Nice Enough To Eat
(how a £1 compilation changed everything)
When I was at secondary school, the punk wars were in full swing. Punk had declared that all music before 1977 was invalid, and listening to anything that pre-dated it was a crime punishable by playground exile.
That might sound extreme now, but it was gospel at the time. Anything vaguely hippy-ish was off-limits. Long hair and flares were cultural contraband. For a gangly ginger kid like me, that wasn’t a risk worth taking.
There were, of course, exceptions. The Jam covered The Kinks. The Sex Pistols did the Small Faces. Patti Smith gave The Who a nod. The raw, noisy mod sound of the early '60s passed the punk purity test. But full-blown psychedelia? Absolutely not.
And yet, some bands were beginning to flirt with it again. Echo & The Bunnymen and The Teardrop Explodes led the charge, while early compilation series like Chocolate Soup for Diabetics dug out rare British psych tracks, much like Nuggets had done for US garage rock. The Psychedelic Snarl, released on Bam Caruso in 1984, followed in its footsteps with better sound quality and a bit more respect for the artists involved.
At school, we had Tigger Lyons — the physics teacher, serial smoker, and all-round disreputable character — who once lent me Ogdens’ Nut Gone Flake, the 1968 masterpiece by the Small Faces. Psychedelic, yes — complete with round sleeve and surreal Stanley Unwin narration — but still sharp-edged, still mod.
But much of the music from the late '60s remained a mystery. Too obscure for the radio. Not obscure enough for the compilations. And this was pre-YouTube, pre-Wikipedia — you couldn’t just fall down an algorithmic rabbit hole.
Then came Nice Enough To Eat — a bargain-bin compilation from Island Records, released in 1969. You could pick it up for a quid at a jumble sale, and suddenly you had access to a dozen or more acts from the late '60s.
Some names were familiar — King Crimson, Traffic, Fairport Convention. Others, like Quintessence, weren’t even famous in their own squats.
Heavy Jelly — who feature on the comp with "I Keep Singing The Same Old Song — had only released one single under that name. They were actually Newcastle’s Skip Bifferty in disguise, and they’d go on to form one of the weirdest family trees in British rock: members later turned up in Lindisfarne, in Ian Dury and the Blockheads,
Note, the credits for Marriot and Lane. Some of them even played on the Get Carter soundtrack. The frantic piano at the start of Same Old Song, the cool piano figure at the start of Get Carter and the riff on Hit Me With Your Rhythm Stick are all the same person:
Of the dozen tracks, some were forgettable, but others landed instantly. Traffic’s “Forty Thousand Headmen” was a favourite:
And I’ll admit it — it includes the only Jethro Tull track I can actually tolerate:
We taped it. We passed it around. We discovered a kind of music that wasn’t quite mid-'60s mod and wasn’t full-blown prog either. It sat in that strange hinterland — melodic, trippy, but not yet sprawling.
There were other Island samplers too. You Can All Join In came out the same year with an equally scattergun selection — early art-rock, folk-rock, and this stone mod groover from Wynder K. Frog:
Bumpers (1970) was weaker overall, although Spooky Tooth’s slow stoned version of “I Am the Walrus” is still worth a spin:
And then there was El Pea (1971), more of the same — with The Amazing Blondel’s “Spring Season” a personal highlight:
But there was one track on Nice Enough To Eat that stopped you in your tracks.
Nick Drake.
At the time, he was a complete unknown. He’d sold almost nothing in his lifetime, and by the early '80s, every one of his records was out of print. It wasn’t until 1985’s Heaven in a Wild Flower compilation that you could buy his music again.
But there he was, hidden in plain sight on a £1 compilation — and it was obvious that this track, “Time Has Told Me,” was something else entirely. The songwriting, the voice, the playing — it was a quantum leap ahead of everything else on the record.
We scrambled to find out more. Was he a forgotten genius? Was he still alive? Did he make more? That one song sent people down a rabbit hole that would eventually lead to his posthumous renaissance.
People younger than me will never know that thrill — of hearing a track by an artist you’d never heard of, and then spending months, years even, trying to find out who they were and where they’d gone.
Nice Enough To Eat genuinely changed the way I listened to music. It cracked open the late '60s for me, and helped me appreciate a period I’d previously dismissed.
Even if Doctor Strangely Strange might still be a bit of a hard sell.