BOOK REVIEW: Psychedelic Days – Patrick Campbell Lyons

Oh dear.  This puts me in a terrible quandary.  His manager was kind enough to send me a copy, and when it arrived I was touched and gratified to see that it was signed by Patrick Campbell-Lyons personally.  They have been very kind and very nice.  This is why I am in quandary. 

The writing is excellent, just as one would expect from such a literate and erudite songwriter.  He paints a gripping picture of life in De Valera’s Ireland in the grim decade or so after the dissolution of the Irish Free State.  The way this erudite young Irishman came to London just in time to see it swinging is amusingly and sensitively written, and I can’t fault it. 

The way that he met up with a young Greek musician and formed the immortal Nirvana which produced some of the most gloriously psychedelic pop music of the 1960s is fascinating.  He met Hendrix, the Rolling Stones, Mickie Most, and even played on stage together with Salvador Dali.  The story of how he met Hendrix in a pub, and Hendrix rhapsodised lyrically about sexy Sylvia, their cellist was, and then got the name of the group wrong – thinking they were called Nevada, is priceless.  Some of the most entertaining parts of the book take place in Morocco and Paris, and the reader is taken on a gloriously psychedelic journey with lysergic fingerprints writ large everywhere. It talks about drugs, sex, the new equality of swinging London town in the mid-60s, and the time when all you needed was love, and is one of the best memoirs of that time that I have ever read.

So why the quandary?

The layout is – I am afraid – absolutely horrible. I am not saying that because I am a book designer myself, but the enormous typeface, double spacings, grainy pictures and spelling errors are unforgivable and do this otherwise lovely little book a great injustice. On pages 232 and 233, for example, there are entire lines in italics for no reason, and – all the way through – I was itching to re-master it myself.

Am I going to recommend this book to you? Damn tooting! It is a remarkable book, and I hope lots of you go out and buy it, but I just wish it had been presented better.