Graham Reid goes back into a classic garage band compilation now remastered.
In a year that tripped over itself with anniversaries (the Stones' half-century, 45 years since the Velvets' debut and 35 for the Sex Pistols' Bollocks), most of the inevitable reissues played the nostalgia card. But one stands out as different.
Forty years ago, Lenny Kaye - later guitarist in Patti Smith's band - compiled the double-vinyl album Nuggets; Original Artyfacts from the First Psychedelic Era 1965-1968.
In a garishly colourful cover (which bore little relationship to the urgent sounds within), Kaye collected 27 songs by American garage bands and anthologised a history so recent that some of the group's members still hadn't reached their late 20s.
These nagging, raw songs (only three breaking the three-minute mark) were called "punk rock" at the time, but that peculiarly American term came to mean something else just five years later when the Sex Pistols gatecrashed the party. What Kaye collated was the American response to British rhythm and blues of the 60s, suburban bands inspired by the Stones, Animals, Pretty Things and others beyond the mainstream pop of the Beatles, Dave Clark Five and Herman's Hermits. The bad boys, in other words.
