Lucifer Over Lancashire / Sunny Day, Everythings AOK....

The Monkees - Porpoise Song (Single Version)

You grab the weird stuff where you can when you're a kid. Growing up in 1970's rural Lancashire, this was remarkably easy - The Tomorrow People, Children of The Stones, Space 1999, Armchair Thriller, the animated feature of The Lord Of The Rings, all things that bounced around in my developing noggin with abandon. Add to that a local library with a suspiciously well stocked Occult section and you've soon got a boy who's best friend is his imagination, especially when his neighbours are, well, fields. And a road that always led up to the dark hills.

So what about music? And here's where things seemed to warp back to the groovy sunshine sixties….you had The Banana Splits and The Monkees.

Oh, come on, you know what I'm talking about. The last five minutes or so of the programme when Fleagle and the gang kicked it with a bubblegum acid number while the cameraman freaked out. Then they all burned off in their dune buggies like the Manson Family. Hell, they could have been the Manson Family for all I knew.

And it's no coincidence that The Butthole Surfers spent a lot of time riding around in buggies outside Austin Texas. If Gibby isn't a Banana Splits fan, I don't know who is.

And on to The Monkees. Theirs was a buttoned down goofiness, but they gave us Pleasant Valley Sunday, Randy Scouse Git, and then topped it all with the great musical/visual freefall beauty of the Porpoise Song.

God knows how I got to see Head when I was a kid, but I did, unless the Porpoise section turned up in the TV series somewhere. Doesn‘t matter. It gets my vote for the greatest music video of all time.

To conclude - fragments of the Sixties found a refuge in kid's tv long after Altamont, Manson, Vietnam. They were bits that encouraged the imagination, like dream friends.

Did I forget to mention Sesame Street? Onetwothreefourfivesixseveneightnineteneleventweeeeelllvvvveee


Buy - The Monkees - Head (Soundtrack)
Buy - The Monkees - Head (DVD)
Buy - The Monkees - Greatest Hits
Visit - The Monkees
Visit - The Monkees Film & TV Vault

Mike.