Where but for Caravan would I be?

Caravan have always been one of those bands that I can come back to again and again without their having left a bad taste in my mouth after far too much time being devoted to them. You know, that album that always seems to be on the turntable and gets played on constant rotation until your neighbours, or your spouse, or somebody from the council tells you to stop it and put on something else?

There's an intensity to their sound but it's all so laid back that I find myself making tea and eating custard creams rather than rolling a spliff and drifting off to some place dreamy in the company of say, hurm, Daevid Allen and Gong's teapot shaped fling Pixies. Granted- there are some extended jammy bits in the music, even on this, their First proper Long Player - but it's the sound that gets me, so far removed but not dissimilar to such ethereal twaddle as the first Procul Harum album, or Syds trippy Floydisms, or anything else from the land of 1968 to be honest.

There are people out there, and I've sat around their grubby bedsits arguing the fact, who place the "Canterbury Scene" in a different sphere to most other late-sixties proggy-psychedelia, and then raise it up onto some collector-scum pedestal and pass on information to you about the bands that they probably made up in the queue at Boots waiting to pay for some Benylin, but which sounds impressive and ever so slightly Arch.. But I'm starting to drift, I think..

Anyway, there's a point to all of this. Namely that I seem to spend so much time in squalid little shops rubbing shoulders with other 25-39 year old men hastily flipping through racks of tatty vinyl, looking for something special, something lost but, unfortunately most of what I'm looking at is absolute cock you couldn't give away (but there are websites devoted to such inane codswallop) but I want to share with you, O unknown browser of internetness - those groovy little platters which make my heart twitter and send me reaching, regretfully for my almost always empty wallet.

So the first album we're looking at is the first album by Caravan. Its got drums and guitars and lots of Organ, and it's some kind of audiophile Japanese import, and I don't think it had ever been played, which is downright shameful!

Boo to you who never touch stylus to swirly black grooves for fear of diminishing a records value! I spurn you with my foot!

Side One:
1 Place of My Own
2 Ride
3 Policeman
4 Love Song with Flute
5 Cecil Rons

Side Two
1 Magic Man
2 Grandma's Lawn
3 Where But for Caravan Would I

Polydor records 1968

Caravan were:

Richard Coughlan - Drums
Pye Hastings - Guitar, Bass Guitar, Singing
David Sinclair - Organ, Singing
Richard Sinclair - Bass Guitar, Guitar, Singing