No Way Out . . . Plus

LENNY KAYE was supernaturally right to open side four of his Nuggets compilation with The Chocolate Watch Band's 'Let's Talk About Girls. It's a track that sums up everything most startlingly dumb and moronically innovative about those neglected 'arty-facts from the first psychedelic era' which the album championed. All the feisty R&B thunder of the first Rolling Stones LP crashed into a whirlpool of electronic quarks.

The story behind the track is as labyrinthine as the strung-out neon guitar fade that stings in and out of focus all the way into the final groove. The CWB were a five-piece from San Jose with the kind of Brit-Invasion shaggy basin-cut fringes you only see in dark Indie-band videos today. They were seduced into studio-time by one Ed Cobb, the former Big Man with the White Doo-Wop Four Preps, a guy who also wrote 'Tainted Love' for Soft Cell . . . you with me so far?

The Chocolate WB cut the aforesaid 'Let's Talk About Girls', a song done earlier in a less frantic incarnation by Tongues of Truth, A later 'B'-sided, wired with nervous tension, by the Undertones. But vocalist David Aguilar didn't bother to turn up for the session. Hence Don Bennett, a fellow writer and friend of Cobb's stepped over to slur and swagger the lascivious mock-Jagger brag over the CWB's diddleyesque rhythms: "Ah gotta lurve them awl/nawt just a fyooo/let's tawk about guuurls, GURLS THAT BEG FOUR MORE!!!" The drool still glistens so fresh it adds extra lustre to the CD's moist sheen.

And that's just for openers. No Way Out . . . Plus is the CW Band's debut album pumped up with eight bonus relics, and though it's fair to say there's little that approaches the inspired dementia of ' . . . Girls', there's a wealth of twisted esoterica aplenty here on offer. 'Gone and Passes By' uses spidery sitar drones with all the inept enthusiasm of Brian Jones' cultural tourism. 'Expo 2000' and 'Dark Side of the Mushroom' are thinly-veiled instrumental tributes to the powers of hallucinogenic plants. They do Chuck Berry on 'Come On' and Stephen Stills on 'Hot Dusty Roads' and then there's period loopiness on overload with - would you believe - 'Are You Gonna Be There (At The Love-In)?'.

The Watch melted in 1970 leaving Big Beat as sole executors of their battered acid-addled legacy, and we can all give thanks to the ghost of Roky Erickson's braincells for that. And David Aguilar? He's become Professor of Astronomy at the University of Colorado. So some psychedelic fairy tales do have happy endings.

• Andrew Darlington