Cherry Red's archival Grapefruit imprint has been on a roll in recent years with delightfully thorough multi-disc anthologies celebrating a parade of different U.K. psych, garage, and folk pocket scenes from the 1960s and '70s. Ranging from more-expansive celebrations like Strangers in the Room: Journey Through the British Folk Rock Scene 1967-1973 to hyper-specific moments in time like A Slight Disturbance in My Mind: The British Proto-Psychedelic Sounds of 1966, Grapefruit's mission as intrepid rock musicologists always feels like a labor of love. Falling in line with the latter of the two aforementioned sets is another calendar-year time capsule,
Peephole in My Brain: British Progressive Pop Sounds of 1971. Framed in the collection's extensive booklet as a sort of bubbling-up year in U.K. rock,
Peephole's 71 tracks chart a dazzling array of forward-thinking acts as they helped merge the underground scene with pop's mainstream. While America hummed along to the mellow sounds of
Bread, James Taylor, and
the Osmonds, British bands like
Curved Air,
Cressida, and
Atomic Rooster were issuing artful, muscular rock that often made the higher reaches of the charts. Among nicely curated tracks from well-known acts like
the Hollies,
the Move, and
Status Quo are heaps of interesting oddities like Terry Dactyl & the Dinosaurs' springy accordion-led folk romp "Sea Side Shuffle" (which surprisingly became a number two hit a year later) and the rich exploratory pop of
Fickle Pickle's "Down Smokey Lane." In typical Grapefruit fashion, they've also managed to exhume a handful of truly obscure cuts like
Wil Malone's hauntingly avant-garde rendition of
Ringo Starr's "It Don't Come Easy" (previously unreleased), Grandfather's gentle story-song "Dear Mr. Time," and a pre-
Hunky Dory version of
David Bowie's "Andy Warhol" which he had apparently written for
Dana Gillespie, who sings her own much lusher version of it here. It's a testament to both the fertile era and the label's archival efforts that a single year in British music could yield such a bounty of great music without even dipping a ladle into the more obvious mainstream hits by
the Who,
Led Zeppelin, assorted solo
Beatles, or the rise of glam rock with
T. Rex,
Slade, and others. ~ Timothy Monger