Donovan’s “Sunshine Superman” was the UK’s first explicitly psychedelic record. Although there were delays with it hitting shops, it was recorded in December 1965. A large part of its impact came through the instrumentation and arrangement. Jazz players were on board, playing in a folky way without abandoning their core musical sensibilities. The ground-breaking arranger responsible was John Cameron.

Who created the term “electronic superhighway”? First described a system of linked communication that would become the internet? Envisioned a multichannel TV system where viewers chose for themselves what to tune into? Watch Amanda Kim’s excellent documentary Moon Is the Oldest TV and you find that the correct answer to all those questions is Nam June Paik.

For a masterclass in expansive adaptation, one could do worse than turn to Ang Lee’s Oscar-winning Brokeback Mountain, based on American author Annie Proulx’s 1997 short story of the same title. Proulx’s restrained but searing tale of the queer romance between two ranch hands in 1960s Wyoming generated in Lee's 2005 film a tragedy of deep interiority and complex emotion.

Paul Simon is an ornery bugger. Full of awkwardness and perversity as a person, seemingly hugely detached, but as an artist capable of as much tenderness and directness as just about anyone out there. Capable of making world-changing artistic statements but queering his pitch with bizarrely, unnecessarily reactionary statements or actions. Really, a very weird man.

When young Morse went speeding off in his Jag at the end of the Endeavour finale earlier this year, the road was left open for another, zootier Jag to zoom in, the racing green E-type belonging to DCI Adam Dalgliesh of Scotland Yard. 

Amongst the stranger recordings surfacing in 1977’s summer of punk was the version of Sex Pistols’s “Pretty Vacant” appearing on the budget Hallmark label album Top Of The Pops Volume 60 – the latest in a long-running series collecting ostensibly sound-alike versions of current hits recorded by anonymous session musicians and singers in a Wembley studio.

One of the essays in the booklet accompanying Loma Northern Soul describes the titular label as an “outlet aimed at secondary or tertiary record markets, issuing product that it was hoped would prove strong in R&B radio, yet had the potential to crossover and do battle with Motown in the pop charts”.

My associate for the evening has recently returned from Breaking Convention, a conference on psychedelics, celebrating their renaissance in recent years. He’s been microdosing regularly. Around us the crowd sways, many with eyes closed, bobbing, silhouetted by two screens and a stage backdrop on which a dancing silver-grey blob-humanoid grooves itself to liquid, splatters flowing off it.

March 1960’s I Hear A New World EP was British pop at its most extraordinary. As its liner notes put it, it was “a strange record”: one seeking to aurally reflect life on the moon and in outer space. Musique concrète, pop and studio-only sonic manipulation were rolled into one. Its creator was producer Joe Meek.

Record Store Day is nearly here. At theartsdesk on Vinyl we have a selection of goodies which are appearing exclusively in record shops. See anything you fancy?

THEARTSDESK ON VINYL’S VINYL OF RECORD STORE DAY APRIL 2023

Suicide A Way of Life Rareties (BMG)