THE GREATEST SONGS OF THE 1960s THAT NO ONE HAS EVER HEARD
1,414) The Alan Bown! — “Technicolour Dream”
For those who don’t have time for a 14 hour technicolor dream, this ‘67 B-side by the Alan Bown! (see #1,213) gives you “superior psych pop” (Jon Harrington, liner notes to the CD comp Halcyon Days: 60s Mod, R&B, Brit Soul & Freakbeat Nuggets) that clocks in at under 3 minutes!
David Wells notes that:
Club band The Alan Bown Set were one of many acts to find that the emergence of psychedelia had rendered the fingerpoppoin’, footstompin’, handclappin’ soul revue mentality uncool almost overnight. Undaunted, they soaked up the new sounds, invested in kaftans and wrote a batch of songs inspired by the arrival of the Aquarian Age — or, at the very least, the arrival of The Bee Gees.
liner notes to the CD comp Let’s Go Down and Blow Our Minds: The British Psychedelic Sounds of 1967
The album Outward Bown (including “Dream”) is “a charming artefact of Brit-psych . . . . Although there’s none of the unsettling darkness of a Syd Barrett, or the hard Freak-beat edge of Creation, the twelve tracks present stronger songs than many of their high-charting contemporaries.” (http://andrewdarlington.blogspot.com/2016/07/from-mod-to-brit-psych-alan-bown.html?m=1). Dave Thompson writes that:
Everybody who’s followed the convoluted career of Jess Roden, Britain’s best-kept blue-eyed soul-shaped secret for more than 30 years, should close their ears right now. The man who turned “I Can’t Get Next to You” into one of the most dramatically passionate rock workouts of the ’70s is completely up a bubblegum tree [on Outward Bown], running through an album of light-psych whimsy that has as much to do with his future as…name your poison: Peter Frampton and the Herd, Status Quo and “Matchstick Men,” Traffic and its debut album. It’s great pop, of course — as great as any of those and many more. . . . as delightful as only second-division British psych can be, a collection of semi-detached suburban Ray Davies observations full of vaguely Edwardian lifestyle concerns, peopled by pretty girls who wash the dishes, toys that talk, and love that flies from the rooftops with the clouds. Signs of the band’s (and band members’) brilliance are all over the place. . . . And it’s all so impossibly sweet, so implausibly twee, and so utterly a child of its times that you can’t help but wonder just how humanity survived the ’60s. Let alone Roden himself!
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