a luscious dream babe title song composed by Basil Kirchin, which can be currently found gracing Trunk Records’ Fuzzy Felt Folk, a popsike-meets-MOR belter about teenage girls discovering themselves entitled ‘They Want Love’, which wouldn’t pass muster today, and an early appearance by Michael Feast, who alongside flatmate David ‘Jeans On’ Dundas co-wrote the excellent songs for Barney Platts Mills’ Private Road (’71).


Platts-Mills obviously ‘dug’ a good toon, enlisting folk-soul progsters Audience to enhance his socio-realist suedehead movie Bronco Bullfrog in ’69, but his were realist rather than exploitation movies, the sort that chin-stroking cineastes would refer to as ‘non-genre’ productions. Personally, I find that when joined together, the films discussed in this article so far form a genre as yet undefined, one that is equal parts pop film, social commentary, art house, fantasy, comedy, exploitation, suspense and horror, with directors borrowing left right and centre from each other for inspiration, and it’s this approach which, for me at least, makes the years between ’59 and ’79 so fascinating.


heroine Gina Warwick (“whatever happened to?” indeed) and her paramour cavort on a bedspread whilst her partner (at least I think it’s him, but they all look discouragingly similar for an era that celebrated individuality) lies comatose after a stag do. ‘Walking Down The Street’ turns up alongside The Foundations’ ubiquitous ‘Build Me Up Buttercup’ in Donovan Winter’s sexploiter Come Back Peter, soon to be released by Nucleus Films with sleeve notes by yours truly.


What’s Good For The Goose, which pits Norman Wisdom against “the kids”, features half of The Electric Banana Blows Your Mind album, and ‘Alexander’ is whistled by a middle-aged truck driver in the ultra-dodgy rape- umentary Take An Easy Ride (’75) as it blares from his radio! Waving the golden era goodbye, an older and be-druggled Pretties play live in the final scene of The Monster Club (’80) Milton Subotsky’s last portmanteau, with cameos from B A Robertson and Night, featuring Stevie ‘Limara’ Lange and ex-Manfred Mann’s Earthband frontman Chris Thompson.


As with the endless re-invention and exploration found in psychedelic and progressive rock music, rules were being broken and boundaries stretched in cinema (and particularly British cinema) in a way like never before or since. As Thunderclap Newman sang, there truly was “something in the air”. How it disappeared from the air is something I will attempt to touch on later. Where it came from is more difficult to pinpoint, but to a whole generation of us who weren’t even there the first time round,


me this was assisted in no uncertain terms by the images shown on television, everything from Children Of The Stones through to Mr Noseybonk, which seemed designed to unlock those recesses of your brain and prepare you in readiness for what was to follow.


As we grow older and watch more ‘adult’ films, it’s still that dark side we find the most appealing, and if the great bands we’ve just discovered happen to appear in or are in some way affiliated with some mysterious, twisted movie from the murky past, then even better. That’s why we’re so happy to find The Zombies on a pub TV screen in Bunny Lake Is Missing, singing ‘Just Out Of Reach’ as Larry Olivier grills Carol Lynley, and The Peddlers’ ‘Tell The World We’re Not In’ opening the ultimate psychedelic horror flick Goodbye Gemini (’70) directed by Alan Gibson, the man behind Dracula AD 72. Its soundtrack, written and arranged by Christopher Gunning, is worth the price of admission alone, as is Johnny Harris’ demented reading of Richard “Vanishing Point” Sarafian’s Brit outing Fragment Of Fear (’70), starring David Hemmings.


Incest and peppermints. Martin Potter and Judy Geeson in Goodbye Gemini.


One film they definitely didn’t show on TV was Peter Sykes’ The Committee (’69) featuring a live performance by Arthur Brown and incidental music by the cinematically ubiquitous Pink Floyd. Once presumed “lost”, but now thankfully available on DVD, this last-named sums up the old adage, “It was the sixties, they were all on drugs”, perhaps better than any other film mentioned here, even if it is shot in black and white. Star Paul Jones (what is it with these Manfreds chappies?), also bestrode Peter Watkins’ legendary Privilege (’67) as dystopian pop star Steven Shorter, and was the hero of Hammer’s forward-thinking Demons Of The Mind (’72) also directed by Sykes. We shan’t go into detail here about the other Floyd soundtracks More and La Vallee: Obscured By Clouds, as for one thing the films in question were not British, and for another it took me ages to see them. But to a fresh-faced youth discovering the joys of progging out for the first time, simply knowing that the band were in some way linked to strange, hidden films that probably bore some resemblance to Morgan, Performance, Accident or whatever weirdness BBC2 and


Those Pretties certainly did get about. In I Start Counting (’69), a brilliant, semi-horror coming of age tale similar in setting to Here We Go Round The Mulberry Bush, ‘She Says Good Morning’ emits from the listening booth in a Bracknell record emporium adorned with Hendrix posters, as heroine Jenny Agutter’s brother slides a West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band LP into a brown paper bag for a customer: vindication to (m)any of us who believed these bands never existed before Nuggets and Rubble, and that a bloke in a shed in Perivale was knocking them out. Among the film’s other delights are


26


except maybe as small children, there is nothing quite so captivating.


There is a wonderful age of discovery that lurks ‘twixt your innocent childhood and your anguished teens, when knowledge is there to be imbibed and anything seems possible: in my case, this coincided with the first surge of nostalgia for the late ’60s, and the decision of mid-80s programme-planners to screen a series of rare, strange and permanently mind- altering films which I now know were mapping out a path. Prior to that, one’s childhood is oft filled with dark fantasy: for


Channel 4 had just shown, somehow connected everything, and once again, made sense – even if you had never seen the films themselves. I felt joined and tied to a time that was not my own, and in the grip of something unexplainable, and I loved it.


In the second part of this article, I will elucidate further on just what it was that held me, and hopefully many of you, firmly in its grip and (occasionally) made my fevered youth a place of heady delirium. Have your widest bell bottoms and your floppiest hat at the ready, and don’t forget the crucifix.


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