CREASE MAGAZINE RETROSPECTIVEH.P. Lovecraft / The Action / The Open Mind / The Smoke
Four Short Circuits in the Paisley Machine
By Buzz Drainpipe 🖨️🌀
There are bands that become institutions, and then there are bands that become weather stains on the ceiling of the culture. You look up one day and there they are: a little purple, a little water-damaged, shaped vaguely like a face, suggesting that maybe the whole house was dreaming before you got here.
H.P. Lovecraft, The Action, The Open Mind, and The Smoke belong to that second, better category. They were not monuments. They were not clean narratives. They were not the kind of groups that get wheeled out in documentaries by a man in a scarf explaining “the moment.” They are secret-pressure bands, bands that live in compilations, import bins, bootlegs, radio fog, and the part of your brain that still believes a record sleeve can contain a portal if the glue was mixed correctly.
Together, they form a beautiful little damaged republic:
folk-goth mysticism, mod ambition, heavy psych brain-melt, and pop-art London fizz.
Or, in plain language:
Four bands walked into 1967.
None of them came out normal.
H.P. Lovecraft
The White Ship Sails Out of the Coffeehouse and Into the Astral Municipal Department
H.P. Lovecraft were what happens when folk music looks into a mirror and sees a cathedral with a nervous system.
They had the haunted name, yes, but the real spell is not horror. The real spell is serious young men discovering that harmony can act like fog. Their music feels lit by candles, but also by bad fluorescent bulbs in an all-night metaphysical bookstore. There is something clerical about them, something robe-like. They sound less like a rock band than a committee appointed to investigate the moon.
“Wayfaring Stranger” does not merely wander. It drifts through a border checkpoint staffed by ghosts. “The Drifter” sounds like a man who got lost between train stations and came back with a theology. “The White Ship” is the obvious jewel, not because it rocks, but because it refuses to rock in the correct way. It opens like a story being told in a language you almost remember from childhood fever.
The band’s secret weapon was tension: old-world folk material pressed against psychedelic electricity until the seams glowed. They were not trying to be charming. They were trying to summon architecture.
In the great psychedelic cafeteria, H.P. Lovecraft are not eating the sugar cubes. They are staring at the wallpaper until it confesses.
The Action
Immaculate Suits, Ruined Hearts, and the Mod Soul Dream That Didn’t Pay Rent
The Action are the heartbreaking ones.
Every retro obsessive eventually has a moment with The Action where they ask the ceiling: how did this not happen? How did this band not become a household name, or at least the household name in a cooler household with orange lamps and complicated ashtrays?
They had the voices. They had the snap. They had the clothes. They had the mod-soul fluency, that beautiful mid-60s British miracle where young men heard American R&B and decided not to copy it exactly, but to wear it like a sacred borrowed coat.
“Come Around” moves like it knows the room is watching. “Something to Say” is practically the thesis. “Love Is All” has that sincere upward reach that could have curdled into corn, but doesn’t. The Action always feel emotionally dressed-up. Even when wounded, they’ve put on good shoes.
Then come the deeper, stranger colors: “Icarus,” “Strange Roads,” “Things You Cannot See.” Here the neat mod lines begin to ripple. The soul-boy confidence starts leaking into something more inward, more uncertain. The Action become fascinating because they did not stay frozen in the sharp-suit myth. They were mutating, but the industry, that great beige meat grinder, did not quite know what to do with a band evolving in real time.
They are one of rock’s great almosts.
Not failed. Never failed.
Almost.
And “almost” is often where the good ghosts live.
The Open Mind
The Brain Case Opens and a Distortion Pedal Crawls Out Wearing Flowers
The Open Mind are where the incense catches fire.
This is the band for when the paisley party goes late and someone starts talking about Atlantis with frightening sincerity. They are not subtle. Thank God. Subtlety had plenty of representatives. The Open Mind arrived with fuzz, organ, mythological cheekbones, and the sense that every chorus should be delivered from inside a painted skull.
“My Mind Cries” is the sign above the door. That title alone could be carved into the lintel of the entire genre. “Can’t You See?” has the urgency of a man trying to explain the cosmos before the tea wears off. “Thor the Thunder God” should be ridiculous, and it is, but it is also perfect, because psychedelic rock understood something modern culture keeps forgetting:
Sometimes ridiculous is where the voltage is.
“Horses and Chariots,” “Before My Time,” “Free as the Breeze” — these are not just songs, they are painted van panels. The Open Mind knew that heaviness did not have to mean darkness yet. It could mean density. Saturation. Too much color in the bloodstream.
They sit in that glorious pre-metal, post-mod, almost-prog, not-yet-stoner pocket where bands were inventing heavy music without a zoning permit.
The Open Mind did not open politely.
They kicked the hinges off and let the furniture float out.
The Smoke
Bubblegum Espionage from the Carnaby Street Toy Department
The Smoke are the fizzy tablet dropped into the whole beaker.
If H.P. Lovecraft are fog, The Action are tailoring, and The Open Mind are fuzzed-out temple graffiti, The Smoke are pop-art contraband. Bright, cheeky, wired, faintly suspicious. They sound like Swinging London got turned into a children’s cereal commercial by people who had seen too many spy films and trusted none of them.
“My Friend Jack” remains the banner, the calling card, the candy-colored warning label. It is one of those songs that should collapse under its own novelty, but instead becomes immortal through sheer insolent bounce. It grins too hard. That is its power.
“Waterfall” sparkles. “You Can’t Catch Me” darts down an alley. “High in a Room” does exactly what the title promises, but with better shoes. The Smoke understood the psychedelic single as a little machine: three minutes of hooks, colors, slogans, and cheerful danger.
They are not cosmic in the grand sense. They are cosmic in the toy-shop-after-closing sense.
The Smoke are what happens when pop stops asking permission to be weird and starts smuggling weirdness inside the chorus.
The Compilation as Secret Map
Put these four together and something beautiful happens.
Not a history lesson. Not a museum wing. A map.
H.P. Lovecraft point toward the mystical American underground, where folk becomes ceremony and psych becomes fogged glass.
The Action represent the mod dream at its most elegant and wounded, the point where style and soul almost fuse into destiny.
The Open Mind carry the voltage forward into heaviness, fantasy, and amplifier worship.
The Smoke keep the whole thing airborne with pop nerve, joke-shop color, and perfect disposable immortality.
This is the thing about the 60s people forget when they reduce it to peace signs and documentary stock footage: the era was not one sound. It was a warehouse full of unstable chemicals, and every band had a different matchbook.
Some became legends.
Some became footnotes.
Some became better than legends: records you discover alone, at the wrong hour, when your taste has finally developed enough nerve endings to receive the transmission.
Buzz’s Final Inspection
These bands were not simply “psychedelic.” That word has been sanded smooth by tote bags and festival fonts. These bands were psychedelic in the older, stranger sense: they altered perception by refusing to behave like one thing.
H.P. Lovecraft made folk feel haunted by stained glass.
The Action made mod soul feel like an unfinished revolution.
The Open Mind made the brain sound like a garage full of lightning.
The Smoke made pop music feel like a fake mustache sold by MI5.
Together, they make the case for the compilation as an art form. Not a playlist. Not content. A cabinet of charged objects.
Drop the needle, press play, whatever ritual your century allows.
The mind opens.
The smoke rises.
The action begins.
And somewhere, out past the white ship, a stranger keeps walking. 🌀
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