Skip Bifferty — “Yours for at Least 24”: Brace for the Obscure (60s rock)! — March , 2024

THE GREATEST SONGS OF THE 1960s THAT NO ONE HAS EVER HEARD

1,157) Skip Bifferty — “Yours for at Least 24”

Here is a rollicking, shuffling, UK pop psych album track from Skip Bifferty* (see #288), who “RCA allowed . . . to cut a full LP, which contained some notable psychedelic and experimental tracks” despite the fact that “none of their [prior] singles charted”. (Bruce Eder, https://www.allmusic.com/artist/skip-bifferty-mn0000016792#biography) The album “sounds pretty much like the quintessenial aural snapshot of England in 1967, a dazzling fusion of Swinging London pop-art cool and stoned Summer of Love optimism. . . . [D]espite boasting all the trappings of the era, the album’s enduring appeal lies as much with the timeless quality of the songwriting”. (David Wells, Record Collector 100 Greatest Psychedelic Records: High Times and Strange Tales from Rock’s Most Mind-Blowing Era)

Bruce Eder describes the essence of the band:

[T]hey’re cheerfully spaced out, and their music is heavily ornamented with bells, echo, and all manner of sound effects, but at its core, this was a ballsy, hard-playing band that recognized the need for a solid rock & roll base to this kind of [pop psych] music. . . . . In all, it’s cheerful psychedelia with a hard edge and some great virtuoso playing, pleasingly heavy guitar, soaring choruses, and eerie psych-pop lyrics evoking variant states of mind, somewhat akin to Pink Floyd’s early singles laced with the kind of heavy edge that the Creation brought to the genre.

https://www.allmusic.com/album/skip-bifferty-mw0000739474

Bifferty was “discovered playing an early gig at the Marquee [Club] by . . . [Don] Arden, who soon secured them a contract with RCA. Based in London, they regularly appeared on John Peel’s ‘Top Gear’ ”. (Vernon Joynson, The Tapestry of Delights Revisited). Arden had told them that “in 9 months you’ll be as big as the Stones” (liner notes to the CD reissue of Skip Bifferty). Yet, as Joynson points out, “[d]espite having more commercial appeal than many underground acts, they failed to break through”. (The Tapestry of Delights Revisited)

Eder writes that a “dispute with Arden caused the band to walk out en masse, and they next appeared together under the pseudonym Heavy Jelly, cutting an eight-minute single (‘I Keep Singing That Same Old Song’) that charted in a few European countries.” (https://www.allmusic.com/artist/skip-bifferty-mn0000016792#biography)

* There was no one named Skip Bifferty in Skip Bifferty. Joynson explains that, apparently, the band named itself after a “cartoon character of their own invention.” (The Tapestry of Delights Revisited)

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