Cranium Pie - Baby You're A Rich Man/ Madman Running Through The Fields

Cranium Pie hail from the English West Country where mushrooms grow and multi-coloured VW campers prevail and it’s always 1967, VW campers fitted with beanbags for seats and lava-lamps for headlights and fuelled purely by a mature cheddar cheese, and one day Cranium Pie took off on a road-trip in their Dantalian’s Chariot without any predetermined destination, so they headed steadily north eventually hitting the M6, singing songs as they went, passing Liverpool, forming ideas and generally larking about and eating mushroom omelette topped with the aforementioned cheese, until after a day of travelling they reached Blackpool where they stumbled in to the Tower through an unlocked door and discovered an old Hammond or Wurlitzer organ, so they started to play, old songs mostly, nothing after 1967, because that’s what they liked, and that was where “Baby, You’re A Rich Man” was born as they looked down on the twinkling Blackpool lights, then they drove south through the night, in reverse to keep the mileage right, backwards through the madness that is Spaghetti Junction pursued by the police, turn left, no right, and stopping to alight and run through a field near Birmingham where they met an alien man who said “eee, hello” and a Romanian weightlifter who spoke in tongues, and that was the missing link, so they took it with them, pushing on, pushing back, back to the English West Country, where they arrived just moments after setting off, and with Dantalian’s Chariot looking fresh and green with her mileage now less than it had previously been.

What the papers say…

“The remit of these limited seven inch releases being that the invited artist covers a nugget hatched originally in the 60’s, sends it sharpish by unicorn to the Fruits de Mer magic cottage, who then weave said tunes onto circles of coloured wax - this one is set upon ’money-grass-weed-green vinyl. Cranium Pie choose as their favoured obsession the Beatles and the criminally overlooked Dantalian’s Chariot. Their instrumental take of ’Baby, You’re A Rich Man’ is dutifully dippy and kooky, draped as it is in all manner of Hammond key lilts, sounds well smoked and seductively soulful a bit like a fried and flirty Procol Harum blissing out with Booker T and the MG’s and the Graham Bond Quartet after a hard days shopping amid the fashionable boutique stalls of the period’s hip and trendy Carnaby Street. That said it’s the flip that alone proves its weight in gold and worthy of the entrance fee, a sterling cover of Dantalian’s Chariots legendary ’Madman Running Through The Fields’ - absolutely freakishly fried, replete with hallucinogenic mirages so vivid you literally get high just being in earshot of it, as it freebases on some weird and out of it proggy moments while nailed down with lashings upon lashings of mind expanding backward loops and has a tendency to go wonderfully wandering off at tangents while sounding to these ears not unlike a seriously caned Stanshall fronted Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band.

Priceless stuff, goes without saying ruddy essential.” – Losing Today

 "playfully ponderous...worryingly more-ish" – Unpeeled.

So, what do you think? Best reviewer each month gets £10 off their next order!