Nuggets II: Original Artyfacts from the British Empire and Beyond [Box set] [Import]

The first thing to remember about Nuggets is that it's taken from a weirdly US viewpoint. This is British '60s music for an American audience. The pitch is, "Hey, they were making groovy music over in Europe, too", in other words the UK music of the '60s was just an adjunct to the US music of the '60s! Never mind, this is a much better place to grab all this material than any of the other CD collections if only because of its enormous scope.

"Freakbeat" was a term coined in the 1980s to refer to the British pop music of 1965-66 which was still essentially mod but had begun to play with studio trickery such as reverb and feedback. It's the British equivalent of what the original Nuggets labelled "garage punk" in the early 1970s, American kids playing like the British imports of the time (Yardbirds, Kinks, Stones) while again beginning to play with guitar effects, notably fuzz. In both cases this short-lived phenomenon (largely a phenomenon in retrospect, of course) can be seen as a bridge between the Beatles-led "beat" music of 1964-5 and the true "psychedelic" music of 1967-8. It's a handy definition but of course few of the freakbeat bands were more than one-shot unknowns and almost none of them are what we would consider "psychedelic" bands. They were all swept away when Pink Floyd and Sgt Pepper crashed on the scene. Equally in the US garage punk disappeared under the onslaught of hippie bands spearheaded by Jefferson Airplane.

A few managed to survive by adapting their sound. Nuggets 2 includes songs by The Pretty Things, The Move and The Small Faces. It also includes a handful of songs which are from this new wave of "true" psychedelia of 1967 - Kaleidoscope, Tomorrow, Dantalian's Chariot (name spelt wrong throughout). But this isn't a psychedelic collection so there's no Floyd, Simon Dupree, Locomotive, End, Poets, Moody Blues, World of Oz and so on. In short, this is still largely speed music, not LSD music.

If you've already got other freakbeat CDs, there are plenty of lesser known bands to fill in holes in your collection. There are also the obvious suspects - "Circles" by Fleur de Lys, tracks by The Creation, The Action and so on. "Contains virtually no hits!" cries the sticker on the front, but actually much of this material is extremely well known, at least in the UK. A scan through the contents reveals "My Friend Jack" by The Smoke, "My White Bicycle" by Tomorrow, "My Mind's Eye" and "Here Come The Nice" by Small Faces, "Desdemona" by John's Children, "Fire Brigade" by The Move, "Pictures of Matchstick Men" by The Status Quo. Maybe unknown in the US, but standard fare here.

There are a few psychedelic gems to keep acid pop fans happy. It's great to hear "Walking Through My Dreams" by Pretty Things once again (you can never hear it enough), ditto "Vacuum Cleaner" by Tintern Abbey and "Flight From Ashiya" by Kaleidoscope, and Dantalian Chariot's "Madman" is one of the greatest psychedelic songs of all time. If this is the kind of music you love, you won't be entirely disappointed. The UK dominates which means there isn't too much European pop, which is a shame (it could do with a box to itself) but it does mean we don't have to put up with too much of the horrendous and vastly overrated Os Mutates ("Bat Macumba" only) from that dreadful South American scene everybody jumped on a few years back. Time to see that buried, I think. More interesting is the one and only US band featured here (I think), The Misunderstood, whose "Children of the Sun" is quite excellent. They weren't as brilliant as their reputation, at least not on the recorded evidence (the album "Before The Dream Faded" collects just about everything), but theirs is perhaps the most tragic story in a scene littered with dashed dreams, worthy of a Hollywood movie if ever there was one. The picture of a despondent US garage band sitting dejectedly in the rain outside John Peel's house is a moment of bathos worthy of Shakespeare.