VA - Mojo Presents Acid Drops, Spacedust & Flying Saucers (2001)

Lovingly compiled by those scholarly scribes at Mojo magazine (and with excellent sleeve notes from genre connoisseur Jon Savage), the 72-track, four-CD box set Acid Drops. Spacedust and Flying Saucers is a veritable encylopedia of British 60s psychedelic pop. Come, let us leave our monochrome 21st-century adult lives and climb the technicolour loft-ladder into an enchanted and forgotten childhood attic of benzedrine bedtime stories, liquorice allsorts, toy trains, rainbow trees and--in the case of Mandrake Paddle Steamer--strange men walking across the lawn. As Acid Drops correctly points out, American psychedelia was all about napalm guitars, carbon monoxide poisoning and "they're coming to take me away to Vietnam" psychosis. However, its cuddly, post-ration book British sibling was more concerned with sniffing the school chemistry set, eating sweets and something or other to do with gardening. Thus, beat-band blokes from such unlikely places as Scunthorpe, Hove and Hounslow set sail for new musical horizons--possibly on flying carpets made out of flutes and mellotrons--with the pioneering zeal of Victorian free-thinkers. Aside from cult cornerstone classics by The Poets, Timebox, Kaleidoscope, David McWilliams, Amazing Friendly Apple (whose "Magician" really does sound like the work of mysterious robed men with long white beards) and World Of Oz (although surely the pervy nursery rhyme "Muffin Man" would have been a better choice than "Peter's Birthday"), Acid Drops boasts plenty of familiar hit parade fare from The Move, Donovan, The Yardbirds. The Hollies et al, plus obscurities galore. Who, exactly, were proto-punk freak-beat exponents Allen Pound's Get Rich and how come they sounded like Adam and The Ants 11 years before the event? Bamboo Shoot? Nope, us neither--nor the compilers. With such notable absentees as Svensk and Dantalion's Chariot, a whole tangential area of weird-folk to explore and with EMI holding the magic key to the locked cupboard of early Floyd outtakes, here's hoping this essential, un-put-downable box set is the first in a very, very long series.