Music with Mark!

Hey! For a while we'd been talking about sharing some of the music that I help to pick for the videos you see on our Instagram and TikTok accounts, so welcome to Music With Mark! This will be a regular feature on our blog to showcase some of the incredible hidden gems from the 60s and 70s!

It can be really daunting starting to discover music from a different genre that you may be interested in but feel like you don't know the way in to it. For me, the best decade for music is the 60s. Not your typical chart music but music from the underground.

My interest in the 60s started when The Horrors burst on to the scene with Sheena Is A Parasite back in 2006.


Up to that point, the indie that I was finding in the NME was great and enjoyable but there was something completely different about The Horrors and it was exciting! As a friend of mine at the time described it: "the drums are like a skeleton in a metal bin falling down some stairs." - this would go on to form the basic requirement for my musical tastes, and is still a rule to this day. Their debut album Strange House is well worth a listen too.

Around the time they came out, they also released three fanzines called Horror Asparagus Stories, Sounds From Outer Space and Heartbreak Ahead. Each fanzine was compiled by members of the band and each came with a CD compilation of 6 handpicked songs that best represented a favourite genre. The zine called Horror Asparagus Stories was my way in to the garage music that I'm obsessed with to this day. The other two were equally as interesting and I imagine at some point I will discuss them too.

The title track - Horror Asparagus Stories is by a band called The Driving Stupid who were a very sort lived American band from New Jersey. 


They existed for 1966, recorded enough music for a few singles and an album but because they were a commercial flop, they ceased to exist when the band members drifted back to college at the end of 66. But we're left with some of the most incredibly lyrically wild songs, with that skeleton in a bin drumbeat, and they've rightly achieved cult status.

The other five songs are equally as incredible:
  • Never More by The Magic Mushrooms
  • Don't Lose Your Mind by Galaxies IV
  • Boil The Kettle, Mother by The ID
  • Suzy Cream Cheese by Teddy And His Patches
  • No Silver Bird by The Hooterville Trolley

I listened to the CD on repeat for weeks and weeks, because I was obsessed. It's probably a cliché, but up to this point I didn't know that this was the sound I'd craved but when I heard it, it all made sense. I imagine this is what it was like when people first heard Elvis. Six tracks were not enough for me so I took to the internet armed with six titles and six artists and so began a lifelong trip to find as much of this music as I could.

I first landed on compilation albums because most of these bands never released more than one or two 7" singles and then vanished in to oblivion. Thankfully, there are a lot of crate diggers in America and elsewhere who found these gems before I came along and got together to make glorious compilation albums of the stuff, hours of double LPs, huge box sets filled with bands and artists from the 60s just freaking out and making music seemingly with no care about the possibility of never "making it".

If I was to recommend two albums as a way in to this genre of music, the Nuggets box set and Pebbles Vol 3 - The Acid Gallery would be the ones as these were the first two that I found that had some of these tracks on in addition to a wealth of others. Nuggets is slightly more mainstream but no less fascinating, Pebbles is where the real true wild garage gems are to be had. Let me know what you think in the comments below, I'd love to hear what you make of the tracks and which ones are your favourites! Until next time, be seeing you in The Octopus Garden.



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