I had a surprisingly similar journey. My mum had a reel to reel 4 track player and had later period Beatles on there - I was totally fascinated by Strawberry Fields at the age of 8 or 9 in the late 70s and around the same time I remember hearing Itchicoo Park on Ed Stewpot's radio show or something and being transported by those phased drums. I had two older brothers who had various 'best ofs' of UK 60s bands (Cream, Who, Stones, Nice, Kinks etc) and I always liked the stuff from around '67/8 the most as it just seemed to go a bit mad and I couldn't work out why. From that point I was hooked and Piper was a massive revelation, bought at WH Smiths for £2.99 on the Fame label. I then found out this weird period of music was called psychedelic, the Choc Soup comps arrived as did the Acid Trip book and then Rubbles started coming and I was hooked and still am.

I like a lot of other styles and eras of music too, but this brief period of UK psych will always be my favourite

Glad to see there's nothing off-colour since I last visited.

With reference to the psychedelic era, I just noticed an excellent posting on Mixcloud of what I assume was a radio programme from 2014 which is three hours of 'pop, psychedelia and MOR'. It's definitely worth a listen https://www.mixcloud.com/AJRadio/20140111-steve-james-the-velvet-vortex-solid-gold-gem-am-saturday-11-january-2014/