New Musical Express on the 1983 reissue of Charlie Gillett's 1971 book The Sound of the City.
Reviewer Paul Du Noyer notes that "interest in old music has never been higher", with NME's own series of cassette compilations of vintage soul, jazz, reggae, etc, given as proof. He says the timely reissue of Gillett's classic tome can nourish the evident appetite for history out there.
1983 figures here as a lull, a flagging of energy, with a wide range of listeners and musicians looking to replenish the era's empty reservoir of inspiration by drawing from the aquifer of the archives.
But as the review reveals, the early '70s - when the book first came out - similarly were also a moment of "re-cycling, self-consciousness and nostalgia" taking over "from spontaneous forward momentum" .
Indeed Gillett cites Don McLean's "American Pie" as the terminus of his narrative for precisely that reason.
As so often, the Rift of Retro recedes ever deeper into the past...
Gillett's column in Record Mirror - back catalogue grave-robbing is in full swing as early as March 1970, ten years before the big reissue label boom of Edsel, Ace, Charly, et al.
A record I bought! It features hand-scrawled liner notes by Joe Strummer.
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Those cassettes whose popularity with the readers Du Noyer proudly mentioned .... as cheap introductions to regions of the past (nearly always black regions), they were a very decent offer and reader-service indeed from the New Musical Express or (should that be Old Musical Express in this case?)
Just a fraction of the NME cassetteography...
I sent off for several of these but then my interest flagged...
I was still too interested in the present.... didn't fancy turning into one of those tight-pegged pants, short-hair epigoners from a Biff or Serge Clerc drawing, forever (Courtney) pining for some long lost era of quality music....
Still I have to thank this tape in particular - and its compilers - for one evergreen delight
Straight No Chaser didn't turn me into a Blue Note disciple but it did introduce me to one of my favorite tunes of all time
I recreated the Straight No Chaser playlist on Tidal
Also made a playlist of versions of "April In Paris" (concluding that my favorite remains Thad Jones's)
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Straight No Chaser was also the title of a magazine started a little later in the Eighties. Its founders include Paul Bradshaw, who had written about reggae for NME, and Neil Spencer who had edited NME during its postpunk era through to the era of the archival cassettes.
The look of that first issue is close to the NME cassette aesthetic, but more august and austere.
I don't think I ever once picked up a copy of Straight No Chaser - I took it to be acid jazz aligned, Gilles Peterson-vibed, a neo-conservative alternative to The Wire (founded a few years earlier in the '80s).
It seems to have been more adventurous than that, albeit always looking for the jazz connection in modern music. Its slogan is "ancient to the future" and they seemed to have liked it when your futuroid musician paid homage to the ancient ancestors, aspired to the tradition of live musicianship, and generally talked that kind of Talkin' Loud type of talk...
So they had Roni Size on the cover, in 1997, around "Brown Paper Bag" and New Forms.
I'm guessing MJ Cole, or Wookie might have featured later on.
Am I right or am I right!
I do have an instinct, a nose, for this kind of thing, you see
Probably rather a lot of broken beats.
Mo' Wack, natch
SNC is rather like a Brit version of Wax Poetics.
There's that obsession with image - a love of classic-era jazz rooted in the photographs of it as much as the music, you secretly suspect. (And the record design).
Whereas The Wire, despite a similar emphasis on high quality portrait photography, would have much more in the way of musicians who are image-less. Badly dressed improvisors. Haggard legends with wrinkles and disappearing hair. Frowning scowlers with jowls and baggy sweaters.
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Another thing I think is interesting about this area is how much the original fetishized era of music (fusion, John Coltrane and Alice Coltrane, etc) is bound up with spiritual questing in a seriously dedicated, committed way ... but I strongly suspect that the Brit demographic drawn to this kind of music don't have anything like the same degree of interest in their revered artists's belief-systems.... it's probably a rather sceptical and down to earth milieu on the whole.
Nothing wrong with that... I personally don't buy into the creeds of musicians I love, whether it's roots reggae or Pharaoh Sanders... you like the musical outcomes that this devotional mentality generates... a vibe or drive or aura that non-believing musicians can't reach
Especially with the Brit fandom for this kind of music... the U.K. being such a faithless culture... For us the music becomes its own fanaticism... religion enough in itself
But then the writing about the music in this sort of zone doesn't really go in much for testifying or mystical language... it's a rather dusty discographic sort of writing (think also of the fact-heavy liner notes you get with dub and roots reissues.... what the music is actually about, its motor yearnings, is largely evaded).
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Although Wax Poetics and in a different way Grand Royal show that there are Americans like that, I do tend to think it's a British sensibility. "We are the select few white guys who understand the black music."
It always rubs me up the wrong way. For various reasons, but in part because they don't actually seem to understand it that well. They are always catching up with the cutting edge a little on the late side. They are all about rhythm but often have difficulty initially with the new rhythm.
Which is one reason - among several - that I continue to believe that Melody Maker had the best, most acute coverage of hip hop in the late 80s and early ‘90s, out of all the Brit mags covering it.
Yes, Melody Maker, the paper that had The Cure on the cover all the time. But we also had Schoolly D, Mantronix, Public Enemy, LL Cool J on the cover.
Our coverage of dance music wasn’t shabby either - indeed an entire monthly magazine, Muzik, was spun off the club tracks section of Melody Maker. You can’t say that about Sounds or NME.
All that span plus the sharpest coverage of the new underground rock - why would anyone have read any other music paper during this era? Seriously.
And somehow, even though you've been here so many times before, you're never prepared for the way that each week feels deader than the one before.
Until finally it's the last week of August and it's like Time's clock has stopped.
. . .
Hang on a minute
I have a powerful sensation of deja vu.
A sicky suspicion that I wrote exactly these words last year.
Or was it the year before?
Well, I suppose that only goes to prove my point, in a way.
But this August... this August has felt deader than ever, no-thanks to the unrelenting stifling heat, discouraging people from doing anything but sit indoors and sweat.
As our sexton Susan said plaintively the other day, mopping perspiration from her brow as she stepped into the rectory: "has the sky forgotten how to rain?".
The footpaths are cracked and dusty. The grass in the meadows is crisp and brown. The trees have that beat-down sun-struck feeling about them. The birds are silent. Blackberries, ripened prematurely, are already at that bloated, fly-blown stage, too sickly to tempt the rare soul on a stroll across the fields.
Indeed there was some debate about whether this newsletter should be called the Harvest Edition on account of the abnormally early harvest.
"We need rain. On parched soil and souls" - so says Evangelical Focus.
It all brings back memories of the long hot summer of 1976 and the unforgettable events of that season.
I'm talking of course about the village fête - the dispute about the whittling contest, the dead-of-night vandalization of the exhibits display, that shocking brawl on the Castle grounds between Ralph Knapp and Patrick Hearn, culminating in the burly pair tumbling into the moat (thankfully almost completely dried out because of the drought).
Memories of another long-ago era waft pungently from the first of this season's offerings (dead it might be in the streets and the fields, but musicians and other creative sorts have been busy).
Memories of the early '80s and local musicians like Dramatisand Pride of Passion - late-arriving prog rockers who adapted with surprising agility to the synthpop era (if not in these cases actually making the charts like other musicians who followed a similar arc, such as Nik Kershaw and Howard Jones).
I speak of the new album by The Belbury Poly - Sorcerer, released on the Ghost Box sister-imprint Belbury Music to indicate its divergence from the label's primary soundstream.
Release irrationale:
At the outset of the project, Jim Jupp assembled a palette of instruments and sounds which evoke a moment in musical history when digital studio technology just started to take over from analogue.
Eschewing Belbury Poly’s earlier mid 70s obsessions, to focus on that period around 1983, when artists who could afford it started to experiment with samplers. It was a musical moment dominated by the sounds of Prophet 5, DX7 & PPG synthesizers, Fairlight & Synclavier music computers, TR808 drum machine & Simmons Drums (those ubiquitous hexagonal drum pads) and of course the much-maligned fretless bass.
It’s also an era that’s now seen as something of a golden age for fantasy, sci-fi, comics, book, TV, movies and games (particularly in Britain where it was often fuelled by a post punk reaction to Thatcher’s regime).
In Jupp’s memory these things go hand in hand; as a child his nerdy fandom was soundtracked not as it was for most by Heavy Metal, but by the electronic pop of Bill Nelson, Yellow Magic Orchestra, Japan, and Frank Chickens. Also, by otherworldly TV soundtracks & production music of the era: Elizabeth Parker and Paddy Kingsland at the BBC, The Parry Music Library, Rod Argent’s new age library albums and even Clannad’s Robin of Sherwood score.
Also flashing back to the Eighties is the latest release from Fil OK, the final instalment of his "ecclesiastical electronica" trilogy, released under the alter-ego We're in the Water. It's titled The Dome.
No tasters available as yet but to whet your appetite for the kooky chorale of tracks like "Being Eaten" and the final title track, you can check out the previous installments of this 36 song-cycle: The Belltower and The Steeple
Release irrationale:
2026’s three ambitious works have each interpreted the lyrics and music of his new songs literally as architectural spaces, placing them conceptually in these three grand, holy places of worship, celebration and contemplation. Across the past twelve months this musical trilogy has variously explored different facets of the human experience, and The Dome sees Fil delve deep into the universe of spirituality and what lies within its mysterious realms.
Whereas February’s The Steeple explored the mind - how we think, question, imagine and make sense of the world around us - with June’s second long-player The Belltower turning to the body - the reality of living through relationships, joy, struggle and experience – this autumn’s concluding part The Dome completes the trilogy via an exploration of what nourishes the spirit. It's a record all about connection, hope, resilience, compassion, love, and our capacity to keep growing.
The new album’s journey begins with Fresh Air (featuring Carolyn), an invitation to pause, breathe and begin again. From there, Jugglin’ and Tightrope address finding balance in the realities of everyday life, while Desert Island Bed and Permanent Frown explore the idea of facing ourselves honestly and recognising the fears and habits that can leave us feeling disconnected.
The perspective widens with Forty Years On (featuring classical singer Will Eaves) with a string quartet reflecting on what truly matters when we look back on our lives, while the eponymously-titled We're in the Water (featuring We’re in the Water!) celebrates our shared humanity and the wonderfully strange experience of simply being alive. Bankrupt reminds us that compassion also needs wisdom, exploring the importance of discernment and healthy boundaries. Being Eaten embraces the idea that becoming someone new often means letting go of who we've been, while standout track Closer Than My Wife (featuring legendary Vicious Pink / Soft Cell vocalist Josephine Warden) and the epic More Love explore the beauty, complexity and mystery of human connection in its many forms.
But it’s left to the album’s title track to finally bring everything together. The Dome is the place we return to when life feels overwhelming - somewhere to plug into, a well to drink from, a place of renewal, perspective and quiet strength. Not somewhere to escape the world, but somewhere that reminds us who we are before we step back into life with hope, kindness and a renewed sense of purpose.
As Fil reflects, “One of the things that fascinates me most is how strange it is to be alive. Human existence is messy, beautiful, confusing, ridiculous and extraordinary, often all at the same time. None of us has it figured out, yet somehow we're all making our way through it together. That shared journey is, to me, one of the most spiritual things there is.”
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More squarely in the main soundstream of parish activity, a couple of new publications and a podcast series dedicated to all things spectral.
From Reaktion Books, here's the latest in a series of tomes taking the measure of this thing they call hauntology: Jamie Sexton's The Sounds of Lost Futures: British Musical Hauntology by Jamie Sexton (that's the second appearance of that word in this newsletter, and kind of an eerily apt name for a scholar of hauntology to have, since a sexton's responsibilities include funerals, digging graves and keeping cemeteries tidy).
Release irrationale:
Musical hauntology conjures sounds of futures that never arrived: music that reflects on memory and the recent past, drawing on analogue instrumentation, sampling and digital processing to capture how time feels twisted in an age of endless reproduction. The Sounds of Lost Futures offers the first sustained overview of this influential British mode, tracing its emergence, cognate genres and wide constellation of media influences. It also unpacks the conceptual forces that shape it – from nostalgia and retro culture to fractured temporal experience – while covering key artists and labels such as Ghost Box, The Caretaker and Mordant Music. With a dedicated focus on audiovisual hauntology, this book provides new clarity on a musical form attuned to the strange echoes of modern life.
Unconvinced by that "the first sustained overview" claim - A Year in the Country has put out no less than eleven books on the subject, there was this effort by the splendidly named Merlin Coverley several years ago, and there was also Ghost of an Idea: Hauntology, Folk Horror and the Spectre of Nostalgia by William Burns. And I feel like I'm blanking on one or two other books .... Not forgetting some jottings by yours truly and the Reverend Fisher. So I would say the soil is well tilled at this point.
Also, “cognate genres”!
A slightly stale air also clings to this non-nonfiction publication: the anthologyBrutalist Ghost Stories.
You simultaneously think "why did no one think of this before?" and "surely someone already did this?"
From Confingo Publishing, a release irrationale:
‘We live among ruins, surrounded by places built for a future that never arrived.’
Brutalist Ghost Stories is an anthology of seventeen original stories inspired by Britain's brutalist buildings and landscapes.
From grand libraries and university buildings to service stations and closed down car parks, this collection explores the concrete structures which have in their own way shaped Britain and imagines what dwells in them.
Traversing Scotland through to the south coast of England, these stories explore haunting, memory, folklore, loss and the uncanny.
Familiar landmarks become sites of mystery, overlooked corners of our nation's built environment reveal hidden histories and strange encounters abound.
Why no story about our local carbuncle, Tonwell Tower?
Clearly this whole field remains a growth area. Viz, the launch up at the Institute of a special unit:.Hauntology and Spectrality Research Group
Ghost stories are in fact one of the group's subjects of interest:
We can glimpse the gleanings of these researchers through their regular Hauntology Podcast, as amiable and indoor-voice intimate as you'd expect from such a gathering of scholarly kith. It's available via Rephonic, Apple, and other places you might expect, with transcripts offered as well as the audio. Three episodes in, topics include "Spectral Tourism" and "Haunted Writing, Creative Non-Fiction and the Moors Murderers".
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Returning to recent musical emanations...
Well, what a pleasant surprise - a new late-summer release from Moon Wiring Club, an artist I generally associate with the cold, damp weeks leading up to Christmas.
Almost Alive At Morgans Laneis one of Ian Hodgson's irregular delves into auto-archaeology, with a twist: these are not unreleased tracks and alternate takes but live performances, or residues thereof, that have been assembled into a kind of phantasmagoric "live album" that never quite was.
The album is out in a few days time and although a download-only release, it can be acquired in a special package: a "bespoke chunky presentation envelope" containing sundry goodies such as an A6 kineograph "overlaid with fragmented 1985 Microcomputer Soft Command Hallucinations" (yes your guess is as good mine), 8 exclusive postcards, and 4 (out of a range of 40) Curious Quartet Artcards. There are also some other related and semi-related goodies separately available - an Almost Alive Sticker Selection, issue #3 of Catmask , feline greetment cards- but also buyable as a bundle.
Release irrationale:
ALMOST ALIVE AT MORGANS LANE (GEpH020DLX) is quite possibly the cumulative meisterwerk of MWCs ongoing audio reclamation mission / divine calling to conjure up and deftly assemble as much esoteric ODDNUSS inside the most closely packed, yet luxuriously stacked envelope as possible.
Many moons ago, MWC were coaxed from their ephemeral Northern compound by a variety of elegant individuals and highly professional organisations to lucratively perform aLIVE undertaking within a fascinating variety of fashionably showbiz, yet simultaneously clandestine locations throughout the country.
Naturally these MWC performances were instantly and uniformly proclaimed a MASSIVE SUCCESS and soon became the highly sort-after ticket of the season, spoken of with whispered awe and a wide-eyed reverence.
Who amongst us can ever forget the amusing MWC catchphrase quotations ‘In the Phonebook Under Gas’ or ‘On the Never Never’ that artfully proliferated as a welcome secret fever throughout the en vogue vocabulary of the contemporaneous socialite elite.
Now YOU, who understandably were :
denied entrance
unable to locate the supposed venue
not yet sentient
choosing instead to rewatch repeats of Lovejoy
erroneously duped by pernicious rumours viciously perpetrated by the stealth agents of our envious rivals into avoidance
flamboyantly overdosed on Opium derivatives during the proceedings
Can rectify this catastrophic oversight + finally fully submit to Hexperience MWC ALMOST ALIVE AT MORGANS LANE with this highly stylish and unique bespoke chunky presentation envelope ~ jam-packed with HAND-ASSEMBLED interactive mnemonic articles all adeptly infused with occult significance potentiality.
8 tracks of unreleased MWC Musick(e) have been assiduously exhumed and thoughtfully re-spliced from an arcane assimilation-jumble transfer of aLIVE locationals, sound-bored recordings, reassembled rehearsal footage, in situ bootlegs, digital camera memory cards + patented MWC test recovery CDR Disc Rot Technique.
An undeniable RUFFness alongside an omnipresent atmosphere of uncanny malevolence eerily permeate these recordings, which feature aLIVE baked-in beat loopery elaborately juggled with copious quantities of unmoored vocal exclamations, percolated with corroded roomtone reverberations and myriad splintering aberrative atmospheric fluctuations.
Familiar MWC favourites such as Doll Hill House & Tudorbethan Jobbernowl now feature mutating situation deformities, alongside never repeated MWC obscurities such as the distorted machinations of Black Pudding Jacking Zone and the sublime Seance Psychedelia offering Sherry at the Ritz ~ all considerately rescued from the Vault ov ‘Orror by dedicated + discerning MWC archivists for the eternal delectation of future generations.
The resulting 55 minute opus provides a definitive aural totality of what undeniably conceivably occurred when MWC manifested one last time and performed their infamous Psychotopographical Swansong
And it's another splendid splodge of oozy-woozy oddnuss... simultaneously disintegrative and driving (the show must go on even if chunks of flesh are flaking off the performers)..... schmears of scrambled sound veer out of the foggy mix like a drunkenly jeering stranger... melody-riffs and refrains naggingly familiar from the MWC songbook return in distended form like hall-of-mirrors reflections of friend-faces... Top tune: the tauntingly jaunty "Tudorbethan Jobbernowl (Ergotoxicosis Mix)".
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Sunday school director Dave Howell informs me that the new record by Lawrence English, who hails from our Australian twin town Woolloongabba, is definitely on the vibe: sonically "somewhere between Vangelis and The Caretaker" and carrying a polemic about "the weaponisation of nostalgia for the purposes of cloaking possible futures." English's release irrationale refers to a term he's coined, "Acid Nostalgia... a shorthand to describe the de-contouring of the future through a corrosive fixation on a flatten rendering of the preceding times... a certain type of lazy cultural scripting where tropes of the past are presented in the absolute, as empty pictorials; photocopies without any original from which to draw actual meaning, or useful detail."
The album's title is certainly bang on theme: The Rest Is My Ghost.
Mr. Howell incidentally directs us also to a new release by Ukrainian exchange student Regina Collage that if not exactly haunty does waft off halcyon echoes of A.R. Kane - "It Should Be Something".
Gorgeous stuff, definite "Up!" vibrations.... From the album Horizont. It's on Jabu's label do you have peace?
(Jabu themselves return shortly with a wonderfully atmospheric and spacey-sounding new EP, Severn Flood Plain / Where You Run To on Mr. Howell's label Six of Swords)
It pops up in the cover story on Space Afrika, whose new albumQuiet Storm is out at the end of September.
And it pops up again in the lead review for an artist unfamiliar to me: Conflux Coldwell. The album is called Echolalia and it explores the connections between hauntology and autism.
Release irrationale:
"There is a spectre haunting Conflux Coldwell, the spectre of autism."
Bulletdodge is proud to announce the release of Echolalia a striking new electronica album from Conflux Coldwell. Arriving digitally this June, with a vinyl edition to follow in early September, the album Echolalia explores the notion of internal “ghosts” — the lingering traces that inhabit the mind. Sparked by his daughter’s autism diagnosis earlier this year, and his sister’s AuDHD diagnosis the year before, Coldwell was prompted to reflect on his own neurodivergence. The result is a deeply personal and introspective work that interrogates how these experiences have shaped his creative process, his unique perception of the world, and his enduring fascination with machines and hauntology.
Also lead reviewed in that same issue of The Wire is a record that truly can only be described as bringing-up-the-rear when it come to its subject: the spookiness of children's TV of the British 1960s and 1970s: Luke Haines's Izzy Wizzy Let's Get Busy.
"By the 1960s and 70s magick was all over children's television in the UK..."
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Not precisely hauntological but hailing from our Canadian twin town of Port Moody, Realm of Dusk - the new-ish alias of Sam Macklin - have recently released a third album of spacey glitchscapes. It's titled, logically enough, III and comes via the evocatively named imprint Blasted Gorse.
If a title like "Astral Vomit" suggest a secret and hitherto unexpected arsequake influence, other titles like "Bill Evans" and "Solitude Seekers" probably convey the atmosphere more closely. Indeed Matthew Ingram, reviewing at Woebot, uses words like "pensive" and "sidereal" and "funereal". Which last does sound a wee bit haunty.
Another elder of the parish swings by with news of an Extended Play.
Kollidaskope is a hot slab of Ekoplekz homing - or honing - in with laser-precise focus on the exact set of sounds that tickle his audio-erogenous zones. Sensibility refinement as a lifetime's project.
So the opening title track is Rastakraut fastskank, like a dried-up Monolake. Dank 'n' bouncy, "Refrakzion" is like "dub techno" if it meant something completely different. "Dubnauzium" finds the sour spot between "Silent Command" and "The Gospel Comes to New Guinea". "Autoekpression" is Bandalu chasing "Bitches Brew" down a long dark tunnel.
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Overtaken by meteorological events! In between starting the Newsletter last weekend and finishing up this morning, well, the sky remembered how to rain. Susan, the sexton, popped by the rectory on her way back from the shops - her face streaming with moisture, only this time precipitation not perspiration. Drenched to the skin she was and shivering, thanks to the sudden cataclysmic downpour and temperature drop. Dripping all over the newly waxed parquet flooring.
Answering the prayers of farmers and gardeners alike, the heavens have finally opened up.
In the comments to the previous post about Robyn Hitchcock and his epigonic attempt to perpetuate 1967... Phil Knight mentioned that there was quite a bit of it - back-to-psychedelia (specifically English psychedelia) in the early-mid Eighties.... Television Personalities... The Cleaners from Venus, The Monochrome Set...
Quite a bit of it - indeed there was, indeed there was.
Focused on the UK Eighties uptake of the UK Sixties vibe, what follows is not even the complete inventory...
First line of this references Rita Tushingham... Second verse references David Hemmings and David Bailey... the title nods to one of the Men From UNKLE. The entire lyric is a phantasmagoric montage of Sixties references
Patrick Macnee and Twiggy on the cover, not a collage but apparently a shot taken at a fashion shoot dedicated to the Avengers style...
Then there's the ironically named The Times
Ripping the lick from "Keep On Running" by Spencer Davis Group at the start... they should have been called The Past Times.
This song by Billy Childish's early band the Pop Rivits might actually just precede the Eighties but I include as a nod to that whole Milkshakes et al scene
"I know you'll say I'm living in the past / But those Beatle boots were made to last"
An Englishy Beatles (psych-era) flavour crept into XTC's albums from Black Sea onwards and then eructated in Dukes of Stratosphear , a side project that was pure Rutles really.
Then there was the neo-psych DIY loner Nick Nicely.
From the 1982 album Psychotropia, "Hilly Fields" is the tune that has cult love
Vocal's a bit Buggly for me...
"Nick Nicely" sounds like the title of one of those character-sketch songs that were rife in UK pop circa 66-67. Or something off the shit McCartneyfied side 2 of Abbey Road.
Nicely popped up again in the "nice one, top one, get sorted" era, as part of the breakbeat house outfit Psychotropic who did the classic rave track "Hypnosis" .
Another Nick doing neo-psych in the early-mid 80s was Nick Haeffner who if memory serves I met at a party - a very quiet fellow, who shyly spoke of his music... and who then materialized a few years later with an elpee on Bam Caruso. Paul Oldfield gave it a generous hearing.
The Great Indoors is a good title - indeed I might have nicked that phrase for something or other, now I think of it
Paul mentions Julian Cope in the review and he would indeed have been the great example of a laughing-madcap-wannabe of the English Eighties.
As Copey put it in an interview I did with him in the '90s, his thinking circa Teardrops / early solo elpees was "the accumulation of all of my heroes would be one hell of god to be" - the heroes being Barrett, Roky Erikson, Skip Spence, et al, whose heroic intake he tried to match in pursuit of druggy divinity.
Liverpool really was the first of the several New Psychedelias of the decade: Echo and the Bunnymen and then all the other non-starter groups with daft names like A Shallow Madness. Even Liverpool groups who weren't psychedelic had psychedelic sounding names - Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark
On the less Cope-ious intake committed to journeying up the road of excess end of things, there was the whole Mood Six / Marble Staircase / Doctor and the Medics scene around clubs like The Clinic and Alice In Wonderland. Foppish clothes horses and London scene-fabricators rather than real rainbow-chasers.
Good Lord how undignified - later in their career, Mood Six "guested in the award-winning music video to the Moody Blues' single "Your Wildest Dreams", playing a younger version of the band"
Soft as runny shite
As is this early release on (re)Creation Records
A label named after The Creation, freakbeat gods, one of whose song also provided McGee with a band name
Not far off some of the more overtly retro-psych moments on the first Stone Roses album
Talking of Barrett-isms
A friend thinks that Creation and The Jesus and Mary Chain were influenced by the Paisley Underground groups in LA, The Dream Syndicate and The Rain Parade
"This Can't Be Today" - no indeed, no indeed
American versions of this back-to-psych tended to be more solid than the Brits but in this case it's only a notch away from The Smithereens
Opal and Mazzy Star were better efforts from Roback. Despite repeated efforts, I cannot hear anything hypno-magical about the The Dream Syndicate, whose inspiration stretches to the astute citation of their well-chosen name.
As for The Three O'Clock - almost flimsy enough for the Mood Six scene.
The Bangles started out in this scene and here they cover quite fetchingly a song by ex-Soft Boy Kimberley Rew.
I love the idea that many of its American listeners would have been puzzled by the line "where you going with that UB40 in your hand", thinking it perhaps a snide reference to a record by the Brit reggae group, rather than a form for applying for unemployment benefit
But I've strayed across the Atlantic - back to Blighty, the main focus here
A loner - a scene-of-one - a true out-of-time underground man - Nick Saloman aka The Bevis Frond - leaning towards acid rock rather than paisley psychedelia, heavy at times
As noted earlier here, in one song the Frond explicitly addresses the shame of the epigone, semi-exorcising the anxiety of influence (that all these groups don't seem to be afflicted by, particular)
The Legendary Pink Dots - who I rather liked. Edward Ka-Spel had a more expansive conception, informed by Krautrock and experimental music and possibly Hammill and Supersister, as much as by the Barrett side of psych. The track below is from the 1985 album Asylum - as Paul Oldfield, a Dots supporter, pointed out, an ambiguous word, suggestive of sanctuary but also a place of confinement for the mentally disturbed. Madness as visionary state but also estrangement and exile.
On the mainstream tip and far more superficial - a fleeting fancy - there was Prince with Around The World. Lamentably there was also "Sowing the Seeds of Love" by Tears For Fears.
Veering away from the flower power moment to something a little hairier and heavier, there was the Cult, conjuring up Steppenwolf and early Led Zeppelin and such like... much more cock in this rock than the psych boy-men. But they were bandying around words like "Love" and "Revolution" and even the cult-of-Native-Americans ("Spiritwalker" etc) is rather late Sixties, Jim Morrison's souls of dead Indians jumping into his child's "fragile eggshell mind" etc etc.
I did quite like this, more for the tingly filigreed intro than the pumping main groove-drive
I was quite won over by the "boogie 'til you blow chunks" of the next album Electric (1987), when Rick Rubin got them to strip the sound right down.
Astbury has lungs like bellows and the guitarist can screech, but the swing and smoky thickness of sound that Steppenwolf had is completely flattened out -
Groups like Walkingseeds were referencing Blue Cheer (the title of a song on their 1987 album Skull Fuck... more prosaically they also had a number titled "St. Albans").
But I've veered into the American Sixties...
While this was going on you had the label Bam Caruso and the related magazine Strange Things (Are Happening)doing the heavy work of historical excavation: digging (for) freakbeat on the Rubble comp series, John's Children anthologies etc.
And that reminds me of Richard Norris, who was Bam Caruso's label manager, and who then teamed up with Genesis P-Orridge - Psychic TV already on this tip with their Hyperdelia concept: the Brian Jones tribute "Godstar", the cover of "Good Vibrations" - and together Gen and Richard did Jack the Tab, which was sort of but not really acid house.
The Shamen also plunged into the techno-house sound, with better results than either Jack the Tab or The Grid. But back in the Eighties - when I saw them about four times, always as the support or middle of the line-up group - they were total psychedelic revivalists, always performing with Op Art projections.
"Young 'Till Yesterday" - hark at the 67-reference there.
The guitar are quite nicely overloaded and frazzled - Electric Prunesy, White Noise-y - but the songs and the singing are faint and feeble.
This next one is transitional, when they are starting to get into beats and samples, but it's more industrial in feel than it is house-groovy. The title "Christopher Mayhew Says" is about the Liberal MP who took mescaline as part of a Panorama experiment for the BBC.
It was their pre-existing interest in hallucinogens that drew The Shamen to the new dance-drug culture.
And it was at one of the Shamen's Progeny events - them plus Orbital playing live but also loads of deejays - that I had my rave conversion experience in the autumn of 1991.
Good Lord, from "Pictures on My Wall" and "Sleeping Gas" through to the Second Summer of Love (1988) and the Second Second Summer of Love (1989 - getting our heads untogether in the country), the Eighties really was Sixties flashbacks all decade long, from start to finish...
(And then, crikey, it carried on into the early '90s with baggy and Inspiral Carpets with their pudding bowl haircuts and sub-Seeds keybs.... Candy Flip covering "Strawberry Fields Forever")
And of course the Stone Roses, who namechecked house and Hacienda and all that, but didn't really figure into their music, apart from a vague grooviness, a stronger rhythm section than Primal Scream
But this is pure retrodelic
Still, I suppose, bringing it back to where this all started- conceivably this makes Robyn Hitchcock a pioneer of sorts, the earliest of adopters - with the Soft Boys, the first to go back to this particular moment.
The advert for the debut Soft Boys single - released in 1977, the New Wave in full swing - bore the proudly untimely slogan: "First Psychedelic Record Release in 10 Years"
The second single's title is flying the phreak flag quite fervently.
But perhaps the Soft Boys weren't the first "acid-punks" after all.
Wire's Chairs Missing got criticized in some quarters for having gone in the space of less than a year from Pink Flag to Pink Floyd - not just for the whimsied picture-lyrics, but for the glassy, heavily effected guitars (using delay and flange, which is just a frostier version of 1960s phasing) and - the horror - for using keyboards.
The Stranglers were all Doorsy with the rippling grandiose organ solos and weird FX on the vocals ("Peasants in the Big Shitty"). In interviews they gruffly stated "we're into acid".
a 1976 piece on the Stranglers from Time Out
The Fall were "pickled" (Martin Bramah's word) in shrooms and LSD as well as amphetamines. Indeed Mark E. Smith's vision-thing was a catalytic influence on Julian Cope and Ian McCulloch. For a time they followed the Fall around from gig to gig.
(Them and Meat Puppets. But we won't go into the all the American acid-punk contenders - Chrome et al)
(Also such out-of-time outsider musicians / private press cult figures as Bobb Trimble)
No we'll keep it focused on the the U.K.
And then right at the start of the Eighties, you could say Psychedelic Furs helped put the word back into circulation, although sound-wise they are not really a Sixties flashback, maybe there's a bit of Velvet Underground in there. I don't know if drugs were involved - if they were, it feels more like amphetamines than hallucinogens. Fixated drones and sneery tones.
But I have now thought of something else...
The psychedelic revival was started not by New Wavers after all - but by a handful of Old Wavers who had lived through it the first time round as participants.
Todd Rundgren
That's 1975
1976 - wholly pointless recreation of the original!
And closer to the English source...
Steve Hillage (who didn't so much return to psychedelia as he simply stuck with it)
That's 1977 and it's produced by Todd Rundgren
Brian Eno and Phil Manzanera, with the short lived 801, covering "Tomorrow Never Knows" in 1976
Goodness, that's awful....
Meanwhile...
Eno was one of the first, circa his early solo albums, to talk of the enduring influence of psychedelia on him. So (as per Hillage) it's not so much a revival or a return, it's a continuation. Much of the pre-punk scene is post-psychedelic....
Still, doing the cover versions is a retro move.
Blimey, ahead of the pack in going back, you of course have David Bowie with Pinups.... That is 1973, harking back to less than a decade earlier, to 65-66.
"Shapes" - or "shipes" as Bowie ridiculously pronounces it - "shapes" not of things to come, but of things that have been and gone.
Twiggy on the cover too, almost a decade before Television Personalities.
And Roxy, pastiching and parodying everything under the pop sun, also did a psych-era style "false ending" on "In Every Dream Home a Heartache". With a swirl storm of phased drumming and phased guitar like "Itchycoo Park" and Todd's own Nazz track "Open Your Eyes". That's from For Your Pleasure, 1973.
This experience of "retro" receding deeper into the past is familiar to me from researching Retromania ... as soon as I thought I'd established a hinge point, "the rift of retro", I would realize there was an earlier one.
In rock I managed to trace it (i.e. rock referring back to itself, its own history - not some other earlier sound like music hall) definitively to the Beatles doing the Chuck Berry soundalike "Back in the USSR" and to a 1967 Move B-side that pastiched the Beatles themselves circa "Daytripper" i.e. two years earlier. That was the ground zero point of retro and meta in pop music.
So a kind of Sixties revivalism starts in the Sixties itself...
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Cherry Red did a whole box set , Losing Touch With My Mind, dedicated to Eighties British resurrections of Sixties British psych
It extends the scope beyond indie to touch on the free festival circuit (Magic Mushroom Band) and grebo (Gaye Bikers On Acid) along with all kinds of other anomalies
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It occurred to me later that I had clean forgotten about The Jam - but then they are way more mod than psych. "Start!" is a Xerox almost of "Taxman" off Revolver, a psychedelic album at least in part although that particular song is lean and stark R&B.
As for the mod revival itself, that is an eve-of-Eighties upsurge of Sixties-ism, but without the psychedelic leap taken by many actual mod bands - it's mod-mod, as opposed to freakbeat (let alone, actual kaftan-wearing hippie which an element within mod went into - from Spencer Davis Group to Traffic, from The Action to Mighty Baby - while the rest became hippie-bashing skinheads).
A covert kind of psychedelia enters post-punk through figures such as Martin Hannett, enthusiastic smoker of dope, lover of reverb and studio-spun spatiality. But Hannett was simply an original hippie who had moved with the times. He and the other Invisible Girls were part of a Didsbury scene of stoners and underground paper types... John Cooper Clarke was a Sixties survivor.
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As mentioned in comments, this was a significant moment, signposting the new psychedelia orientation of Kiss In the Dreamhouse.
Not forgetting Blue Sunshine by The Glove - Severin and Robert Smith's side project. The album title comes from a fictional type of LSD in a horror movie.
The Glove is the Arcadia to The Creatures's The Power Station.
Then Robert Smith gets into some Incredible String Band-ish whimsy with "The Caterpillar"
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Here's a whole recent article about psychedelic rock in the context of retromania and AI, by Ed Prideaux at The Psychedelics Community.
