VA - Climb Aboard My Roundabout! The British Toytown Pop Sound 1967-1974 (2022) {3CD Box Set}

• First-ever legitimate anthology of British toytown pop, a much-loved sub-genre among
• Four-hour compilation with 87 tracks including hits, misses, rarities and previously unreleased

Issued at the start of 1967, Beatles’ single ‘Penny Lane’ coupled a widescreen production (bolstered by a phalanx of session musicians on brass and woodwind) with a mildly hallucinogenic lyric populated by mundane characters going about their unremarkable suburban lives.

It proved to be an enormously influential record. For the next year or two, British pop was awash with records that married quasi-classical arrangements with newly-minted fairy tales and character vignettes based around the grey everyday lives of ordinary small-town folk.

Many years later, this burst of English eccentricity came to be known in collector circles as toytown pop – a pseudo-genre that took in everything from Jeff Lynne‘s early band The Idle Race and Deram-era David Bowie to backroom auteurs like Mark Wirtz, whose ambitious ‘Teenage Opera’ project inspired the young Andrew Lloyd Webber, who provided similarly over-the-top arrangements for CBS hopefuls Cardboard Orchestra.

Featuring 87 excerpts from various pre-teenage operas, ‘Climb Aboard My Roundabout!’ is a 3CD celebration of the toytown pop experience. It includes contributions from the key players as well as many obscure delights and some huge rarities, including a hitherto-unreleased track from Wirtz’s aborted ‘Teenage Opera’ project.

With four hours of music housed in a clamshell box featuring a lavish 48-page booklet, ‘Climb Aboard My Roundabout!’ is an invitation that very few late 60s pop aficionados will be able to resist.