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Psychedelic rock music groups by nationality. Hidden category: Commons category link is on Wikidata.
Fortunately, most of the groups associated with the scene managed to leave their mark with at least a single or two. This list aims to document the 50 best non-album British psychedelic songs.
Find British Psychedelia Albums, Artists and Songs, and Hand-Picked Top British Psychedelia Music on AllMusic.
- A distrust of technology. Tomorrow's World: Home Computer Terminal 20 September 1967 - BBC. 3rd party content may contain ads - see our FAQs for more info.
- A rejection of America. The staple of British beat music before 1965 was American blues. The psychedelic bands looked to British culture for inspiration, including The Beatles.
- Classical music. In the film, Jim McCarty from The Yardbirds says: "We used to listen to classical music - Stravinsky, all sorts of stuff - and then when we got in the studio we were experimenting with it."
- Jazz. Jazz was also a huge influence, especially on groups like Cream (above) who had a jazz drummer in Ginger Baker and smashed the conventions of the three-minute pop song by going on extended, spontaneous jams, like bebop artists had before them.
- White Rabbit. Psychedelia’s spiritual home is San Francisco, where Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters conducted many of their famous mid-60s Acid Tests - mind-expanding bacchanals where the Kool-Aid was laced with LSD.
- Pink Floyd. Over in London, a small psychedelic scene was coalescing around the UFO Club, whose house bands were Soft Machine and Pink Floyd. Led by the mercurial Syd Barrett, the Floyd played spaced-out deconstructions of rhythm 'n' blues, with whimsical lyrics about dandelions and gingerbread men.
- Yellow Submarine. Thanks to the vivid cartoon style of artist Heinz Edelmann and a team of cutting-edge animators, The Beatles’ 1968 film Yellow Submarine provided a joyous visual representation of psychedelia.
- Purple Haze. Sixties psychedelia wasn’t all teacups and sunflowers. There was a harder edge to the genre, exemplified by the likes of The Jimi Hendrix Experience, Cream and Blue Cheer.
In general, British psychedelia was either more whimsical or artily experimental than its American counterpart, plus it tended to work within the pop song structure. This is not a hard-and-fast rule, however.
No matter how many concise, pop singles they released, Pink Floyd still stretched out dramatically on stage, taking songs into uncharted territory with each performance. However, these general rules do more or less apply, particularly to the studio recordings of British psychedelic acts.
