The Creation - Action Painting

Pitchfork 87

The Creation are the definition of a cult band. They only existed for a brief spell—formed in 1966, fell apart in 1968— but during those months, they bore a sound that could’ve made them stars. Adding to the Creation’s mystique is the fact that they weren’t widely heard at the time. In their native Britain, they eked out only one hit, “Painter Man,” which scraped the Top 40 at No. 36. But that’s better than they managed in the U.S., where they essentially didn't exist; their four singles stiffed and the haphazard 1967 LP We Are Paintermen never even materialized in America.

Eurodisco outfit Boney M took their cover “Painter Man” into the UK Top 10 in 1979, but that had little to do with the cult of the Creation that was already well underway. The first true flowering of Creation awareness arrived in 1978, when the Jam conspicuously framed a Creation 45—“Biff Bang Pow,” the flipside of “Painter Man”—in their collage of inspiration and self-celebration in the inner sleeve for All Mod Cons. By the early ’80s, Television Personalities were covering their songs and the band’s chief advocate Alan McGee formed a label called Creation and named his indie band after “Biff Bang Pow.” Fan devotion doesn’t come much clearer than that.

By that point, Edsel released How Does It Feel To Feel, the first in a series of Creation compilations created for British Invasion, freakbeat and psych collectors. Many similar collections have appeared over the last three decades, but Numero’s new double-disc Action Painting is the first Creation compilation designed to appeal to listeners who might not already know them. It’s for people who may be aware of the band through the indelible impression “Makin' Time” made in Wes Anderson’s 1998 film Rushmore, or perhaps Ride’s cover of “How Does It Feel To Feel” in 1994, or maybe they just trust Numero’s curation of the forgotten corners of our musical past.

Action Painting certainly contains its own collector bait—the first disc includes remasters of the band’s original mono mixes supervised by their producer Shel Talmy, while the second contains all the previously un-reissued early sides the group cut as the Mark Four along with new stereo mixes—but its value is in presenting the work of this extraordinary band in an easily digestible fashion. The sequencing of Action Painting gives their short, turbulent life some coherence, presenting a narrative where the group keeps kicking against the pricks of their time.

For outsiders, Shel Talmy may provide the best gateway to the Creation. Talmy produced the earliest hits of the Kinks and the Who (he’s responsible for the proto-metal blast of “You Really Got Me” and the sneering defiance of “My Generation”) and the Creation benefitted from his blunt touch. On his productions, Talmy ratcheted up the violent pop-art of the Who when they were at the peak of their mod swagger, a move that was only fitting for a band who seemed to exist in an eternal now, simultaneously hoovering up ideas from R&B-besotted mods and mind-bending psychedelia. In that sense, the Creation sometimes flirted with the subversion of the Move, but where Roy Wood often indulged in irony, the Creation were sincere, never raising an arched eyebrow when conjuring waves of noise and grounding their whimsy with truly nasty, gnarled guitar riffs.

The creation existed in a hot house between mod and psychedelia, ranging between the fevered stomp of the former and the mind-warping experimentation of the latter. Listen to “Sylvette,” one of their earliest numbers: it’s essentially a rewrite of Eddie Holland’s “Leaving Here”—notably covered by the Who on their 1965 debut My Generation—but the Creation feels coiled and lethal, as if they were deliberately keeping their full power in check. One of their chief attributes is that they sounded almost vicious.

Innovation never played into the Creation’s legacy. Guitarist Eddie Phillips sawed a violin bow across his six strings, a move Jimmy Page would steal, but the band embodied their time more than transcended it. The feeling that the band was always on the cusp of a breakthrough is what makes them exciting to this day. Particularly in the mono mixes that comprise disc one, they are vibrant and alive, sometimes hinting at the clean lines and big beat of mod, but usually sounding like the bold explosion of pop art. It doesn’t pull you into a cerebral undercurrent the way the best psychedelia does, it just detonates. “Biff Bang Pow” takes its name from comic art—the title suggests the hyper-stylized Batman series of 1966—and it rampages like the Who on a bender and it never makes a play for the head. Even “How Does It Feel To Feel”—a churning circle that suggests psychedelic obsession—pushes brawn over brain.

The Creation arrived just as the British Invasion shook off regimented R&B influences, then they departed just as rock started to get deeper and weirder. Certainly, a band that was pushing wailing organs and keening guitars could’ve survived the prog rock era, but that early lack of success pushed the band into a series of personnel upheavals, eventually dooming the band. Yet, their brief, blazing life is also why they remain captivating: they lived minute to minute, pushing out their best ideas because it was likely they’d never survive to another seven inch. Action Painting reflects this urgency, particularly as the singles pile up one after another on the first disc. Here, the Creation often recall their peers—they’re as vicious as the Who, clever as the Kinks, as self-aware as the Move—but they seem utterly original, a band with the ideas, sound and songs for the big time, but one that never caught the right break. They are blessed and cursed by existing for a flash.