Silver Apples and Contact

If you thought Suicide and the Velvet Underground were ahead of their time, check out the Silver Apples, a late 1960s experimental psychedelic electronic band hailing from New York. Consisting of Simeon and Danny Taylor, the duo got their name from a WB Yeats poem, The song of the Wandering Aengus (‘The silver apples of the moon’). Wikipedia think they anticipated not only experimental electronic music and krautrock, but also dance and indie rock music of the 1990s.

Their first self-titled album was released in 1968, followed a year later by Contact. The front cover depicted the band in a plane cockpit with a Pan Am sticker clearly visible. The back cover showed a plane crash with the band playing banjos in front of it. Pan Am were unhappy with the plane crash association and sued, causing the demise of the band and their record label.

The band were little heard of again until the late 1990s, when both albums were re-released, along with their third LP which was previously unissued. Silver Apples reformed, toured, released a few new albums and enjoyed some of the success they should had got first time round, until Simeon broke his neck in a road accident in 1998. Though he lived, he could never play quite the same again. Danny Taylor died in 2005.

Their first two albums can be bought collectively for under £3.