Kaleidoscope (UK) & Fairfield Parlour - Please Listen To The Pictures (The BBC Sessions 1967-71)

English psychedelic folk and prog rock band existing between 1967 and 1969. The group was formed in 1964 as The Sidekicks (8) and renamed to The Key in 1965, they signed to Fontana in 1967 and released two albums as Kaleidoscope. Despite of massive airplay and touring they didn't have commercial success at the time but they retained a loyal fanbase. In 1970 they switched to the Vertigo label under the name Fairfield Parlour. A third Kaleidoscope album was recorded in 1971 but it was released only in 1991.

It's rare that bands as obscure as Kaleidoscope -- and Fairfield Parlour, the group Kaleidoscope evolved into -- are honored with a comprehensive CD retrospective of their BBC radio sessions. Despite never having a chart record, however, they did enough radio work to generate this 22-song disc of BBC cuts from 1967-71 (and even this doesn't contain all of it; some BBC performances remain unfound). A little over half of this comes from the era in which they were releasing music as Kaleidoscope (1967-69), and the rest from the time their discs bore the name Fairfield Parlour (1970-71). This material isn't a revelation -- the arrangements are pretty similar (if at times less ornate) than the ones used on their studio releases, and there's just one song that didn't make it on to record back then, the innocuously unmemorable "Jump in My Boat" (from a '69 session). The liner notes even admit that backing tracks supplied by their record company's producer were sometimes used, and off-air recordings of four 1968-69 tracks have pretty abominable fidelity (one of them cutting off before completion), though everything else sounds good. It's a shame about those four off-air recordings, as in some ways they're among the more interesting items here; the version of "Faintly Blowing" was cut more than a year before the release of its studio counterpart, and two April 1969 tracks have the group playing live before an actual audience. Nonetheless, it's a valuable archival release for collectors of the lighter side of British pop-psych, particularly as Kaleidoscope and Fairfield Parlour didn't release tons of material, though the earlier stuff holds up better than the somewhat more mainstream, poppier Fairfield Parlour-era tracks. 

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