Kaleidoscope (UK): Tangerine Dream [SURVIVAL RESEARCH]

Why you'll love it

This stereo LP comes in a single jacket with a polylined inner sleeve. Tangerine Dream is a classic of British psychedelia, often mentioned in the same breath as Pink Floyd's The Piper at the Gates of Dawn.

This edition

• Stereo mix
• Polylined inner sleeve

About the album

No relation to the German electronic band, Tangerine Dream is the debut album by four Londoners called Kaleidoscope. Singer Peter Daltrey and guitarist Eddy Pumer wrote the songs in 1966, fired up after hearing The Beatles' Revolver, and Fontana signed them in January 1967. One label man was so taken with "Flight from Ashiya" that he called them the new Beatles.

They cut most of the album at Fontana's Stanhope Place studio that summer, with Steve Clark on bass and flute and Dan Bridgman on drums. Chiming 12-string guitars and tight harmonies carry "Dive into Yesterday" and "Please Excuse My Face," "Mr. Small, the Watch Repairer Man" is a portrait of Pumer's watchmaker father, and "(Further Reflections) In the Room of Percussion" is named for a bedroom the band swore was haunted. "The Sky Children," written on a sunny day at the beach in Swanage, closes the album as an eight-minute fairy tale.

Fontana put it out on November 24, 1967, and it has been passed hand to hand by psych collectors ever since. A record that features a watch repairer, a haunted bedroom and a seaside fairy tale is exactly the sort of thing the English were for in 1967.

Also at Kops: more Kaleidoscope on vinyl · browse Rock

Tracklist

Listen

On Survival Research (cat# SVVRCH086), a reissue of the 1967 album.