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‘Climb Aboard My Roundabout!’ Review by Martin Hutchinson.
Adventures in Toytown
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Issued at the start of 1967, The Beatles’ single ‘Penny Lane’ coupled a widescreen production (bolstered by a phalanx of session musicians on brass and woodwind) with a mildly hallucinogenic lyric populated by mundane characters going about their unremarkable suburban lives. It proved to be an enormously influential record and for the next year or two, British pop was awash with records that married quasi-Classical arrangements with newly-minted fairy tales and character vignettes based around the grey everyday lives of ordinary small-town folk.
Many years later, this burst of English eccentricity came to be known in collector circles as Toytown Pop – a pseudo-genre that took in everything from Jeff Lynne‘s early band The Idle Race and Deram-era David Bowie to backroom auteurs like Mark Wirtz, whose ambitious ‘A Teenage Opera’ project (recorded in 1967, but unreleased until 1996) inspired a young Andrew Lloyd Webber, who provided similarly over-the-top arrangements for CBS hopefuls Cardboard Orchestra.
Featuring 87 excerpts from various pre-teenage operas, ‘Climb Aboard My Roundabout!’ is a 3CD celebration of the Toytown Pop experience brought to us by Grapefruit Records / Cherry Red. It includes contributions from the key players as well as many obscure delights and some huge rarities, including a hitherto-unreleased track from Wirtz’s aborted ‘A Teenage Opera’ project.
In fact, there are quite a few previously unissued tracks here and historians will love hearing some great names at the start of their career. As well as the aforementioned Lynne and Bowie, there is an embryonic Slade, Gilbert O’Sullivan, producer extraordinaire Chris Neil and, hiding as a session musician with Simon Dupree and The Big Sound in 1968 is a young Elton John. As well as the forgotten artists, there are also some ‘known’ artists like The Kinks, The Mindbenders, Marty Wilde, The Shadows, Ayshea Brough and even Kenny Everett! And let’s not forget the 48-page booklet which is fully illustrated and has very informative notes by David Wells.
