Note: values shown are for original vinyl pressings in Mint condition and reflect recent market trends.Įscalator (Stable SLE 8001) January 1969 £200 The message was clear the dream was over.
Others such as Second Hand, Arcadium and The Writing On The Wall were producing more anguished, cathartic music, while a few far-out acts the likes of Arzachel, High Tide and The Human Beast were ploughing their own unique furrows, making heavy and utterly distinctive music that pointed towards progressive rock and heavy metal – which would have been inconceivable in 1967. The underground was still clinging to vestiges of psychedelia, but bands such as Sam Gopal, The Open Mind and Andromeda were unmistakably grafting a heavier rock sound onto acid-influenced roots. Lyrics were getting more abstruse and unsettling, and production simpler and more direct.
Led Zeppelin’s mighty debut (issued in the US in January 1969) had steered blues-rock into new waters, with tracks such as Communication Breakdown heralding a new brand of high-energy rock’n’roll. In the UK, a noticeably harder edge was also creeping into rock. Over in America, the discontentment felt by the young was starting to be expressed, not by protest singers, but by hard rock bands such as The Stooges and MC5, whose nihilistic noise outraged many. Heroin and amphetamines flooded the scene, where once marijuana and LSD had been the preferred substances, and many casualties resulted. This wasn’t just unwarranted aggression on the part of the police: the establishment was terrified of the perceived threat to the status quo, and there was a sharp increase in hard drug use. The reality was that tensions between authority figures and the young were simmering as never before. In a sense it was inevitable that disillusionment with the so-called hippie dream would set in – it had promised impossible fantasies, with LSD curing society’s ills, different factions spontaneously loving one another and a full-scale political and socio-economic revolution magically occurring. As Deviants leader Mick Farren puts it: “The 1968 student revolt had crashed and burned, leaving little but social secretaries on the make, incompetent wannabe terrorists, and scrag-end psychedelic clubs waiting for the coming of disco.” By 1968, blues-rock had started to take over but, when 1969 came around, a darker vibe was starting to seep through. In 1967, psychedelia was all the rage in Britain’s underground.
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