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This album doesn't exist... But don't you wish it did?

First of a spine-tingling new series - in which members of NME Wishful Thinking Inc. compile their Ideal Album of any or each particular musical genre. Or not. As the case may be. THIS WEEK: CHARLES SHAAR MURRAY and the Golden Years of British Psychedelia.

HOW TO COMPILE AN ALBUM FOR FUN AND PROFIT

Though this album doesn't exist, we decided to compile it under the real limitations facing anyone who attempts such an endeavour. Limitation number 1: you have to rely on the material owned by one specific company or group of companies, since label managers are somewhat averse to leasing material from other companies unless it's dead cheap (budgets, y'know). Limitation number 2: there's only so much material that you can squash onto one side of an album before you start losing volume and tonal quality.

Unless you have a stone genius of a mixdown engineer and Uri Geller to master and cut the tapes onto disc, you cant get much more than twenty-two or twenty-three minutes of music onto an album. Take a look, for example, at the first Led Zeppelin album. Even though there's not much more than eighteen minutes worth of music on each side, the groove runs abnormally close to the label. This is because Jimmy Page packed as much volume and reproduction in the tapes as he could, and the more you put into it, the more disc space it takes up. By contrast Al Kooper managed to bump Side One of Super Session up to half an hour, though you had to crank up your machine to get optimum volume and sound quality.

The original version of Nice Stuff was a real utopian deal which ran for something well over an hour, included material from half a dozen different labels and featured Beatles and Stones material plus a twenty minute Soft Machine bootleg tape. As such, it was widely impractical and served no real purpose, and was ruthlessly suppressed.

The one we're dealing with here could actually exist if Polydor were prepared to issue it. The material is drawn entirely from labels which Polydor control, including Giorgio Gomelski's now defunct Marmalade label (source of the Blossom Toes, Kevin Godley and Auger-Driscoll) and Track (Arthur Brown, Marsha Hunt, John's Children and Thunderclap Newman). In an attempt to avoid material which has already been anthologised to death, no Who or Hendrix material has been included, and the Cream track chosen is one that has so far escaped the attention of the trained armadillos who slave away in Robert Stigwood's basement endlessly permutating old Eric-Jack 'n-Ginger tracks. I've attempted to balance off the familiar with the obscure - everybody knows Fire, Something In The Air, and This Wheel's On Fire, but Devil's Grip, Accidents (particularly the long version from Thunderclap Newman's grossly neglected Hollywood Dream album) and Road To Cairo failed to grasp public attention on anything like the same scale. The Godley track, which should come as a considerable eye-opener to present-day 10 cc. fans, only ever saw the light of day on a Marmalade sampler entitled 100 Per Cent Proof and the Blossom Toes track known only to the people who listened to Top Gear in 1968 and those dedicated crazies who actually bought the blamed thing. The point is that this stuff is available to Polydor and they haven't really attempted to use it. Sure, they've packaged up endless Cream and Hendrix albums and done a "Rock Flashback" on Auger and Driscoll, but their reissue policy hasn't exactly been too adventurous. To the A&R Department at Polydor Records, then, this Phoney Compilation is affectionately dedicated.

BRITISH PSYCHEDELIA was a far more eccentric beast than its American forebear. Possibly because of a sense of distance from the authentic "roots", British bands had generally tended to lose patience with the idea of playing twenty minutes of Johnny B.Goode every night and, fortified by shining examples from the West Coast and suspicious packages purchased from slicked-up West Indians, they set out into the unknown to produce music of the genre located within this well-laminated, guaranteed-not-to-split-until-you're-out-of-the-shop sleeve.

All Of seven years ago. The Crazy World of Arthur Brown were the heroes of those hippies who were either brave enough to confront them while wasted, or had taken too much acid to care. Operating as a trio at first (Brown, organist Vincent Crane, and drummer Drachen Theaker) they played grotesquely mutated soul music (even including "I Put A Spell On You" and James Brown's "Money") with Brown's insanely amped-up horror-movie lyrics and psychedelic punch-and-judy theatrics. "Fire" was a huge hit, got Arthur Brown in all his demented glory onto "Top Of The Pops" complete with flaming helmet, and was quite the weirdest thing to assail the nation's screens until the coming of Alice Cooper several years later.

The omnipresent Pete Townsend had had a considerable hand in the launching of Mr. Brown, co-producing his record with Kit Lambert. Another act that he put together was Thunderclap Newman. Composed of pretty-boy whiz-kid guitarist Jimmy McCullough (who's still ver pretty and still a whiz-kid), eccentric GPO engineer and pianist Andy Newman, and manic songwriter/hooligan John (Speedy) Keen, Thunderclap Newman had been assembled out of three diverse ingredients by ol'Pete who produced their records and played bass on their album Hollywood Dream. Something In The Air was a massive hit, and still survives through its recent revival by LaBelle, whose magnificent reinterpretation of the song can be found on their Pressure Cookin' album.

The story of Cream is too well known to require any lengthy retelling. In addition to breaking the five-minute barrier (and the ten-minute barrier, the fifteen minute barrier and the twenty minute barrier), they also recorded various orthodox pop songs, usually composed by Jack Bruce and Pete Brown. This one was the product of Eric Clapton and his flat-mate, former OZ art director Martin Sharp. It was the theme from a totally forgettable trash movie, and also proved a less than successful single. Note especially the unutterable poignancy of the line "and the elephants are trampling on the brains of squealing mice/Anyone for tennis, wouldn't it be nice". Of such stuff is greatness born. Can you hear me, Steven Harley?

From the dim mists of time come John's Children, the first rock band to get seriously camp. They posed naked, discreetly veiling their hairy bits with convenient hunks of shrubbery, and included in their number were a singer named Andy Ellison (currently fronting a group named Jet) and a guitarist named Marc Bolan (currently unemployed). This track was banned at the time by the BBC because of the line "Desdemona, lift up your skirt and fly". Bolan later left to pursue his own devices, and John's Children fled into no doubt well-deserved obscurity. Desdemona is their legacy to the youth of today.

One of the many legendary incidents of those golden years was the occasion on which Marsha Hunt appeared on "Top Of The Pops" to perform her interpretation of Dr John's classic "Walk On Gilded Splinters" wearing a buckskin skirt and halter. Owing to the amount of effort that she put into it, the halter top gradually unlaced itself, much to the consternation of the technicians and the delight of the audience. Due to great presence of mind by all concerned, public decency was preserved. The record was great, incidentally; required listening for anybody with a collection of back numbers of Tales Of The Zombie, and it was promoted in the underground press with ads involving photographs of Our Marsh performing yoga exercises in the nude; one of which, to Ms Hunt's entirely justified displeasure, emphasised the initial letters of the title to spell "W.O.G.S." Her next appearance on TOTP, incidentally coincided with the release of a single entitled Keep The Customer Satisfied.

Road To Cairo was one of the Great Flop Follow-ups. It came hard on the heels of Julie Driscoll and the Brian Auger Trinity's Wheel's On Fire, and was a solid example of More Of The Same. It was longer and slower, which counted against it, but since Julie Driscoll had become the recipient of a vast amount of colour-sup attention it was assumed that this new-found cult status would provide an automatic smash. It didn't. Funny old world, innit?

Described by The Observer as playing "electric guitar Asian jazz" (bully for The Observer), Blossom Toes were very heavily publicised but proved a trifle too eccentric for public acceptance on the scale of the Floyd, Arthur Brown, or even Tomorrow. Nevertheless, they reached some extraordinary heights, not the least of which was Peace Lovin' Man, a non-mystical revolution song which makes no musical compromises whatsoever, and featured some extraordinary guitar from Brian Godding.

This Wheel's On Fire was the hit that set Road To Cairo up to flop. It brought the aforementioned Julie Driscoll, Brian Auger and The Trinity out of the clubs and into international prominence, and it was some kind of small masterpiece. It took one of Dylan's most oblique and paranoid songs and made it even more sinister and mysterious, with a chilly Mellotron in the background, an icily malevolent vocal from Julie Driscoll, and a rampaging organ solo. Ride-out, which was buried in trifle in the original mix.

Kevin Godley is now 10 cc.'s drummer, but a few years ago he and Graham Gouldman were a short-lived and righteously obscure duo planning all kinds of projects for Giorgio Gomelski's Marmalade label. To Fly Away, a gorgeous little piece, was included on Marmalade's sampler album as a trailer for an album that never emerged due to Marmalade's premature collapse. Godley, of course, went on to Hotlegs and from thence to 10 c.c., where he is now extremely rich and famous. This is what he sounded like when he was poor, folks.

Ditto for The Soft Machine except that they still aren't that rich. Love Makes Sweet Music, a merry little ditty written by Kevin Ayers, who is famous, features the original line-up of Kevin Ayers (bass), Robert Wyatt (drums), Daevid Allen (guitar), and Mike Ratledge (keyboards), and predates the banks' first album on ABC. Mr. Wyatt indulges in a wee dram of scat-singing, and the piece is quite uncharacteristically straightforward. Needless to say, it wasn't exactly a worldwide smash, though it did make No. 28 in Radio London's Top 40.

And let's hear it for genuine British psychedelic idiocy. No American band of the time could ever have made a record as triumphantly absurd as this, the first musical adaptation of Edward Lear since the days of Elton Hayes and his small guitar. The rather large guitar on this record is the work of a gentleman named Bim. Wherever you are now, Bim, your contribution to Western thought did not go unnoticed.

Gripi> preceded Fire, but regrettably didn't come to as many people's attention. Even more bizarre, it showed Mr. Brown's ensemble at their most idiosyncratic with Arthur in magnificently uninhibited form and Crane really whipping out that Phantom Of The Opera stuff. It's B-side, Give Him A Flower was possibly the only recorded example of British psychedelic stand-up comedy and could well be included on a future collection.

Again, a follow-up that missed. Certainly a more demanding work than Something In The Air, its theme - small children involved in lethal accidents - may well have weirded out many potential consumers. This version, extracted from Newman's Hollywood Dream album is a masterpiece of production, and involves the "Air" device of seeing how far you had to go to render logical Newman's magnificently irrelevant piano solos. The ending, with its repeated spoken motif, could serve as some kind of "hail and farewell" epitaph to its era. The brain damage must go on! (From The NME, April 19, 1975.)

It's dream-time in Compilationsville once again, amigos. This week Charles Shaar Murray does his worst to induce EMI into issuing Volume Two in is discocartography of The Golden Age Of British Psychedelia - an auspicious era during which this country's youth eagerly did its brains in on everything from S.T.P. to macrobiotic food, all of us caught crabs, and rock-wise there were...

MORE ZITS THAN HITZ...

Volume Two of Nice Stuff is really wish fulfilment on an extremely grandiose scale, as Roy Carr and I discovered when we dreamed up the idea of "Hard Up Heroes" eighteen months or so ago. We took our little project to E.M.I., dazzled with the extraordinary material that lurked in their capacious vaults, and friends, they turned us down flat. (They also turned us down flat when we offered to compile the ultimate Yardbirds anthology, on the grounds that their extraordinarily slapdash and inadequate "Remember The Yardbirds" set on Starline was still selling, which it was - in the absence of something better) Even the consistently high import sales of a series of compilations put together by E.M.I. Germany haven't convinced them that there is much that can be done in terms of creative recycling of the wealth of legendary stuff still at their disposal, and it doesn't look as if Nice Stuff Vol. 2 will ever see the light of what passes for day on the shelves of record shops. Time's a-wastin' though, so awaaaaaaaaaaaaaay we go...

SIDE ONE

Who The Smoke were I never knew nor cared. For all I know they're all butchers or bus-conductors now, though there's always the possibility that one of them joined a group like Supertramp and is currently a teenage idol.

My Friend Jack emerged in the misty dawn of 1967 and was built around the central thesis that "my friend Jack eats sugar lumps", which was a cutesy nudge-nudge-wink-wink reference to the fact that users of lysergic acid diawhateritwas (hereafter referred to simply as "acid") used to consume the foul stuff pouring it onto sugar cubes and crunching same, and then going out and seeing God. Naturally, all the degenerates who indulged in this habit were delighted to hear this public reference to their vice, and enough of them stopped listening to the heartbeat of the cosmos long enough to buy this record. Without a shadow of a doubt, it was dreadful in the extreme, but it is included herein as an instant cultural reference point. Besides, records as bad as My Friend Jack cannot be allowed to vanish into oblivion. Proudly it stands, therefore, as simultaneously a monument to the excesses of a by-gone-era, and An Awful Warning to us all.

Once upon a time, a radical group known as the Provos (short for "Provotariat") flourished in Amsterdam. One of their many admirable stunts was to get hold of a bunch of bicycles, paint them all white, and place them at the disposal of the public - ie anybody who needed to get somewhere in a hurry could just grab the nearest white bicycle and use it to take him to wherever he needed to go. With impeccable logic, the Dutch police confiscated the lot because (a) they weren't registered in anybody's name and (b) they were left around unlocked. Tomorrow were Keith West (vocals, poses and Teenage Opera), Steve Howe (guitars and subsequent superstardom), Junior (bass and mystique) and Twink (drums, lunacy and notoriety as per Mr. Farren's Fairies piece). During 1967 and early 1968, they were rated by many as being in the same league as the pre-hit Pink Floyd, Arthur Brown and Driscoll-Auger, but despite West's solo success with the abominable Excerpt From A Teenage Opera, they never achieved what we rock writers are fond of describing as "that elusive hit single". "My White Bicycle" features loony guitar from Howe, all the production gimmicks popular at the time and a very English vocal, Living History, as is...

This little ditty is a curiosity on many levels. It was Jeff Beck's last recording as a Bird, one of the only two tracks which feature both Beck and Jimmy Page (the other being its B-side Psycho Daisies, the only Yardbirds single apart from Good Morning Little School Girl to be an unqualified flop, plus it conformed to the demands of the then-imminent Psychedelic Era more than anything else the group ever did. It has lyrics of the utmost cosmicity ("It is real or only in my dreams/I gotta know what it all means"), a relentlessly crazy guitar-solo-and-monologue from Beck, and a fabulous impersonation of a police siren by Page. Every home should have one.

And the flops just keep on comin'! "Apples And Oranges" was the Floyd's last single to involve miracle ingredient "Syd", and it was quite unutterably manic with a vocal line that gradually spiralled ever upwards and then toppled gracefully over the edge. It followed Arnold Layne and See Emily Play, but for some odd reason did absolutely nothing. Maybe Barrett's lack of communication with the outside world had something to do with it - just maybe. Shortly after its release, he swan-dived into the infinite to be replaced by Dandruff King David Gilmour, who gets his moment of glory over on Side Two.

And God (or someone like him) created George Bruno, and George Bruno created Zoot Money, and Zoot Money created the Big Roll Band, and Sandoz and Owsley created most wondrously fine acid. The result of all these geneses was Dantalian's Chariot. Challengers Of The Unknown and Hallucinogenic Warriors Extraordinarie, Madman Running Through The Fields was an invigorating riot of backward tapes and other then fashionable devices, and it sold not a whit. D. Chariot specialised in all-which costumes and instruments, had what was for a while regarded as the best lightshow in town, and lost a small fortune. Such is life, and in the Great Psychedelic Era, it kept getting sucher and sucher.

SIDE TWO

It was like this, see, Tomorrow were doing this gig at UFO, see, and word of the Jagger-Richard bust came through, see, and everybody got mucho indignant, see, and so Twink grabbed a handmike and wandered out into the audience yelling "Revolution now! Revolution now!", right? And later it became a song, man, and it didn't sell. Tomorrow were actually a fine band.

I have faint, dim memories of seeing them on this all-night lunatics' convention entitled "Christmas On Earth Continued", and during the set Steve Howe played beautifully, Junior dropped his bass, and Keith West demonstrated a variety of on-stage poses that anticipated many of the excesses of the Sublime Seventies. In addition to Bicycle and Revolution, they performed a hideous creation entitled Three Funny Little Dwarves, and Strawberry Fields Forever, twice.

And enter David Gilmour, Point Me At The Sky ran into problems right at the start because it mentioned the Evening Standard, and so things had to grind to a halt while the offending phrase was redubbed as "the Daily Standard". I'm sorry to have to tell you that it wasn't a hit (is this becoming monotonous?), since it was well over five minutes long and not particularly catchy. It operated in sections, something that the Great British Public wasn't quite ready for, and it wasn't particularly orientated towards the taste of Radio 1 producers, which may have contributed to its downfall. The pirate radio stations, y'see, had been packed up a couple of months before, which had an immediate conservatising effect on public taste. After the Sky debacle, the Floyd stopped making singles.

At last, friends, a bona fide HIT! One of the legacies of the Psychedelic Age was a frenzied outburst of guitar-heroing, based on either Strange Electronic Devices and/or recitals of "The Complete Works of Albert King Performed Consecutively In No Less Than Eighteen Seconds". Dave Edmunds came from a peculiarly demented Welsh branch of the latter school and, as part of Love Sculpture, got signed to Parlophone because the label at that time was without a blues band. (it was also 1968, when record companies had to have blues bands or else be Last Year's Label.) Love Sculpture dutifully made an album entitled Blues Helping, containing numbers like The Stumble, Wang Dang Doodle, Three O'Clock Blues and so forth, and then somehow persuaded their record company to go for an absolutely murderous hell-for-leather version of Khatchaturian's Sabre Dance, which was first premiered when the group guested on John Peel's "Top Gear". Their performance so unnerved Peel that he insisted on playing it again later on in the show. It boosted Love Sculpture into a fair-to-medium-sized attraction on the college circuit, and enabled them to only play blues when the actually felt like it. Eventually they split up and Dave Edmunds, apart from a temporary resurfacing with I Hear You Knockin', turned to studio whizz kiddery and bailing out Stardust.

While the vast majority were farting around with studio gimmicks and hippie mysticism, a few resolute souls continued to play blues and rock out. Among the latter division were the Jeff Beck Group, who at that time included Rod Stewart (microphone), Micky Waller (drums) and Ron Wood (bass), with the occasional assistance of Nicky Hopkins (piano). They in fact recorded two versions of Rock My Plimsoul (a bastardised version of B.B. King's Rock Me Baby), one of which appeared on the B-side of their Tallyman single in 1967 and the other on the Truthi> album in 1968, though they were probably cut at the same session. In the liner notes to Truth, Beck claimed that the album version was far superior to the single version, and it is probably due to this that the album version was included on last year's Rak maxi-single of Jeff Beck Group triumphs. Personally, I always felt the single cut to be more compact, more inventive and to have a far higher energy level, and without wishing to re-open any old wounds, a cursory listen to Plimsoul and, to a certain extent, to Blues De Luxe on Truth, should demonstrate fairly definitely that Beck and Stewart were developing at lest two years before Jimmy Page and Robert Plant teamed up many of the stylistic devices that were to characterise Led Zeppelin's blues work.

Once upon a time, before the formation of Purple Records, and even before EMI formally acknowledged the fact that D. Purple were a "progressive group" by switching them to Harvest, they recorded a couple of albums for Parlophone, the first of which was charmingly entitled Shades Of Deep Purple. They don't dream up titles like that any more. Simultaneously, they were signed to Bill Cosby's Tetragrammaton Records in the States, and achieved a couple of massive hits with Vanilla Fudge-style reworks of songs like Hush and Kentucky Woman. Hush was actually an object lesson in how to heavy up a pop song, complete with a neat little organ riff and rather overstated vocals from one Rod Evans, the Deep Purple's singer. He waslater to reappear in a singularly nasty group called Captain Beyond.

God, how I used to hate this song when the Broughtons' performed it - as they inevitably did - at large open air gatherings such as Hyde Park freebies and the Bath Blues Festival of 1969! As the First Psychedelic Age began to fade from the nervous system and everybody calm down, it seemed that its legacy was hordes of shirtless kinds in headbands banging Coke tins together and howling "Out demons out!" right along with the Broughtons. Little did they know, all those years ago, that what they were actually doing was pioneering exorcism-rock.

Addendum: Something that I only noticed when I was halfway through compiling this second volume of Nice Stuff is that both anthologies consist principally, if not entirely, of material originally issued on singles. At a time when only soul and idiot pop actually think in terms of singles as singles, it could be worth noting that the anthologists of the late '70s and early '80s are going to be in one hell of lot of trouble. (From the NME, April 26th 1975.)

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