10 Unjustly Overlooked British Invasion Albums (1964–1966)

SO MANY artists in the tsunami of music from the U.K. that flooded America in the mid-'60s went on to make extraordinary albums over a long period of time that when it comes to compiling best-ever lists, the tendency is to zero in on the established classics: Revolver, Let It Bleed, The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society, Odessey and Oracle, Dusty in Memphis. And a number of artists with shorter track records and a few hit singles — Manfred Mann, Georgie Fame, the Spencer Davis Group — are hardly mentioned at all, which is a shame. Sorting through the music of the British Invasion is navigating a labyrinth of neglected and underappreciated LPs, a task made all the more complex because the creative coordination between English and American record labels was so haphazard. There are albums that didn't exist at all in one territory or the other, or were radically reconfigured, edited, retitled, cobbled together from the original LP tracks plus stray EP and 45 sides, with different artwork slapped on. And some early albums just got overshadowed by later ones.