Guest Blogger: Psychic Nick's Picks

It's our first guest blogger of the year. Firing up a hand-picked playlist of his favourite soul, rock and stoner tones is Nick Saloman: main-brain and multi-instrumentalist behind psych-rockers Bevis Frond, star of TV's Countdown and compiler of Psychic Circle's albums including the excellent Instro Hipsters and UK Floor Fillers series, so let's tuck into this handful of musical, magical beans.

Barry St. John - Turn on Your Light: I only discovered Miss St.John relatively recently. A Glaswegian soul girl who cut a string of great 45s and one brilliant album called 'According To St. John'. This single is also on the album.



The Flies - I'm Not Your Stepping Stone: I bought this when it first appeared back in 1966 in National Radio in St. John's Wood High Street. An absolutely fantastic slice of raw fuzzed up freakbeat from Ilford!



Dave Crosby - Laughing: My favourite track off the amazing If I Could Only Remember My Name album. Stoned out bliss direct from the Laurel Canyon hot tub of your mind!



Patto - Loud Green Song: On which the incomparable Ollie Halsall plays some of the most incendiary guitar ever put on vinyl. Definitely to be played at my funeral!



Steve Miller Band - Your Old Lady: From the 'Revolution' movie soundtrack album. An absolutely superb hit of San Franciscan/Texan blues psych.


Steve Miller Band dans le film Revolution (1968)

There you go no Beatles or Jimi which I have to confess is sacrilege as they are my two favourite artists of all time. But I was trying to make it interesting.

A big psych-salute is due to Nick for his help with this. Coincidentally he'll be back on the blog via a Dear Diary entry later in the year. However - should you fancy catching him in action - he's backing Debbie Duveen and The Millbanks at the Hoxton Underbelly on January 26th - details here and here

Funky Friday - the freewheeling genius of Richie Jackson

Meet Richie Jackson the Australian skateboarder who's more Salvador Dali than 'surfer dude'. His look may be Robert Plant joins Jellyfish. But don't be misled by the Hobbiton hair and 'tache topiary. Richie's a psychedelic skateboarder with the surreal, high-flying fluid moves of the Silver Surfer. An eye-popping eccentric of mentalist inventiveness - think:Wilf Lunn meets Willy Wonka.

Flipping, gliding and grinding over and around the unlikeliest urban furniture. Pavements, pipes, posts, rope chains, escalators - trees even! No boundary or bollard can contain his combustible skateboard combos.


Behold, boggle your eyes and blow your mind at the the screaming genius of Richie Jackson



Sound tracking the vid above is ....
The Attack - Too Old

Sound tracking the vid below is
Pentagram - Be Forewarned



For some homegrown talent - lend an eye to the two wheeled tear-ups of Danny MacAskill (previously seen in the Doves Winter Hill vid')

Funky Friday - Island In The Sun

I don't know how Mrs M does it. I am a bugger-to-buy for. Birthdays, Christmas etc. Yet, every year she manages to fill some crack in the collection with a trump card. This year it's Keep On Running - The Islands Records Story. What a corker and a cracker of a read. Full page artwork, album cover galleries, but, more mind fryingly it threads together the back stories and tales of some of my most played or favourite styles and artists. Artists, I hadn't quite connected were on the same label together. It's suddenly like finding distant groups of friends gathered in the same school photo.

Blue beat, ska, reggae and the Trojan association, Guy Stevens and Sue Records (we'll save that for another post), Spencer Davies, Traffic, Wynder K Frog, Head Hands And Feet, Fairport Convention, John Martyn, Nick Drake, Kevin Ayers, John Cale, Roxy Music, Eno - and into the eighties and beyond. But for now, let's go from the beginning.

Written and performed by Jackie Edwards from 1958 ~ one of the Island's earliest releases, We're Gonna Love is a sonic eclipse of rock, roll 'n' reggae and blue beat meets big band. Jackie late wrote Keep On Running and Somebody Help Me

Jackie Edwards - We're Gonna Love



From Islands 'pink' period Quintessence look exactly as you'd imagine ~ a fuzzy-faced commune of flute-tooters and freak-beaters. Celebrating Notting Hill when it was sleazy stoner central (best rendered here)rather than the Boho village it's become.

Quintessence - Notting Hill Gate



And how must have this lot bristled on the grizzled roots, rock and reggae artists when they signed to Island..Richard Williams ( head of A and R from 73 to 76) intro sets the scene

But Boy Could He Play Guitar

On January the 1st 1970 Yorkshire folkie Michael Chapman released his second album Fully Qualified Survivor, a record that passed with few fanfares or fireworks (apart from John Peel crowning it 'Album of the Year'). Forty years on, the album pooling all the elements for the post sixties Bowie tone remains an overlooked obscurity.The Velvets, Iggy and Dylan may get the knowing nods for the rise of Ziggy Stardust but the core components are much closer to home.

Produced by Gus Dudgeon, with string arrangements by Paul Buckmaster, both having worked on Chapman's debut Rainmaker - and Bowie's Space Oddity in between - it's Chapman's choice of fretman for 'Fully Qualified Survivor' that's the key ingredient here. Handpicked from Hull, and making his recording debut is - Mick Ronson.

Ronno's glittering riffs and runs electrify the album's open aired fuggyness of acoustic shuffles, lumpen drums and sparkling guitar work. Effectively it's a style that informs The Man Who Sold The World through to Ziggy Stardust. In the the same way Anthony Newley and this chap (no it's not Bowie singing honest!) were borrowed for Bowie's vocal coat of many colours, Chapman's chewed 'S's, fey waywardness and louche-lipped, gin-soaked vocals seem to have been appropriated as the voice of choice for DB's heavy hippy moonage daydreaming.

We've already documented, Bowie's magpie eye for talent, so it's no surprise that shortly after Fully Qualified Survivor's release, Ronson and Hull-based band mates Trevor Bolder and Woody Woodmansey were recruited for Bowie's new band The Hype eventually evolving into The Spiders From Mars until Ziggy broke up the band.

If you're familiar with the Dame's pre-Pinups discography (Pin ups drummer Ansley Dunbar also appears on Rainmaker) Fully Qualified Survivor will get you spotting a references from the off. Build in the space-age mod clobber of a Droog suit, top it off with Vivienne Westwood's feather cut, and all the pieces fall into place.

Michael Chapman - Soulful Lady





Eleven months later Bowie releases The Man Who Sold The World



Micheal Chapman can be visited online at...

Michael Chapman's official website
Michael Chapman on Myspace

Wristory

One autumnal number I'd been hoping to place in last Sunday's Autumn Falls mix was Humble Pie's Wrist Job. An oddly titled outtake from As Safe As Yesterday Is. A performance rumbling along on a slow-shifting tidal swell of heavy Hammond, roof-raising gospel vocals and one runaway bass, all of which come crashing together in heady perfection between 3:00 and 3:30

As much as I love the track, it's just too, well, potent and powerful to sit alongside the soft footfall required for last Sunday's mix.

Humble Pie - Wrist Job



However, a Wrist Job-lite can be traced back to a track from Steve Marriot's previous band The Small Faces, where it had an instrumental run out under the title of The Pig's Trotters.

The Small Faces - The Pig's Trotters



Oh, and the tweety-bird samples bookending Autumn Falls come from this and this.

Freaky Friday - Lift Up Your Skirt And Fly

It's a Pop Quiz - 'lift up your skirt and fly' is the last line of single, banned by the BBC for this saucy sounding statement (although in reality, it was actually reference to witches). But who were the band that recorded it, and the soon-to-be glammer wot wrote it?

We've had Wolfmen doing dark duets, tales of terror, spiders, snakes (and a Halloween podcast Podroscreamia is on it's way), but today as move nearer to All Hallows' Eve, and those final witching hours it's time to bubble and boil a couple of numbers in the cauldron for today's Freak Friday..

The master blaster himself Tom Jones lung-busting, head-shrinking and doing the voodoo and gumbo a-go-go with...

The Witch Queen Of New Orleans



Sharon Tandy goes Snow White's Wicked Queen meets Hammer Glamour - backed by last week's Tick Tockers Les Fleur De Lys on..

Daughter Of The Sun



Guitar geek alert - watch out for the axe at 1:18 Tele body/Strat neck?

Hirsute You Sir

This week's Funky Friday brings you, what at first glance appears to be, a hair bear bunch of grizzle-faced ol' rockers and gnarly Catweazle-a-likes who've spent all night a'supping at the soup kitchen. But, have no fear these fuzzy faced funkateers are as gilded with 'the groove' as they are with beards, burns and barnets . Heads, Hands and Little Feat it is then...


Little Feat - Spanish Moon



Head Hands and Feet - The More You Get The More You Want



Followed with two chunks of funk from unlikeliest looking bunch of fatback-packers ever - The Average White Band - Hamish Stuart, he of the Azlan style ginger 'fro, (spottable at 0:05 in the first clip), later went on to work with Paul McCartney. Although he's made some strikingly bizarre claims against Macca since.





Now if these are that type of tunes that tickle your tastebuds, why not try an earful of Axe Victim's AXE FM Radio Download show for one full hour of quality cuts covering all points from hairy rockers to heavy funkers - you can check it right hair here

Funky Friday - 40 Years of Peace & Music

I know I'm a few days out of date with this, but had my own anniversary to do last week.

Two years ago, I had my brain fried, my mind altered and my doors of perception blown to smoke and splinters in one sitting How? By sitting through my first ever viewing of 'Woodstock'.

Partly - as I thought I'd brought home the DVD of that music fest' where Hendrix sets his Fender aflame. It took a few minutes viewing until realised that music fest was actually Monterey! Whoops.

But mainly - still ingrained with 'Never Trust a Hippy' hard-coded punk standards from my teenage days, viewed Woodstock with a sly eye and had it pegged as fuggy aired, fuzzy haired, hair-baring love-in. And a long weekend of Freak Brother freak-outs and whispy women twittering to polite applause from sky-eyed stoners and other-worldly arm wavers. Which in part it is.

However, what I hadn't expected, and left my head spinning like a shell-shocked owl were...

Sly Stone and his rip-roaring funk review
Santana's explosive Soul Sacrifice
Alvin Lee's giddy guitar work
Janis Joplin's ear-bleeding screeching
CSN's layered harmonies and shifting whisper melodies
The 'orrible Who booming in like boot boys (and Pete's white boiler suit and bovver boots look, surely inspired Kubricks Clockwork Orange droog designs)

Captured pitch perfectly with progressively edgy editing, split screen shots, triple screen shots, offstage observations from gig-goers, police, parents and much, much more, make 'Woodstock' the definitive time capsule of that heady weekend and it's place in social history.

If you haven't seen Woodstock yet, you really are doing yourself a disservice. The 'director's cut' DVD regularly sells for as little £3 in some entertainment retailers, so why not treat yourself on the 40th anniversary of the event - here's a couple of clips and cuts to tempt you..

The two tunes are studio takes not live - don't be alarmed by the names they really are lolloping chunks of funk.

Try (Just A Little Bit Harder) - Janis Joplin




Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young - Woodstock



If you can't swing watching the whole clip, skip to the seven minute mark for the tempo change and the way it bursts back into life with the hookiest of hooky horn riffs.



The drummer looks like he's just finished a paper round, the keyboard player looks like Elvis. There's guitar hero gurning and curly cables too - perfect! Watch out for the naked stranger dancing with a sheep, and the ginger stoner at the close - you have been warned

My First Vinyl Rip!

Phew what a slog lumbering back to business-as-usual after two weeks slumbering around in a laid back state of lazy days, lay-ins and beach-bumming. Southwold is an absolute gem, Walberswick is wonderful but windy and Aldeburgh is King's Road on sea (apparently it's become something of summer playground for the Rock, Cowes and Salcombe set)

But to put some gloss on the gloom, after a five year mission of trawling record shops, antique markets and online auction houses, to seek out the early seventies obscurity that is Head Hands and Feet - Warming Up The Band I finally managed to get my ol' mitts on a copy recently.

I've been trying to track down 'Warming', since discovering it through the excellent Old Grey Whistle Test DVDs. Thanks to a tip off from Ben Soundhog, I pipped a copy on ebay. And what a snip too, £4.99 instead of the Collectors Guidebook value - £25 (although I could've grabbed the demo disc version, with a deliciously diff' Island label for an extra 50p half an hour later).

So what better way to celebrate my first vinyl rip, than by uplumping this tricky-to-track nugget in the blog...

Head Hands and Feet - Warming Up The Band



It's A Pop Quiz - HHF's bass player is better known as one half of a seventies/eighties light entertainment duo - but who is he? You'll hear him at the tail end of the verses on the 'woah mama' section..

You can lend an ear to Don Everley's refit of Warming Up The Band here...

Funky Friday - Folking About On The River

So the Annual Leigh Folk Festival rolls round again this weekend, and really, who needs Glastonbury - when last year's LFF (my first visit) was such a joy and a gem. Please leave any ideas of fuzzy folkies a'wailing and a'wauling about shipwrecks, smugglers and sweethearts long gone, at the gatepost please - this free, two day event of live musical doings is coloured with all shades and styles from solo strummers to ska bands and young folkies to old rockers..

Saturday sees fun for all the family in the Library Gardens with live bands on rotation, perhaps circus skills for the kiddies and dusty ol' vinyl stalls for the dusty ol' dads. Why not bring some plonk and perhaps bagels (from the Leigh Bagel Bar). While Sunday is bands amongst the boats down Old Leigh way with it's wharfs, seafood stalls and those fishermen's pubs...

So, if you're at a loose end this weekend, why not take the C2C to Leigh On Sea, where you may hear funky folk along the lines of..

John & Beverley Martyn - Sorry to Be So Long



Kathy Smith - It's Taking So Long



Heather Jones - Penrhyn Gwyn
If any continental viewers are wondering what's the crazy talk on this track - It's Welsh! Claimed to be Britain's oldest language and still spoken by over half a million people in Wales..



I won't be posting anything on Michael Jackson or Farrah Fawcett, I'll leave it to others who'll do them more justice than I ever could - but will spin this up in memory ...

Keep On Holding On

I'm sure you can do your own jokes for this pic'

Remember Sharon Tandy from Friday's post? Well she's back doing a Dusty-meets-Cher shakedown 'Hold On' (keep 'em peeled for a young DLT intro'ing the clip)



Sharon Tandy - Hold On

A heavier, wah-guitar, stomper versh of Hold On was later nailed by Ipsissimus, (a name I find almost impossible to pronounce) - and used as the opener on this mix o' mine..

Ipsissimus - Hold On

Funky Friday - The Hair Flare Bunch

I’m guesting over at Devil Dick's blog today with brand new bespoke mix - ’33 and a 3rd Eye’ - that scrapbooks heavy mod, rocking hippy and some swishy sounds of the underground into a 70 minute blitz of grooving guitar based goodies - there’s a taste test below – but the full fat version is available right here..

33 and a 3rd Eye trailer



Two tracks I couldn’t seem to squeeze in - and one that I could, form a trio of early doors appearances, and low key/in disguise numbers featuring some of rock’s heaviest-hitters..

Jeff Beck (with Rod Stewart and Ron Wood)- All Shook Up



And the Magical Mystery Tunage...

Who are the undercover rockers masquerading as The Murgatroyd Band and doing the Jenny Hanley anthem

‘Magpie’



Or the anon' artist lending some welly to this budget comp cover of..

Spirit In The Sky..



I know who the last two are - but do you????

If this a touch too crash, bang, wallop - and you fancy something lighter on it's feet - why not try the confessions of a drummer...it's disco a go-go

Funky Friday - Folksie Blokes

From Folk Hobbit........

The Leigh Folk Festival is taking place, just round the corner from me this weekend. Criminally, considering it's only a twenty minute hoof - this year will be the first time I've actually wandered along. I'm not entirely sure to what to expect, but yelling, yodelling and some polite humored a hootin' and a howlin' are sure to feature on the fixtures list - let's hope some of it's as groovy as these green fingered funky folkies....

Donovan - 'Barabajagal(Love Is Hot)'



Donovan was discovered in Westcliff (about two miles, or two train stops ) down the line from the Leigh Folk Festival by Tin Pan Alley legend Peter Eden who until fairly recently ran an excellent second hand record and book shop in Leigh - 'Barabajagal' features The Jeff Beck Group doing the backing duties - you can smell the Zep' in this track.

John Martyn - 'Dreams By The Sea'



I've always felt there's a touch of 'The Sweeney' style stake out texture about JM's snake hips shake down.

Led Zeppelin - 'The Girl I Love She Got Long Black Wavy Hair'



Like Bowie, Bolan and Rod Stewart - Robert Plant followed the same hop, skip and jump from Mod to Folk to Hippie before joining the rock aristocracy - you've got to love Zep for tempering their testosterock with both funk and folk.

If you do end up taking a trip to the Leigh Folk Festival( perhaps via the Fenchurch flyer) - keep an eye out for someone in a straw pork pie hat (yes, really!) sitting and sipping down by The 'Billet.

......To Rock God