Читать книгу The Mojo Collection - Various Mojo Magazine - Страница 151

Record Label: Phillips

Produced: John Franz

Recorded: Stanhope Place Studios, London; summer 1968

Released: 1969

Chart Peaks: None (UK) None (US)

Personnel: Terry Martin (g, v); Mike Brancaccio (g); Timothy du Feu (b, p); Philip Fox (d); Kiki Dee, Maggie Bell (bv)

Track listing: Dear Louise; Try Another Day; I Feel The Same Way Too; My Mind Cries; Can’t You See; Thor The Thunder God; Horses And Chariots; Before My Time; Free As The Breeze; Girl I’m So Alone; Soul and My Will; Falling Again

Current CD: Sunbeam SBRCD5019 adds: Magic Potion; Cast A Spell

Further listening: This was pretty much everything they recorded give or take a few B-sides

Further reading: An interview with bassist Timothy du Feu: www.pooterland.com/index2/looking_glass/open_mind/ open_mind.html

Download: Not currently legally available

As The Beatles bowed out and Led Zeppelin took off, many other excellent bands slipped between the cracks. Amongst them The Open Mind are prominent – and some would say pre-eminent. In 1969 they released a thunderously heavy psychedelic album and a legendary 45, both of which vanished so completely that mint copies now fetch truly terrifying sums on the collectors’ market.

Their roots lay in London’s fertile blues scene, where they gigged for years as The Drag Set before embracing the emerging psychedelic scene in 1966 and becoming a fixture in underground clubs such as the Middle Earth, the UFO and The Marquee. ‘Bluesy bands started to go psychedelic, and we were no exception’, says Tim du Feu, their bassist. In keeping with the changing times, they rethought both their name and image. Far from the standard hippy threads on show all around them, The Open Mind opted to reflect their proto-metal psychedelia in the leather suits they always wore. ‘It was very unusual at the time’, he continues. ‘You could say that we started the look that people like Iron Maiden took up later.’

Their music was evolving as well. ‘The later it got at gigs, the wilder things became, and we’d experiment’, says Tim. Playing alongside such legends as Jimi Hendrix, Pink Floyd and The Electric Prunes, by 1968 they were red-hot and ready to record. Landing a deal with Phillips, they made their sole album that summer.

Standing today as an unquestionable high point of UK psychedelia, it’s arguably the first album in the style that came to be known shortly afterwards as ‘heavy metal’.

Album completed, the band returned to the live circuit and eagerly awaited its release. They were to be disappointed, though. Too heavy for hippies and too snappy for progressive rock fans, The Open Mind vanished at once when it appeared in early 1969, though du Feu believes it went to Number 1 in Japan. Resisting disillusionment, they returned to the studio shortly afterwards to record the mighty ‘Magic Potion’, a single whose frantic riff, demented drumming and furious guitar solos make many consider it to be the finest heavy psychedelic rock 45 ever produced in Britain. If anything was going to break them, it was this. John Peel put his weight behind it and it seemed reasonable to expect a breakthrough, especially give the heavier direction that rock was starting to take. Fate, however, intervened again. The censorious British media panicked at the song’s unabashed celebration of the joys of acid, and the single was swiftly banned. In the wake of this blow, a split became inevitable. The Open Mind was closed for business, leaving some of the heaviest music of the decade in their wake.