Review: 'Another Splash of Colour: New Psychedelia in Britain 1980-1985'

Pop music is cyclical, which was never more explicit than in late seventies/early eighties Britain when punk returned rock to the simplicity of the fifties before a new Mod scene indebted to the early sixties emerged. These scenes naturally led to a return of mid-sixties trippiness, and the New Psychedelic scene was barely underway when WEA was already putting it into historical context with a compilation of its very own. The thirteen tracks on A Splash of Colour did a pretty good job of laying out the guidelines of UK New Psychedelia. American garage psych groups such as The 13th Floor Elevators and The Electric Prunes were as influential as homegrown fare by The Beatles (always “Tomorrow Never Knows”) or Syd Barret’s Pink Floyd (always “Lucifer Sam”). Though the influences and attitude were unapologetically retro, drum machines, synthesizers that don’t require an engineering degree to play, and other eighties tools and toys were welcome at the Love In. The anti-war, pro-understanding sentiments parroted Summer of Love ethos but also served as contemporary statements against Thatcher/Reagan-era bellicosity. Consequently, the music often doesn’t sound any more stuck in the past than the latest discs by The Cure or Siouxsie and the Banshees, two seemingly super-contemporary bands that drew on sixties influences deeply.

35 years later, Cherry Red’s RPM Records is revising and expanding A Splash of Colour with a triple-disc set called Another Splash of Colour. With the exception of two tracks by The Doctor, all of the tracks from the 1982 compilation are on this new box set, although the running order is mixed up, shuffling the 11 remaining tracks with 53 additional cuts basically in the Splash of Colour spirit. Some of the new artists are bigger names than the ones on WEA’s comp: Robyn Hitchcock with and without The Soft Boys, Captain Sensible, The Damned in the guise of Naz Nomad and the Nightmares, Julian Cope, The Television Personalities, The Monochrome Set, The Attractions (without Elvis), The Dentists. Those bands all turn in reliably excellent tracks, while lesser-known acts supply the excitement of discovery, particularly when they don’t follow psychedelic tropes so doggedly. Knox takes a rather obvious cover choice—Syd Barret’s “Gigolo Aunt” — and makes it truly exciting by shooting it up with punk aggression. Magic Mushroom Band’s “Wide Eyed and Electrick” is another thrilling punk/psych fusion. Some of the best tracks would have sounded perfectly at home on Cherry Red’s Millions Like Us: The Story of the Mod Revival box, namely Kimberley Rew’s “Stomping All Over the World” and Squire’s “No Time Tomorrow”. 

There are only a couple of outright skippable tracks — Charlie Harper’s novelty “Night of the Jackal” and Blue Orchid’s grating “Work”— though Another Splash of Colour is not quite back-to-back gems otherwise. At times, groups get a little too trapped in the tropes, as when The High Tides waste their time and yours with a longwinded, sloppy jam in the middle of “Electric Blue”, a remnant of the WEA compilation. Some of the new selections sound like they don’t quite fit, such as Scarlet Party’s “101 Dam-Nations”, which is a bit jangly but generally indistinguishable from any other piece of eighties pop. However, as Miles Over Matter shout on “Something’s Happening Here”, “Just because the love generation did it, doesn’t mean we have to.” The fact that the mass of tracks on Another Splash of Colour do not merely copy psychedelia’s original wave but update it for their own age gives them a personality of their very own and makes them sound strangely contemporary today.

The Ten Best Old Albums That Were New to Psychobabble in 2010

I may purport myself to be some sort of authority on classic Rock & Roll, psych, pop, and punk records, but in reality, there are lots and lots and lots of them I’ve never heard. Nevertheless, I’m happy to say that I’m still discovering great old albums that are new to me, whether I’ve long heard about them but have yet to give them a spin or I’d never even been aware of their existences. Here are the ten finest retro-rock records that were new to me in 2010, presented in glorious chronological order...

1. We Are Ever So Clean by Blossom Toes (1967)



Having long read about We Are Ever So Clean, a real cult favorite of British psychedelia, I was a bit disappointed on first listen. “When the Alarm Clock Rings”, which concludes Rhino’s Nuggets II box set, was all I knew from Blossom Toes prior to hearing their only LP, so I was a bit taken off guard by how thoroughly daffy, and often cacophonous, it is. I’m glad I gave the record a number of additional spins. Now it sounds perfectly conceived, and that includes the more insane tracks, such as the borderline grating “The Remarkable Saga of the Frozen Dog” and “Look at Me I’m You”, which sounds like William Burroughs diced up the master tapes of Revolver, and reassembled them willy nilly. Still, the album’s best songs are its most straightforward. There’s the rousing “When the Alarm Clock Rings”, “I’ll Be Late For Tea”, a marvelous Kinks pastiche that fuses that band’s early heaviness with their mid-‘60s pastoralism, the groovy “Telegram Tuesday”, “What’s It For”, with its chugging cellos, and the Move-esque “I Will Bring You This and That”. Definitely the psychedelic find of the year.


2. Pandemonium Shadow Show by Harry Nilsson (1967)



I probably wouldn’t have given Harry Nilsson his fair shake if my friend and occasional collaborator Jeffrey Dinsmore hadn’t insisted I do so. I like “Everybody’s Talkin’” and “Coconut” (more because it was used to great effect at the end of Reservoir Dogs than anything else) well enough, but “Daddy’s Song” and “Cuddly Toy” are not among my favorite Monkees songs and “Without You” makes me barf. Because Jeffrey was a former Nilsson skeptic, himself, I agreed to check out Pandemonium Shadow Show. This is a terrific vaudeville record, much closer in spirit to Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band than a lot of records to which The Beatles’ album are often compared. Really, the predominant sound of Pepper’s is not psychedelia but old-timey music hall, so Pandemonium Shadow Show sounds much more Peppery than, say, Their Satanic Majesties Request. And not only did the Fabs inspire Nilsson, but he pays direct tribute to them when he covers “She’s Leaving Home” and cheekily mangles a variety of their songs in the hilarious mishmash “You Can’t Do That”. “River Deep, Mountain High” has been covered by too many people who aren’t Tina Turner, Nilsson’s version of “Cuddly Toy” is just marginally better than The Monkees’, and “Ten Little Indians” was neither a good song in the hands of its creator or The Yardbirds, who recorded the most famous rendition during their Jimmy Page period. The rest of the album is phenomenal though. “Sleep Late, My Lady Friend” is the lullaby Bacharach and David always wanted to write. Gil Garfield and Perry Botkin’s show-tuney “There Will Never Be” is an instant standard. Sparsely arranged with cello, bass, and flute, “Without Her” is a haunting melding of baroque and jazz balladry. The masterpiece of this collection is “1941”, an elegiac lament about Nilsson’s abandonment by his father (a recurring theme in his work that did not prevent him from pulling the same shit on his own first born). The album’s ultimate endorsement is that it won Nilsson a quartet of Liverpudlian super-fans, three of whom personally called him to tell him how much they loved his latest record.


3. The Natch’l Blues by Taj Mahal (1968)