Hapshash And The Coloured Coat
Featuring The Human Host And The Heavy Metal Kids

Both young and old will certainly remember the sunglasses with lenses decorated with the English flag that were sold on Carnaby Street during the psychedelic era. Or perhaps the dazzling cover of "Disraeli Gears" by Cream, or even the marvelous colorful posters (regularly torn from the walls and taken home by connoisseurs) promoting records and concerts by Soft Machine, Tomorrow, Hendrix.

 Well, all this was the work of a duo of ingenious designers, Michael English and Nigel Weymouth united under the tongue-twisting name Hapshash and the Coloured Coat. In a magical period when music was something free and not suffocated by various speculations, they were convinced by Guy Stevens, a disc jockey at the legendary club "The Scene", to turn their pictorial visions into music. Stevens, who would have an excellent career as a producer starting with Procol Harum, was the Human Host, while the Heavy Metal Kids, the group that accompanied the delirious forays of the two Hapshash, were actually the Art, already authors of the extraordinary "Supernatural Fairy Tales" (try to guess who designed the cover and who did the musical production...) which a few years later, with the arrival of American keyboardist Gary Wright, would transform into the excellent Spooky Tooth.

 If you don't like hippies, change the review now while you still have time, because this 1967 album is steeped in freak oddities from the first to the last note. One could ironically say that the splendid kaleidoscopic-style Hapshash cover or the red vinyl on which the music was printed is worth more than the music itself, but if you are among those who love freewheeling digressions in the style of the German Can of "Tago Mago" then you'd better give a listen to a track like "H-O-P-P-Why?", a tangled jam like a hallucinogenic ivy on a tree supported by funky piano and the singer doing nothing but spelling out the few letters.

The hypnotic free-form stride of "The New Messiah coming 1985" is a folk reinterpretation of Nostradamus' prophecies conducted around a tribal bonfire complete with acoustic guitars and tambourines chanting "we are...we are...I am...I am " until we collapse to the ground exhausted by the lysergic trip. A track like "Aoumn" not only reminds us of "Augmn" by Czukay & Co. but also means abandoning every earthly concern, sublimating into the meditative ommmm induced by massive doses of LSD that open the doors of perception towards a kind of Gregorian chant. However, it is made of breaths, gargles, and gasps of female voices that, more than the composure due to the situation, lead straight to the involuntary rictus.

 The entire second side of the red vinyl is taken by "Empires of the Sun" where under the beneficial rays of the sun on the cover, our hippies let themselves go to the usual acoustic street jam. Where you are pleased to leave some coins in the hat of these troubadours who mix, on the pounding rhythm section of bass-drum - acoustic guitar, the alternation of voices and female shouts of Sabbath, bells, cowbells, trills, bongos, tambourines, penny whistles to reach the paroxysmal finale with the mock-dramatic reciting voice that derides the arrival of Ragnarok, the epic battle between the forces of good and evil.

Music that belongs entirely to the period it was released. Today it seems naive and dated, but in its festive astral madness, I prefer it a thousand times over music pre-packaged to please the audience or to what today is defined as depressive or that dies in June or that beatifies the departure and the raunchy soul of the dearly departed.

 When music was free, and the world did not crawl like a worm on rotten carcasses.

Epilogue

After this album and with the end of the hippie movement, Michael English was already thinking of dedicating himself to something else, Weymouth pulled him back in for the second album of Hapshash and the Coloured Coat, which is a half-miracle given the poor sales of the first. "Western Flier" of 1969 is less radical than its predecessor, also because of the participation of excellent and seasoned musicians like Tony McPhee guitarist of the Groundhogs and Mike Finn (T. Rex) on percussion. The umpteenth commercial flop would discourage the two from all musical ambitions, Nigel Weymouth dives completely into figurative art (he designed the cover of "Bryter Later" by Nick Drake) while only some generic information is available about Michael English.