Wallace always had a settled aversion towards baroque pop - especially when touted on a "psychedelic" forum.

Baroque and psych are antipole.

Lovesongs done to strings? Cummon now. Are you for real? When talking psych, syrup just ain't gonna cut the mustard. never.

Right now there are three different titles of the US definitive baroque-pop band ,New York R&R Ensemble, at the used record store. Origionals (I believe on the collectable Reprise label???) and priced at a ridiculous low $5 each. No one has touched them for on-going a year now.

Wallace won't have them either.

Long ago my friend was positing 5Th Dimension's lp "Magic Garden" being the closest they got to psychedelic. Well, the coverart looked promising - at least not the group picture you see on all the other releases. So I gave it a try.
Okay, side one has 2 or 3 tracks that are beyond their usual chuff but...sorry...not remotely psych.
..............
No way that easy-listening, cutesy,gentle,soothing la-la music (sometimes based on pop balladry)is going to be psych.
Got harpsichord & strings? - its baroque. Or sunshine pop.

I'd say -with possible exception of Ivy League and Mike Batt and two or three others - baroque was started as a US deal, not UK.
Burt Bacharach (spelt wrong, okay) and the big powers of Boettcher and Gary Usher. (Maybe even Kastenatz-Katz , but that is bubblegum.)

Sagittarius/ Millenium being the big ones. Van Dyke Parks.
Neon Philharmonic. Sunshine Co., Noel Harrison/Richard Harris.
And, of course, The Left Banke.

Wallace what would your top ten Baroque tracks be then ? just to give me a taste of your view
Plus which is your top Baroque album?

None Phil.

Well....some folk -for some reason which escapes Wallace - call the incredible first Procol Harum lp baroque.

(By the way - I just did a thread elsewhere on posters found in lps that are rare. Anyone ever get the big poster that came with the first Harum lp?)

The genre is traced to the United States and the United Kingdom. By early 1966, various groups began using baroque and classical instrumentation, described as a "baroque rock" movement by Gendron.[19] The Zombies' single "She's Not There" (1964) marked a starting point for British baroque pop. Stanley explains that the song "didn't feature any oboes but stuck out rather dramatically in 1964, the year of 'You Really Got Me' and 'Little Red Rooster'". "She's Not There" would inspire New York musician Michael Brown to form the Left Banke, whose song "Walk Away Renée" (1966) is considered by Stanley to be the first recognizable baroque pop single. "Baroque rock" was the label devised by the band's publicists and the music press. According to Richie Unterberger, "the sobriquet may have been ham-fisted, but certainly there were many Baroque elements in the Left Banke's pop—the stately arrangements, the brilliant use of keyboards and harpsichords, the soaring violins, and the beautiful group harmonies." Guerriri says that, in Britain, the song "bridged the passage from rock into psychedelica for numerous groups: the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the Zombies, [and] the Kinks."

Conversely, Decider wrote that the Beach Boys' album Pet Sounds (May 1966) "almost single-handedly created the idea of 'baroque pop.'"[20] The only track on the album that employs a harpsichord in conjunction with a string section is "God Only Knows".[21][nb 3] The Sydney Morning Herald deemed the song a particularly "exquisite" example of baroque pop,[22] whereas The Record's Jim Beckerman called it "baroque rock" in the same "retro instrumentation and elegant harmonies" vein as the Beatles' "Eleanor Rigby" (August 1966) and Procol Harum's "A Whiter Shade of Pale" (1967).[23] Gendron's "baroque rock" examples include "Walk Away Renée" with Spanky and Our Gang's "Sunday Will Never Be the Same" (1967), and the Stone Poneys' "Different Drum" (1967) – all of which used harpsichord and strings.[24][nb 4]

Stanley highlighted a strand of baroque pop he calls "English baroque", it being a combined simulacrum of the Zombies' album Odessey and Oracle (196 , Paul McCartney's contributions to The White Album (196 , Honeybus' single "I Can't Let Maggie Go" (196 , Scott Walker's chamber pop, and Crosby, Stills & Nash vocal harmonies.[wiki]

There you go then : another fuck-up McCartney's granny music is, in part, responsible for.