This is Psychic Circle's oddest compilation yet. Cult actors and UK game show hosts mingle with ethnic novelties, opera singers, prostitutes and unknowns. The liner notes acknowledge some utter crap and complete nonsense within: welcome relief from talk of forgotten gems and legends which has set me up for disappointment with several of PC’s previous efforts.
Psychic Circle
The title Music for Mentalists offers up the premise that only a mind reader could guess what record executives were thinking when they released these efforts. But a cursory glance at the songs which actually made the UK pop charts over the last forty years reveals that great singles were rare and many pitiful efforts sold significantly. So it makes sense that someone tried to cash-in by selling a pop song to those television viewers charmed by David McCallum as the cool U.N.C.L.E. agent Ilya Kuryakin and David Carradine as the mystical and reluctant martial arts wanderer in Kung Fu. And given the horrific chart violations by (so-called) easy-listening band-leader James Last, it might have been thought reasonable to have Al Hirt and Joe Loss take their respective stabs at the TV theme tunes from The Monkees and Steptoe and Son (remade in the US as Sanford and Son). It doesn’t even seem too long a shot to have let boozy newsreader Reggie Bosenquet go disco or have Jim Bowen, host of cult Sunday afternoon game-show Bullseye (part general knowledge part darts match) record a suitably down-to-earth “rap.” Bowen’s piece is actually a hilarious self-depreciating culture shocker, mocking his hair loss, painful jokes, poor singing voice, dead-ordinary contestants and on-screen mess-ups.
Compiler Mick Dillingham has done sterling work in locating Linda Jardim’s “Energy in Northampton,” a laughable song on the topic of aliens in a damaged spacecraft being drawn to the middle-England town by its go-ahead energy. Funded by the Northampton Development Corporation I am pretty certain this overblown oddity had at least one spin on the truly legendary John Peel radio show. Equally, “Tina’s Song” by Tina Harvey is a brief but genuinely bizarre foray through such mind-numbing topics as living in Slough and being a Gemini. Harvey deconstructs the song out of existence using a deceptive voice that is half sung and half spoken; wry and understated enough to have caught Peel's ear, I think.
There are also promo-ditties by various businesses. Of those, Swingin’ Thom’s “The Weakling in Thom McCann Shoes” is marginally more amusing than John Collier’s “Saturday Night Suit” and Cadbury’s Singers’ “Come into the Warm” beats The Barclay Supergroup’s “Barclay Girls" hands down. Maybe that’s because Barclay’s Bank was notorious for their investment in apartheid-era South Africa, but also as chocolate is obviously better than banking. Hylda Baker was 73 years old when she recorded “Substitute” and it is worth hearing, once. The wild take on Lee Hazlewood’s “Boots” by Balsara & His Singing Sitars, though, is something to which I expect to return more often.
Unfortunately, Max Bygraves shows up, and there’s a dreadful version of “The Music Man” by Rusty Goffe, who happens to be a dwarf. However, a brief speech by Aldous Huxley’s daughter provides a nice introduction and Xaviera Hollander (author of The Happy Hooker) is also included, with “My Attitude to Sex” a suitably raunchy effort. Actor Michael Elphick’s “Gotcha” is a creepier listen. Taken literally it might be a paean to rape and imprisonment but, more likely, is a poorly written, disturbingly chauvinist take on relationships. Elsewhere, depths of taste and dignity are well and truly plumbed: “Song for Sefton” (dedicated to the household cavalry horse who survived an IRA bomb) is pathetic, devoid of musical interest and even lacking in sentimentality. Even worse than "Sefton" is an appalling Yiddish version of “Rock Around The Clock.”
If this is the most interesting Psychic Circle compilation yet that’s because the ones I’ve heard so far have been raw and spirited but also uneven and quite repetitive. A thread of the current zeitgeist seems to be that any music ever released should be repackaged under a snappy title and be written up as containing either a forgotten gem or two, or an overlooked legend. Sadly, that is just not true. Yet Music for Mentalists does have the very worthwhile track by Linda Jardim and Tina Harvey's brilliant effort and if you feel you simply must learn how to pronounce the Welsh village Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch, then look no further.
samples
- Balsara and His Singing Sitars - Boots
- David McCallum - Communication
- Linda Jardim - Energy in Northampton
Read More
