Pretty Things

Members of Led Zeppelin were huge fans of the Pretty Things before there even was a Led Zeppelin. A member of the Pretty Things made up the original line up of the Rolling Stones before Brian Jones. And after listening to the Pretty Things’ rock operetta "SF Sorrow,” Pete Townsend wrote Tommy, professing it was directly influenced by said Pretty Things’ album. So why doesn’t everyone and their parents know the Pretty Things? In the early 1960s a rock’n’roll band with hair down their backs, the demeanour and work clothes of the thugs from Straw Dogs ten years before Straw Dogs, who played punked up rock riffs even more years before punk rock were not the type of "boys” that middle class Britain wanted adorning their daughters’ walls and spinning round their record players. Not only were the Pretties able to belt out the roughest R&B of their time and since, but the most beautiful psychedelic pop and heavy rock with next to effortless transition. The Pretties had particularly amazing singles easing their Fontana to Columbia label years, which were rightly included in this compilation; psychedelic masterpieces like "Defecting Grey” and "Talkin’ About the Good Times” but the inclusion of only one track from the excellent Parachute album is a serious mistake. Although the title track from 1974’s Silk Torpedo album is a necessary conclusion to this integral period in the Pretty Things history it is not the most winning piece of this fine reissue. Everyone who professes to love all that’s cool about that profound period of early ’60s to early ’70s rock should get these masterpieces — "get the picture”?