Psychedelia Frae Bonnie Pscotland!

Scots hippie escaping to U.K. 1986. Photo: FMF© Art Department Dept.

Scotland is a mist-shrouded wilderness broken by reeking slums somewhere between Iceland and Greenland, where the raw wind blows icy rain up the men's skirts, and a greasy bag of rock-hard sheep's intestines is considered a delicacy. Small wonder that the Peace n' Love© thing never found its way up there. But decades later, a few brave souls ventured south into civilisation and cut these swell albums.

The Shamen clearly took drugs. Perhaps the wrong drugs - their later success as banging techno ravers ruined their music and reputation for the handful of psych fans who loved Drop (geddit?) and the attendant singles. Melodic, shimmering with Electric Prunes reverb, and propelled by unlikely surf-inflected drumming, this is one of the very few post-sixties [1987 - Ed.] albums to get this type of thing absolutely right

The cosmos turned. Generations came and went before Art Of The Memory Palace crawled across the border, blinking in the unaccustomed sunlight. In 2015, reviewers hadn't been born when the Paisley Undergound briefly shimmered the airwaves and had no reference points, the poor dears. "Psychedelia" was by then, and is now, a meaningless tag in a *cough* music scene *cough* consisting entirely of labels and sub-genres and references. But This Life Is But A Passing Dream is the real thing hidden in the crates of Pepsidelia. Where Drop shows its garage roots, TLIBAPD is swimmy, dreamy, slightly melancholic, and sounds as much 2015 as 1969, for better or worse. Sample song title: Sun-Blinded Capsule Memory Haze, which is exactly what it is.

Both these albums are authentic, as you'll recognise after a few seconds in. They're not camp recreations, hommages or pastiches. They don't use psychedelic cliché as  branding devices. That they were made (mostly) by skirt-wearing caber-tossing haggis-eaters is a small miracle.

THIS JUST IN: Th' Isle O' Foam© is pleased to announce this piece has garnered the prestigious Scottish Tourist Board Award for Services to National Heritage!