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.
Julian did better enthusing about the original punkadelia than trying to bring it back (the solo LPs sound awfully 80s).
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.
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
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.
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.
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...
Even the words "rave" and "raver" are Sixties words
(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")
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".
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.
And then out of The Fall sprouted The Blue Orchids, the truly great and genuinely psychedelic band of the Eighties.
(Them and Meat Puppets. But we won't go into the all the American acid-punk contenders - Chrome et al)
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.
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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
I think there were certain mind-blowing moments that tended to stick in people's heads that they never got over and had to recreate. Things that are difficult to imagine now that the culture has become so diffuse.
ReplyDeleteFor a lot of the 50's throwback glam rockers it was probably seeing Gene Vincent, or Elvis in his comeback special. For the sixties obsessives it was hearing Strawberry Fields Forever for the first time. For the Bowie-obsessed New Romantics, it was the legendary TOTP Starman performance. Events that they just couldn't get over, that set the tone for the rest of their lives.
I think I heard Strawberry Fields Forever for the first time in the early to mid-eighties, and I remember being really impressed by it, but I was somebody who had already heard lots of extraordinary, ground-breaking pop music. To have heard it appear out of nowhere in 1967 must have been an extraordinary experience.
That's a good point.
ReplyDeleteI can actually dimly remember 'Strawberry Fields' and "I am the Walrus" as real-time events from being a child. So their music does have the after-image of that impact while also having a little bit of 'this is just what pop music is' perspective of the kid who has no bearings for appraisal. When pop music went back to being normal again - bluesy late sixties, glam as tarted up rock'n'roll - it must have disorienting for those really caught up in the moment, almost like the history of film going in reverse - from colour to black and white, talkies to silents.
As a kid, I remember being as struck by the films, seen a few years after the fact on TV. Particularly Help, which is not objectively a good film, but has some striking scenes - like the terraced houses where they all enter a different front door but inside the walls have all been knocked down and it's one giant Beatles home. And Ringo's bed is in some kind of cavity chamber below the floor. I thought this was actually how they lived.
The films contributed to a sense that they were much more than a pop group.
For quite some time I thought of the Beatles as over there, in their own category that went beyond music, and then there was pop music on the other side. Not even that they transcended pop but were just their own separate thing.
It was odd later on as grown-up with much listening and historical backfilling under my belt, to listen to Beatles records and realise they were a rock 'n' roll group, like 'ah there's a guitar solo', 'hmmm, interesting bassline'. And also that they followed trends as much as set them, that they were in conversation with The Beach Boys or whoever.
Also that not all the material was great - having only known the singles and select epochal album tracks, you listen to the albums and they all have duffers. Songs where they clearly are part of the times rather than leading it.
And about americans carrying on the sixties into the eighties there´s Eddie Brickell and the New Bohemians, Eddie Brickell married Paul Simon, and one hit wonder nu shooz´s I can´t wait, they were a couple who met at some commune, I can´t wait is typical 80´s synth pop but at the same time completely psichedelic sixties
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