Psychedelic Rock

Serving to embrace the floral heavens of British pop, this ceremonious edition combines the first ten prized volumes of the acclaimed Piccadilly Sunshine series. Celebrating the obscured artefacts of illustrious noise that emerged from the Great British psychedelic era and beyond, it is the essential guide to the quintessential sound of candy-coloured pop from a bygone age Pop is NOT a dirty word!

When was signed by Jester Records, newly set-up by Kristoffer Garm Rygg of Ulver, and the next album would mark another radical change in When's musical direction. Psychedelic Wunderbaum was indeed a psychedelic mix, with apparent inspirations from rock, noise, and cartoon music, and with lyrics taken from Aleister Crowley and Tom Wolfe.

Craft Recordings has revealed the full details of the forthcoming Poppies: Assorted Finery from the First Psychedelic Age: a compilation of 1960s-era psychedelic rock featuring cult-classic artists such as Buffy Sainte-Marie, Circus Maximus and Southwest F.O.B.

After a few years of outdoing the Rolling Stones at their own game, Messrs. May and Co., clearly affected by their love of swinging London nightlife and all that went with it, injected their primal R&B roots with added spice (as Mike Stax, "numero uno Los Pretty Things fan," points out in his excellent liner notes). "Can't Stand the Pain" (from the 1965 Get The Picture album) has "a remarkably effective mood with a sense of a dreamy disembodiment that foreshadows what was yet to come with the arrival of psychedelia." By April 1966, B-side "LSD," yet another controversial shot in the Pretty Things' canon, helped pioneer the "freakbeat" sound, whilst the media's attacks on the Pretties slack, druggy values were foremost to the changing times - in fact, the record was a play on words about the English economy and not a celebration of the merits of LSD usage…