Name: Lullabies For Catatonics - A Journey through the British Avant-Pop / Art Rock Scene 1967 - 74
Brand: Various

Bonus disc

Bonus disc: No

Catalogue number

CRSEGBOX056

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Colour

Colour details

Discogs ID

Format multiplier

Download code

Download code: No

Rough Trade Exclusive

Rough Trade Exclusive: No

Extended format

Extended format: No

Format detail

Format Music GB

Limited edition

Release date

2019-05-31

Signed copies

Signed copies: No

Supplier GB

Cherry Red (ADA)

Tax rate GB

UPC / Barcode

5013929185609

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Total Cap

3 / CD / Extended format: No / Rough Trade Exclusive: No / Signed copies: No

Artist

Various

Genre GB

Prog Rock

Label GB

Grapefruit

Grapefruit is a UK-based music label that specializes in psych/garage-era music from the 1966-70 timeframe. Managed by Cherry Red, Grapefruit focuses on releasing single-artist career anthologies and definitive versions of rare and classic albums. Each release features sympathetic artwork, rare photos, detailed liner notes, and high-quality sound from the original masters.

Grapefruit's 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 SoftMachine’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 ingénues The Velvet Frogs, while Captain Beefheart’s Magic Band would inform Arthur Brown’s equally uncompromising playmates Rustic Hinge.

A fascinating window on a movement that stands as one of the most creative, challenging and esoteric in British music history, Lullabies For Catatonics incorporates the hugely successful (Yes, Genesis, 10cc) cheek-by-jowl alongside the unsigned (both Gnome Sweet Gnome and As You Like It now gain their first-ever commercial release), together with the art-rock collectables (Gnidrolog, Spring) and the unclassifiable avant-garde iconoclasts (Third Ear Band, Pink Floyd collaborator Ron Geesin). Housed in an attractive clamshell box, this essential set features suitably sympathetic artwork as well as a heavily illustrated 40-page booklet that includes the story behind each track.

Lullabies For Catatonics - A Journey through the British Avant-Pop / Art Rock Scene 1967 - 74

Music GB