Children of Nuggets: Original Artyfacts from the Second Psychedelic Era, 1976–1996

Recorded
1976-1995
Released

Rhino’s codification and expansion of Lenny Kaye’s original Nuggets compilation across two extensive box sets gained a 2005 conclusion with another four CD effort, Children of Nuggets, a perhaps fitting coda in celebrating any number of bands from around the world during the rest of the 20th century that took inspiration in part or even in whole from Kaye’s legendary first survey of 60s garage and psych sounds. With its aim being a general worldwide portrait – if essentially Anglophilic, drawing on the US, UK and Australia and New Zealand, though with a few contenders from the strong Swedish and Finnish scene of the 1980s as well – Children of Nuggets touches on a huge swathe of the major bands and performers that could fit the general bill of some form of those sounds, though among its contestable absences are R.E.M. and the Spacemen 3 and Loop family trees among many others its creators acknowledged couldn’t fit the box as it stood. Even so, it’s absolutely an embarrassment of riches, from higher profile bands like the Cramps, the Bangles, the Church, Primal Scream and XTC (inevitably but rightfully appearing in their explicitly Nuggets-crazed Dukes of Stratosphear guise) to underground legends like the Mummies, the Fleshtones, the Pandoras and the Bevis Frond.

Ned Raggett