Go Back In Time With This Rambling Track From English Folk Vet Mike Cooper

Mike Cooper_TroutSteel2
This June, Paradise of Bachelors will reissue the first three albums from English folk artist and experimental music icon Mike Cooper. Rolling Stones aficionados may remember Cooper as the man the Stones asked to join their ranks in the early 60’s — he declined, paving the way for Brian Jones to come on board.

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Paradise of Bachelors will offer Trout Steel (1970), Places I Know (1971), and The Machine Gun Co. with Mike Cooper (1972) on June 16. The latter two will be presented as a double album, as Cooper originally intended.

We’ve got one of the standout songs from Trout Steel for you to enjoy – the 11-minute-long acoustic ramble “I’ve Got Mine,” which is currently available on iTunes.

“I’m actually in Spain at the moment up the coast some way from where that song was written in the early 70s,” Cooper says when reached for comment. “I was very much into the works of the mystic sufi poets such as Rumi at that time and the lyric uses a lot of the same symbolism that they used. It was also the first song that we decided to let the musicians have a totally free field to improvise over the pulse – plus we experimented with some delay echo effects influenced by the (at the time) very early dub music.”

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