Fat Mattress is the debut self-titled studio album by English rock band
Fat Mattress, released on 15 August 1969.
Background
Fat Mattress was formed in late-1968 by vocalist
Neil Landon and guitarist and vocalist
Noel Redding, who was then playing bass with the popular
psychedelic rock band
The Jimi Hendrix Experience.[1] Landon and Redding had already written a number of songs for Landon's cancelled solo project and, with the recruitment of bassist Jim Leverton and drummer Eric Dillon, completed writing and began recording their first material.[1] The self-titled debut was completed the next year, and was released in the United Kingdom by
Polydor Records on 15 August and in the United States by
Atco Records in October.[2] In promotion of the album, the band also released their debut single, "Magic Forest",[3][4] which reached number 11 in the Netherlands.[5]
Fat Mattress was later
reissued in 1992 by Sequel Records featuring five new songs, all of which were later included on the 2000 compilation album The Black Sheep of the Family: The Anthology (which also contained three more previously unreleased songs);[2]Castle Communications subsequently re-released the 15-track reissue on 5 March 1996 under the title One.[6] The album was reissued again on 29 June 2009 by
Esoteric Recordings with eight bonus tracks, all of which had already appeared on The Black Sheep of the Family anthology.[7][8]
The debut album by Fat Mattress was a minor commercial success, charting at number 134 on the American
Billboard 200 albums chart (then known as the Pop Albums chart).[9] The album was described, in a review for
allmusic, by critic Richie Unterberger as "passable, pleasant late-'60s psychedelia with a far lighter touch than the hard
bluesypsychedelic rock Redding played with Hendrix."[2] Unterberger went on to suggest that the album is "often like an amalgam of
the Byrds,
Buffalo Springfield,
Moby Grape, and
Love, with some passing nods to British psychedelia by
Traffic [...],
the Move, and the
Small Faces; there's even a bit of a
Monkees-go-spacy feel to 'I Don't Mind.'"[2]