The first rock band to be signed to the Elektra label, they may have been called Love, but their Memphis-born frontman Arthur Lee was more straight-up punk than flower child.

Forever Changes was his band's third album and the second released by them in 1967. If, on first hearing, it sounded like a once-competent folk-rock outfit was suddenly playing as if there was no tomorrow, that was because Lee was writing like there was no tomorrow - literally. He later recalled: “When I did that album I thought I was going to die, man, or physically deteriorate... I just had a funny feeling.”

Prodigious drug consumption might not have helped Lee's paranoia, but it does explain the edginess of otherwise mellifluous acoustic tunes such as A House is Not a Motel and The Red Telephone, with its chilling opening lines: “Sitting on the hillside/ Watching all the people die/ I'll feel much better on the other side.”

You Set the Scene, pulled together from fragments of unrecorded songs and the final song on Forever Changes, was actually supposed to be Lee's farewell to the world, a nihilistic counterpoint to the album's most famous song, the instantly recognisable mariachi pop of Bryan Maclean's Alone Again Or.

Forty-one years after its creation, Forever Changes preserves, in notes, words and breathtaking energy, the precise moment that 1960s idealism started to sour.

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