Toytown pop

Last updated

Toytown pop is a microgenre [1] of pop music which emerged in the 1960s. It became ubiquitous in the m usic charts in the years following 1967. At the height of psychedelia, an abundance of what music journalist Rob Chapman cites as "nursery-rhyme pop songs" appeared. The style is marked by the influence of LSD and psychedelia, as well as the work of authors such as Lewis Carroll, Edward Lear, C. S. Lewis, J. M. Barrie, Hilaire Belloc, Beatrix Potter, Charles Kingley, and Enid Blyton.

Contents

The genre contrasted with American artists who made music in response to the Vietnam War, which was not broadly the case in the United Kingdom.

History

Background

The post-World War II generation of baby boomers which reached its teens and twenties during the 1960s widely read authors such as Lewis Carroll, Edward Lear, C. S. Lewis, J. M. Barrie, Hilaire Belloc, Beatrix Potter, Charles Kingley, and Enid Blyton. [2] Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear were significant influences on late 1960s music, including on John Lennon of the Beatles and Syd Barrett of Pink Floyd. [2]

Lewis Carroll's influence had been constant in Great Britain since his Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass enjoyed a revival in popularity due to World War I. [2] Once the hallucinogenic drug LSD became widespread, references to the books found their way into numerous songs. [2] These included Jefferson Airplane's "White Rabbit," the Beatles' "I Am the Walrus," the Incredible String Band's "Alice Is a Long Time Gone" and "The Mad Hatter's Song," and many others. [2] Songs could also take influence from the Alice books not by way of direct references, but through their "dreamtime ambience and the startling jump cuts and lurches in tempo." [2]

Shortly before the dawn of English psychedelia, on 28 December 1966, Jonathan Miller's adaptation of Alice in Wonderland as a TV play was shown by the BBC. [3] [2] It had been in the planning for three years, and thus psychedelia was not an influence; nonetheless, "its hazy replications of the logic twists and warped perceptions of the LSD trip were unmistakable." [2]

Origins

At the height of psychedelia, an abundance of what Rob Chapman calls "nursery-rhyme pop songs" appeared. [2] The trend was begun by the Beatles' "Yellow Submarine," released as a single on 5 August 1966. [2]

The Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band , released on 26 May 1967, and Pink Floyd's The Piper at the Gates of Dawn , released on 4 August 1967, were highly influential to the course of British psychedelia, imbuing it with a character distinct from that of its American counterpart. [3] While the music of American artists such as the Doors and Jefferson Airplane responded to the Vietnam war, this was not broadly the case in the United Kingdom. [3] In the wake of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, numerous English groups took influence from the Beatles' "Yellow Submarine" and "Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds," which responded to LSD with a retreat into "nursery rhymes and doggerel." [3] This style of pop music became known to enthusiasts as toytown pop. [3]

Examples

Examples of toytown pop include Tomorrow's "Three Jolly Little Dwarves," World of Oz's "The Muffin Man," Cuppa T's "Miss Pinkerton," the Decision's "Constable Jones," and Consortium's "Colour Seargant Lillywhite." [4]

See also

References

  1. ↑ Rushbury, Ian (2023-01-24). "British ToyTown Pop Anyone? 'Climb Aboard My Roundabout' » PopMatters". www.popmatters.com. Retrieved 2025-12-05.
  2. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 Chapman 2015, pp. 499–520.
  3. 1 2 3 4 5 Hann, Michael (2017-06-01). "The rise of toytown pop". The Spectator. Retrieved 2025-12-05.
  4. ↑ Rekret, Paul (2017). Down With Childhood: Pop Music and the Crisis of Innocence. London: Repeater. ISBN   978-1-910924-50-1.

Bibliography

This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.