The British Act Have A New Obsession With Aussie Bands

The two lads from iconic Manchester dance outfit The Future Sound Of London – Gary Cobain and Brian Dougans – long ago expanded their musical consciousness and formed offshoot The Amorphous Androgynous to delve into the world of the weird and psychedelic, the multi-format works of which they labelled A Monstrous Psychedelic Bubble. Now, many years later, they’ve curated a compilation of Australian underground psych called The Wizards Of Oz, which mined our fertile scene with fascinating results.

“I came over with The Amorphous Androgynous in 2005 – we did some gigs – when somebody handed me a Wolfmother album,” Cobain explains. “We were eight years into A Monstrous Psychedelic Bubble at that point – we hadn’t released any of them, but we’d been doing radio transmissions as DJs since 1987, and they were so radical that we couldn’t release them because we were only using like a minute of every track. I came back to Australia in 2009 to meet a friend... and somebody gave me Tame Impala. By 2009 we’d released Cosmic Space Music and Pagan Love Vibrations, which were the first two actual official Psychedelic Bubble releases – and at that point we’d started doing some production work for Warner Brothers. We started joking with them – just pub banter over a drink – and we were going, ‘We know best, why should we listen to your music? What do you know? You come from a country where your sole contribution to rock’n’roll history and heritage is Olivia Newton-John, Rolf Harris and AC/DC! Oh, and you’ve been saved by Tame Impala and Wolfmother – something’s finally happening! Oh, and by the way why do you claim that the Bee Gees are yours when they come from Birmingham, England?’ It was a joke of course and just a bit of fun.

“The reason that Tony Harlow and David Laing [from Warner] came to us in the first place is because they were huge fans of A Monstrous Psychedelic Bubble and they started feeding us [Australian] tracks, and as they did we started to go, ‘Ooh, maybe we’d best take that joke back! Why haven’t we heard this?’ We were thinking, ‘If this was English, would we have not heard it?’ When you have a counter-culture exploding like that you have to be there at the right place and the right time. This was pre-Internet, and Australia was clearly being influenced by radio stations and import records so it would have all been pretty slow. So it started as a joke, but then I went, ‘You know what? We need to look at this because after ten years of A Monstrous Psychedelic Bubble we should know more about this music.’”