"This album could be racked under 'sunshine pop' or 'pop psych'. My idea of what makes good psychedelic music isn't a fixed thing – it's about the feeling you get from a record. In direct relation to my work, I think psychedelia is about creating another reality. I work from pure imagination and records that create their own spaces are hugely appealing to me. The Aphrodite's Child album does that and this Sagittarius record does it too. They are records that really suck you into their own worlds. Present Tense takes you to paradise, it makes you want to jump into the speakers and fully experience the place that they've imagined for the listener. Growing up on the Beach Boys, I was familiar with the kind of sound on the record. It's very gentle, very orchestral, soft and lush; it offers a place to escape to from the real world. You can check in whenever you want to put the record on. In a way, the music we make as Seahawks tries to do the same thing – it's trying to conjure up a glorious utopia in a world that's clearly gone to shit!"

"Half a century ago in 1967 there were two Kaleidoscopes, one in the US and one in the UK. Both were wonderful, but the UK band sang endearing lines such as "My god! The spiders are everywhere!" so I'll just write about them for now. Probably the tinniest band of the 60s, they never achieved mass popularity but psychedelic fan lists rate them higher than the era's supposed classics, due to their ecstatic melodies and gleefully oblique lyrics. "Strawberry monkeys are smiling for Julie, with pearl button eyes that reflect velvet clouds. Can you hear them smiling?" They changed their name to the Fairfield Parlour and stayed just as great. Now that the competition is quickly disappearing, they should get back together and be the most popular pop-psych band in the world, instead of merely the best. If they're missing some members, they can just take them from Kaleidoscope USA. "

"Again, Jesse turned me onto that record, years ago. We revisited that when we were in the desert at Rancho De La Luna, we were playing lots of good stuff on YouTube through the mixing board. The house was so cool. David Catching, who lives there, he was out on tour - great guy, but we had the whole house to ourselves. Just that record - throw it on in the daytime and then the sun starts coming and you're in this chill house and you're just cranking this record and then eventually when the sun starts going down, that's just super psychedelic. It was a good companion piece. That record has Leon Thomas singing ""the creator has a master plan"" over and over again. Never thought about this at the time, but repeating lines in a spiritual way - there's a title track to b'lieve i'm goin down…, which isn't on the album, which is just the same line over and over again - something about that spiritual vibe. Eventually Leon Thomas just does this spiritual yodelling! The record's so melodic. Pharoah Sanders does this cool thing - it's like pop, but it's like spiritual pop, mixed with jazz, where it's a relatively simple line, just a couple of chords, usually. It just puts you in this zone, it's so beautiful. It's simple, but not at all; nobody could touch it. Pharoah Sanders comes in eventually and plays the sweetest emotional sax and eventually it turns into insanity, noise, skronking and screeching. Honestly, he's known for that, but it's my least favourite part of him. I understand why he does it, because it reaches this climax and then all of a sudden, you come out and go back to this thing and it just goes all the way to the limit; it's just like life, it goes from zero to 60 and then you come back out of it. That's the beauty of him."

"Most people think that the concert at Altamont was the antithesis of Woodstock. But one of my students at UCSB recently commented that you could tell a lot about what went wrong at Altamont by watching what went right at Monterey. I couldn’t agree more . . . It’s fascinating to watch both of these films and compare what happened just a few years and less than a hundred miles apart. First off, Monterey Pop, which may be my favorite of all Criterion DVD packages. The booklet is printed on nature-rough hippy-grade paper stock that you would have first encountered on the streets of Haight-Ashbury, in the form of a free press or psychedelic poster on a telephone pole, and later on your thrift-store coffee table with a pile of pot about to be rolled next to it! Yes, it is this evocative! The DVD box set includes amazing outtake performances with Laura Nyro, Quicksilver Messenger Service, TINY TIM (!), and Buffalo Springfield . . . and another DVD, Jimi Plays Monterey and Shake! Otis at Monterey, contains the complete performances by Jimi Hendrix and Otis Redding (with commentary by the ever-enlightening Peter Guralnick, who knows the history of Memphis musicians better than anyone alive). The accompanying doc of a conversation between record producer Lou Adler and filmmaker D. A. Pennebaker is such a coup—not only do you hear how the concert came together and how it was organized during the entire event, but you also get to hear Lou Adler’s story. A lot of people don’t know (although smarty-pants me did) that Adler started his music career with Herb Alpert, as songwriting and producing partners . . . and he has awesome stories of Paul McCartney hanging out at Cass Elliot’s house in Laurel Canyon . . . There’s endless music-nerd gold like that! The color in the film is all that psychedelia had to offer—vibrant, otherworldly, and hyperreal. There’s an innocence throughout Monterey Pop that exceeds the “positive vibes” of Woodstock a few years later and that is of course completely nonexistent in Gimme Shelter. You can also see in Monterey Pop the cops in the crowd (who were replaced by Hells Angels at Altamont) and SEATING! My student pointed out there were folding chairs on the lawns at Monterey—very civilized. Now that wasn’t throughout the concert grounds, but it was more in the tradition of the Newport Folk Festival than the mayhem to follow in Altamont. Also like Newport, the performers were in the audience—they were not in some rarefied backstage area, cut off from the fans or their fellow performers—and you get to see the moment when Mama Cass Elliot in the audience has her mind blown by the powerful performance of young Janis Joplin. There’s a fabulous interview with Papa John Phillips, who cofounded the event with Adler, and a gorgeous photo exhibit by photographer Elaine Mayes. Gimme Shelter director Albert Maysles was one of seven cameramen on Monterey Pop. And I need to point out that you do see a few Hells Angels on the lawn toward the end of Monterey Pop. So the Angels already had a presence at large outdoor rock events that far back. I’ve talked to a lot of people who were at Altamont as performers, friends of bands, and audience members, and the consensus is that nothing in this film was manipulated in the least: the vibe was bad from the very start, and the filmmakers didn’t create that in the editing room. Interestingly, the film is shot much darker than the saturated colors in Monterey Pop—but then again colors were becoming less vibrant in pop culture and fashion at that time too. But interestingly—here you have some of the same players—you have Jefferson Airplane, who are almost humble on the Monterey Pop stage (despite the fact that Grace Slick shows off her powerful rock pipes at Monterey—she was the first true female rock singer and very underrated in my opinion), having to stop their set at Altamont when singer Marty Balin is dragged off the stage and beat up by the Hells Angels. The Grateful Dead play a soothing jam at Monterey and don’t even make it to the stage at Altamont. Chris Hillman with the Byrds plays an evening set to the Monterey audience, and in Gimme Shelter his band, the Flying Burrito Brothers, only get two songs done before the mayhem drives them off the stage at the Speedway. Watching Charlie Watts listening to the interviews with the promoter and with Hells Angel Sonny Barger makes Watts your favorite member of the band if he wasn’t already . . . His quiet devastation over the murder at his band’s concert is profound to witness (and you do feel as though you are let in on a very private event)."

"This is more of a current favourite and I first heard it when it came out. I'd left Supergrass and started writing for the first solo album and I got quite deep into that when I heard Shields, but really it was like the bridge between Here Come The Bombs and Matador. I just love the fact that I can hear the room on this record; I can hear the rawness of it, I can hear their love of sounds which is something that I'm a bit of a nerd about and those are some of the things just grabbed me straight away. It's so weird; sometimes a bass guitar sound can be enough to make me love or hate a band. It's quite shallow when you think about it, because it should be about the lyrics, and the package, and the melody, and everything about it but no, it's like: 'If that bass is shit then I don't like it!' I can get quite anal about those sorts of things, so Grizzly Bear are another one that I aesthetically gravitate to towards immediately, and then appreciate later the songwriting and the melodies, and Edward Droste's voice is similar to that of Midlake's Tim Smith. There's a similar quality in both of their voices that I really appreciate. And I like their playing with synths as well; they're not too overt or progressive rock-like. Yeah, this was definitely an inspiring album for me. I guess, if I'm being really honest, it made me think that I wanted to write a record like that. It's not screaming out hit singles all over it and I'm sure this wasn't an easy album for their record label to present to radio stations, but I really like that. When you've been in a band for 20 years [and] with each album, you get this extremely intense pressure to provide a three-minute pop single and I just wanted out. But writing those pop singles did come naturally and I don't think we'd have done as well as we'd done if I hadn't and I think I still do. Even on Matador I still can't help containing things in three or three-and-a-half minutes. It's like what Supergrass did on 'Strange Ones' or even 'Caught By The Fuzz'. There's a lot of information on those songs and it flies by. I guess that's just the natural way that I write. But then again, having listened to a lot of music on soundtracks over the years, the music on this album made me realise that I don't have to contain it all. It's like 'Detroit' on Matador; I really like the groove on that, so I just kept it going. It satisfies my curiosity like Neu!'s 'Hallogallo' does. I'm happy to sit there for that ten minutes. I think Supergrass came from quite a psychedelic background and that's stayed with me and what I'm into. This is where bands like Grizzly Bear come in, and I think that psychedelic thread runs through a lot of these records."

"You asked for albums, but albums are already a bit away from pop because of they're a more serious proposition, so all of these are albums that I own on vinyl, and because I'm of a certain age that's what I think of as a record. We didn't have a big record collection in our house when I was growing up, but my mum had three Beatles albums, Sgt Pepper, Revolver and Abbey Road. Even though I was a kid I could tell that Sgt Pepper and Revolver sounded like music that had happened a while ago, but Abbey RoadM sounded more modern. It still does sound quite modern, because on second side where all the songs run into each other, that's quite a thing, not many people had done that since and not many have since. There's an art to an album. If you've got an album that's got a shit song on it, especially if it's in the middle of a side, you're not going to play it as much because you know you're going to have to get up and skip that track. That's what I've tried to do with these, it's records that I don't mind putting on then you can relax or talk to people or whatever, but you know you're not going to get some kind of fucking horrible shitty stinker of a song on it. Abbey Road - I was young at the time, 10, 11, 12, whatever, and the track that ends side one, 'I Want You (She's So Heavy)' that was mind-blowing to me, the way it went on and on and on at the end, with this big synthy wooshy noise. I've since found out its Ringo playing this machine that sounds like wind that you get in classical orchestras. It was a psychedelic experience in a living room in a normal part of Sheffield in the early 70s, where, you know, psychedelic experiences weren't that common. I'll always remember it, that song in particularly took me somewhere. And that's the end of that side - if you had Abbey Road on CD it wouldn't be right, it only really works as a statement if you listen to it for ages and then it suddenly stops and then you're left in silence for a while until you can be bothered to get up and start again. I started with this because it plays with what an album can be. It's great.
"

"When I got into psychedelic music in my late teens and early twenties this was one of those songs that left a big impression on me. It’s not a song that would have been on a Nuggets collection or anything, it was quite a big song. It wasn’t a rare find or an unusual one-hit wonder, but the melody in it still blows me away. “It’s very, very British-sounding. There’s something very whimsical about it and there’s a little darkness in there but it’s incredibly uplifting - just the chords, the way it’s played and everything about it. It’s definitely been an inspiration when it comes to writing chord changes for me. “The Zombies have an incredible collection of songs so it’s very hard to choose just one, but apart from ‘Time of the Season’ this is a track where I would’ve been “Wait, how do I know this song?” There’s no pretentiousness to ‘Care of Cell 44’. or any of their songs in fact. There’s something very honest about it. Even though they’re very musically-minded and clever, it’s not distracting to listen to. It leaves you intrigued, more than bewildered. “Some bands get too clever with their chord changes, to the point where they’re not memorable, all of the sections of this song work so well together, but it’s not straight-up. It’s a pop song but there’s definitely some underlying eeriness to it. I don’t know whether it’s just the chords or the way it’s recorded. Maybe it’s something in the reverbs as well - the chambers, they just sound so good"