The first thing to establish about the debut is which one you are holding. The British album and the American album share a band, a year and eventually a title, and they do not share a tracklist — and the three famous singles are on the one most people have never seen.

The short version

Island, catalogue ILP 961, released on 8 December 1967 in mono, in a gatefold sleeve designed by Chris Wood, the band’s own wind player. Cut at Olympic Studios in London with Jimmy Miller producing and Eddie Kramer engineering. Ten tracks, five a side. It reached number 16 in Britain and number 88 in the United States. The line-up is Steve Winwood, Dave Mason, Chris Wood and Jim Capaldi.

Two albums under one name, and the singles are on the other one

The American edition came out on United Artists under the title Heaven Is in Your Mind, resequenced, with two of Mason’s songs dropped and four tracks added: the singles ‘Paper Sun’ and ‘Hole in My Shoe’, the latter’s B-side ‘Smiling Phases’, and a Capaldi and Winwood song called ‘We’re A Fade, You Missed This’. That makes twelve tracks against the British ten. It was later retitled Mr. Fantasy to match. None of those four is on the British album at all. Anyone writing about this record from an American pressing is describing a different, longer and poppier object than the one Island released, and the two have been confused for nearly sixty years.

The sound

Sitar-flecked, cottage-written English psychedelia. All four men sing and all four play more than one instrument: Winwood takes organ, guitar, bass, piano and harpsichord, Mason adds Mellotron, sitar and tambura to the guitars, Wood covers flute, saxophone and organ, Capaldi drums and sings. The songs are short, the arrangements are crowded with colour, and the writing splits two ways — Mason’s own songs on one side and, on the other, various combinations of the remaining three, including one credited to Capaldi alone and one to Capaldi and Winwood. It is a division that would break the band twice inside a year.

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The songs

‘Dear Mr. Fantasy’ closes the first side at five minutes thirty-four, the longest thing here and the song the album takes its name from. ‘Heaven Is in Your Mind’ opens the record at a little over four minutes. ‘Giving To You’, which closes the album at a little over four minutes, is the one instrumental, and the only track credited to all four members. The times here follow the mono pressing; the stereo one prints every track a few seconds longer. Mason wrote three songs on his own here: ‘House For Everyone’, ‘Utterly Simple’ and ‘Hope I Never Find Me There’ — and the last two are exactly the pair the American edition removed.

Reception and legacy

Number 16 in Britain and number 88 in America, with no certification documented. Rolling Stone, reviewing it in April 1968, called it one of the best from any contemporary group and singled out Winwood’s singing. In 1999 the album was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame, and Colin Larkin placed it at 517 in his All Time Top 1000 Albums. Mason left the band shortly after it came out, the first of two departures inside twelve months, and the pattern of a group forming and re-forming around Winwood was set from the beginning.

The verdict

This is the psychedelic Traffic, and it is a good deal stranger than the band’s later reputation suggests: a sitar, a harpsichord, a Mellotron and a flute inside ten songs that rarely pass four minutes. What holds it together is that everybody plays everything, so the arrangements never sit still. Come to it after the 1970 album if you are working backwards, and make sure you are hearing the British sequence — the American one is a compilation with an album inside it.

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