Tomorrow (group) – { feuilleton }

Weekend links 477

Edge of Industry (2009) by Anne Starling.

• “In her darkroom with her silver salts and gelatine plates, she experimented with the mercurial effects of light, time and temperature.” Hailey Maxwell on the photographic art of Dora Maar.

• A Visionary Work Renew’d: A conversational review of Swan River Press edition of William Hope Hodgson’s The House on the Borderland by the late Sam Gafford & The joey Zone.

• Brian Blomerth’s graphic novel Bicycle Day tells the story of the psychedelic ride made in 1943 by Swiss chemist Albert Hofmann while he was researching LSD.

• “The cinema is not the industrial cinema. The cinema is independent cinema.” Francis Ford Coppola on Apocalypse Now and related matters.

• More lunacy: “Fireworks, wild swans and super-cannons were propelling people mentally Moonwards long before 1969,” says David Seed.

• Mix of the week: Then Beautiful Swift Sparrows Led You Over the Black Earth by The Ephemeral Man.

• Working (You Are), a new recording by Stephen Mallinder, his first solo work since Pow Wow in 1982.

• Lost Proust stories of homosexual love finally published (but only in French for the moment).

• Oren Ambarchi‘s favourite albums.

• My White Bicycle (1967) by Tomorrow | Trip On An Orange Bicycle (1968) by The Orange Bicycle | Blue Bicycle (2008) by Hauschka

Listen to the Colour of Your Dreams: Part One

Blame these things: the Jon Savage booklet, and Mojo Presents Acid Drops, Spacedust & Flying Saucers (design by Phillip Savill).

One of the commissions for the New Year is psychedelia-related so to get in the mood I’ve been listening to the six CD compilations of psychedelic songs I made some years ago. I must have spent about five years gathering everything on these discs which comprise 132 selections in all, three for UK music and three for the USA, covering the years 1966–1969. The impetus was an annotated booklet listing “100 mind-expanding masterpieces” that Jon Savage had compiled for Mojo magazine in 1994; a revised list was published in 1997 along with some debatable contemporary additions. Things came to a head (so to speak) in 2001 when Savage and fellow Mojo journalists put together a four-CD collection of prime UK psychedelia for EMI, Acid Drops, Spacedust & Flying Saucers, which included many of the songs from Savage’s list. That collection and the Rhino Records Nuggets box began the mania to accumulate everything on Savage’s list. Once I’d started burning my own compilations the Savage 100 quickly expanded when I realised that I ought to include more favourites of my own.

To start the year, then, I’m uploading all six compilations to Mixcloud beginning with the UK selection. Despite all the effort and the number of songs this still isn’t a definitive collection. As Savage observes in his notes, the late 1960s was a time of massive over-production by record companies with hundreds of singles released, especially in the UK. Many one-off releases by obscure bands are as good as those that topped the charts which is why psychedelic compilations are so numerous, and why omissions are unavoidable.

With that proviso here’s the first part of the UK collection covering the years 1966 to 1967. The tracklist below indicates in bold the songs from the Savage 100 with notes about my additions. The listing is by order of release although this isn’t strictly accurate throughout. I’ll be uploading the rest of the compilations over the next few weeks.

UK Psychedelia, Part One by Feuilleton on Mixcloud

Dialogue — Alice In Wonderland (From Jonathan Miller’s BBC film, 1966.)
The Beatles — Tomorrow Never Knows
The Rolling Stones — Paint It Black
The Creation — Making Time
Craig — I Must Be Mad (A ferocious single by a band that only released one other 45 before splitting. Carl Palmer is on drums.)
Donovan — Season Of The Witch
The Yardbirds — Happenings Ten Years Time Ago
The Misunderstood — I Can Take You To The Sun (An American band who moved to London in 1966. This was their second and final single, and one of John Peel’s all-time favourites.)
Cream — I Feel Free
The Beatles — Strawberry Fields Forever
Pink Floyd — Interstellar Overdrive (Savage has the version from Tonite Let’s All Make Love In London which runs for almost 17 minutes. The version here is the shorter one from Piper At The Gates Of Dawn.)
The Smoke — My Friend Jack
The Poets — In Your Tower
The Move — I Can Hear The Grass Grow
The Troggs — Night Of The Long Grass
Traffic — Paper Sun
The Jimi Hendrix Experience — Are You Experienced?
Tomorrow — My White Bicycle (Savage has a later single, Revolution, but I much prefer this earlier 45.)
John’s Children — Midsummer Night’s Scene
Dialogue — Yellow Submarine
The Beatles — It’s All Too Much
The Attack — Colour Of My Mind
Small Faces — Green Circles

Previously on { feuilleton }
• What Is A Happening?
• My White Bicycle
• Ogdens’ Nut Gone Flake
• Tomorrow Never Knows
• The Dukes declare it’s 25 O’Clock!
• Yellow Submarine comic books
• A splendid time is guaranteed for all

My White Bicycle

My White Bicycle (1967), poster by Hapshash and the Coloured Coat. Too risqué for EMI.

In what passes here for spare time I’ve been working on a private project that concerns events in London during a single week in 1967. I won’t elaborate for now but the research has been fun, and has led down byways where it’s easy to get lost in a profusion of historic detail. The International Times archive is a great time-sink if you want to see London’s psychedelic culture evolving from one week to the next. Oz magazine covered much of the same ground but in broader strokes; IT being a weekly paper was the closest thing the underground of the time had to a journal of record which means you’ll find things there which weren’t reported anywhere else.

International Times, Volume 1, issue 13, 19/05/1967.

A brief item about a poster for the debut single by Tomorrow caught my eye, the artwork being an early piece by Hapshash and the Coloured Coat (Michael English and Nigel Waymouth) who we here discover were briefly known by another name:

MY WHITE BICYCLE

EMI join the long and growing list of those self-censors who still believe that the younger generation are going to continue to support them. The above poster for the Tomorrow record, MY WHITE BICYCLE, was rejected by EMI on the grounds that the titties might provoke “complaints from certain organizations…” So Jacob and the Coloured Coat (Mick English and Nigel Weymouth [sic]) put on their crocheted boots and manufactured a poster design from every phallic image they could. Subliminal pornography triumphed where open indecency had failed and the prick within sustains where the exposed breast falters.

Tomorrow were one of the first British psychedelic bands. My White Bicycle is their most memorable song but the rest of their self-titled debut album still holds up today. Ace guitarist Steve Howe became a lot more famous in Yes a few years later, while drummer Twink was in a host of bands in the late 60s and early 70s, Hawkwind included. My White Bicycle sounds superficially like a typical piece of psych whimsy à la Pink Floyd’s Bike (both songs were recorded at Abbey Road) but according to Twink there’s an anarchist subtext:

“My White Bicycle” was written out of what was actually going on in Amsterdam. One of the owners of Granny Takes a Trip, Nigel Weymouth [sic], had gone there and come back with a Provos badge which he gave to me. They were kind of like a student anarchist group that believed everything should be free. In fact, they had white bicycles in Amsterdam and they used to leave them around the town. And if you were going somewhere and you needed to use a bike, you’d just take the bike and you’d go somewhere and just leave it. Whoever needed the bikes would take them and leave them when they were done.

What would have been dismissed as pure utopianism now looks like prescience when bike-sharing schemes have become a reality. As to the redrawn poster, there’s a copy here which is described as very rare, hence its absence from other Hapshash galleries. Not really as phallic as the IT report implies; Aubrey Beardsley got away with a lot more priapic subterfuge in the 1890s when the strictures were also more severe.

My White Bicycle (1967), the replacement poster by Hapshash and the Coloured Coat.

On the same page of IT there’s a brief announcement that The Beatles will have a new album out in June, something entitled Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. That album also gave EMI a headache with both Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds and A Day In The Life being accused by “certain organisations” of promoting drugs. If the record company could have seen the greater headache that was coming less than ten years later from Malcolm McLaren and his King’s Road scallywags they might not have been so uptight.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Hapshash Takes a Trip
• Michael English, 1941–2009
• The Look presents Nigel Waymouth
• The New Love Poetry