Missus Beastly had formed in Herford in 1968 under the name Psychotic Reaction - lifted from the Count Five song - before settling on a name borrowed from a doll on a German children's television programme. Lutz Oldemeier on drums, Reinhard "Atzen" Wehmeyer on guitar and vocals, Wolfgang Nickel on keyboards, and Petja Hofman on bass had been playing the southern German circuit - Mainz, Munich - to crowds that responded to their unstructured, hour-long improvisations with something approaching devotion. They shared stages at Burg Waldeck with Guru Guru and Tangerine Dream, and appeared at the second Essener Pop & Blues Festival alongside Black Sabbath, Edgar Broughton Band and Kraftwerk. A band operating at the outer edge of what German rock was becoming.
The album was self-financed for 12,000 DM and pressed in 1,000 copies on the small CPM label - one of only three LPs the imprint ever released, the others being records by Limbus 3 and Checkpoint Charlie. The sessions drew in Hansi Fischer of Xhol Caravan on flute, and Chris Karrer, John Weinzierl and Dieter Serfas of Amon Düül II, who were passing through the studio. The material emerged in real time: Hofman's "Uncle Sam" and "Decision" were written on the spot, as was Wehmeyer's "Shame on You" and "Mean Woman," and the group miniature "XOX" - a short, distorted organ jam dissolving into backward spoken text by the Swiss poet Urban Gwerder. Tight, raw, and completely unrelated to anything the band played live.
What followed the release was one of the stranger episodes in the German underground's already labyrinthine history. A man named Henry C. Fromm - unknown to anyone in the band - presented himself as their manager, secretly re-pressed the album with a new cover and scrambled tracklist under the title Nara Asst Incense, and then, when no legal challenge came, recorded and released two further albums under the stolen Missus Beastly name with a completely different group of musicians. The real band, meanwhile, had dissolved under financial pressure by 1971.
Original copies of the debut now trade at around 1,000 euros. This Garden of Delights edition, pressed in the original red gatefold sleeve with a detailed insert, is the authorised restoration of a record that spent years circulating in someone else's shadow.
