Looking Through A Glass Onion: The Beatles Psychedelic Songbook 1966-72 3CD

Though largely forgotten now, Liverpool quartet The Beatles were the toppermost of the poppermost in the Sixties, responsible for some of the biggest-selling singles of all time and a series of ground-breaking albums that dictated musical trends until their next LP emerged. With those albums containing numerous potential hit singles, it was inevitable that producers and groups would wait impatiently for the latest Beatles LP to land in order to rush into the studio and clone a track with the aim of scoring a cheap hit single. That process continued unabated for the rest of the band’s career, but the results became more interesting with the arrival of the psychedelic and progressive era, when rock started to take itself more seriously and a more self-respecting, artistic approach was called for. Suddenly the cheap imitations were joined by more adventurous interpretations of Beatles material, including some startling re-imaginings of songs that dated back to the salad days of the Lennon/McCartney writing partnership, with early efforts like ‘Every Little Thing’ and ‘You Can’t Do That’ given radical treatments to reflect the changing musical times. A 3-CD set, “Looking Through A Glass Onion” assembles these disparate strands into one cohesive package, with the studio day trippers, the cultural pranksters, the genre-benders, the folk club stalwarts and the hair-down-to-his-knees prog-rock brigade all grooving up slowly to the starting line. The result is the proverbial Magical Mystery Tour, a Fab Four parallel universe, a Looking-Glass world in which ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ can be an Elizabethan garden party madrigal or a churning slice of Fudged-up sludge, where a spaced-out Duffy Power takes the lyrics of ‘Fixing A Hole’ perhaps a little too literally, ‘Penny Lane’ becomes avant-garde easy listening, the likes of Nick Lowe, Alex Harvey and Ritchie Blackmore try out early identities, and the Walrus was Lol. Containing nearly four hours of music and a 40-page booklet, “Looking Through A Glass Onion” features 68 tracks from various UK acts, with tons of memorabilia and rare photos as well as the usual verbose smartarse annotation shamelessly passed off as informed musical commentary. A splendid time is guaranteed for all. Well, almost all.