Dr. Strangely Strange

Ireland's answer to the Incredible String Band, Dr. Strangely Strange engaged in the same type of psychedelic acoustic music with folksy arrangements. With traditional instruments like penny whistle, fiddle, harmonium, and mandolin, Dr. Strangely Strange was more solidly rooted in melody and structure than the group's flaky Scottish counterparts. Produced by British modern folk guru Joe Boyd, "Kip of the Serenes" is built around simple and repetitious melodies occasionally interrupted by stream-of-consciousness musical and lyrical diversions. This simplistic approach would be abandoned with their 1970 follow-up, "Heavy Petting", which saw their first partnership with electric guitarist Gary Moore.

An unsuccessful attempt to assemble an album of live/BBC material by Dr. Strangely Strange (not enough usable stuff could be found), unusually, led to something better - an entire LP's worth of well-preserved 1969-1970 studio outtakes. Those ten outtakes (with two versions of one song, "Cock-a-Doodle-Doo") form the bulk of this 2007 release, topped off by three 2006 recordings supplied specifically for this project. It's the 1969-1970 material, naturally, that's the main attraction, and it's a surprise to find that - unlike the unissued cuts excavated for most collections of this sort - they're pretty much on a par with the two albums this fairly obscure Irish acid-folk-ish band issued during their brief lifetime…

Heavy Petting, the follow-up to their first album 'Kip of the Serenes', is a little more electric but almost equally eccentric in the best possible way. Songs full of profundities and meaning that then tell you that if you found a meaning you were wrong, songs about people turning into wasps, songs that take you to places no-one else goes….
Completely wonderful…and an astonishing four+ minute guitar break by Gary Moore that fits perfectly. Amazon

The subtitle of this album reads "The Difficult Third Album," and in fact 27 years passed between Dr. Strangely Strange's second and third releases. Their first album, Kip of the Serenes, was a singsong psychedelic folk record while their second, Heavy Petting, employed more rock and free-form ideas. This album incorporates traditional Irish music, blues-rock, and acoustic rock & roll, thus separating itself significantly from the two earlier releases and perhaps even paving the way for the BMC Band's The Peace Within, which was released in 1998 by Irish blues guitarist Barry McCabe. He also combined the blues with Irish music…

Released in 2015, Grapefruit’s 3-CD multi-artist British underground folk compilation Dust On The Nettles was widely praised, with a five-star review in The Times hailing it as “a delight from beginning to end”. A long-overdue follow up to that set, Sumer Is Icumen In tightens the mesh by focusing on the point when traditional folksong and the burgeoning late Sixties counterculture collided, largely courtesy of seminal acts like the Incredible String Band, Fairport Convention and Pentangle.

3CD compilation focussing on the mid-60s haunt of the emergent folk and blues scene in London. Featuring a host of big names who visited the venue many of whom went on to national success. Les Cousins was a folk and blues club in the basement of a restaurant in Greek Street, in London’s Soho, which became a home and the epicentre for the folk revival of the mid-1960s, a venue where musicians met and learnt from each other. As such, it was influential in the careers of so many pioneers – Al Stewart, Davey Graham, Bert Jansch, John Renbourn, Sandy Denny, John Martyn, Alexis Korner, Strawbs, Roy Harper, Paul Simon and many others.