Description
As that noted hipster Plato once observed, when the mode of the music changes, the walls of the city shake. And there was certainly a whole lotta shakin' goin' on in 1967.
As the year progressed, it seemed that more or less every element of the British pop world had been swept up in the blissed-out UFOria. Beat boom survivors, R&B stalwarts, sharp-suited mods, Swinging London soul revues, earnest acoustic folkies, Denmark Street hustlers, traditional pop acts € all abandoned or refined their previous identities to make music that reflected the ubiquitous influence of psychedelia in its myriad paisley-patterned guises.
Across four hours and eighty tracks, the all-singing, not-much-dancing Let's Go Down And Blow Our Minds anticipates the fiftieth anniversary of the Summer of Love to chronicle a tumultuous twelve-month period of music-making within the British Isles. The dizzying breadth of the set incorporates everything from key names such as The Move and Procol Harum, both represented with less obvious choices (surely nobody needs to hear 'I Can Hear The Grass Grow' or 'A Whiter Shade Of Pale' yet again?!), to the likes of mondo obscuro West Country quintet T. J. Assembly, who pressed a mere 25 copies of their self-penned November 1967 album as a strictly personal memento of their time together.