Far Out There Character Soundtrack: Aunt Domino

WHAT? A soundtrack for Aunt Domino? That one weird side character who’s only appeared in, like, six pages so far? Why the crap does SHE get a character soundtrack? Well, I’m not gonna lie, there are still other characters with MUCH greater relevance who could have come next. In fact, I’d actually started writing the blog for one of them already, when I realized something: my birthday was coming up! And you know what? I decided I deserved a little present to myself, and switched gears to Aunt Domino instead. She’s already the single most indulgent entry on my entire soundtrack list, seeing as how I literally invented the character as an excuse to justify a playlist I’d already made. …okay, actually that’s overstating it a bit. I knew I needed some more Nitpicker characters outside of the ones we’d been seeing all these years, and decided to try compiling a set of songs first then creating a character inspired by the music. I think it worked out pretty darn well, personally. Aunt Domino was already shaping up to a lot of fun to work with right before the hiatus hit, and I’m sure I’ll continue to get use out of her as a recurring gag character in the future. And get this, SHE ISN’T EVEN THE ONLY NEW CHARACTER I CREATED THIS WAY. You have no idea what surprises are in store once regular updates resume!

But just what IS this soundtrack I made? What kind of music could possibly inspire a character as fractured and crazy and shrill as Aunt Domino? Why, Psychedelic Music, of course! AAAaaand immediately those of you with good memory are groaning, because we’ve already HAD two wannabe hippies who listen to psychedelic rock. Why the crap would we need a third? Well… because I like it and I wanted to, obviously. I DID say this was indulgent, didn’t I? But seriously, these have all been very specific strands of a very complex and varied trend. Trigger’s soundtrack is full of big, power chord-heavy, sing-along anthems, while Skye’s is a showcase for West Coast, jam band festival rock. Aunt Domino, on the other hand, is all about whimsical British pop-sych singles. There was a very, very, VERY specific brand of acid-drenched twee pop that blew up for a year or so around London, a melding of flashy pop art hipness and childish fairytale escapism that never truly caught on in other regions. Even where it was big, this kind of hallucinogenic storybook music was out of fashion after a year or two, giving way to more “grown up” sounds like prog and heavy metal. But I still love this stuff to death. I’ll restrain myself from going on a full rant about how it was the first genre I ever truly explored and discovered new things about, and instead just gush about how much I enjoy the paradoxical union of avant garde strangeness with pop music conciseness, all wrapped up in a paisley bow of childish regression. And really, what else would a scatterbrained, childish person like Aunt Domino listen to?

You really can’t talk about this sub-genre without focusing on Pink Floyd and Syd Barrett. Before going on to all those stately Arena Prog albums, Pink Floyd was a virtually unrecognizable singles band fronted by rock’s most legendary acid casualty. The Floyd are represented here by their first two singles – “Arnold Layne” and “See Emily Play” – as well as the closer of their debut album, “Bike.” All three of these songs perfectly set the template for this soundtrack: punchy and effortlessly catchy while somehow not conforming to any recognizable pop song structure and repeatedly slipping into absolute sonic anarchy. And with “Bike” especially, the lyrics are a maddening jumble of Alice in Wonderland-esque nonsense, fitting together even more precariously than the music does. A whole wave of pop psyche bands based their entire sound and image on these songs, and we’re going to hear from SEVERAL of them later on. Heck, even Aunt Domino herself is literally named after a pair of Syd Barrett compositions. Not Pink Floyd songs, mind you, but the later solo songs “Gigilo Aunt” and “Dominoes.” The influence runs deep.

Indeed, we have two more Syd Barrett solo songs, from after he’d flamed out too hard to continue in Pink Floyd, but wasn’t QUITE washed out of the music industry entirely yet. Not the two that got Voltron-ed together to make Aunt Domino’s name, though. The first, “No Good Trying” is arguably the darkest track of this whole soundtrack, and one of the most chaotic. The song boast several members of Soft Machine on backing, and despite being no strangers to weird, trippy music (their “Lullabye Letter” was actually in the running for inclusion here) even they struggle to keep up with Barrett here. And that’s not because the song is that unconventionally structured, either, but rather because Barrett was too far gone to keep a regular, steady rhythm. For a genre that so often praised the innocent virtues of retreating from reality into madness, its chief innovator doesn’t make actually living it out sound very appealing. Less chaotic, though arguably more spooky, is “Golden Hair,” Barrett’s adaptation of a James Joyce poem. It’s possibly the most musically simplistic thing on this entire playlist: a simple, repeating, almost-folksy melody surrounded by eerie atmospherics. It’s one of the best glimpses of what Syd Barrett was still capable of in the rare instances he could be focused, and brief moment of (relative) clarity in the madness that is this playlist. After all, part of the joke with Aunt Domino is how she’ll throw in one random bit on insight amid all the jabbering goofiness. We can’t go the entire playlist without representing it here!

Moving away from Pink Floyd to bands trying desperately to sound like them, we’ve got a nice cross-section of all the big British psychedelic bands of the era. You can’t have ‘60s British rock without mentioning The Beatles somewhere, and they set the fairytale tone quite explicitly with “Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds.” Hitting that same note even harder is “Hole In My Shoe” by Traffic, which goes so far as to have a little girl performing a blatant Alice In Wonderland knockoff spoken word section. Exemplifying that romanticizing of insanity I mentioned earlier, we have “Madman Running Through The Fields” by Dantalion’s Chariot, which is actually one of the most driving, enthusiastic songs on the whole soundtrack. By contrast, “Defecting Grey” by The Pretty Things is arguably the most convoluted, with around half a dozen different songs’ worth of melodies crashing into each other without any warning. Strictly in musical terms, I think “Defecting Grey” is probably the single best representation of Aunt Domino’s scattershot mental state: going literally EVERYWHERE with absolutely no breaks or warning. More musically straightforward, but also more egregiously trendy in it’s trippiness, is “Pictures of Matchstick Men” by Status Quo… ironically, the Technicolor EXCEPTION to a multi-decade career of denim-clad boogie woogie.

And then we have the only non-pink Floyd artist to appear more than once on this soundtrack: Kaleidoscope. I’ve mentioned before that they specific strand of British psychedelia on display here is notably different from its American counterpart, and this might be the best way to illustrate the differences in style and sound. Both Kaleidoscopes were not only psychedelic bands, but drew from a distinctively folksier foundation than your standard 60s rock band. However, the US Kaleidoscope ran their sound through extra layers of Country music and also indian ragas, resulting in a West Coast rock sound like a jugband Jefferson Airplane. OUR Kaleidoscope, on the other hand, are just so ding dang ENGLISH that their electrified folk comes across as fantastical and twee rather than the earthy, snarky mood of their cousins across the pond. “(Further reflections) In The Room Of Percussion” is the more Barrett-ish of the two songs, a dainty pastoral folk melody amped up with electric guitars, a juuuuuuust enough of a warped arrangement to become disorienting in ways that are hard to explain. Oh, and more Lewis Carroll imagery, can’t leave that out. The second track, “Flight From Ashiya” is probably the closes the Brit Kaleidoscope comes the their cousins in the colonies, with weird raga guitar and a less fantastical narrative about a plane crash (look up the American band’s “Keep Your Mind Open” for comparison). But even there, the heart of it all is still a quaint-sounding folk melody that most grit & attitude obsessed US bands would never allow themselves to indulge in.

And having said that, let’s talk about some American bands! Yes, despite all my ranting about this being a quintessentially British sub-genre, at least a few Yanks bucked their surrounding trends long enough to slip onto Aunt Domino’s soundtrack. In fact, they’re even both West Coast bands, despite that being the haven of the very Grateful Dead festival rock that this soundtrack is supposedly the antithesis of! First up, we have Spirit’s “Uncle Jack,” a wistful ode to a weirdo that brings to mind the UK’s penchant for character study songs (and odes to crazy folk). Even the vocals are atypically high and youthful for a Spirit song, further evoking the whole “nostalgia for childhood” vibe. And yet, at the same time, “Uncle Jack” also boasts a big, rumble bass line and wall of fat guitar fuzz that sound more like Steppenwolf than Syd Barrett. But in a weird… well, weird-ER way, that stylistic mismatch just makes it all the better a fir for Aunt Domino. Far better known is the other American track: “Eight Miles High” by The Byrds. In between codifying Folk Rock and being early pioneers of Country Rock, The Byrds dipped into some far spacier sounds than logic probably suggests they should have been capable of. “Eight Miles High” in particular seems to emanate from another planet, to the point that one could easily imagine early Pink Floyd mashing it into a medley with “Astronomy Domine” or “Interstellar Overdrive.” Prime musical accompaniment for an obvious space case.

But, of course, I can’t allow an explicitly 60s-based soundtrack to JUST be 60s-based. We gotta have a smattering of modern retro/revivalist acts, because ANY musical trend that was popular more than twenty years ago has to have tribute acts, it’s some kind of law. Actually, as I write this in 2020, most of the “modern” acts included here are more than old enough to qualify as some kind of “vintage” themselves, largely hailing from the 80s Paisley Underground-era. Also, since we’re talking about artists already willfully out of touch with the dominant trends of the day, this batch of artists are far less UK-dominated, though there are still a few Brits on hand. Early 90s duo Vibrasonic provide “Kingsley J,” which probably does a better job of evoking the pop-friendly side of Syd Barrett than any of the actual Pink Floyd’s latter attempts at the same. Quite the shame, then, that nobody’s heard of them. Rather better known is The Dukes of Stratosphear, who contribute “25 O’Clock,” though that’s cheating a bit as “The Dukes” were actually a side-project of XTC. America crops up again with Plasticland’s “Mink Dress,” a song that sounds as much like Rick Wright (Pink Floyd’s keyboardist) as “Kingsley J” does Syd Barrett. Australia’s Tyrnaround provides “Hello or Goodbye;” less explicitly Barrett-esque and more generalized cross-section of all psychedelia, it says a lot about the rest of this soundtrack that this one feels like one of the more straightforward songs. In any other context, the multiple shifts in tempo and melody might come across as disorienting, but “Hello or Goodbye” has the misfortune of coexisting with the likes of Jennifer Gentle’s “Nothing Makes Sense.” The most recent song on this soundtrack, Italy’s Jennifer Gentle is straight up named after a Syd Barrett lyric, so it’s hardly surprising that “Nothing Makes Sense” evokes the most erratic, nonsensical side of Barrett’s songwriting. I said before that “Defecting Grey” is probably the best depiction of what it’s like to be inside Aunt Domino’s head, but “Nothing Makes Sense” is probably what being stuck in a room with her for an hour feels like. This one song sounds like an entire album put in a blender and compressed into four and a half minutes, with the energy cranked up to fifty and the vocals gulping down a giant tank of helium. I like this stuff, and even I have to be in the right mood to not find it annoying. People who aren’t in the same headspace as me are pretty much assured to get lost and confused, which is pretty much EXACTLY the Aunt Domino experience. Alas, I must also confess that I’ve broken the “at least one Japanese artist” streak. Not that there aren’t psychedelic revivalist acts in Japan, but if any of them are doing the Syd Barrett shtick, I haven’t heard of them yet.

And speaking of unknowns, I’ve held back on one more vintage 60s track, just to end this blog on a mysterious note. Tucked away around the middle of the soundtrack is “Dogs in Baskets” by Geranium Pond, a nice middle ground between that fractured fairytale sound I keep talking about here and a proto-ELO sound with lots of cello and the like. And nobody seems to know who recorded it. I mean, it’s relatively well documented who the London band Geranium Pond were, but in the typical weirdness that was the 69s music industry, that band playing live was totally unconnected to whoever was in the studio recording “Dogs in Baskets.” Somebody in management just seems to have though it’d make a good fit and convinced the band to lend their name to the record, which was all for naught since it doesn’t seem to have actually been officially released until rarities compilations became a thing. And by that point, anyone with any knowledge of “Dogs in Baskets” ACTUAL performers seems to have fallen off the face of the Earth. So now it’s just this inexplicable oddity, with no known history or explanation, and that ABSOLUTELY sums up Aunt Domino.

(Okay, this particular blog post was a present to myself in more ways than one. Not only was it all the more fun to write up, but it actually turned out to be the easiest YouTube playlist to compile in AGES. Sixties Pop is really one of the best eras to go to YouTube for. There’s enough of an established collector’s scene for SOMEBODY to have everything, enough of a preservationist mindset for them to actually do so, and most of it is obscure enough for the copyright bots to leave it alone. Heck, I was even able to find a well-known studio recording by The Beatles with minimal fuss! Admittedly, it’s a clip from Yellow Submarine with Spanish lyrics, but they’re in a column on the side of the picture rather than obstructing any of the animation. That’s another thing: this is one of those genres where the visual element really adds a lot to the audio, and I was hoping to find a decent selection Swinging London live TV appearances for these, but alas most of these bands never made it in front of a camera, at least not for the songs I wanted. One of the few aggravating moments I DID encounter was looking for Status Quo performing “Pictures of Matchstick Men” on Top of the Pops. Technically, multiple copies of the appearance are on YouTube, but everything I found seemed to either be terrible quality or had the Stereo version of the song dubbed over. See, Mono was still a going concern in the late 60s, and often times the Stereo and Mono mixes of songs could turn out weirdly different. In the case of “Matchstick Men,” that means the Stereo mix inexplicably missing the distinctive wah wah power chords that help give it it’s period charm. I chose to believe whoever mixed that version was the same genius who cut the violin out of the live video of Kate Bush’s “Violin.” I’m also a bit annoyed by the clips I was able to find of “Eight Miles High,” as there doesn’t seem to be any video of them performing the song while Gene Clarke was still in the band. Every clip I could find just has David Crosby and Roger McGuinn acting like they’re the only vocalists. Speaking of membership changes, the video for Pink Floyd’s “Bike” is a bit on an odd one as well, not the least bit because it’s not really even a “performance” so much as the band doing a weird silent film routine for a Belgian TV special. But while I think Syd Barrett was still officially a band member at the time, he’s nowhere in the video, with David Gilmour acting like the only guitarist. Barrett’s on hand for the other two Floyd songs, though, including probably the single lowest-quality video I’ve ever used in one of these: “See Emily Play” on Top of the Pops. The thing is, old BBC TV history is riddled with holes of lost material, and Pink Floyd’s appearances were always considered to be among them, so even though the surviving tape pretty much looks like it was run through a coffee grinder, the chance to get ANY footage of a still-functioning Syd Barrett was too good to pass up. Besides, with all the psychedelic light shows that would NORMALLY bathe Pink Floyd in a live setting, some tape distortion honestly isn’t THAT out of the ordinary.)

Aunt Domino's YouTube Playlist