An acid-folk masterpiece finally revealed! When two worlds collide, here's where the legacy of Tim Hollier begins. Released on United Artists in 1968, this long overdue reissue is a definitive statement of the master genius who walked among giants yet remained mysteriously obscured by time's passage. Guest on the opening night of a Beckenham folk club run by his friend David Bowie, Hollier moved through the same London folk circuit that nurtured Paul Simon, Al Stewart, and Nick Drake. Yet while his contemporaries ascended to varying degrees of recognition, Hollier's singular vision remained hidden in the grooves of this extraordinary album, waiting over five decades for its proper resurrection.
Recorded with the assistance of Donovan arranger John Cameron, Message To A Harlequin captures that precise moment when English folk tradition dissolved into psychedelic consciousness. Cameron's arrangements, which had helped shape Donovan's transformation from folk troubadour to cosmic wanderer, here serve Hollier's more introspective, darker vision. This is not the sunshine superman's kaleidoscope garden, but rather the harlequin's twilight masquerade, where medieval imagery meets lysergic revelation.
The album exists in that rarefied space occupied by the truly visionary works of 1968, when the boundaries between folk, psychedelia, and art song completely dissolved. Hollier's songwriting reveals a poetic sensibility that matches the literary ambitions of his Beckenham friend Bowie's early work, the melodic sophistication of Simon's most adventurous compositions, and presages the haunting introspection that Nick Drake would perfect in the years to follow.
For several years, Hollier was a regular presence on London's folk club circuit, his performances remembered by those who witnessed them as something beyond the typical singer-songwriter fare of the era. Here was an artist operating on a different frequency, crafting songs that seemed to arrive from both ancient ballad traditions and future possibilities simultaneously.
That this album disappeared into obscurity while lesser works became touchstones of the psychedelic folk movement is one of those cruel mysteries of music history. But perhaps its time has finally come. In an era when every marginal psych-folk artifact has been excavated and reappraised, Message To A Harlequin emerges not as another curious footnote but as an essential text, a missing piece in the puzzle of British music's most creatively fertile period.
