The Invaders - 1970 - Spacing Out

The Invaders
1970 
Spacing Out

01. It's Your Thing
02. Lost Time
03. Can't Get Next To You
04. The House That Jack Built
05. Look A Py Py
06. Bossa Blue
07. Spacing Out
08. Where We Are
09. Latin Lips
10. It's Your Thing Part 2

Bass – Stan Gilbert
Congas – Sturgis Griffin Jr.
Drums – Mike Stowe
Guitar – John Burch
Producer – Jean Paul Salvatori
Saxophone, Flute – Lloyd Williams
Trumpet – Ralph Richardson

Spacing Out (1970): The Funkiest UFO Landing That Never Got Reported

Picture this: it’s 1970, the world is busy arguing about Vietnam, bell-bottoms, and whether Hendrix is actually from another planet. Meanwhile, in a smoky basement studio in Georgetown, Guyana, a gang of teenagers who look like they just escaped a high-school prom committee decide to record the grooviest, greasiest, most blissfully unhinged funk album you’ve never heard of. They call themselves The Invaders, slap a flying-saucer cover on it, title it Spacing Out, and then, poof, vanish into the cosmos, leaving exactly 100 copies behind. That’s not an origin story; that’s a war crime against obscurity.

Fifty-five years later, this 36-minute Guyanese holy grail (reissued by Jazzman’s Holy Grail Series in 2019) still sounds like someone spiked James Brown’s orange juice with liquid sunshine and handed the controls to a Martian who’d only ever heard “Cold Sweat” through a transistor radio on Jupiter. It is, without hyperbole, the single most joyful funk record ever cut in the Caribbean, and possibly the only one that can make you grin so hard your face files for workers’ compensation.

The band? Seven teenagers plus one slightly older ringleader named Sammy Baksh who played everything that wasn’t nailed down. The lineup is basically a funk Voltron: two drummers (because one is never enough when you’re trying to start an interplanetary riot), bass, two guitars, organ, and a horn section that sounds like it learned arrangements by watching cartoons. They recorded it live in one room, no overdubs, no second takes, no adult supervision, and somehow everything locks so tight you could set your watch to it.

Track-by-track, it’s pure sugar-rush genius:

“Spacing Out” (the title cut) kicks the door down with a drum break so nasty it should come with a health warning. Then the bass slithers in like it’s late for its own wedding, and the horns start shouting “hey!” like they just spotted free beer. Three minutes of this and you’re legally required to dance or surrender your soul.

“Look a Py Py” is the one that broke the internet when hip-hop producers discovered it decades later. It’s built on a single descending guitar lick so addictive scientists have tried bottling it as a controlled substance. The organ bubbles, the horns do call-and-response like gossiping aunties, and the whole thing feels like the musical equivalent of laughing gas.

“Girl in the Hot Pants” – yes, they really went there – is sleazy in the most wholesome possible way. Imagine a 17-year-old trying to sound like a player while his mom is in the next room. The lyrics are basically “nice legs, wow,” repeated with the confidence of someone who’s never actually spoken to a girl. It’s adorable, it’s ridiculous, and it grooves so hard your furniture will file noise complaints.

By the time you hit “Loving You Is Simple” you realize these kids weren’t just talented; they were dangerously happy. It’s a straight-up soul ballad that somehow still has two drummers treating the quiet parts like a stealth mission. And the closer, “It’s Only Love,” ends the album on a note so sweet you’ll need a dentist appointment.

The humor is baked in at every level. The band name? The Invaders. The cover? A flying saucer beaming up a palm tree. The song titles? Straight out of a 14-year-old’s diary after three Coca-Colas. Even the recording engineer (probably some poor guy named Ken) sounds like he gave up halfway through and just let the kids run the asylum.

And yet… it’s perfect. Not perfect in a Steely Dan, 47-takes way. Perfect like a Polaroid of your best summer ever: slightly blurry, colors too bright, everyone laughing too loud, and you wouldn’t change a thing.

The Invaders broke up almost immediately after this. Most of them became accountants, teachers, or (rumor has it) one guy drives a taxi in Toronto. They never knew their one-and-only album would end up changing hands for $5,000, getting bootlegged by Italian funk nerds, and eventually resurrected on thick 180g vinyl with liner notes longer than the original session.

So here’s the final verdict, delivered with a straight face: Spacing Out is the best funk album ever recorded by a bunch of Guyanese teenagers pretending to be aliens while high on teenage hormones and Fanta. It makes the Meters sound restrained, Parliament sound serious, and every other funk band on Earth sound like they’re trying too hard.

Play it loud, dance like nobody’s watching (because in 1970 Georgetown, literally nobody was), and remember: somewhere out there, seven middle-aged grandpas are quietly smiling every time some DJ in Berlin or Tokyo loses their mind to a drum break they laid down when Nixon was still president.

Ten out of ten flying saucers. No notes. Just beams of pure joy.