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56: THE YARDBIRDS
Happenings Ten Years Time Ago/Psycho Daisies
(Columbia, 1966)

MORE often than not, The Yardbirds are thought of today as a kind of finishing school for three fledgeling UK guitarists who would blossom into full-scale titans in succeeding years - Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck and Jimmy Page.

However, the fact that the band acted as a blues/rock manger for three guitar gods-to-be should never be allowed to overshadow the importance of The Yardbirds as a performing and recording ensemble.

They started life in 1963 as an uncommonly adept blues band, but a restless, experimental mindset led them to stretch out and get seriously weird - so by mid-decade they were doggedly pushing the sonic envelope and prefiguring the excesses of psychedelia, having already invented rave culture. Seriously.

Somehow, they had managed to drag Gregorian chanting into the charts (Still I'm Sad), not to mention raga inflections (Heart Full Of Soul) and full-on shuddering, questing, shock-of-the-new soundgasm (Shapes Of Things). Now, in October 1966, they were primed to put all of these elements together in the sole single release from the pioneering line-up featuring the twin lead guitars of Beck and Page.

Volatile personal chemistry ensured that this arrangement would not be built to go the distance - but what a blast it was in that fleeting moment. Straight from the doomy portent of the E minor chords which introduce it, Happenings plunges the listener into an apocalyptic sound picture built around a descending riff of such robust construction that The Stooges later lifted it wholesale for their downer epic Sick Of You.

At this time, Beck's Telecaster was more like an antenna tuned to the unknowable bleeps of the distant cosmos than a mere guitar.

Combine this with the bar-raising vigour of Page's contribution and you end up with a monumental "freak-out" section smudged with feedback and strafed with police sirens and explosions. Patently, it was all a long, long way from Billy Boy Arnold.

The B-side, Psycho Daisies, is almost as good, taking a simple 12-bar sequence and punching its lamps out with a rhythm pattern alternating between a shuffle and a murderous, hammering straight 4/4.

All told, an extraordinary, life-changing single from a band at the height of their incendiary powers.

A blue plaque should read: Led Zeppelin were born here.

9:54am Friday 15th February 2008

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