Intense Records

The 1960s Blues Boom And Psychedelia

£11.66 (£13.99 incl. VAT)

After World War Two big band music started to decline, partly because such bands were expensive to run, and partly as a younger generation were looking for something new. in reaction to the cozy back home crooning of a war weary survivors. The new trend first looked back at New Orleans jazz, and Ken Colyer, for one, even managed at length to get to the places he admired and brought back what he had found. Others like Chris Barber followed by forming trad jazz bands. Instruments and American records were hard to come by. so a do-it-yourself child was born as skiffle. If a rare guitar could be got it would get an electric pick-up added, then be given a rhythm backing of a washboard strummed with thimbles, and a bass made usually from an old tea chest and a broomstick handle, to render songs by the likes of Leadbelly [Huddle Leadbetter] audible to British ears. As sounds of U.S. black performers began to spill out from segregated radio stations in America. whites. and at length British travellers, began to hear the rhythm and blues music and acquire early recordings as they became available from sailors and other travellers. As the even rarer electric guitars also began to appear in Britain, on both sides of the Atlantic r&b morphed into rock and roll. Black performers eventually managed too circumvent British musicians union regulations and the musical public then got to experience the genuine artists performing. So by the mid 1960s after a repackaging of rock, thanks to the Merseybeat generation, copyists of Mississipi Delta acoustic blues, Chicago big city blues, and all manner of r8Lb began to appear among British artists. What follows in this volume is a history of how that developed up to 1967, when a new influence found it's way across the Atlantic, as dabblers into inner space found inspiration from synthetic derivatives of the, at first legal, derivatives of psycho-active plants traditionally used by indigenous sharpen, and sought to replicate their experiences with electronic feedback and other electric experiments, hypnotic rhythms, and light shows developed out of contemporary kinetic art. Often this was mixed with lyrics of protest against social injustices like the Vietnam War. So psychedelic music was born, creating a counter culture of communal togetherness that has lasted well beyond the '60s.  
Phoenix Publications of Chelmsford 2019 ISBN 978-0-9542286-2-0  
Cover by the author  

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