The result of  two years of extensive crate-digging and foraging by the UK psychedelic DJ duo The Amorphous Androgynous has led to A Monstrous Psychedelic Bubble (Exploding In Your Mind) “ The Wizards of Oz”.  In keeping with previous volumes of this acclaimed series, A Monstrous Psychedelic Bubble (Exploding In Your Mind) “ The Wizards of Oz” traces the lineage from the sixties to the present day, reappraising the meaning of the term psychedelicâ along the way. The tracks (dug out of various archives and all originally recorded in Australia) are expertly woven and mashed together to form a trip as enjoyable “as it is both enlightening and educational.” Sean Sennett caught up with Amorphous Androgynous main man Garry Cobain for a chat about the project.

“I’m in France, began Garry.” “I’m just ready for my bed, and you’re just out of your bed. There you go. Opposite ends of the spectrum. Our Circadian rhythms are diametrically opposed.” And so we begin …

Sean: This record of yours, from an Australian point of view, is pretty fascinating. I saw that Tony Harlow (Warner Music MD) asked you to do the project. Is that correct?

Garry: That’s right, yeah. Would you like the full story? We came over in 2005 to do some gigs as the Amorphous Androgynous and somebody gave us a Wolfmother album. And we dug some tracks from that. And then I came over in 2009. Somebody gave me a Tame Impala album. By which point, we’d been doing A Monstrous Psychedelic Bubble since 1997, but it was only on radio.

We were enjoying them so much, and they were so radical, because we would use literally 30 seconds to a minute of tracks. And none of the artists would allow them to be used like that. We would have a verse of the Monkees mixed against Jonathon King, “Everyone’s Gone to the Moon,” and all these artists would be insulted by it.

You’d get about 60 tracks in the hour. It was brilliant on radio, so we never thought about it as being a release. But by 2007, we’d actually put out the first Monstrous Bubble, so that all changed. When I come over to Australia in 2009, Bubble was out and doing quite well. Tony introduced himself as a huge fan of A Monstrous Psychedelic Bubble.

We then started to talk about producing some bands and we started to joke. We had a bit of a drink in a bar, and I think Tony disagreed with something I was saying. I joked that he didn’t have any right to have an opinion because, this is very tongue-in-cheek, you must understand,  I delight in my ignorance at points, because it’s something I find very useful. I don’t want to be an expert. I’m not interested in being an expert.  All I care about is what works now to create a modern revolution in sound. That’s all that I’m interested in. I’m not interested in knowing more than anybody else. There’s hundreds of articles that are written from an expert perspective, about the definitive psychedelia. I’m not interested in any of that. I’m interested in creating this vast, varied, exotic sound. Extending it. I don’t want it to be like psychedelia that’s just bands. I want it to have flutes and orchestras and be as rich as it can be, and to create something that’s new, now.

We were sort of joking that they should listen to us because at the end of the day Australia had only spawned Rolf Harris, AC/DC, Olivia Newton John, and Midnight Oil and Men at Work. You’d been saved by Wolfmother and Tame Impala.

They (Warners) just started sending me tracks, and it was interesting. It kind of made me stop. It was fun, and we were enjoying that kind of banter. But then I stopped and went this is really interesting; why don’t I know this track? I think the first track I heard that really made me stop was Doug Jerebine, and I’d never heard of him before.

The moment I heard that, I thought if this was an English or American would I have heard of this, and the answer was categorically ‘yes’. Then I started to ask around and began to realize that because your music industry is so separate to ours, there is nothing to be gained by England or America promoting your artists. There was a revolution and it was moving very quickly, the counterculture exploded in ’66 when Donovan was pretty much the first person and … you were on the bus or off the bus that rode into history. A lot of these artists basically just missed the bus.

There’s no denying that they were influenced by the West. I can hear that and you can trace it. When you look at Russell Morris in ’69, as soon as I heard that, I could trace that (producer Molly Meldrum)  heard George Martin. He’d definitely heard Mickey Most producing Donavan. But as I said, I don’t really care. Influence is cool, as long as you produce great music.

They might have missed the bus that rode into history but they’re due a reappraisal. Yes, Tony (Harlow) was very involved, as was David Laing who also works for Warner Brothers. But at some point we basically picked up these tracks, ran with them, and basically searched.

I think once we found Leong Lau, and Cybotron we knew we had something that deserved to be a Monstrous Bubble.

Sean: A lot of Australians won’t know a lot of the material on the compilation either. Australian radio can be  very ageist. A lot of things get lost. Why was Donovan the big bang as opposed to the Beatles? 

Garry: Donovan is a very interesting guy. I’ve worked with Donovan. He’s very unique. He’s a very spiritual being, so he’s very ahead of the game. He is in touch in terms of the psych of what’s hanging in the air. He’s probably got the ability to flow because he’s an individual. He’s solo, so he probably has the ability to move much quicker than a band. You can certainly trace Donavan as well ahead of the game with his stuff.

You’d have to say Mickey Most was as well, the producer. Certainly Donovan’s best stuff is with Mickey Most.

Sean: When did you first hear ‘The Real Thing’?

Garry: Russell Morris, and a lot of these artists, we made sure we didn’t know too much about any of them. We just went through thousands of tracks, records, anything that looked interesting, sounded interesting, had an interesting cover, had an interesting story. At the end of the day, we looked for hybrids where people have had the strength and bravery to really go against the grain of the fashion of what’s going to sell.

When we first heard Russell Morris, we just heard a great pop song. But we heard a pop song that had been produced as an avant-garde psychedelic track. We were fascinated by that. But we heard something that was very catchy and we just thought ‘why wasn’t this a hit?’

Then when we were doing the liner notes, that was only when I started to dig around and found it was a hit in Australia, one of your top-50 greatest songs. In Australia it’s one of the best songs that had been written from an Australian artist. It had been covered by Midnight Oil. I didn’t know any of this stuff.

That made me feel happy because it made me realise that people had acknowledged that it was a great song. It would have been much sadder for me if I found out that none of this stuff was appreciated. As I say, I’m very happy to put the obscure stuff that people haven’t heard against popular stuff. To me, there’s no difference. It’s just what works now. That’s it.

With Russell Morris, you might find yes, maybe in ’69 when it was written and released, maybe it was a big hit. Maybe people really loved it, but there’s millions of kids now that have never heard of it. To me, I’m not into the idea that all music should be archived or new. For me, it all coexists together. Monstrous Bubble is all about showing that lineage of something that to me will never die. The idea of psychedelia is not something that lived and died in ’67, ’69. Psychedelia is inherently the universe. We live in a cosmic universe that of course it’s psychedelic. Life is, and nature is, psychedelic.

Life is psychedelic in its very essence. So the only thing that’s happened is we’ve become imprisoned slightly. We’ve lost the psychedelia, but if you look hard enough, you’ll find that there is psychedelic music. It changed though. From psychedelic music it went into the punk rock and kraut rock, and then where did it go? It went into Floyd, and then where did it go? And then some indie people started doing some beats with it. And then what happened? I don’t know, but Monstrous Bubble tries to show that the psychedelic spirit never died, and it’s all around us. And to try and create ingredients for a modern psychedelic revolution. Wow, there you go!

Sean: Obviously you couldn’t get ahold of the multi tracks for a lot of this stuff. 

Garry: We did on some of them. It took two years to find these tracks and to find out who owns them. To give you an idea, Rob Thomsett, we couldn’t find out his record label at all. It had been released as 100 records in 1975. We were about to give up on Rob , and I was Googling around and found a Rob Thomsett IT company.

It was a multi-million turnover in Australia. I was trying to find out if the head guy had a past as a space-rock guitarist. We were just about to start mixing the album and I wouldn’t accept the fact that we couldn’t find these. I wanted to use three tracks from this album. I sent a letter to the only email address I could find of somebody at Rob Thomsett IT Company: “Can you tell me if your boss has a bit of a weird past as a space rock guitarist in the ’70s?”

The next morning I woke to an email from Rob saying, “Yeah, I do. You found me.” Leong set up a record label at the same time, 1975, on a chance meeting with Frank Zappa in a party. Frank Zappa told him you’ve got to start your own label; that’s the way to do it these days. So Leong Lau set up his own label and released That Rongeng Sound in ’77. That’s where “Salem Abdullah” comes from, which is the track we’ve got on there.

Can you imagine how difficult it was to track these people down, and to track the masters down? If it took two years to do all that, can you imagine how long it would have taken if we’d remixed everything on multi tracks, found the multi tracks, and then had to go back to every band member that was in the band to get their permission with what we did? Although we had got multi tracks, and we have done work on Madder Lake, we decided we’d probably save that one for the next stage, if we do it.

Sean: Railroad Gin’s “Matter of Time,” what a fantastic track that is. 

Garry: That is a great song, isn’t it?  What’s the orchestra arrangement like at the beginning of it? It’s amazing, isn’t it? You wouldn’t get that in your average pop song these days, would you? You wouldn’t get a two-minute intro with an orchestra before the beat even comes in.

Sean: With Amorphous Androgynous, do you find that by changing your name makes you free to let go of the past and do new things?

Garry: Yes, of course. Are you referring to changing Amorphous Androgynous from the Future Sound of London? We’re just into experimental music of all kinds, so it’s not surprising that we need some different names. At the end of the day, the Future Sound of London was very obsessed with what we called organic electronic classical instrumental music. We didn’t do a lot of songs.

At some point, I had to get interested because I’m a communicator. I had to get interested in the song, and the message of the song. When I did that, I quickly got into psychedelia because I didn’t want songs that were just about love affairs or getting drunk.

If I did want songs about love, I wanted songs about the mystic love, the unconditional love, not the love that we’ve been singing about for the last 30 years. I went to India and meditated and did yoga for about ten years. I’m into the unconditional love. I quickly found that a lot of my interests in lyrical communication or spiritual communication were included in the psychedelic revolution of ’67. That’s what they were into.

In 1967 Everything opened up. There was experimentation. The counter culture wanted to try and form a new society. They wanted to experiment against the old order, with drugs, with sex, with politics. It looked like spirituality. They started to look at the mystics. They didn’t want organised religion. They didn’t want their peers telling them what to do.

All they could see was that the world was being messed up by all these people proclaiming to be the elders. I don’t see much difference now. I still see the world being absolutely mucked up on every level. We’re less free than we’ve ever been, and yet we pretend, because we’ve got a fridge and a computer and a TV that we’re proud of, to think we’re free.

The Amorphous Androgynous will be releasing a limited edition double vinyl version of their critically acclaimed A Monstrous Psychedelic Bubble (Exploding In Your Mind) “ The Wizards of Oz” as part of Record Store Day on April 18. The CD/digital edition are out now through Festival/Warner Music.