Various Artists Lullabies For Catatonics ~ A Journey Through The british Avant-Pop/Art-Rock Scene -1967-74 CD

Previous Grapefruit genre anthologies have shown how the various strands of British psychedelia developed tangentially in subsequent years: I'm A Freak Baby observed how the blues-based, harder-edged element of the genre gradually morphed into hard rock/proto-metal, Dust On The Nettles examined the countercultural psychedelic folk movement, while Come Join My Orchestra looked at the post-"Penny Lane" baroque pop sound.

Our latest attempt to document the British psychedelic scene's subsequent family tree, Lullabies For Catatonics charts the journey without maps that was fearlessly undertaken in the late Sixties and early Seventies by the more cerebral elements of the underground, inspired by everyone from Bartok, Bach and The Beatles to Dada, Dali and the Pop Art movement. Suddenly pop music was no longer restricted to moon-in-June lyrics and traditional song structures. Instead, it embraced the abstract, the discordant and the surreal as pop became rock, and rock became Art.

A new, post-Dylan emphasis on lyrics led to self-proclaimed poets like Keith Reid, Pete Brown, Pete Sinfield and Adrian Henri aligning themselves with rock bands, while the free jazz and classical influences embraced by the underground scene resulted in a new musical hybrid. While Soft Machine's mordant wit and musical complexity established them as progenitors of the so-called Canterbury Scene, the likes of Procol Harum instigated a more portentous, symphonic style that was subsequently classified as Art Rock, a sub-division of a wide-ranging scene that would be codified by the one-size-fits-all term Progressive Rock.

Those two complementary strands are at the heart of Lullabies For Catatonics, with the more challenging American bands of the era also an influence: The Velvet Underground impacted on everyone from a young David Bowie to teenage ingenues The Velvet Frogs, while Captain Beefheart's Magic Band would inform Arthur Brown's equally uncompromising playmates Rustic Hinge.