Most of what we've seen of the Pretties here has come from their creative peak period of S.F. Sorrow and Parachute, their fourth and fifth albums. Here we wind all the way back to the beginning, featuring a largely different band, save for vocalist Phil May and guitarist Dick Taylor (who quit his own band after S.F. Sorrow and does not appear on Parachute).
The "Embryonic Stones", a label applied to all variant of the Rolling Stones prior to their first album, spun off at least two important groups. One was more by affiliation, which was the Kinks, who picked up early drummer Mick Avory. Meanwhile, the other was a direct offshoot, the Pretty Things, created by early bassist Dick (not Mick) Taylor, who really wanted to play lead guitar for his own band than bass in somebody else's.
The early Pretty Things are incredibly raw and about as bluesy as a band could get during the R&B fueled British Invasion years. Phil May sounds like he gargles regularly with razor blades to get that voice. They perform almost entirely covers and the few originals sound more like studio jam outtakes than anything else. Most of the songs here went nowhere, a fact of life that would plague almost every one of the band's albums, though their version of "Rosalyn" is a real standout track and earned inclusion in the Nuggets II box set alongside a couple of their more progressive cuts.
And boy did things get more psychedelic and progressive. Their next album, Get the Picture? shows inklings of a move away from blues purity, while the third album, Emotions, is a flawed document of uncertain psych with a grating horn section, yet all the elements were in place to unleash S.F. Sorrow the following year. In the midst of all of this they were releasing albums under the pseudonym "Electric Banana" as soundtrack music for various low-budget and/or adult films. A band's gotta eat, you know.
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