Caleb* – Baby Your Phrasing Is Bad

I have the reissue of this single but cannot sell it on Discogs

I'll bet the 70 people who 'have' this on here all have the bootleg reissue. Well, except for one of them obviously...

Yes, this is one of those touchstone UK 'freakbeat' records that basically set off a massively regenerated interest in the '65 - '69 era of UK psychedelic pop when it was compiled on volume 4 of Bam Caruso's famed Rubble series (the B side was compiled on Vol 1 and is pretty cool too).
This record sounds like nothing else before or since. It's a completely over-the-top sparkling confection of phased vocals and deliriously produced melodic pop.

The A side is up there with The Syndicats' Crawdaddy Simone, The Craig's I Must Be Mad, The Poets' That's The Way Its Gotta Be, The Factory's Path Through The Forest and The Smoke's My Friend Jack (just to reel of a few of the best at random).

It doesn't really adhere to any accepted notion of commercial pop at the time... it was an era of experimentation (you never knew what those crazy kids were gonna buy next).... so a lot of great stuff got put out very quickly over a short period. Sometimes this stuff hit big - and sometimes it disappeared without trace for a couple of decades before a new generation picked up on it.

It probably didn't help that this was released in the very same week in 1967 that Sgt Pepper came out - thereby killing its slim chance of getting onto any radio playlists.

One of the first uses of the wonderful 'phasing' effect on a record, pre-dating those famous sky-defying drum runs on "Itchycoo Park" by a couple of months. This 45 is totally drenched in it too, mirroring the stoned haziness and blissed-out confusion of the lyrics.

More famous for his collaborations with a certain Elton John, who is rumoured to play on this record, Caleb Quaye was apparently obsessed with Hendrix at the time and set out to produce his own psychedelic opus with this. It sold virtually nothing and received only one documented play on the airwaves - on Radio Scotland 242 where the DJ apparently played the B side accidentally. Reviews were also pretty lukewarm, with the anti-psychedelic Penny Valentine commenting in Disc and Music Echo that the vocalist should check his own singing before criticising anyone else.

The single languished in obscurity until it was picked up again in the early 80s by the Bam Caruso label on their 49 Minute Technicolour Dream compilation, with the B side appearing on The Psychedelic Snarl.