The British Rail 423 class of train entered service in 1967 and continued to be a mainstay of lines in South London as well as Kent, Sussex and Hampshire for the next 38 years. Here, the Squire meets up with a dedicated band of enthusiasts who are looking to restore the last remaining 423.
If you wish to help with the restoration of this train, please follow this link. https://www.setg.org.uk/donate
In the third of my Who compilations, I am looking at the period of time just after ’Tommy’ up to and including ‘Qudropheania’. With the success of ‘Tommy’, the band became financially secure but were not keen to sit on their laurels. Having played two key festivals in Woodstock and the Isle Wight (both in 1969), the band decided to release a live album that would show how different their sound was on stage compared to the studio. ‘Live at Leeds’ is considered one of the greatest live albums of all time and some of those songs are included here as I prefer them to their studio versions. The rest of disc 1 is made up of some tracks that were written for the ‘Lifehouse Project’ with some like ‘Sister Disco’ being Pete Townshend demos.
Disc 2 cover the ‘Quadrophenia’ sessions and so does not follow the storyline of the original album. Like Disc 2 on the previous collection, I was going with how it sounded to me as a compilation without having to worry about maintain the narrative. I used the 2011 Super Deluxe Edition of the album and took from that a number of songs that had originally been dropped from the LPs running order and some that only exist in demo form. It does not follow the story of the original album, but it still finishes with the main character of Jimmy sitting on a rock and his final fate is once again ambiguous.
Disc 1
This disc could not be replicated due to one ore more songs not available on Spotify.
Disc 2
The cover is adapted from the band’s compilation ‘Meaty Beaty Big and Bouncy’ which was released in 1971.
This disc could not be replicated due to one ore more songs not available on Spotify.
By 1969, Pete Townshend had given up drugs and had taken an interest in the works of Meher Baba, an Indian spiritual master who gave teachings on two main subjects. The nature of the soul and advice on achieving spiritual ambitions. Taking these on board, he set out to develop these teachings in his music and wanted to expand on the idea of the rock opera that he had dipped his toe into with the songs ‘A Quick One, Whilst He’s Away’ and ‘Rael’. The resulting album was ‘Tommy’ the story of a deaf, dumb and blind kid who suffers from a psychosomatic condition that was caused by his childhood trauma of seeing his father killed by his mother’s lover. Eventually the mental block that has caused Tommy’s condition is broken and he becomes the leader of a religious movement that eventually collapses around him.
To compile the first disc of this collection, I used the 2003 Deluxe and 2013 Super Deluxe editions of ‘Tommy’ as well as well as the 1998 reissue of ‘Odds & Sods’. Even though it mostly follows the story of Tommy as laid out on the original album, I have gone for what sounded good sonically instead of an understandable narrative. Well, what sounded sonically good to me anyway. ‘Tommy’ was the game changer for The Who and tuned them from a group on the slide to a commercial force that they have continued to be up to the current time. With such an album under your belt, how were they going to follow this up?
This is the point where we come to the ‘Lifehouse’ project. This is the great lost Who album project, and many people have looked to recreate what could have been. A search of the internet will throw up numerous websites discussing the album and there have been numerous attempts by other sites to create what ‘Lifehouse’ could have been. I decided against this as I didn’t want to limit myself with songs that were destined for that project. I therefore decided that anything recorded after ‘Tommy’ and before ‘Qudropheania’ could be included and that left me with two CDs worth of songs. The second being the first disc of Volume 3. This included demos for the songs that Townshend had written that would later be released on the ‘Lifehouse Chronicles’ box set in 2000.
By 1972, The Who were light years away from the band that had released ‘My Generation’ eight years before. That did not mean that Townshend was not looking back on those days for inspiration. However, for the remainder of the 70s, the band would continue to re-imagine ‘Tommy’, with a version recorded with the London Symphony and a feature film. Both of these versions would include guests musicians singer taking on the roles originally sung by the band. Townshend also never quite gave up on the ‘Lifehouse’ project and would also return to it at later points during the decade.
Disc 1
Disc 2
The cover is adapted from the ‘Tommy’ EP the band rebased in 1970.
The Who are one of the great British bands, having come to prominence in the mid 60 and after the odd break here and there, they have continued to release new music up until the modern day. This month, I am posting a series of Who playlists that I have put together which looks at their career from 1965 to 1968. The songs here are when they went out as The Who and I did not include any of the bands recordings when they were The High Numbers as these did not fit in with the rest of the compilation, sound wise.
The first CD cover the band in earliest incarnation as an R&B covers band and even though the band recorded enough cover versions to fill an album, these were mostly rejected in favour of material written by guitar player Pete Townshend. Even though this early period of The Who would give rise to such classics as ‘Substitute’ and ‘My Generation’, I found when putting this together that the bands covers neatly fitted into the overall sound that they had. When I normally put compilations like this together I tend to ignore covers and stick to their original material. If I had done this with The Who, this first CD would have been a bit short.
CD 2 focuses on their next two LPs (‘A Quick One’ and ‘The Who Sell Out’), one EP (‘Ready Steady Who), and assorted singles. Townshend continued to produce a number of classic songs during this period but as this was era of the single, when it came to recording ‘A Quick One’, he didn’t have enough material to fill the record. ‘A Quick One’ is a curious beast as it is the most democratic of all Who albums in terms of songwriting credits. Either to secure a publishing deal for each member of the band, or as part of the marketing push to promote it, each member of the band were tasked with supplying at least two songs. Daltrey only managed one, so a cover of ‘Heat Wave’ was included to fill the gap. Townshend supplied what he would later call a min-opera in the form of ‘A Quick One, While He’s Away’. Made up of six songs he had not finished, the song made up a cohesive narrative of a women who’s love has been away for over a year, so she had a fling with Ivor the Engine Driver. When the original lover comes back, she reveals her transgression and all is forgiven.
Apart from Heat Wave, the second CD shows The Who evolving away from the R&B band of the first CD and into something else. It is a bit hard to say what because in the era when everyone else seemed to be going all psychedelic, The Who did not really embrace that genre. Granted, on ‘The Who Sell Out’ there are two bonafide psych classics in ‘Armenia, City In The Sky’ and ‘I Can See For Miles’. These two songs do not make the cut here as they did not fit into the sound of this compilation; well, to my ears anyway. ‘The Who Sell Out’ could be argued to be one of the first concept albums as it was designed to celebrate the culture of Pirate Radio, so the album was mixed with jingles and fake adverts. They recorded so much material for that album that when an expanded addition of this album was released in the mid 1990s, the compilers were able to continue the fake radio concept through out the entire CD.
‘The Who Sell Out’ also revealed a more mellow side to Townshend with the inclusion of the beautiful ‘Sunrise’ and the almost psychedelic ‘Relax’. It is also the album with the most humour, with the bands self written adverts showing a side of the band that would rarely come to the fore after this. There was even room for a mini opera in the form of ‘Real’ and the at the time unreleased ‘Glow Girl’ gave hints as to what was coming with ‘Tommy. What these two CDs highlight is how quickly the band changed their sound and how bit by bit, the pieces for what was coming next were being put into place.
Disc 1
Disc 2
The cover is adapted from a band posters used to advertise some of their earliest gigs.
Record Collector magazine, a magazine that I have been buying since since the very early 90s when I saw a picture of there Syd Barrett line up on the front cover. I had only just bought ‘Piper At The Gates Of Dawn’ and wanted to find out more about the band during the Barrett era. Anyway, Record Collector has always been a great resource for information on all sorts of artists. In an article from at least eight, if not ten years ago, it mentioned a number of acetates Pink Floyd had recorded before they adopted their famous name. Before they were the Floyd, they went by numerous monikers such as Sigma 6, The Meggadeaths, The Abdabs, The Screaming Abdabs, The Tea Set and then The Pink Floyd Sound. There would also be a number of members who would leave before the band found fame. These would include Juliette Gale, who would later marry Floyd keyboard player Rick Wright and a guitar player who went by the name of Rado Klose.
One acetate which contained the songs ‘Lucy Leave’ and I’m A King Bee’ would appear on bootlegs over the years, but the other two did not and it was only with the release of a vinyl EP going by the name ‘1965: Their First Recordings’ that fans finally got to hear them. These songs are nothing like the Floyd of ‘Arnold Layne’ or ‘See Emily Play’, but a more R&B/Blues based sound that was the rage at the time. These songs would also be released on the ‘The Early Years 1965-1972’ box set.
Whilst trawling through fan made Pink Floyd LP sleeves, I came across this sleeve. The photo includes Rado Klose (he is the chap on the left) and I think it was taken in the back garden of 39 Stanhope Gardens, Crouch End, where Roger Waters and Nick Mason lived at the time. I thought it would be a nice bonus to present this as an EP the band could have put out if they had signed a contract with Columbia earlier than they did in reality. After all of the other Pink Floyd bits and pieces that have been presented this month to include this one as well.
Side A
Side B
As I was at it, I thought I might as well make a picture sleeve for the other two tracks. ‘Lucy Leave’ and ‘I’m A King Bee’. I thought I would use the name the band were using at the time these tracks were recorded which was The Tea Set. If this were to have been made back in 1964/5 for a UK releases, it is possible that only the promo version would have had a picture sleeve like this. We in the UK didn’t seem to warrant picture sleeves back in the day. If we were on the continent though, they did produce picture sleeves so let’s pretend it comes from Germany.
Side A
Lucy Leave
Side B
I’m A King Bee
As was mentioned earlier, I found this cover online but I did not make a note of who made it. The same with the ‘Lucy Leave’ single which was adapted from someone else work. Thanks whoever you are. Good job on both fronts. I was also surprised to find all of these songs on Spotify.
This is another what-if album I put together because of the mock up sleeve that was on the website https://idesignalbumcovers.tumblr.com. ‘The Man & The Journey’ was a suite of music the band performed during their tour of 1969. The songs in this concert included some that had already been released, some that would appear on some future releases (like ‘Ummagumma’, ‘More’ & ‘Relics’), and some would stay unreleased. Even though a live album was considered at the time, it didn’t happen due to the overlap of material with ‘Ummagumma’. One of the shows from the tour was widely bootlegged as it was take from a show played in Amsterdam, but it was missing some of the material.
An almost complete show was eventually released in 2016 on ‘The Early Years 1965-1972’ box set. It was almost complete because in the set list, there was a performance called Teatime which was positioned between Work and Afternoon. It was removed because it was during this time that the band would not play anything but instead be served with cups of tea. This was essentially 3 mins and 36 of near silence. The estate of John Cage would most probably sue.
The loose concept of the album is that the first disc follows the man during his everyday life, but the second disc is the journey. What this journey is and where it goes is unclear. However, what is clear is that this was the beginning of Pink Floyd as a band that would produce music based on a theme which would be developed over the next few years until it culminated in the release of Dark Side of the Moon.
If it had actually been released in 1969 as suggested, it would have worked as a double vinyl album because the timings of the sides actually match up quite closely. The timing was also helped with Teatime being removed. On reflection, it is a shame that this wasn’t released in place of ‘Ummagumma’ because even though it is a definite period piece, The Man & The Journey works better as a piece of music and as an album. ‘Ummagumma’ may have its fans but I am not one of them.
Side A
Side B
Side C
Side D
As I said back in May of 2021, I have a real soft spot for music that came out in the Psychedelic Years of 1966-1969, and when I first getting into ‘it’, I only thought that this sort of music was produced in the UK and USA. As I showed in that previous post, it did not take long to discover that the rest of the world wasn’t that far behind. I did cover this this topic in Episode 80 and 81 of the my podcast under the title of ‘Mundo Psych’. As I said previously, those shows only scratched the service of what there was, and so this month I present a second volume look at this genre from around the world.
Some of these songs could be argued to be bordering on Progressive Rock, but this works well as a compilation and a genre label is pretty loose anyway.
Disc 1
Disc 2
When Pink Floyd released their debut album ‘Piper At The Gates Of Dawn’, there was one driving force behind it. That was original guitar player/vocalist Syd Barrett. However, but the time they were ready to record their second, Barrett’s days in the band were numbered. His behaviour had becoming more erratic throughout 1967 to the point where he was detuning his guitar on stage. His material which once managed to break the Top Ten in the UK Singles chart was now failing to make the grade. By the time of ‘Apple & Oranges’, the last single he wrote for the band, their days as a chart band were gone and it would remain that way for another twelve years. The fact that they did not realise many singles in the UK in those twelve years might have played a part in that also. Anyway, as his ability to perform live diminished, Dave Gilmour, an old friend of Barrett’s was brought in as cover. The band thought that as Barrett had been responsible for most of the bands material up until this point, they would keep him on as a writer and non touring member along the lines of Brian Wilson from The Beach Boys.
This situation did not last long and by the end of January 1968, Barrett was no longer in the band. Even though he contributed to the playing on a couple of songs as a player, only one of the songs he had written for the group was used on the album that would be known as ‘A Saucerful Of Secrets’. ‘Jugband Blues’ was not like the joyous songs that had been included on the debut album but many have seen it as a self diagnosis of what he perceived was happening to him. Was it schizophrenia, a wry sense of humour, too many drugs, the fact that he longer wanted to be a star or a combination of all of them. Barrett had recorded a number of other songs but these would not seen an official release until 2016 and the Early Years box set. So, what if the second Pink Floyd album had sounded like it if it had used more of the material the band had recorded with Syd Barrett?
I’ll start by looking at the one track that did not make the cut. I did not want to use Saucerful of Secrets as it is the only the third section that I can actually listen to repeatedly. Wikipedia has that part listed as Celestial Voices and it is beautiful. It is shame that the rest of it was a load of psychedelic noodling that in any other era would have been seen as self indulgent. Seeing as this is quite a long song, that leaves plenty of room to fill on this LP. More on that later. Side A is the same as the album that was actually released. I did play around with this, moving songs around and trying to place the songs in a different order but it just didn’t work.
It is Side B that is very different from the album that was ultimately released. It starts off with ‘See-Saw’ was listed on the recording sheet as ‘The Most Boring Song I’ve Ever Heard Bar Two’. It its not the most memorably of songs but it is not terrible. I would love to know what the two songs the band thought were more boring than this though. I have followed this with one of the unreleased Barrett songs that was officially released in 2016. ‘Vegetable Man’ is not an easy listen and the lyrics show Barrett looking in on himself. This and the other unreleased Barrett number, ‘Scream Thy Last Scream’ were considered as the A and B side of a single, in lieu of anything else in the can. This, as we know did not come to pass and I suspect that it would not have returned the band to the top of the single chart. The band did perform these songs on a BBC session in December 1967.
‘Painbox’ was originally released as the B-Side of the Apple & Oranges single, and is one of a number of songs that band recorded that show the Barrett influence whilst not being written by him. ‘Jugband Blues’ is another song with lyrics that could be said to be Barrett looking in on himself and I almost finished this album in the same way it did on the original LP did. However, I decided to throw a little bonus in there, because otherwise my sides would not match up time wise. That track is an instrumental that has been bootlegged under the name as Sunshine, but supposedly the track is officially known as ‘Experiment’. Even though this track is meant to be 15 minutes long, only the first 90 seconds have escaped the studio. The track does sound a little rough, it fits into the sound of the album. I put a fade in and out and added some echo to the first 20 seconds.
The original Saucerful of Secrets was possibly the most democratic album the band ever made. Each of the five members take a lead vocal and this is the only album where Keyboardist Rick Wright vocal performances outnumber everyone else. I have used the same artwork as Saucerful of Secrets but I took out the original photo to include one with all five Floyd members in it.
Side A
Side B
A Spotify playlist could not be created for this play list due to one or more songs not being available on that platform.
Harlequins have played in numerous grounds around London since their formation. In the fourth and final part of this series of videos, The Squire sets out to find where each and everyone of them was (including a couple that are still in existence today).
Now, normally I create a playlist and then try to put together a piece of artwork to go along with it. With this what-if album, this was the complete opposite in that I had the piece of artwork and wondered how I could find a playlist to go with it.
Now, this piece of artwork was is another one taken from the site https://idesignalbumcovers.tumblr.com and is for an album that would have been an overview of American popular music throughout the 20th Century. This was meant to be a follow on from the band’s previous album, ‘The Notorious Byrd Brothers’ which had already laid the template by expanding the genres of music the band was looking to incorporate into their repertoire. The ‘Notorious Byrd Brothers’ was an end of an era album though as drummer Michael Clarke and guitar player David Crosby had been fired before the record had been released. Pulling in new drummer in the from of ex-Rising Sons member Kevin Kelley, the band thought that they needed a jazz pianist to achieve the sound they required for their 20th Century album. In came Gram Parsons who did not waste anytime in turning this project into the album he wanted to make which would be released under the name ‘Sweetheart Of The Rodeo’. This is considered to be one of the first country rock albums and would be an influence on many bands that came after this. The 20th Century album was never revisited and as far as I can tell, not one recording session took place.
So, why use this cover when no material was recorded for it? Well, it is a really good cover and it is a shame that it does not have a what-if album to go with it. I took inspiration from the sleeve itself and wondered if I could produce an album that followed a space theme. Not quite, but with some songs thrown in that have a flying theme (and Mind Gardens as it could be argued that the song is about travelling through inner space), there was enough material recorded between 1965 and 1967 to get an album of sorts. Most of the songs on this record were written or co-written by Jim McGuinn who was fascinated by aeronautics, so much so that he started using the name of Roger instead of Jim. Roger being used by pilots as part of the signalling protocol to say that the last message has been received satisfactorily. Like many of the what-if records I put together, this one would never have come out as the songs had already been used on other records but it did mean that that wonderful piece of artwork found a home.
Side A
Side B
* The Byrds did not finish their version of ‘Stranger In A Strange Land’ and the instrumental backing track was released on the 1996 reissue of the ‘Turn! Turn! Turn!’ album. However, in 1966, the duo of Blackburn & Snow recorded their own version of the song with vocals included. Paul from the Albums That Should Exist website took the vocals from the Blackburn & Snow recording and added them to the Byrds backing track. To find out more, follow the link.
http://albumsthatshouldexist.blogspot.com/2018/05/blackburn-and-snow-with-byrds-stranger.html
It is because of this mash up that this playlist is not available on Spotify. Not much of a surprise really.
