to Mrs Poulter, matriarch of the fish ‘n’ chip family, whose grandson Paul was a schoolmate of mine and a demon bowler on a cricket pitch. We used to spend time at his gran’s listening to music, and around this time he invited me in to listen to two LPs he’d just acquired. They were Evolution by The Hollies, whose psychedelic cover and Graham Nash-driven contents delighted me, and sunshine pop trailblazers The Turtles’ album, Happy Together, whose irresistibly catchy choruses and harmonies immediately made a huge impression. As I left, probably for ‘my tea’, Paul nonchalantly told me, ‘You can have those records if you want.’ I needed no second bidding. Still own them, still play them, still think they’re wonderful.

Back in Herga Road, I’d later discover that I was hearing groups (I’m sure they were always described as groups rather than bands back then) like Quicksilver Messenger Service, Big Brother & The Holding Company, Jefferson Airplane, Country Joe, Spirit, Captain Beefheart, Hendrix, etc, and, boy, did I like… no, I loved the sounds they made. Acid rock or (the American version of) psychedelic music was what it was called and it rapidly became the love of my musical life. It was a short-lived phenomenon in terms of mainstream appeal, but has gone on to become probably the most collectable, most valuable genre of rock music. Even now I am still discovering more of it which was created from 1966 to the early 1970s, much of which either sold painfully few copies, or never secured a release at the time.

I’m not the only one not entirely clear about what is, or isn’t, psychedelic. Look through the ‘Psych’ section of a number of different record shops and you’ll see for yourself how tricky it is to decide. There are many nominations for the ‘first psychedelic record’ honour. You could write an entire book about the subject. Some people have. Perhaps one of the best attempts at the subject is Record Collector 100 Greatest Psychedelic Records, from 2005, which came down in favour of The Beatles’ ‘Rain’, B-side to ‘Paperback Writer’, released in June 1966. ‘Rain… is the first fully-formed English psychedelic creation’, declared the publication.

I wouldn’t necessarily dispute that. I loved ‘Rain’ as soon as I first heard it but I will always refer anyone who is genuinely interested in a definition of psychedelic music to ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’, released in Feb 1967. That, to me, typifies the genre, with its eerie atmosphere, unexpected rhythms and sounds, mysterious lyrics and genuinely original tune. The backwards section, chiming guitars and pure ‘difference’ made it special from the first hearing – and, for me, each subsequent one.

The ordinary – such as finding a flaw in one’s footwear (consult Traffic’s ‘Hole in My Shoe’) – becoming extraordinary was a common theme in Brit-psych. ‘My White Bicycle’ (Tomorrow); ‘I Can Hear the Grass Grow’ (The Move); ‘Itchycoo Park’ (Small Faces); and ‘Apples and Oranges’ (Pink Floyd) are all of this type. There was also what became known as the ‘Toytown’ element to it, which music writer Paul Morley described well in his 2016 biography, Bowie. Seeing its arrival as ‘a fascination with traditional symbols of British national identity’ he feels there was a ‘desire to reframe the influences of a post-war childhood in the mind-bending new context of psychedelia.’ ‘What’, went on Morley, ‘if the Goons, Alice in Wonderland, C S Lewis, Charles Dickens coexisted with experimental pop music?’

This kind of psych clearly ‘speaks’ very clearly to my generation, which was brought up on these books and similar radio and TV programmes during our formative years and relates sympathetically to it when prompted by lyrics referring to them and others of similar ilk, written by group members cut from the same cloth. This view of psych is the specific focus of the triple CD compilation, released in 2016 by Grapefruit Records, featuring 80 ‘British psychedelic sounds of 1967’. Well, 79 really. Quite how ‘Support Us’ by The QPR Supporters justifies inclusion is beyond me.

The title of the collection is Let’s Go Down and Blow Our Minds, an inspired choice, which is not only part of the opening line to the opening track of the box set, the single ‘Toyland’ by The Alan Bown!, but also completely captures the atmosphere of the music therein. That song, by band members Tony Catchpole and Jess Roden, who would also turn up in the under-estimated Bronco, remains ‘a classic slice of childhood-inspired English psych-pop whimsy’ as the box set’s accompanying booklet written by David Wells put it.

As, indeed, does Past & Present’s 5-CD, 82-track romp from 2010, Chocolate Soup For Diabetics which mines similar fertile ground, and another triple CD delight from Grapefruit in 2017, celebrating ‘The British Psychedelic Sounds of 1968’ under the heading Looking At The Pictures In The Sky. I’d suggest that only those there at the time could have come up with these evocative memory-jogging headline names, such as We Can Fly, the catch-all title of another terrific set of psych’s forgotten voices and sounds well worth any aficionado’s investigation

In late 1967, along came the latest Moody Blues’ LP, Days of Future Passed, which saw psych, still in its infancy to a large extent, begin to morph into yet another segment, ‘progressive music’ and/or ‘prog rock’.

American psychedelia/acid rock was fundamentally similar, but at the same time very different. ‘Get Me to the World on Time’, demanded the Electric Prunes in May 1967, having already explained in November 1966 that, ‘I Had Too Much to Dream Last Night’. But Jefferson Airplane’s ‘White Rabbit’ was inspired by a prime piece of British literary psychedelic heritage. ‘White Rabbit’ was one of vocalist extraordinaire Grace Slick’s earliest songs, written during either late 1965 or early 1966 and released in 1967. It uses imagery found in the fantasy works of Lewis Carroll, author of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, first published in 1865, including changing size after taking pills or drinking an unknown liquid.

Slick claimed the composition – reportedly written after a ‘trip’ – was supposed to be a slap in the face to parents who read their children such novels and then wondered why their children later used drugs. Characters Slick referenced include Alice herself, the White Rabbit, the Dormouse, and the hookah-smoking caterpillar. There is an element of acid of another type in Rob Chapman’s excellent book, Psychedelia and Other Colours which covers the full gamut of the genre’s derivation and progression. A review in a Bibliophile catalogue observed of the music – that it had ‘its roots in fairy tales, myths and fairgrounds, the music hall, the dead of Flanders’ fields, the Festival of Britain’, and that it feeds into ‘that peculiarly British strand of surrealism that culminated in the Magical Mystery Tour’.

I’d say the first really psychedelic US offering came courtesy of the Byrds’ literally electrifying ‘Eight Miles High’, released in March 1966. It left those listening wondering whether the official explanation that it described the latter stages of a flight by the band from the US to London was entirely accurate, or whether another kind of trip was the true inspiration.

Other American bands are often tagged with the psych label – but maybe acid-rock, a brasher, more aggressive, more political animal, is a more accurate term to use for their style, while garage-rock is something else again, often lumped in with psych/acid but rougher and readier than those two. Although ten or more years earlier than punk, perhaps it has more in common with the aggressive, confrontational aspects of that mid-1970s explosion.

That some of the US bands were also inspired by the Brit fairy tale genre is clear from the fact that in 2013, when the much-respected Charly Records compiled a double disc of music called The Great Lost Southern Popsike Trip, they subtitled it ‘Alice in Wonderland and other Rainy Day Girls’, largely on the back of the fact that the opening track was The Berkeley Kites’ ‘Alice in Wonderland’. Sam Szczepanski, the author of the accompanying booklet, dubbed this ‘pure toy town pop’ with its nursery rhyme references and ‘whimsical’ flute.

A – THE, maybe – major link between British/American psych/acid rock – apart from the obvious influence on both of illegal and illicit substances – is the one person who could, and did, straddle both and more besides – when, in March 1967, he unleashed ‘Purple Haze’ on the unsuspecting world – yes, of course, Jimi Hendrix.

I love and embrace all of these genres, but when forced to side with one, it is the British psych style which does it for me just a little more. Perhaps this is because of the impressionable age I was when this music made its presence felt, not only on disc, but also in a number of influential movies. They may look old fashioned and out of time if watched today, but they really hit the spot at the time and boasted brilliant soundtrack albums.

Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush was a rite of passage film with a Spencer Davis/Traffic soundtrack, notably the title track – but it also featured a wonderful Andy Ellison solo effort, ‘Been A Long Time’. Then there was the politically edgy kitchen-sink cum-swinging-London mix of Up the Junction, the film version of Nell Dunn’s novel, which involved members of Manfred Mann, notably the evolving writing talent of Mike Hugg, particularly in evidence on the title track. Add to these two films the Sidney Poitier/Lulu vehicle, To Sir, With Love, and the Lovin’ Spoonful soundtrack ‘You’re A Big Boy Now’ and music was sucking me into its grasp wherever I looked and listened. Bizarrely, old-school comic Norman Wisdom also got in on the act in his movie What’s Good for the Goose which featured a great soundtrack by the Pretty Things.

All of this helps to explain the answers to questions often posed to me. ‘Why do you almost exclusively collect and listen to music from 50-plus years ago? Don’t you realise there’s been great music appearing regularly since then and there is still much that is terrific being made now?’ Of course I do – I’m as avid a viewer of Jools Holland’s TV show as the next person. But the point is that the music I loved first was that being written by my contemporaries, and by and large aimed at people just like me. Yes, much of it has become over-familiar over the past few decades, but the real joy for me now is unearthing the stuff that was also being made back then but which did not capture the airwaves, did not make the charts, was not picked up by major labels. That too was being made for the likes of me by the likes of me and to discover it now, still sounding fresh and contemporary to the part of my brain which never wanted to ‘move on’ to other areas, is just an amazing delight.

I’m no longer 17 in looks, but a large part of me remembers precisely what it was like being that influential and impressionable age, and how I felt about life and the world, and to rediscover the way in which others were experiencing just those emotions and feelings is the next best thing to boarding a time machine and returning to those long-gone days.