Boeing Duveen, The Beautiful Soup

Boeing Duveen & the Beautiful Soup made just one single, the 1968 release "Jabberwock"/"Which Dreamed It" - but what a single it was. The A-side was one of the best and most unusual British psychedelic obscurities, with its zany, menacing setting of the Lewis Carroll tale to music. The melody was at once bouncy and ominous, the vocal like that of a mad storyteller, and the arrangement spruced up by weird laughter and screams in the background. The flip side was, in comparison, a pretty mundane piece of period raga-rock. "Jabberwock" has been reissued on several collector-oriented psychedelic compilations, as has to a lesser degree the flip side.

The story behind the real identity of Boeing Duveen is perhaps even stranger than the single itself. Boeing Duveen was Sam Hutt, known to the British '60s counterculture as a "rock & roll doctor" who administered to rock musicians and practiced homeopathy and holistic medicine, as well as dealing with drug casualties at festivals. Although he remained a doctor, he also continued doing music for decades, though switching to country & western sounds under the pseudonym Hank Wangford.