The Grumbleweeds Take A Trip

Weird Musical History #12

I loved this Leeds comedy cabaret band as a kid, so when I heard they’d recorded a ‘psychedelic’ album in the early 1970s I had to track it down. And it’s really rather good.

If you’re of a certain vintage, you’ll most likely remember the Grumbleweeds from their TV appearances and radio shows in the 70s and 80s. They mixed musical parodies, gags, comedy characters and catchphrases such as ‘You’re gettin’ right up my nose, you are, pal!’

But sometime at the dawn of the 70s, Maurice, Graham, Robin, Albert and Carl went into the studio to record a ‘straight’ album that at times sounds like it came straight from 1968.

The standout track is undoubtedly the titular ‘Teknikolor Dreem’, a blistering slab of fuzzy, heavy psych with bonkers lysergic lyrics about purple darts blowing your mind. Maurice’s blood-curdling scream at the end of the song, so the sleeve notes tell us, was so intense that he collapsed and lost consciousness for several minutes, his band mates assuming he was just playing a prank. It’s easy to find this track on youtube, and worth getting the record for this highlight alone.

The rest of the songs on the LP are pretty varied, though several have surprisingly philosophical, even existential lyrics such as ‘Dying to Live’, another stand out. Some songs have a searching, spiritual theme that reminds me at times of Sunflower era Beach Boys or Elvis in Memphis. At other times the album veers into baroque pop psych territory along the lines of the Zombies Odessey and Oracle. Of course, the Grumbles never hit the highs of those classic albums, but who did?

Most of the songs are written by the band, with a few covers thrown in such as credible versions of Leon Russell’s ‘Stranger in a Strange Land’ and George Harrison’s ‘My Sweet Lord’. I never thought I’d hear the Grumbleweeds singing ‘Hare Krishnaaa, Krishna Krishnaaa…’ but the album has plenty of surprises. The least welcome surprise, though, has to be ‘So Sweet Netta’, (‘when she’s good, she’s very good, but when she’s bad she’s better’) in which the saucy innuendos fall rather flat as the last line of the song reveals that Naughty Netta is a three-year-old girl.

The album was arranged and conducted by ‘King of Library Music’ Alan Hawkshaw, who wrote the theme for Grange Hill and many other movies and shows.

The copy here is a white label test pressing with sides 1 and 2 hand written (on the wrong sides).

The great front cover with its pink clouded sky over polka dot hills shows the Grumbleweeds in silhouette heading off into the psychedelic distance… I have a soft spot for this album, as I have for that strange sub-genre of unlikely psychedelia – trippy tracks by artists you’d least expect to go psychedelic.

Stay tuned for more tales of unlikely psychedelia….