Hapshash & The Coloured Coat - Featuring The Human Host and The Heavy Metal Kids

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5...according to our Brett on Thu 17 Sep, 2009.

Gotta love Sundazed ain'tcha? Bit pricey these days but their reissues of highly sought after classics provide an invaluable service to those of us who'd prefer not to pay a million pounds for things.. In this week we've got some tasty Chocolate Watch Band LPs, a 7" of lost Arthur Lee recordings and the one I'm most excited about - Hapshash & The Coloured Coat's Featuring The Human Host & The Heavy Metal Kids. It's a true cult effort from 1967 which chucks all that's wild and raw about psychedelia into one highly rhythmic broth which owes a clear debt to eastern and African music but often anticipates Klaus Dinger's motorik beat, using the drums as the grounding point around which all sorts of crazy freakout business can occur.. It quite often sounds like there's about twenty people in the studio strumming, tooting and banging away in communal style. HIGHEST PROPZ!

One of the most sought-after of all ‘60s cult LPs, 1967’s Hapshash and the Coloured Coat Featuring the Human Host and the Heavy Metal Kids is the sort of record that could only have emerged during the psychedelic era, and a vibrant manifestation of that period’s freewheeling, boundary-breaking spirit of musical adventure. Hapshash and the Colored Coat—the English duo of Michael English and Nigel Weymouth—initially achieved notoriety as a graphic design team whose distinctive visual sensibility placed them at the center of London’s original psychedelic explosion. The pair’s vivid visual imagination spawned numerous album covers, including Cream’s iconic Disraeli Gears, and countless posters promoting performances at London’s legendary UFO Club by such acts as Pink Floyd and the Incredible String Band. Those visual works brilliantly captured the London scene’s buoyant, mind-expanding vibe, and feature some of the psychedelic era’s most arresting imagery. Such was Hapshash and the Colored Coat’s prominence and influence that, in 1967, they were given the opportunity to branch out as a recording act. For the occasion, English and Weymouth teamed with legendary producer/manager/DJ/scene catalyst Guy Stevens, whose lengthy resume encompasses work with the Rolling Stones, Procol Harum, Mott the Hoople and The Clash. Out of print on vinyl for decades and never before reissued domestically, Hapshash and the Coloured Coat featuring the Human Host and the Heavy Metal Kids has been meticulously restored for this LP reissue, using Sundazed’s usual exacting standards. The album is pressed on high-quality audiophile vinyl, and features complete original cover art.

TRACKS: H-O-P-P Why? / A Mind Blown Is a Mind Shown / The New Messiah Coming 1985 / Aoum / Empires of the Sun

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