The Pretty Things

British R&B trailblazers’ dark pychedelic classic album gets 50th-anniversary repackaging.

By 1966 The Pretty Things had been evolving at an amazing rate. They’d begun their career as the scariest garage-punk band in the world, long before the idea of garage-punk had been invented, and had released a stream of R&B singles and hard-nosed rockers which out-Stonesed the Stones.

But, like a teenager whose spots and hormones are finally calming down, The Pretty Things were reaching a kind of maturity. They were still the most frightening band in the world, but they had, perhaps through drug consumption, somehow found themselves in the cream-twee world of English psychedelia. But while the darkness at the heart of Syd Barrett and the cynicism of John Lennon were both well hidden in the mid-60s records of the Pink Floyd and The Beatles, there was very little love-and-peace in The Pretty Things’ version of psychedelia.

SF Sorrow, from the bleak birth of its protagonist to his bleak death, is a chilly record, all back streets and rainwashed alleys. Sorrow works in the misery factory, becomes a soldier, and travels on an airship which explodes, killing its passengers. Song six is even titled Death, just in case the listener is still hoping for talking rabbits or happy toadstools.

Compared to Sergeant Pepper or even Tommy, then, SF Sorrow is hard and cold, but unlike those albums it’s more rock than opera. Its best tracks, like the Beatle-y Good Morning, snarl and twist with tension and menace. There are moments of beauty, true (the West Coast-inflected The Journey, for example) but throughout SF Sorrow there’s a sense of foreboding and doom, best reflected in the wind-tunnel sound effects of Baron Saturday or the entirely sinister-sounding Old Man Going. Released at the end of 1968, the album reflects not the cheery rainbows of psychedelia, but the harsher wind of different drugs and the sound of nascent bands like Hawkwind and other artists who were hippies without the peace or the love.

Like much of The Pretty Things’ brilliant work, SF Sorrow wasn’t a chart hit, but the passage of time and word of mouth have given it the ‘classic album’ reputation it deserves. The band went on to embrace hard rock as well as new wave and ties, before returning to their 60s brilliance in recent years. This new 50th-anniversary edition contains a very large booklet and the usual bonus tracks, most notably the superb and creepy Defecting Grey.

■■■■■■■■■■

david Quantick