Gomrath: The strange tale of the psychedelic masters buried for 50 years
In this modern age of music streaming, where you have seemingly every song ever recorded directly at your fingertips, it is easy to forget that there is still a wealth of musical discoveries to be made, sitting in dusty attics and basements, on old reel-to-reel tapes, cassettes, and scratchy acetate records. Every now and then, these forgotten recordings resurface, bringing incredible bands like Gomrath back into the sunlight after some 50 years.
Back in 2024, Jon Groocock’s Bright Carvings Records released Gomrath’s self-titled album, answering the prayers of a small niche of true psychedelic obsessives, and leaving the remainder of the rock and roll landscape with a plethora of unanswered questions. Who are Gomrath, and why on Earth has nobody heard this psychedelic masterpiece before? As it turns out, the answers lie in the unlikely setting of 1970s Wimbledon.
A little too leafy and suburban to fully immerse themselves in the liquid light show of London’s psychedelic landscape back in the 1960s, Wimbledon was never going to be the focal point of England’s psych scene, but that didn’t stop a small group of musical obsessives – headed up by brothers Adrian and Martin Long – from seeking out records by the likes of Cream, The Doors, or Jimi Hendrix.
Eventually, those many nights of blasting psychedelia out of their parents’ hi-fi culminated in the group starting their own band, and thus, Gomrath was born. Although they never harboured any desire to rival their musical heroes, the band began performing at various local spots, honing a reportedly magnificent live act that was fatefully captured on an obscure vinyl record back in 1971, recorded at Wimbledon’s King’s College School Pop concert.
Shortly thereafter, as many teenage bands do, Gomrath dissolved without much of a fuss; the entirety of their existence reduced to that lo-fi live recording and an acetate single recorded on the fly.
They were never ‘discovered’, the various home recordings the band had made were left to rot on reel-to-reel tapes, and that was that. Until, that is, Bright Carvings were able to track down Adrian Long from that King’s College record, in doing so uncovering the rest of Gomrath’s incredible material.
“It was amazing to us that anyone was in the least bit interested in these old tracks,” Martin Long shared in an interview with It’s Psychedelic Baby Magazine. Eventually, then, Gomrath’s debut album that never was finally found a widespread release, and it was certainly worth the wait. Not only does its hard rock and psych leaning still pack a punch over half a century later, but the band boast the kind of spontaneity that many mainstream psych bands of the era struggled to retain.
“Although, I suspect that we secretly hoped we would be ‘discovered,’ realistically we weren’t that interested in pushing the music or publishing it in any way,” Long shared of the band’s attitude at the time. “The recordings were for our own enjoyment.”
Now, though, those recordings stand as an incredible time capsule for the kind of psychedelic exploration and musical mastery that might have been occurring in every town and suburb across the nation back in the early 1970s, if only there were people there to listen.
Unfortunately, as Long shared, their fellow band members Roy Wiles and Paul Martin have since passed away, and Clive Rutledge, who rounded out Gomrath’s line-up, “has not been able to be contacted.”
However, the phrase ‘better late than never’ certainly comes to mind in the case of this once-lost psych rock masterpiece; a stark reminder of just how much musical wizardly, past and present, is still out there waiting to be uncovered.
