THE SUNSHINE PLAYROOM: IN PRAISE OF PSYCHEDELIA

Sunshine came softly through Donovan’s window; John Lennon lay in the back of a newspaper taxi with his head in the clouds and was gone; Syd Barrett tried to explain his cat; Ray Davies watched the world from his window.

I’ve never forgotten how these tracks made me sit up and listen when I first heard them. This kind of “fairytale psychedelia” is, for me, the unmatched pinnacle of all pop music, even though I was not alive when most of it came out. It’s incredible to think that these songs were all done within a few short years, between 1965 and 1971. (The Battle of Evermore on Led Zeppelin IV and Echoes on Pink Floyd’s Meddle surely belong in the same category, though you can sense the magic fading just a little.)

What makes psychedelia, and British psychedelia in particular, so good and so worth returning to with a good pair of headphones?

First off, it’s just amusing how a lot of – often, not always - working-class lads were inspired by the Beatles or LSD or whatever to cast off all the macho strutting they’d carefully learned in their teens and revisit their childhoods. On this inner journey, they created a distinctive kind of music-hall pop music devoid of the kind of self-conscious “attitude” that makes a lot of other music so derivative and dull. It’s as if they were playing to audiences from other planets; well, perhaps they were.

Britpop tried, and failed, to recreate this in the 90s, precisely because it was so full of ironic references to the 60s template. (Actually, I’m sure there’s some dance/ambient music in the 90s that has the same kind of experimental, joyous flavour. Screamadelica is one obvious example.)

The songs are full of surreal imagery - Lennon’s is effortlessly evocative; others just as strikingly inept: (“An elephant’s eye was staring at me from a bubblegum tree”… a different prescription, perhaps?) Into these landscapes come characters from all kinds of half-remembered storybook versions of England: Sgt Pepper, the Hurdy Gurdy Man, the Gnome, Mr Small The Watch Repairer, Mr Fantasy, etc.

“Across the stream with wooden shoes / Bells to tell the king the news / A thousand misty riders Climb / Higher once upon a time

Wondering and dreaming… the words had different meanings.”

It makes you wonder what it was in the LSD-fuelled experiences of British musicians that propelled them back to the nursery. Perhaps it was merely the influence from Dylan’s Mr Tambourine Man and the Beatles’ Yellow Submarine, or was it a sentimental grasping for security in the middle of an unpredictable psychedelic trip? Or disillusionment and a sense of powerlessness on the verge of an adulthood where all these exuberantly breaking dreams would surely be extinguished?

The records are so inventive in the way they play with sound. Like kids in a toyshop, the musicians and engineers pushed their meagre equipment to the absolute limits in search of newer and stranger sounds, proving that, in this case, less is more. The sonic palette on many of the late 60s albums is unrivalled to this day in terms of its glowing colour; use of the stereo spectrum and sound effects (which Pink Floyd developed further in the 70s); and the sheer capacity to surprise. On Flaming (Piper at the Gates of Dawn, Pink Floyd, 1967) a toy keyboard, acoustic guitar, bells and a few percussion instruments are used to create a startlingly magical effect, even though the arrangements are simple and the playing is almost clumsy. On the same album, listen to how the vocals come in from the left-field (literally) and are deepened by echoes and sudden bursts of harmony. The producer who created these soundscapes for Syd Barrett's songs was Norman Smith, who'd previously been the Beatles' engineer and is the unsung hero of British psychedelia. Both this album and Sgt Pepper were recorded using, as far as I know, a 4-track desk. 128-track is routine these days.

The sheer joy that the musicians had making this music is unmissable, and irresistable. It’s so clear that they were in control, giving free expression to their imaginations, and in league with the studio engineers, rather than being dictated to by them under pressure from the demands of record companies and markets.

That’s why the music is still being reissued and remastered, selling more copies today than when it was made. It’s not all good, of course, and beware: there are absolutely no undiscovered gems left at the bottom of the barrel.


Start with:
Matilda Mother and Flaming (Piper at the Gates of Dawn) – Pink Floyd, 1967
The rest of that album
Sgt Pepper & Magical Mystery Tour

The only compilation of psychedelic obscurities I can honestly recommend is Acid Drops, Space Dust & Flying Saucers – MOJO magazine