Music Sunday: The British Invasion Edition, slightly truncated

I've been doing some reading about the 1960s recently, and so I thought it might be nice, this Music Sunday, to revisit the British Invasion, with an emphasis on the bands who were not The Beatles or The Rolling Stones.

Not that there is anything wrong with either band. It's just that they have gotten plenty of time and exposure here in the months that I've been writing my Music Sunday posts. But there were plenty of other bands that also brought their music from the UK to the United States that those of us who were there at the time remember quite fondly.

Of course, there isn't enough time or space to share work from all of the British Invasion bands today, so I'm going to focus on some of the bands and songs that I particularly liked at the time and that I still like today.

Donovan came out of the British folk scene. One of his first songs was 1964's "Catch the Wind", in which he sounds remarkably like Bob Dylan:



A little later on, in 1966, Donovan produced one of the first of the "psychedelic" records unleashed onto the world. This was "Sunshine Superman":



Another early Invasion song was "You Really Got Me", by the Kinks, from 1964:



I'm not sure exactly what that is at the end of that video, but it is very, very sixties.

The Kinks followed up in 1965 with "A Well Respected Man", although listening to the song one can't help but get the feeling that this is not exactly what the members of the band were actually shooting for in their own lives. And that attitude would be very Sixties:



I like early promotional films for songs, like this one, from 1967, for the Troggs' song "Love is All Around". Who says that the music video didn't appear until the 1980s?



I had planned on sharing some songs from The Animals, one of my favorite British Invasion groups, but it seems that YouTube is having issues all of a sudden, and so that will have to wait for another Music Sunday.

Meanwhile, enjoy your day, and if you're in the US enjoy your day off tomorrow, if you get one, for the Presidential Inauguration and for Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday.