haptalaon | Climb Aboard My Roundabout! (Reply)

First-ever legitimate anthology of British toytown pop, a much-loved sub-genre among collectors. Four-hour compilation with 87 tracks including hits, misses, rarities and previously unreleased

ahahahahaha no no no no no thank you Grapefruit Records, I will lick your toes, I will give you my blood and flesh and walk, I will sacrifice to pick up anything you put out but i will NOT climb aboard your roundabout.

(toytown pop is this moment that's a bit of late psychedelia, a bit of early prog, and a bit of slipstream acid folk, and it's godawful; I think I hate it so much not only because it is Extremely annoying, and because it's psychedelic and sunny in a way that this miserable country could never be - you would have to be so fucking high for IT’S THE BEST SEASIDE IN THE WORLD – Frabjoy and Runcible Spoon and (HE’S OUR DEAR OLD) WEATHERMAN – Mark Wirtz to gloop into your lavender daydreams and feel like here and now (unlike, say, the Smiths which even if you don't like, you hear and think 'ah yeah, that's about right, punctured bicycle on a hillside desolate'

(below the cut: flippancy about CSA and state violence)

but also because it rubs alongside genres I like a lot, and so you get albums like Bright Phoebus which intertwines haunting, autumnal strangeness like 'Fine Horseman' and 'The Scarecrow' with rooty-toot nonsense like 'Rubber Band' and 'The Magical Man', both of which sound just like you think they do; and given everything we know now about children's light entertainment stars of the 1970s, they put the jolly in jolly sinister, no i do NOT want to come to the show and see the magical man, no thank you, no i do not want to chase the Ice Cream Man i might get kidnapped by the Childcatcher. Do you want to visit Uncle Henry's Magic Garden, little girl...?

A bit of the Kinks is as close as I'm getting to this, and that's pushing it. But, say, Genesis has a touch of it in Willow Farm and For Absent Friends, but they wreathe it in a wistfulness so I don't feel like I'm being assaulted by fucking Noddy.

These microgenres gain momentum because eventually, the gems run out at the bottom of the box. If you are a record collecting type, what you collect has to get more and more niche, and then you need to invent reasons what you can lay your hands on is noteworthy. Toytown Pop is songs that wanted to be Penny Lane: that's not a genre. Does anybody actually like these songs? I have a collector's soul; I understand the appeal of curating and nurturing your taste for something kind of awful as a way to horrify your mates and make your own taste feel more elevated. My taste is poptimist or avant garde with nothing in between, and there's a half dozen things I 'like' which in my heart, would not make the cut above something I could dance to; which I like to be known as a person who likes it more than it gets actual play on my hi-fi; like being the sort of person who cutesily refers to his laptop speakers as a 'hi fi'. Repeat after me, vinyl boys: sometimes, things are rare for a reason.

& of all the truly classic bands, I feel like the Beatles have not aged well; their songs are nice, but they lack that shock of the groundbreaking that at some point I'm told they had. So second-tier Beatles sweet shop fever-dream knockoffs: I feel legitimately dubious that anyone really loves Toytown Pop, apart from record dudes who have the market cornered on singles, and they have it cornered because this music is really very awful. Do you remember when it came out the American military were using the theme from Sesame Street as a torture tool? Toytown Pop.

But i suppose it's nice to think that a moment once could have existed where the terpinoid sun shone through a music-box here, however unimaginably.)