Climb Aboard My Roundabout: British Toytown Sound - Climb Aboard My Roundabout! The British Toytown Sound 1967-1974 / Various

Three CD set. First-ever legitimate anthology of British toytown pop, a much-loved sub-genre among collectors. Four-hour compilation with 87 tracks including hits, misses, rarities, and previously unreleased material. Issued at the start of 1967, Beatles' single 'Penny Lane' coupled a widescreen production (bolstered by a phalanx of session musicians on brass and woodwind) with a mildly hallucinogenic lyric populated by mundane characters going about their unremarkable suburban lives. It proved to be an enormously influential record. For the next year or two, British pop was awash with records that married quasi-classical arrangements with newly-minted fairy tales and character vignettes based around the grey everyday lives of ordinary small-town folk. Many years later, this burst of English eccentricity came to be known in collector circles as toytown pop - a pseudo-genre that took in everything from Jeff Lynne's early band The Idle Race and Deram-era David Bowie to backroom auteurs like Mark Wirtz, who provided similarly over-the-top arrangements for CBS hopefuls Cardboard Orchestra.