BB BLUNDER

Workers’ Playtime ESOTERIC Newly remastered re-release of stylistically challenged 1971 obscurity.

The highways and byways of popular music are strewn with the detritus and wreckage of countless groups of nearly-rans, the just-not-goodenoughs and the plain unlucky. Ergo BB Blunder. Like so many of their contemporaries from the psychedelic scene of the late 60s and early 70s, BB Blunder have become a footnote while contemporaries such as King Crimson, Emerson, Lake & Palmer and Genesis – just for starters – are rightly held up as the exemplars of a new form of music.

There’s a good reason for this. Whereas the pioneers of the nascent prog movement had a clear focus of what they wanted to do and how they were going to get there, the hapless BB Blunder produced one wildly erratic album and its less-than-committed lineup soon fell apart shortly after that album’s release.

It could have been so different. They formed from the ashes of Blossom Toes – one of the best British psych bands of the day – when guitarist Brian Godding and bassist Brian Belshaw elected to keep going. Soon joined again by drummer Kevin Westlake – who’d played on the first Blossom

Toes album, We Are Ever So Clean – the trio started out backing singer Julie Driscoll before renaming themselves BB Blunder. Despite contributions from Driscoll and her musical partner, organist Brian Auger, as well as Rolling Stones guitarist Mick Taylor, who was recording Sticky Fingers next door, Workers’ Playtime stylistically veers like a drunk heading home from a kebab shop at closing time. Taken on an individual basis there are plenty of tracks to enjoy here. The heavy bump-and-grind of Put Your Money Where Your Mouth Is and Sticky Living’s irresistible groove succeed in separating asses from the sofa. Alas, Research’s creamy psychedelia and the heavy blues that beats at the heart of Rise are too sharply at odds to produce anything resembling a coherent statement. There’s the occasional nugget on Workers’ Playtime, but it’s no treasure chest.