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Neo Psychedelia

Rugby Art College, autumn 1982

Spacemen 3

Spacemen 3 started with a meeting at Rugby Art College in the autumn of 1982, when Peter Kember and Jason Pierce, both 16, began making music together in Rugby, Warwickshire. Kember became Sonic Boom and Pierce became J Spaceman. Glass Records signed them in 1986 and put out Sound of Confusion that July and The Perfect Prescription in 1987. Then they moved to Fire Records, where Playing with Fire reached No. 1 on the UK Independent Chart in 1989. The two founders fell out, and Recurring, issued in 1991, was split into a Kember side and a Pierce side. Pierce went on to lead Spiritualized. Kember recorded as Spectrum and produced MGMT, Panda Bear and Beach House.

From post-punk to stone circles

Julian Cope

Julian Cope was born in Deri, near Bargoed, but made his name in Liverpool, where he fronted the post-punk band the Teardrop Explodes into the UK charts before they split in 1982. Solo, he went further into a strange, theatrical kind of psychedelia and sold best in the mid-1980s. He got just as well known for reinventing himself once more, this time as an obsessive antiquarian. He wrote The Modern Antiquarian, a bestselling guide to Britain's prehistoric stone circles, and started an archive covering ancient sites and outsider music both. He kept recording too, putting out albums himself, on his own terms, well into the 2000s.

Rugby, 1990, after Spacemen 3

Spiritualized

Jason Pierce, known as J. Spaceman, formed Spiritualized in Rugby, Warwickshire, in 1990 with three players fresh from Spacemen 3 (bassist Will Carruthers, drummer Jonny Mattock and guitarist Mark Refoy) and a local friend, Steve Evans. The name came off the label of a Pernod bottle. The debut, Lazer Guided Melodies, came out in 1992. Their third album was NME's Album of the Year in 1997, the same year they became the last band to play Manchester's Haçienda. Over 120 musicians took part in Let It Come Down in 2001, and Sweet Heart Sweet Light, in 2012, was made while Pierce was undergoing experimental chemotherapy for a liver disease. Everything Was Beautiful, from 2022, was their ninth studio album.

San Francisco, Anton Newcombe's band

The Brian Jonestown Massacre

Anton Newcombe founded the Brian Jonestown Massacre in San Francisco in the early 1990s, naming it after Rolling Stones guitarist Brian Jones and the 1978 Jonestown deaths in Guyana, and he has led a revolving cast ever since. A shoegaze-tinged debut arrived in 1995, then three albums in 1996 alone, Their Satanic Majesties' Second Request among them. Ondi Timoner's documentary Dig! won the Documentary Grand Jury Prize at Sundance in 2004. The band says it misrepresents them. Newcombe later moved to Europe and built a studio in Berlin, where Revelation was recorded in 2014. The band has now made twenty studio albums.

New York, 2003, Sacred Bones

Psychic Ills

Psychic Ills was formed in New York City in 2003 by Tres Warren, a Texan, who had met bassist and singer Elizabeth Hart at the University of Texas at Austin. Warren later said the band grew out of a drum machine he had just bought. Their debut single came out on the Mental Violence label in November 2003, and the first album, Dins, followed in February 2006. After Mirror Eye in 2009 they went on tour supporting the Butthole Surfers. Then came a move to Sacred Bones Records, a more song-based album in 2011, another in 2013, and the double LP Inner Journey Out in 2016. Warren died on March 21, 2020, aged 41.

Chalon-sur-Saône, 1986

Vietnam Veterans

Vietnam Veterans formed in Chalon-sur-Saône in the late 1970s, led by Mark Enbatta, and started out on Rolling Stones and Kinks covers. By the mid-1980s they had pushed that into the fuzzed-out psych-garage revival then going round Europe. Despite the name, none of them had ever served in the military. Their 1986 album In Ancient Times came out on the German label Music Maniac at around the time a single Frankfurt show drew some 2,000 fans, which was about as big as the band got. They split later that decade.

The Collection