The Love Generation Compilation
I don't review compilations much (or greatest hits albums for that matter), not wanting to detail track after track that many people are very familiar with.
They tend to function as something that gives you an individual feeling of satisfaction as you play them based on their choice of songs and their running order. Like a well-curated playlist does these days. With that in mind - just how damn good a compilation is this? Sure, there are more tracks I could add digitally, but this collection stands tall in its own blissful right.
It is hard to get hold of 4CD set from 1998 that has to go down as one of my favourite compilations of all. I love it. It covers the years of 1967 to 1970 and you have to say that it is a pretty definitive collection of rock and pop from that classic period for music. It concentrates on material that fitted the whole "summer of love" and onwards hippy vibe. While not all of them obviously fit that bill many of them do.
These songs were part of my childhood from the ages of eight to eleven. So much of my eternal love of music is due to songs like these. Green Tambourine by The Lemon Pipers is one of the first records I can remember actually putting on a turntable and playing. My father worked at a radio station and brought it back one day. I loved it and felt very grown up playing it and digging those hippy vibes. It all just sounded fantastic - a world of mystery before my very ears.
I have also loved Peter Sarstedt's Where Do You Go My Lovely? since I first heard it and Love Affair's Everlasting Love is possibly (although this regularly changes) my favourite record of all time. Either way, it's high up there. I can't help but get a tingle down my spine either when I hear Oliver's strange nasal voice sing Good Morning Starshine or one of my late mother's favourites in Scott McKenzie's San Francisco (Be Sure To Wear Flowers In Your Hair).
Just how breezily sixties does Pentangle's Light Flight sound? Or Fifth Dimension's Up Up And Away?
I heard Marmalade's version of Ob-La-Di Ob-La-Da before I heard The Beatles original and Melanie's cover of Ruby Tuesday is one of the best Stones covers around.
There you are - that's given you a little taster.
The songs speak for themselves and need no further comment from me. Their very existence together like this makes for one killer of a late sixties playlist. So, without ado, let me list the little gems of peace, love and understanding, man, as we travel, half a million strong, to a love-in in San Francisco by way of Nazareth and the Boulevard St. Michel on the eve of destruction with Maggie, Ruby Tuesday, Jeremiah the bullfrog, an American woman, the white rabbit and gentle people with flowers in their hair for company......now, where did I put those incense sticks??
CD 1
