Tomorrow - A psych meteor in underground London

One of the (forbidden) dreams of every rock music fan is to be able to relive, if not as a protagonist then at least as a spectator, one of the many epic sagas that the history of this genre has given us in the past. Many, thanks to a hypothetical time machine, would go back to San Francisco in the second half of the Sixties, catching the Summer of Love and the Monterey festival in full swing (the drug addicted among them would also catch the Grateful Dead's acid tests...), and perhaps would also take a trip to the US east coast at the end of the decade for Woodstock, but just as many would instantly rush to London in the same period. The second choice is motivated not only by the fact that many of rock's sacred monsters, fresh from the British Invasion, resided in the British capital: in fact, alongside the flourishing of the trendier and more superficial Swinging London, a thriving underground scene was being born in the same city, closely connected to the emerging phenomenon of psychedelia. The hippie movement, born in the United States, was putting down roots in underground London, which borrowed from the California scene not only the freer, more visionary musical style (with due and significant differences) but also the flower-power aesthetic and a revolutionary ethic based on individualism, rejection of society, sexual freedom and drug use.

The seeds for the birth of the movement in Great Britain were sown in 1965 by the International Poetry Incarnation at the Royal Albert Hall, which featured among its protagonists beat poets of the stature of Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, Lawrence Ferlinghetti and William Burroughs, who arrived in the UK with a retinue of colorful hippies in tow. No less important, for better or worse, was the introduction to England that same year of lysergic acid by a mysterious figure, not particularly well known but decisive: the American Michael Hollingshead, the man who first turned on Timothy Leary (who would later go down in history as the guru of LSD), then three quarters of the Beatles (only Ringo Starr was missing), Keith Richards, as well as numerous intellectuals, filmmakers and writers. At the time, the hallucinogenic substance was hailed as a means of expanding consciousness and artistic inspiration, and it certainly played a role in rock music's evolution toward the psychedelic revolution, but at the same time LSD abuse caused psychiatric conditions, marking the lives of artists such as Syd Barrett and others (in the United States, the less widely known Skip Spence and Roky Erickson) who, like him, crossed the thin line dividing genius from madness.

The following year, the movement broke away from American influence and turned its attention more to the musical ferment produced by bands that were little known at the time, such as the very first Pink Floyd (who had not yet recorded any material), protagonists of happenings held at the famous Marquee Club called Spontaneous Underground, events reserved for a select few attending in eccentric outfits or bizarre costumes, where the band led by Syd Barrett offered up its first sonic experiments. Also in 1966, Barry Miles and John Hopkins, the cultural agitators who founded "International Times", the first English underground magazine devoted to poetry and music, were giving shape to the movement. To make up for the magazine's financial troubles, Hopkins himself, together with Joe Boyd (the legendary producer who also worked on Pink Floyd's first single "Arnold Layne"), founded the UFO Club at the end of that year, a venue frequented by the best emerging bands of the time, which unfortunately had a short (but intense) life, closing its doors in October 1967. The UFO Club was the hub of underground music: among the regular attendees were members of the Beatles (taking notes for their own stylistic evolution), while on stage, alongside the aforementioned Pink Floyd, acts of the caliber of Soft Machine, Procol Harum, Incredible String Band, Crazy World of Arthur Brown, Move took turns performing, as well as one-hit wonders like Purple Gang and, last but not least, Tomorrow.

If the band's fleeting career earns it the label of one-hit wonder, at the same time we could speak of Tomorrow as a supergroup in retrospect: certainly not because of the presence of bassist John "Junior" Wood, who later played only in the short-lived Aquarian Age, and only partly because of singer Keith West, who thanks to his involvement in producer Mark Wirtz's parallel project achieved fleeting (but commercially significant) success with the single "Excerpt From 'A Teenage Opera'" (aka "Grocer Jack") before fading into obscurity and turning to production. Rather, Tomorrow will be remembered as the band that featured drummer John "Twink" Alder, a key figure in the history of psychedelic rock (besides the aforementioned Aquarian Age, he played from '68 in the Pretty Things of "S. F. Sorrow", in the Pink Fairies, in the short-lived Stars, a fleeting experiment lasting a few weeks led by post-Pink Floyd Syd Barrett, as a solo artist with the album "Think Pink" released in 1970, a hidden gem of British psychedelia, and finally collaborated in the Eighties with neo-psychedelic artists such as Bevis Frond and Plasticland), and above all Steve Howe, the virtuoso guitarist who would go on to write the history of rock (progressive and otherwise) with Yes.

The band's history was intertwined with that of the UFO Club, so much so that the quartet, initially called The In-Crowd, changed its name after Joe Boyd refused their request to play at the venue because the name was deemed "too mod". By changing their name to the more visionary Tomorrow, the band finally managed to perform at the UFO in 1967, the year they began producing their first songs.

In May '67 their first single "My White Bicycle" was released, which immediately launched Tomorrow into what some critics have since dubbed "evolved pop-sike", that is, a psych-pop-rock that inserts acid, estranging elements through the use of novel sounds, baroque arrangements and studio-created instrumental experiments, within the popular song form, evolving it without launching into sprawling suites or jam sessions — a sub-genre that reached its zenith in the same period with the late Beatles and the early Pink Floyd. The track, a lysergic garage-beat number with innovative editing, propelled by a hypnotic rhythm interwoven with a profusion of electric flourishes, guitar inlays, sitar flutters and backwards tape loops, is dedicated to the Provos, a Dutch anarchist group symbolized by their iconic white bicycles, and was championed by DJ John Peel, who played it on air and invited the band to perform on the very first live session ever broadcast on his show in September '67, helping to spread what came to be regarded as a true underground anthem.

In the same month as the radio live session, their second single "Revolution" was released, proving to be an even bolder experiment thanks to its complex, multifaceted construction, a collage opened by a mysterious, derailing guitar that spills into a sonic attack of acid wah-wah (while Keith West extols revolution), alternating with a Merseybeat verse and a classically styled chorus: a track of great creativity but little commercial appeal, so much so that it failed to reach the Top 40. What really put a spoke in the band's wheel was not so much the failure of the second single as the fact that, in the meantime, Keith West was devoting himself to collaborating with EMI and Tomorrow's own producer Marc Wirtz on "Teenage Opera", an ambitious project later abandoned but one that earned the singer a number two chart position with the aforementioned single "Grocer Jack", which moreover went in a stylistic direction quite different from the band's, confusing fans.

The side project delayed the release of the self-titled Tomorrow, recorded in the summer of 1967 but not released until the following year — a decisive delay when you consider that the year in question, crucial to the entire history of rock, is remembered, just to limit ourselves to debuts (and only within the psychedelic field), for the first albums of Pink Floyd, Velvet Underground, Doors and Jimi Hendrix, not to mention that within a short time interest in psychedelic music would begin to decline. Tomorrow missed the boat to potential success by just a few months, but their record remains a thoroughly valid document representing that magical, unrepeatable era. Counting the singles that preceded it (and which stand out as highlights), Tomorrow is rooted in the beat of the Kinks and the Beatles ("Colonel Brown"), but enriched with kaleidoscopic arrangements (the keyboard that lights up "Shy Boy" like a rainbow, the baroque music-box of "Auntie Mary's Dress Shop", worthy of Barrett at his most playful) or smudged with more acidic solutions and melodies ("The Incredible Journey Of Timothy Chase", a delightful sugary treat dipped in LSD). The bond with the Fab Four is sealed by a faithful cover of "Strawberry Fields Forever", lacking the magic of the mellotron, replaced here by guitar, but appreciated by John Lennon himself.

The band's versatility becomes even more pronounced when it moves beyond the sixties-British-pop style, adding alternative touches, as in "Now Your Time Has To Come", where freakbeat shards alternate with the hallucinogenic wonder typical of the American Summer of Love, evoked by ecstatic vocal harmonies before getting lost in a visionary Steve Howe solo — a sign of superb technique that is never an end in itself, but rather geared toward a mental journey — and in "Real Life Permanent Dream", which intersects the livelier psych-folk of Love with raga-rock touches.

Rounding out the original tracklist is "Hallucinations", yet another splendid flower-power anthem on the theme of consciousness expansion induced by drug use, serving as the crowning touch to an album that is unfortunately little known and relegated to niche status, but which in terms of quality deserves to stand alongside the trinity of British psychedelia ("Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band", "The Piper At The Gates Of Dawn" and "S. F. Sorrow"), thanks to the convergence of Keith West's melodic talent, producer Mark Wirtz's meticulous and creative studio work (Hopkins and Burges, the credited songwriters, are his pseudonyms) and the fundamental contribution of Steve Howe, whose guitar — now sweet and enveloping, now aggressive and powerful, at times Eastern-tinged and often saturated and acidic as befits the psychedelic style — is a decisive and distinctive element of the band, as well as a testament to the guitarist's abilities before his progressive-rock turn.

So, an album that every fan of this kind of sound should know, ideally in the CD version reissued by EMI in 1999, which contains genuinely interesting material that is otherwise hard to find, both from the band and from its members' future projects: credited to Tomorrow we find the decent garage-mod track "Claramount Lake", B-side of the single "My White Bicycle" and left off the album without regret, the previously unreleased "Now Your Time Has Come" which, with its folk-rock drive, would instead have enriched the album with an extra shade, a cover of the Byrds' "Why", and the, in their own way interesting, alternate versions of "Real Life Permanent Dream" (sped up and electrified) and "Revolution" (conversely stripped of wattage but certainly no less acidic and even more enveloping); the singles by Aquarian Age, the short-lived project of Twink and John "Junior" Wood, marked by an increasingly visionary, hippie (and trippy) brand of acid-folk, a prelude to Twink's solo album; and finally the only tracks by Keith West as a solo artist, graced with an exquisite beat sensibility culminating in "On A Saturday", an instant classic with a lively rhythm and a knockout melody, which unfortunately fell into obscurity, as did its author, who in these pop nuggets gave the impression he could become a new Ray Davies, but instead abandoned the microphone and songwriting to slip into the role of producer.

Tomorrow, who by then had already missed their chance to break through and whose members were about to go their separate ways with mixed fortunes, split up shortly after the release of their self-titled album, their only studio record, and indeed the only release of any kind for thirty years, until the 1998 release of the compilation 50 Minute Technicolor Dream, worth seeking out for completists but hardly essential for anyone else. Alongside tracks later included on the expanded reissue of the self-titled album (which, however, came out the following year), the collection contains two songs written for the soundtrack of Michelangelo Antonioni's film "Blow Up" (in the end the director opted for the better-known Yardbirds, yet another snub for Tomorrow...), two more recorded for the BBC's Top Gear programme, and finally the recordings - valuable as a document but not exactly hi-fi - of the live "Christmas On Earth", dated 22 December 1967, the concert-event that closed out the high point of a movement which, at least at its peak, lasted no longer than a season - much like the adventure of the hapless Tomorrow, whose brief flash, though spotted by only a handful of devotees, left an indelible trail among the stars of the finest psychedelic rock of all time.

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