Entertainment For Lively Minds
Influences
I've been listening to a lot of 60s pysch pop, having been fortunate enough to have been given the Rubble series recently.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubble_series
Anyway, given the nature of the music, late 60s psychedelic pop and garage you would expect a lot of Beatles influences. But their influence is only really apparent in the chemical mood, and occasional Indian influence. For the most part these tracks are more on the heavy side, sounding like Townsend or later Small Faces. It's weird, because for a moment you see an alternative 60s to The Beatles dominated scene, and it's one where The Who were gods apparently!
It's not that dissimilar to Punk. The sound of The Sex Pistols in hindsight isn't that influential, whereas the garageband simplicity of the first Clash album would appear to be the sound of Punk.
Here's a little taste of what I'm on about. This is a band called The Living Daylights, with a tune that sounds like a collision of Hollies pop and Who heaviness, called Always With Him.
(And for those who relish rock family trees and making connections between different eras, The Living Daylights feature one Norman Watt-Roy, one of the best British bass players of all time, most notably in The Blockheads...)
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The Beatles are still in the mix
Just not the chemically enhanced era Beatles. Nuggets, Rubble, Acid Dreams Epitaph period bands were backtracking to an earlier gritty garage sound, something the Fabs cranked out from Hamburg to Shea..
The Damned's influence on the shape and sound of punk is massively overlooked. The Pistols and The Clash didn't release albums until well into 77. The Damned's album had been out since Febuary of that year, which included a Stooges cover as the closing track. Lend an ear to early US punk bands and you'll see they're more Damned tempo than either the Pistols or Clash.
It's also rumored that The Damned were invited on The Pistols Anarchy tour as they were a bigger drawer than other bands on the bill, but got dropped as soon as the Grundy interview exploded the Pistols into the media spotlight.
The Damned
A lot of the American hardcore punk bands took their influence more from The Damned than anyone I think (along with those other unfashionable punk scene pariahs the U.K. Subs).
Probably as they didn't have the political baggage of bands like The Clash and played in places like L.A. where quite a few in the audience had their punk "epiphany".
The Damned never get taken seriously in the Punk Rock retrospectives but they released the first punk single and album and were not part of the already established music scene that got labelled as Punk (such as The Stranglers, Ian Dury, Costello etc).
They were in their own way far more unpredictable and dangerous than many of the punk bands of the time too and their "Here's three chords - now form a band" logo was certainly inspirational to those that saw punk rock as a huge burst of creative energy.
Their more chaotic and, dare I say fun approach was pretty much at odds with the Pistols (or MacLaren's) vision or The Clash's year zero idealism so they never really fitted in with the "fashionable" London Punk clique.
A lot of The Damned's influences were from the Nuggets and Rubbles era psych bands and albums such as the excellent "Strawberries" brought all these to the fore.
They also did a similar trick to XTC in creating an alter-ego psych band called Naz Nomad & The Nightmares and released an album of garage rock covers called "Give Daddy The Knife Cindy" which is well worth tracking down.
From Naz to Nazz and another family tree link - Todd Rundgren was in the Psych band Nazz who will pop up on some of those Nuggets compilations.