In 2016, the Cherry Red label released Another Splash of Colour, an excellent overview of the neo-psych scene happening in the U.K. between the years 1980 to 1985. Since the sound didn't fade away after that time frame but instead fragmented and grew in new directions, the label thought it worth their time and effort to put together another set to round up the highlights of what came next.
Losing Touch with My Mind: Psychedelia in Britain 1985-1990 is a three-disc set that does a fine job trying to corral the various slippery strands of psychedelia as it mutated into new forms. It's no easy task to connect the dots between the various styles, and to their credit, the compilers of the set kind of throw their hands up and just let the weirdness of the music take over. They don't try to shape the story in any coherent manner as they let the songs bump against each other in mostly random fashion, which is itself an act of psychedelic inspiration. It's easy to imagine a listener losing their bearings as the set switches from the twisted psych-pop of
Robyn Hitchcock to the danceable and loose strut of
the Stone Roses, the brain-scraping grind of
Spacemen 3, or the sky-walking whoosh of
the Boo Radleys. The set touches on shoegaze, dream pop, garage rock revival, super-twee baroque pop, noisy indie pop, Madchester, baggy, drone pop, electro-psych, and biker rock as it trips along, mixing up well-known bands like
the Primitives and
Inspiral Carpets, cult favorites like
Paul Roland and the Modern Art, and some bands who only the most dedicated fans of the era might remember (such as the Glass Keys, the Sugar Battle, and
C Cat Trance, whose trancey "Shake the Mind" might take the prize for most left-field track).
No matter the band's profile, the selections are all top notch, and while it's a treat to rediscover old favorites in a new context (like
the Dentists' jumpy "You Took Me by Surprise" or
the Telescopes' dreamlike "Everso"), the real treat of the set is how deep they dig for obscurities like
One Thousand Violins' brilliantly urgent garage pop near-classic "Please Don't Sandblast My House" or the Honey Smugglers' groovy rocker "Smokey Ice-Cream," which comes complete with a totally wigged-out guitar solo. It's also impressive how wide the compilers cast their net. Any set that contains both
the Shamen's "Christopher Mayhew Says" and the King of Luxembourg's "Smash Hit Wonder," or
the Charlatans' super-baggy "Opportunity" and the Sea Urchins' fragile folk-rock gem "A Morning Odyssey," is one that's telling the entire story of the U.K. psych scene of the time. Like the bands themselves, who continued to take the tropes and tones of psychedelia in interesting and almost always worthwhile new realms,
Losing Touch with My Mind is a worthy successor to Another Splash of Colour. It's similarly well chosen and documented, and well worth checking out for anyone with a healthy nostalgia for the time frame or for anyone who missed it the first time around and wants to discover something weird, wild, and decked out in trippy finery. ~ Tim Sendra