Alan Bown, The - Outward Bown + Bonustracks (Doppel CD)

One of the most popular club bands of the Swinging London era, the Alan Bown Set abruptly changed direction in the Summer of 1967, shedding their soul / R&B togs to reinvent themselves as flower power pop merchants the Alan Bown!
Under this new guise, they cut one of the lost jewels of the British psychedelic pop scene, the magnificent Outward Bown.
The LP appeared in late 1968, but unfortunately was only briefly available due to the collapse of the band’s record company. To add insult to injury, a long-overdue late 1990s CD release of Outward Bown suffered a similar fate, meaning that this most quintessential of English psychedelic pop albums has never been available for more than a few weeks at a time.
Finally, however, Outward Bown receives the release that it deserves with this definitive double CD package, which features both mono and stereo mixes of the album together with obscure B-sides and alternative single versions. Pieced together from recording sessions that spanned the summer of 1967 to spring 1968, Outward Bown deftly embraces all points of the psychedelic pop compass, taking in proto-hard rock (including the original electric blueprint of ‘All Along The Watchtower’ that inspired Hendrix to cut his own version), blue-eyed mod soul and, perhaps most notably of all, the voguish toytown pop sound, evident in such winsome vignettes as ‘Toyland’, ‘Violin Shop’ and ‘Story Book’.

Original released 1968
CD reissue 2012 Grapefruit Records
Double-CD
sealed !