Rainbow Ffolly - Spectromorphic Iridescence: Complete Ffolly

Pretty much every record released during the psychedelic era by EMI's various satellite labels was honed and buffed to opaque perfection by the studio technocrats who were working for the company. That wasn't the case, though, with Sallies Fforth, which appeared on the Parlophone label at the beginning of May 1968. Recorded by a quartet of ex-art students from High Wycombe in Buckinghamshire, Sallies Fforth was a collection of quirky demo recordings that, without the band's knowledge, found it's way to the self-styled "greatest recording organisation in the world". Fortunately the album transcended it's unfinished, unvarnished nature by dint of a winning sense of humour, some charming harmonies and, most of all, a bunch of excellent, highly diverse songs. More than half-a-century later, Sallies Fforth is now one of the most valuable artefacts of the British psychedelic era, original copies having sold on several occasions for in excess of a thousand pounds. Although there have been previous reissues of the album, Spectromorphic Iridescence represents the Ffolly motherlode. Mono and stereo versions of the original album (once described by Record Collector magazine as "a psychedelic miasma of English pop whimsy, Beatles-inspired diversity and cracking good tunes") are joined by a scarce non-LP B-side, a swathe of previously unheard late Sixties home and studio demos, local radio station jingles and recordings as well as a revamped, extended version of the band's hitherto vinyl-only 2016 reunion album Ffollow Up. Housed in a clamshell box with a twenty-page booklet that's crammed with rare photos and a new 5000 word essay on the band, this lavish 3-CD package is the final word on the activities of a quartet of English eccentrics who viewed psychedelia through a mocking, slightly surrealist art school prism rather than as unblinking zealots.