Long player: First true rock opera still stands up well

For the first half of the '60s, rock bands lived or died by the 7-inch single. By the end of the decade, the boundaries had been extended to the outer edges of the long player and beyond by acts brave or silly enough to think instant gratification no longer mattered.

Two products of 1967's astonishing season of creativity at London's Abbey Road Studios clicked with critics and public alike: The Beatles' Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band and Pink Floyd's Piper At The Gates Of Dawn set their respective makers on the path to greatness. A third album, arguably the most adventurous, failed to register anything more than the grudging respect of other artists and industry insiders.

The Pretty Things' SF Sorrow, released at the tail end of 1968, is widely accepted as the first true rock opera, preceding the Who's Tommy by six months. It charts the cradle-to-grave course of Sebastian F Sorrow, a man driven mad by both the ordinariness of his life and his turmoil on witnessing first-hand the horrors of war and the fiery death of his fiancee.

In retrospect, the band's dogged attempt to break free from its past as a moderately successful garage R&B unit and to rewrite the long-player formula seems especially bold, but context is everything.

Change was occurring in every facet of daily life and the spirit of the Summer of Love was at its zenith. The capabilities of the recording studio were being opened ever wider by the likes of George Martin and his Abbey Road team, which included in its number SF Sorrow producer Norman Smith.

The evidence of Smith's ambitious hand is everywhere on this psychedelic folk-blues oddity, his Martin-like tricks leaping strenuously from the stereo-mix version of the album in particular. But underneath lies a strange and wonderful collection of tunes that stands up well after all these years, noticeably devoid of a cash-in hit single.