FREE: The Free Story (2LP, Island ISLD 4, 1973)

Wow: this two-album compilation is a line drawn in the sands of self-belief. You won’t find many bands that a mere five years after their inception merit a collection of such perceived importance and value as this one. Gatefold sleeve; numbered (“The Free Story is released in a limited edition”, state the huffy liner notes); printed inner sleeves that themselves contain further record-protecting bags; and a stapled-in four page booklet that talks through, in more detail than most people would like to know about, the history of the phenomenon known as Free. And you thought that they were just that band that did ‘All Right Now’? Hell, no. If you’re taken in by the majesty of this tribute, you’d be justified in thinking that they’re the greatest musical event of the past fifty years.

There’s a whole ton of long-haired, flare-trousered, coke-fuelled 1960s-fallout self-confidence on display here. It’s hard not to be seduced. Bands these days just don’t seem to mean it quite so desperately or convincingly as those that emerged blinking from the excesses of the ’60s into the mysterious 1970s. I want every band to mark their fifth anniversary with this kind of double-album tribute to their Story So Far. It’s like the music industry equivalent of a celebrity kiss’n'tell (ghost-written) biography.

TRAFFIC: Here We Go Round The Mulberry Bush (7″, Island WIP-6025, 1967)

Ah, I love this record. I saw the movie Here We Go Round The Mulberry Bush, for which this is the theme tune, when I was around 17, and it immediately became one of the things that make me who I am today. If nothing else, it may have been the genesis of my long-standing desire to have been born in, ooh, 1950, and to have grown up through the 60s as a young teenager. I read the book – I forget who it’s by – soon after seeing the film, and remember that being great as well. Utterly vacuous and superficial, in both book and film form, the story may be; but hey, that’s what I like, maybe. I used to be friendly with a neo-Riot Grrl named Andrea in the early 90s, and she was utterly repelled by the book and saddened that I had read it and enjoyed it. She was doubtless right, but I was never quite so black and white and set in my opinions – or, at least, I could (and still can) come up with convincing, pseudo-intellectual reasoning for liking something that is, to many people, utter rubbish.

One of the great things about the movie is the appearance of the Spencer Davis Group in one of those quintessentially 60s scenes that sees the protagonists visit a swinging, hip nightclub (or, as memory serves, some kind of youth club, in this case…) That band’s Steve Winwood was, of course, the main man behind Traffic,  whose softly psychedelic theme tune, with one flared leg squarely in acid nirvana, the other in the pop charts, is one of the more lightweight parts of their output. The flip to this 7″ is ‘Coloured Rain’, a dreamier, more introspective number that hints more at the extended wigouts that make a lot of Traffic’s albums so horrendous and captivating in equal measures.

I’d like to see a lot of old movies from this period again, some time – this one, The Knack And How To Get It, Head, Psych-Out, The Trip, etc etc etc. I can’t get enough of them, or the music and perceived lifestyle of simplicity and fun that inevitably comes along with them.

This is a second-hand record, bought from a record fair at some time in the past. The labels have the name ‘G. Albury’ written on them in biro – I wonder who that is? Did G. Albury buy this in 1967? Are you G. Albury?