I’m sitting on the floor in the living room of our little end of terrace in Wellington, Somerset and my dad has just finished connecting the separates of the new stereo he’s bought as a present for the family. It’s Christmas 1973 and I am 6 years old. As I was an only child and to avoid spoiling me my parents often bought “family presents” that we’d all share. The stereo was wanted by all us: mum for her soul records, dad for his rock (Focus played to death as I recall) and me for all the records they’d collected in the 60s and early 70s.
My dad smiles at me and asks me what I want to listen to. I look at my mum in pant-wetting excitement and shout for The Beatles. Out comes the Blue album, another recent purchase. Sometime later dad plugs in the new headphones, places them over my head then drops the needle carefully onto ‘Strawberry Fields’. My life is changed forever.
Listening to ‘Strawberry Fields’ in that cocooned moment was my first experience of music becoming a part of the space inside my head rather than a part of the space around me. It was also the first time I sensed that ‘Strawberry Fields’ was different; not just different in terms of style and arrangement or to the other tracks on that peerless compilation but in how it affected my sense of time and place. I wasn’t just lost in the moment; I was euphorically lost in another dimension, the enclosed space of the headphones stopping time and earth-bound senses. I had left my mum and dad in the living room and was now travelling with John, Paul, George and Ringo – to quote Willy Wonka – in a world of pure imagination.
I now know that The Beatles weren’t a psychedelic band, they were a pop band who made psychedelic pop songs. They were adept at working their music in, around and through other genres while still creating something distinctively from The Beatles and for a 45. Looking at my record collection,as I often do, I’ve come to realise that the constant theme of the music I’ve truly loved for the past 40 years has been songs made by artists trying to avoid simple categorisation, bands striving to push beyond the here and now of the time in which they record their music. More often than not an injection of a psychedelic is the catalyst that frees them of the genre into which many of their apparent peers become pigeon-holed.
I’m too young to appreciate the original wave of psychedelic music from the mid-to-late 60s. But I know enough to understand why a track like ‘Shine On You Crazy Diamond’ manages to be so much more than the generic blues riff and time signature it’s built upon. It’s blues music that’s been extruded into its unique form by a band that were instrumental in coaxing popular music on its nascent psychedelic trip, who didn’t create something so perfunctory as a road map for music but a series of multiple psychedelic universes waiting to be explored by future generations. How else to equate the sound of a Victorian London music hall penny orchestra drowning in the Thames as evoked by ‘Bike’ with the sound of a 31st century rock band crashing their spaceship into a collapsing star as sound-tracked by ‘Interstellar Overdrive’? Sometime in 1967 The Pink Floyd learned how to travel through musical worm-holes, there’s no other explanation. Syd, alas, never found his way back.
Accepting that surreal notion explains why I can listen today to Julian Cope’s album ‘Fried’ and never once feel inclined to listen to it through the reductive prism of forced nostalgia even though it was released over 30 years ago because from the first moment I first heard it I already knew it wasn’t from 1984. It was from Julian’s head and he’d found his own worm-holes, probably propping up some standing stone in the Outer Hebrides, and had travelled there and back again.
The 1980s heralded a rebirth of this other-worldly musical influence, termed neo-psychedelia, which reignited a new crop of artists in the UK and the US. In truth its influence never went away during the 70s but after punk’s Year Zero manifesto music thereafter could be written anew even while borrowing keenly from the sonic progressions of previous generations. Punk and post-punk enthused and infused an energy and willingness to experiment again in music, to return to sounds that had lain dormant in the musical undergrowth and to unashamedly work them into a new kind of pop (like The Beatles) and into a new kind of rock (like the Pink Floyd).
For me it was a great decade to buy music, make and swap playlists on cassettes and to generally switch off the television set and go and do something less boring instead. Neo-psychedelia, whether it fused itself within a melody, a riff, a lyric, a sensibility or simply a new piece of technology, opened up music again without insisting on barriers. Music could still be tribal but I could as happily listen to Rael’s travails in Genesis’ The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway alongside Real Life by Magazine and Reel to Real Cacophany by Simple Minds and not blink twice at the apparent incompatibility of having these albums playing through my headphones. It wasn’t simply prog, post-punk and new wave to these ears. They all shared some common musical flourishes and ideas, invariably something I identified with, wrongly or rightly, as being psychedelic, something that raised them above the norm and lifted me above my bed, through the ceiling and towards the space beyond the clouds.
So, here’s Part 1 of a neo-psychedelic playlist for the 1980s, a 2 hour selection (in real time for squares) of tracks in no strict order but all from 1980-1989 that, to my ears, betray a sense of musical worm holes, of artists avoiding genre pigeon-holes and, sometimes if caught unawares, of my tripping over my own expectations and as a result tumbling head(phone) first down a rabbit-hole.
Nice essay Bisto. I have some of those tracks on your playlist – i never realised it was nu psychedelia 🙂 . I shall investigate the ones I don’t know at my leisure.
It’s term I first heard describing Echo & The Bunnymen and The Teardrop Explodes. Add to that the Paisley Underground movement in the US and the Antipodean surge from the likes of The Church and Split Enz and you find yourself awash with bands working some psychedelia into their music. There’s plenty more to come including some of acid house and cross-over dance/rock that hi in the mid to late 80s.
Yes, very familiar. I’ve tried to ignore it for the playlists I’m putting together but it’s hard not to choose the same songs, let alone the same acts! It’s why in Part 2 I’ll tap into acid house and Madchester/baggy.
Fab writing, Gravyboy.
Floyd were really made for headphones, Meddle being the first time I “got” stereo, as ‘one of these days I’m going to cut you into little pieces’ traversed thru’ my head from one side to the other.
Excellent end-of-term essay here, Mistah Bisto. I can’t do spotify but if The Church ain’t on your list you’ll have egg on your face and a chip on your shoulder.
Good to see Plasticland there! That period was brilliant – I bought a lot of albums from the mail-order ads at the back of the NME on the strength of their names, and I was never disappointed. The Three O’Clock, The Rain Parade, True West, Plasticland, The Dream Syndicate, Green On Red …
I first heard music on headphones in, ooh, sixty-eight. Must have been. A big favourite was Piper At The Gates Of Dawn (which we referred to affectionately as “Piper At The” to save time) with that brutal panning on Interstellar (Overdrive). Also the first Hendrix album, although this is one of the few examples where I now prefer “the original mono”.
Headphones arrived for me circa 1970 and the eureka moment came while listening to Led Zeppelin II on a cheap stereo bought on the drip out of Freeman’s catalogue.
Jimmy Page’s slide panned right across the stereo spectrum every time the title was repeated and life was never the same again – “Gotta whole lotta love – nneowwwwww”
Then, during What Is And What Should Never Be things got even better. At exactly 3.30 Page’s guitar bounced from one ear to the other, then back again! First, all the sound was in one ear, then it was all in the other! What sorcery was this?
After that I was hooked and listened on headphones virtually all the time, scarcely leaving the house for months.
Yes, I remember hearing Whole Lotta Love on the headphones, that whole central instrumental. I used to have that segued in and out of Floyd’s On The Run when I did a psychedelic night at University.
Oh yes! The orgasmic middle part of Whole Lotta Love. On headphones you could hear it going round and round, then came the climax with Page’s guitar compressed beyond anything we had ever heard and sounding like nothing had ever sounded before.
The first headphone experience I had was with Jean Michel Jarre’s Oxygene & Marillion’s Misplaced Childhood & I was about 10. Still gives me that eerie rush to this day. Thete’s something about that personal listening experience that nevet leaves you.
I prefer headphone listening. In fact, the most enjoyable and comfortable way is through the Mac iBuds or whatever they’re called. They have a whomping great bass that blows all other earbuds out of the … er … earwax.
Headphone listening regulates your breathing, for some reason. Very meditative.
Yebbut, in the days when you could do a six month stretch in the Scrubs for possession of a ten bob deal of Moroccan , I used to get terribly paranoid about headphone wearing, especially when home alone.
I’d be listening to Clapton tearing it up on Laylaor something similar with the AKGs clasped tightly to my lugholes, oblivious to any extraneous noise from the outside world, all the while half-imagining the rozzers were kicking my door in and about to roughly manhandle me into the back of a Black Maria. Then at the police station they’d give me kicking in the cells until I gave them the name and address of the dealer who supplied the ten bob deal.
*goes rheumy-eyed with nostalgia* the Ten Bob Deal!!! You talk about that to Kids Today and they just don’t want to know. Did we fight the Acid Wars for nothing, Johnny Concheroo?
A Ten Bob Deal was about half the size of one square of Cadbury’s Dairy milk and about the same colour. You’d carry it home in your sock in case you got stopped by the filth for having long hair. You’d imagine you were being followed the whole way, too.
Even possession of a packet of Rizlas was enough to get you searched (Five Leaves Left, said Nick, knowingly)
You got a block of resin the size of a square of chocolate for ten bob?! We got about a quarter of that, if that. Wrapped in silver foil, bought off some hippy in an afghan coat who hung around the school gates (yes! to sell dope! they were more innocent times).
The Dealer At The Gates Of School would have been 1967. We used to score off him at lunchtime and roll up on the top floor of the multistorey car park. Then we’d take our school ties off and go for half a lager at Don Fardon’s pub. This made us pretty unsuitable material for afternoon education.
A tour-de-force introduction there that Mr Wonka himself would be envious of. A real magic carpet ride ahead. And the playlist is just what Spotify was created for.
I only hope that it’s not just the Acid Wars Veterans that give it a listen.
One of my favourite moments when I listen to new music is to not have a sense of it being NOW! but of it being of any time. Beck’s Morning Phase springs to mind as an example of that kind of sensation arising when I first heard it.
Cliff Kite had wealthy parents and a crap taste in music. So the Moody Blues was my first headphone experience and bloody marvelous it was too. Quadrophenia was the first listened to on my own headphones and bloody marvelous it was too.
I spent the next twenty years or so with them clamped to my head – I’m sure listening to music at Volume 11 has resulted in my partial deafness.
Hardly ever use them these days, I like music filling the room rather than my head.
Ah, the ten-bob deal.. in Aberdeen that more often or not got you a silver-foil wrapped piece of something definitely not dope. “You gettin’ anything yet.” The answer was usually no.
Great post. Dark side of the Moon for me was the one headphone experience that screamed out this is what music should sound like. I remember at a friends house we had smoked a few spliffs and took it in turns to listen on headphones. In the end my one mate lay on the floor and put one speaker next to each of his ears and lay there in a trancelike condition for the length of the album while the rest of us had to content ourselves with stereo speakers out of position. Memories.
Oh yes the “speakers as headphones” was how I set my stereo up in my 2nd year at University. Late night DSOTM would have been a regular play along with Cocteau Twins, Brian Eno, David Sylvian and Harold Budd. There’s a track on Budd’s Lovely Thunder called Gypsy Violin that was a particularly good headphone/head speakers track.
Ahh_Bisto says
I’m sitting on the floor in the living room of our little end of terrace in Wellington, Somerset and my dad has just finished connecting the separates of the new stereo he’s bought as a present for the family. It’s Christmas 1973 and I am 6 years old. As I was an only child and to avoid spoiling me my parents often bought “family presents” that we’d all share. The stereo was wanted by all us: mum for her soul records, dad for his rock (Focus played to death as I recall) and me for all the records they’d collected in the 60s and early 70s.
My dad smiles at me and asks me what I want to listen to. I look at my mum in pant-wetting excitement and shout for The Beatles. Out comes the Blue album, another recent purchase. Sometime later dad plugs in the new headphones, places them over my head then drops the needle carefully onto ‘Strawberry Fields’. My life is changed forever.
Listening to ‘Strawberry Fields’ in that cocooned moment was my first experience of music becoming a part of the space inside my head rather than a part of the space around me. It was also the first time I sensed that ‘Strawberry Fields’ was different; not just different in terms of style and arrangement or to the other tracks on that peerless compilation but in how it affected my sense of time and place. I wasn’t just lost in the moment; I was euphorically lost in another dimension, the enclosed space of the headphones stopping time and earth-bound senses. I had left my mum and dad in the living room and was now travelling with John, Paul, George and Ringo – to quote Willy Wonka – in a world of pure imagination.
I now know that The Beatles weren’t a psychedelic band, they were a pop band who made psychedelic pop songs. They were adept at working their music in, around and through other genres while still creating something distinctively from The Beatles and for a 45. Looking at my record collection,as I often do, I’ve come to realise that the constant theme of the music I’ve truly loved for the past 40 years has been songs made by artists trying to avoid simple categorisation, bands striving to push beyond the here and now of the time in which they record their music. More often than not an injection of a psychedelic is the catalyst that frees them of the genre into which many of their apparent peers become pigeon-holed.
I’m too young to appreciate the original wave of psychedelic music from the mid-to-late 60s. But I know enough to understand why a track like ‘Shine On You Crazy Diamond’ manages to be so much more than the generic blues riff and time signature it’s built upon. It’s blues music that’s been extruded into its unique form by a band that were instrumental in coaxing popular music on its nascent psychedelic trip, who didn’t create something so perfunctory as a road map for music but a series of multiple psychedelic universes waiting to be explored by future generations. How else to equate the sound of a Victorian London music hall penny orchestra drowning in the Thames as evoked by ‘Bike’ with the sound of a 31st century rock band crashing their spaceship into a collapsing star as sound-tracked by ‘Interstellar Overdrive’? Sometime in 1967 The Pink Floyd learned how to travel through musical worm-holes, there’s no other explanation. Syd, alas, never found his way back.
Accepting that surreal notion explains why I can listen today to Julian Cope’s album ‘Fried’ and never once feel inclined to listen to it through the reductive prism of forced nostalgia even though it was released over 30 years ago because from the first moment I first heard it I already knew it wasn’t from 1984. It was from Julian’s head and he’d found his own worm-holes, probably propping up some standing stone in the Outer Hebrides, and had travelled there and back again.
The 1980s heralded a rebirth of this other-worldly musical influence, termed neo-psychedelia, which reignited a new crop of artists in the UK and the US. In truth its influence never went away during the 70s but after punk’s Year Zero manifesto music thereafter could be written anew even while borrowing keenly from the sonic progressions of previous generations. Punk and post-punk enthused and infused an energy and willingness to experiment again in music, to return to sounds that had lain dormant in the musical undergrowth and to unashamedly work them into a new kind of pop (like The Beatles) and into a new kind of rock (like the Pink Floyd).
For me it was a great decade to buy music, make and swap playlists on cassettes and to generally switch off the television set and go and do something less boring instead. Neo-psychedelia, whether it fused itself within a melody, a riff, a lyric, a sensibility or simply a new piece of technology, opened up music again without insisting on barriers. Music could still be tribal but I could as happily listen to Rael’s travails in Genesis’ The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway alongside Real Life by Magazine and Reel to Real Cacophany by Simple Minds and not blink twice at the apparent incompatibility of having these albums playing through my headphones. It wasn’t simply prog, post-punk and new wave to these ears. They all shared some common musical flourishes and ideas, invariably something I identified with, wrongly or rightly, as being psychedelic, something that raised them above the norm and lifted me above my bed, through the ceiling and towards the space beyond the clouds.
So, here’s Part 1 of a neo-psychedelic playlist for the 1980s, a 2 hour selection (in real time for squares) of tracks in no strict order but all from 1980-1989 that, to my ears, betray a sense of musical worm holes, of artists avoiding genre pigeon-holes and, sometimes if caught unawares, of my tripping over my own expectations and as a result tumbling head(phone) first down a rabbit-hole.
Ahh_Bisto says
Ahh_Bisto says
MC Escher says
Nice essay Bisto. I have some of those tracks on your playlist – i never realised it was nu psychedelia 🙂 . I shall investigate the ones I don’t know at my leisure.
Ahh_Bisto says
It’s term I first heard describing Echo & The Bunnymen and The Teardrop Explodes. Add to that the Paisley Underground movement in the US and the Antipodean surge from the likes of The Church and Split Enz and you find yourself awash with bands working some psychedelia into their music. There’s plenty more to come including some of acid house and cross-over dance/rock that hi in the mid to late 80s.
Poppy Succeeds says
Lovely stuff, thank you very much. Are you familiar with the Children of Nuggets box? It’s right up your street by the sounds of things.
Ahh_Bisto says
Yes, very familiar. I’ve tried to ignore it for the playlists I’m putting together but it’s hard not to choose the same songs, let alone the same acts! It’s why in Part 2 I’ll tap into acid house and Madchester/baggy.
retropath2 says
Fab writing, Gravyboy.
Floyd were really made for headphones, Meddle being the first time I “got” stereo, as ‘one of these days I’m going to cut you into little pieces’ traversed thru’ my head from one side to the other.
Ahh_Bisto says
Oh yes. Echoes was made for headphones.
H.P. Saucecraft says
Excellent end-of-term essay here, Mistah Bisto. I can’t do spotify but if The Church ain’t on your list you’ll have egg on your face and a chip on your shoulder.
Good to see Plasticland there! That period was brilliant – I bought a lot of albums from the mail-order ads at the back of the NME on the strength of their names, and I was never disappointed. The Three O’Clock, The Rain Parade, True West, Plasticland, The Dream Syndicate, Green On Red …
I first heard music on headphones in, ooh, sixty-eight. Must have been. A big favourite was Piper At The Gates Of Dawn (which we referred to affectionately as “Piper At The” to save time) with that brutal panning on Interstellar (Overdrive). Also the first Hendrix album, although this is one of the few examples where I now prefer “the original mono”.
Ahh_Bisto says
The Church are indeed there and a few of the others you mention
Johnny Concheroo says
Nice work Mr. Bisto.
Headphones arrived for me circa 1970 and the eureka moment came while listening to Led Zeppelin II on a cheap stereo bought on the drip out of Freeman’s catalogue.
Jimmy Page’s slide panned right across the stereo spectrum every time the title was repeated and life was never the same again – “Gotta whole lotta love – nneowwwwww”
Then, during What Is And What Should Never Be things got even better. At exactly 3.30 Page’s guitar bounced from one ear to the other, then back again! First, all the sound was in one ear, then it was all in the other! What sorcery was this?
After that I was hooked and listened on headphones virtually all the time, scarcely leaving the house for months.
Ahh_Bisto says
Yes, I remember hearing Whole Lotta Love on the headphones, that whole central instrumental. I used to have that segued in and out of Floyd’s On The Run when I did a psychedelic night at University.
Johnny Concheroo says
Oh yes! The orgasmic middle part of Whole Lotta Love. On headphones you could hear it going round and round, then came the climax with Page’s guitar compressed beyond anything we had ever heard and sounding like nothing had ever sounded before.
It still brings a thrill to this day
andielou says
Fab piece, Bisto.
The first headphone experience I had was with Jean Michel Jarre’s Oxygene & Marillion’s Misplaced Childhood & I was about 10. Still gives me that eerie rush to this day. Thete’s something about that personal listening experience that nevet leaves you.
H.P. Saucecraft says
I prefer headphone listening. In fact, the most enjoyable and comfortable way is through the Mac iBuds or whatever they’re called. They have a whomping great bass that blows all other earbuds out of the … er … earwax.
Headphone listening regulates your breathing, for some reason. Very meditative.
Johnny Concheroo says
Yebbut, in the days when you could do a six month stretch in the Scrubs for possession of a ten bob deal of Moroccan , I used to get terribly paranoid about headphone wearing, especially when home alone.
I’d be listening to Clapton tearing it up on Laylaor something similar with the AKGs clasped tightly to my lugholes, oblivious to any extraneous noise from the outside world, all the while half-imagining the rozzers were kicking my door in and about to roughly manhandle me into the back of a Black Maria. Then at the police station they’d give me kicking in the cells until I gave them the name and address of the dealer who supplied the ten bob deal.
It was no joke, let me tell you.
H.P. Saucecraft says
*goes rheumy-eyed with nostalgia* the Ten Bob Deal!!! You talk about that to Kids Today and they just don’t want to know. Did we fight the Acid Wars for nothing, Johnny Concheroo?
Johnny Concheroo says
A Ten Bob Deal was about half the size of one square of Cadbury’s Dairy milk and about the same colour. You’d carry it home in your sock in case you got stopped by the filth for having long hair. You’d imagine you were being followed the whole way, too.
Even possession of a packet of Rizlas was enough to get you searched (Five Leaves Left, said Nick, knowingly)
H.P. Saucecraft says
You got a block of resin the size of a square of chocolate for ten bob?! We got about a quarter of that, if that. Wrapped in silver foil, bought off some hippy in an afghan coat who hung around the school gates (yes! to sell dope! they were more innocent times).
Johnny Concheroo says
Half the size of a square of Dairy Milk, I said. But I could be mis-remembering of course.
Dealers hanging round the school gates? That must’ve been after my time, although I did hear tell of “pep pills” being sold outside the school.
It conjures up images of schoolkids in blazers and caps singing “I’m Waiting For The Man, ten shilling note from my paper round in my hand”
H.P. Saucecraft says
The Dealer At The Gates Of School would have been 1967. We used to score off him at lunchtime and roll up on the top floor of the multistorey car park. Then we’d take our school ties off and go for half a lager at Don Fardon’s pub. This made us pretty unsuitable material for afternoon education.
H.P. Saucecraft says
Sorry, 68. Can be carbon dated through the White Album, contemporary listening.
Johnny Concheroo says
Don Fardon!
Indian Reservation and Belfast Boy.
On the Youngblood label
I’m impressed!
H.P. Saucecraft says
I’d have been impressed, too, if you’d mentioned The Sorrows. Fine Coventry band.
Ahh_Bisto says
You’re right. It never leaves you. It’s like you’re the only person the music has been made for.
Kaisfatdad says
A tour-de-force introduction there that Mr Wonka himself would be envious of. A real magic carpet ride ahead. And the playlist is just what Spotify was created for.
I only hope that it’s not just the Acid Wars Veterans that give it a listen.
Ten bob deal. So fabulously archaic.
Raymond says
Thanks for posting this lovely, evocative piece of writing.
I particularly liked the observation about Julian Cope’s album: “from the first moment I first heard it I already knew it wasn’t from 1984.”
Ahh_Bisto says
One of my favourite moments when I listen to new music is to not have a sense of it being NOW! but of it being of any time. Beck’s Morning Phase springs to mind as an example of that kind of sensation arising when I first heard it.
Lodestone of Wrongness says
Cliff Kite had wealthy parents and a crap taste in music. So the Moody Blues was my first headphone experience and bloody marvelous it was too. Quadrophenia was the first listened to on my own headphones and bloody marvelous it was too.
I spent the next twenty years or so with them clamped to my head – I’m sure listening to music at Volume 11 has resulted in my partial deafness.
Hardly ever use them these days, I like music filling the room rather than my head.
Ah, the ten-bob deal.. in Aberdeen that more often or not got you a silver-foil wrapped piece of something definitely not dope. “You gettin’ anything yet.” The answer was usually no.
SteveT says
Great post. Dark side of the Moon for me was the one headphone experience that screamed out this is what music should sound like. I remember at a friends house we had smoked a few spliffs and took it in turns to listen on headphones. In the end my one mate lay on the floor and put one speaker next to each of his ears and lay there in a trancelike condition for the length of the album while the rest of us had to content ourselves with stereo speakers out of position. Memories.
Ahh_Bisto says
Oh yes the “speakers as headphones” was how I set my stereo up in my 2nd year at University. Late night DSOTM would have been a regular play along with Cocteau Twins, Brian Eno, David Sylvian and Harold Budd. There’s a track on Budd’s Lovely Thunder called Gypsy Violin that was a particularly good headphone/head speakers track.