1970 Orange Bicycle Orange Bicycle CD

A somewhat late-in-the-day attempt at psychedelic pop, this album does have a few advantages, mostly in the way it's executed - for starters, it isn't as wimpy as a lot of U.K. psychedelic pop was during this period; Orange Bicycle plays hard and generates a fairly hard sound, despite their pop orientation, the wattage turned up fairly high and the vocals pretty intense. The album is top-heavy with outside songwriting, Elton John, Bob Dylan, and Denny Laine all playing prominent roles as composers, with Laine giving the group perhaps their best moment with his "Say You Don't Mind", where they even sound a little bit like the original (Roy Wood-era) Electric Light Orchestra.

Various Artists - Real Life Permanent Dreams: A Cornucopia of British Psychedlia 1965-1970 (2007) {4CD Castle Music CMXBX1239}
EAC rip (secure mode) | FLAC (tracks)+CUE+LOG -> 1.52 Gb | MP3 @320 -> 732 Mb
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© 1965-70, 2007 Sanctuary Records / Castle Music | CMXBX1239
Rock / British Psychedelia / Psychedelic Rock / Psychedelic Pop

There have been previous attempts to marshal a lot of British psychedelia into one compilation, but Real Life Permanent Dreams is a little different from those. This four-CD, 99-song box set isn't a best-of, but more like an attempt to assemble a very wide (though still representative) cross section of material, most of it pretty obscure to the average listener. For the most part, it succeeds in delivering a high-quality anthology that manages to offer a lot to both the collector and the less intense psychedelic fan, though it's by no means the cream of British psychedelia.

A seemingly random one-off album from England in 1970, Motherlight is one of those odd little delights that, as the 2001 reissue's liner notes freely acknowledge, gains its reputation in large part given what happened to the three people behind it, with later production credits ranging from Paul McCartney to Iron Maiden and Television. A studio creation given a green light by Morgan Blue Town label owner Monty Babson, the trio consisted of recording engineers Mike Bobak and Andy Johns (that actually being the correct spelling of his last name) teaming with Wilson Malone, lead figure of never-quite-stars Orange Bicycle. Without trying to draw an exact parallel, one can say this was the equivalent to something like Curt Boettcher's work with the Millennium or Sagittarius, though on a smaller scale and with slightly different goals…

Fickle Pickle was an early- '70s band that was part of the Morgan Studios orbit, along with such bands as Orange Bicycle and the Smoke. Indeed, much of Fickle Pickle's lineup was filled out by ex-members of both of those bands, including Geoff Gill, Cliff Wade (a member of the short-lived early- '70s version of the Smoke), and Will Malone, plus ex-Jude member Steve Howden, with Denny Beckerman occasionally augmenting their lineup…

The autumnal sound of Britain at the turn of the 70s, looking out through wet window panes to a new decade with a mixture of melancholy and optimism for what might come next. With the Beatles gone and the pound sinking, a new and distinctive sound emerges, led by flutes and mellotrons. Available in 18-track CD and 19-track double LP formats.