Category Archives: Psychedelia

Tony McPhee, singer and guitarist for rock band the Groundhogs, dies aged 79

Posted on by

Musician who led acclaimed band on and off between 1962 and 2015 – and scored three UK top 10 albums – had suffered a fall last year and a series of strokes

Tony McPhee, the singer and guitarist who led British blues and rock group the Groundhogs across six decades, has died aged 79.

A message was posted on the group’s Facebook page confirming that he died peacefully at home” on 6 June from complications after a fall last year. He had also suffered a series of strokes in later life.

Continue reading...

Pete Brown, countercultural poet, singer and Cream lyricist, dies aged 82

Posted on by

British poet who wrote lyrics for Sunshine of Your Love, White Room and many more also had acclaimed solo career

Pete Brown, a cult figure in British poetry, rock, psychedelia and rhythm and blues who wrote lyrics for many of Cream’s classic songs, has died aged 82. He had been living with what he recently described as “various forms of cancer” for a number of years.

The family of his long-term late collaborator Jack Bruce wrote on social media: “We are extremely saddened to learn of the death of Jack’s long term friend and writing partner Pete Brown who passed away last night. We extend our sincere condolences to Pete’s wife Sheridan and Pete’s children as well as all his family and friends. Love from the Bruce family.”

Continue reading...

60s psych-rockers the Electric Prunes: ‘We couldn’t sit around stoned!’

Posted on by

Discovered in an LA garage, the band rode a psychedelic wave into Easy Rider and a trippy Latin mass – even if they didn’t actually take acid. As a box set revives the music, their lead singer looks back

“I guess I’m part of history,” says James Lowe, lead singer of the Electric Prunes, of the band’s oeuvre being gathered into a box set this month. “It suggests the idea we had for the band was viable – at least for a while.”

Indeed, the Los Angeles quintet were, if only briefly, one of psychedelic rock’s pioneers. Ironically, as Lowe confirms, the Prunes weren’t particularly interested in hallucinogenic drugs – “we had no support crew, no tour bus; we couldn’t sit around stoned” – and no Prune possessed the dark charisma of fellow LA psychedelic shamans Arthur Lee or Jim Morrison. Initially a surf-rock outfit, a passing real-estate agent heard the band rehearsing in a garage and suggested a friend of hers might be interested in them. Lowe gave his phone number but thought nothing of it, because “everyone in LA knows ‘someone’ in the film or music industry”.

Continue reading...

Countdown to ecstasy: how music is being used in healing psychedelic trips

Posted on by

Jon Hopkins timed his upcoming album to the length of a ketamine high, while apps are using AI music to tailor drug experiences. Welcome to a techno-chemical new frontier

Two hundred psychedelic enthusiasts have converged in Austin, Texas for a “ceremonial concert” on the autumn equinox. People sprawl on yoga mats around a circular stage as staffers pace the candlelit warehouse, jingling bells and spritzing essential oils. While psychedelic drugs are prohibited, some attenders seem in an altered state, lying on their backs and breathing heavily as rumbles of bass from Jon Hopkins’ upcoming album, Music for Psychedelic Therapy, shakes the hushed space.

This is the first time Hopkins – known for acclaimed solo electronic albums as well as production for Coldplay and Brian Eno – has played his new record in public, and the crowd is visibly moved. As recordings of spiritual guru Ram Dass’s teachings fill the room on the final song, the woman next to me begins silently weeping.

Continue reading...

Grace Slick and Jack Casady of Jefferson Airplane: how we made White Rabbit

Posted on by

‘I wrote it on a $50 piano with eight or 10 keys missing, but I could hear in my head the notes that weren’t there’

All fairytales that are read to little girls feature a Prince Charming who comes and saves them. But Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland did not. Alice was on her own, and she was in a very strange place, but she kept on going and she followed her curiosity – that’s the White Rabbit. A lot of women could have taken a message from that story about how you can push your own agenda.

Continue reading...

My Bloody Valentine’s Kevin Shields: ‘We wanted to sound like a band killing their songs’

Posted on by

The band have released only one album since 1991 classic Loveless, yet their influence remains undimmed. Their frontman discusses destroying buildings with noise, losing his mojo – and preparing new music

In early 1988, My Bloody Valentine decided that they were, as their de facto leader, Kevin Shields, puts it today, “finished”. You can see how they might have come to that conclusion. They had started life in the early 80s as a Dublin post-punk band, relocated to Berlin at the suggestion of the Virgin Prunes’ Gavin Friday and become a gothy proposition inspired by the Birthday Party and the Cramps, then moved to London and transformed into what Shields calls “a conceptual band”, their childlike record sleeves concealing songs about necrophilia and incest.

The problem was, no one had got the joke; the general consensus, as Shields sighs today, was “that we were this shit Jesus and Mary Chain copyist band”. Following the departure of their lead singer, Dave Conway, they had adopted a jangly 12-string guitar style, to negligible response.

Continue reading...

The Who Sell Out: still a searing satire on pop’s commercial breakdown

Posted on by

Filled with product placement and advertising, the band’s newly reissued 1967 album put the pop in pop art, by showing how closely music was entwined with capital

These days, we think of the period between 1965 and 1967 as one of white-hot musical progress, a dizzying three-year period during which innovation followed innovation, a succession of totemic albums and singles were released and pop music changed irrevocably. But, as Jon Savage’s superb book 1966: The Year the Decade Exploded made clear, not everyone at the time was impressed with how things were going. Savage’s research revealed a succession of contemporary naysayers, devoted to “ringing the death knell” as he put it: 1966 – The Year Pop Went Flat was noted music journalist Maureen Cleave’s assessment of 12 months that had seen the release of Revolver, Blonde on Blonde, Reach Out (I’ll Be There), Eight Miles High, It’s a Man’s Man’s Man’s World and 19th Nervous Breakdown.

The most striking contemporary quote of all might be one that didn’t appear in Savage’s book. “People aren’t jiving in the listening boxes in record shops any more, like we did to a Cliff Richard ‘newie’,” it lamented, before qualifying: “I like some of the new sounds, purely as sound, that are coming out of pop music.”

Continue reading...

Phil May, frontman with the Pretty Things, dies aged 75

Posted on by

Singer revered by David Bowie and Jimi Hendrix had complications in hospital following hip surgery

Phil May, frontman of riotous band the Pretty Things who were acclaimed peers of David Bowie and the Rolling Stones, has died aged 75.

He died in hospital in King’s Lynn, Norfolk, from complications following hip surgery after a cycling accident, that are not related to coronavirus.

Continue reading...

Childish Gambino: 3.15.20 review – at the peak of the zeitgeist

Posted on by

The actor, comedian and musician Donald Glover has made the first truly outstanding album of the decade, offsetting cultural examinations with moments of sweet levity

In hindsight, music has always been Donald Glover’s true calling. Before the sitcoms, the Star Wars movie, the Saturday Night Live hosting gigs, and the well-worn gifs of the performer walking horrified into a burning room with a stack of pizza boxes, you could find him on YouTube as a member of Derrick Comedy. The group’s greatest sketch, B-Boy Stance, saw Glover play an ageing hip-hop pioneer who had his arms surgically attached to his back, ensuring he was forever pulling the iconic pose – it riffs on the distance between the New York acolytes who witnessed the birth of hip-hop and those who came to the music after it was commodified. Glover’s understanding of American culture shines with diamond clarity; Atlanta, his comedy-drama that goes deep into the city’s rap scene, is the evolution of those ideas.

Glover’s early forays into rap were corny and forgettable. The Childish Gambino project felt like the side hustle of a talented kid eager to test every limit of his creativity – that the moniker was taken from an online Wu-Tang Clan name generator seemed to reflect how low it fell on his list of priorities. In 2016, the funk record Awaken, My Love! was an artistic breakthrough. Then came 2017’s vicious This Is America and a video that encapsulates the racial prejudice, police brutality and vicious gun lust freezing the soul of the self-proclaimed greatest country in the world. The clip became a pop cultural juggernaut, anointing Glover as spokesman for the Black Lives Matter generation.

Continue reading...

Ginger Baker, wild and brilliant Cream drummer, dies aged 80

Posted on by

Drummer who straddled jazz, blues and rock ‘passed away peacefully’

Ginger Baker, one of the most brilliant, versatile and turbulent drummers in the history of British music, has died aged 80.

His family had previously made it public that he was critically ill and asked fans to “please keep him in your prayers”. His Facebook page said he “passed away peacefully” on Sunday morning.

Continue reading...