Strange Folk

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.

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.

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…

This is the second album of the British psychedelic folk band Bread Love and Dreams. It's full of really nice melodic progressive folk songs with beautiful acoustic and electric guitars, electric bass, drums and some piano, organ, moothie, flute, African and other percussion and gorgeous female and male vocal and vocal harmonies.
Bread Love And Dreams was a folk-rock duo augmented by some talented session musicians including Terry Cox and Danny Thompson who were in Pentangle at that time. All three albums are now collectables.

The Loyal Seas are Tanya Donelly and Brian Sullivan. For the last decade, trailblazing alternative rock figurehead Tanya Donelly - co-founder of Belly, Throwing Muses and The Breeders - has pursued meaningful collaborations with favorite artists and friends. The resulting work is by turns poignant, delightful and entirely surprising, melding folk, rock, pop and orchestral sounds…

Galliard is a sextet formed in the summer of 68, and developed a psychedelic type of brass rock, fronted by twin wind players Caswell and Smith and singer Geoff Brown. They recorded two albums on the Deram Nova label (the subsidiary prog label of Decca records) around the turn of the 70's decade, when brass rock was the rage. Their first album Strange Pleasure By Galliard, released in 69, was quite eclectic, ranging from Medieval to Flamenco/Spanish music. For their second album New Dawn, wind player John Smith was gone, but the group adjoined a mega brass section of four player, plus keyboardist Morton.