The Pretty Things weren't making enough money transitioning their sound from the gritty,
The Rolling Stones-esque blues rock of their earlier recordings to the psychedelic progressive rock of their landmark
S.F. Sorrow, so to make some income and develop their progressive style, the Pretties cut a series of albums under the name Electric Banana for a music library that would own the rights to the recordings and sell them outright for complete use in films/TV/etc., meaning that while the recordings are not public domain, if you bought them from the De Wolfe library, you could use them any way you liked without continuously having to pay royalties to either the band or De Wolfe. Based on my understanding, only the first three albums released from 1967 to '69 actually had the entire Pretty Things band, while the subsequent
Hot Licks (1973) and
The Return of the Electric Banana (1978) only had some members of the Pretties' concurrent lineups.
The Complete De Wolfe Sessions compiles every one of these albums onto three CDs, making it probably the easiest way to get all of the essential material, as other compilations, under both the Electric Banana and Pretty Things names, don't have all of the essential songs from '67 to '69. Each of the original LPs was split up between a side of library songs and a side of instrumental versions of the same songs. This compilation follows the track listings of the original releases for the most part, except for moving the 1969 track "The Dark Theme" to the last track on the third disc, due to the fact that this track was not actually performed by the Pretty Things. Despite the general impression of this material as being superfluous due to the band recording it quickly for money to finance their landmark concept album
S.F. Sorrow, I personally found the Electric Banana recordings to be among the band's best progressive/psychedelic recordings and the '67 to '69 recordings are absolutely essential in showing the band's development into a prog group.
The recordings on the first Electric Banana show the band performing in more of a pop rock style reminiscent of the Merseybeat of the era, and it's from this selection that the most famous Electric Banana song appears, as the chauvinistic country rock tune "'Cause I'm a Man" appeared in the American cut of George A. Romero's 1978 zombie horror movie
Dawn of the Dead due to Romero preferring to score his film with stock library music compared to Italian producer Dario Argento preferring the original score of Italian prog band
Goblin. After the first record of library music, the Electric Banana recordings tend to be mostly in an experimental psychedelic prog style on the '68 and '69 recordings, with
Even More Electric Banana containing some standout acid rock via "Eagle's Son" and "Rave Up". The '67 to '69 recordings are easily among my favorite 1960s rock recordings, while the '73 and '78 recordings are less essential. They're not bad, but I didn't love them like I did the '60s Electric Banana recordings.
