Andy Partridge of XTC once described record fairs, and more specifically record collectors, as “smelling of broken biscuits”. Butlocating a mint-condition second West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band album or a bootleg of Sonic Youth rehearsing is a difficult job that

someone has to do. Be thankful, then, to Phil McMullen and Nick Saloman, publishers of the venerable British fanzine Ptolemaic Terrascope, who sort through the bottom of the biscuit barrel for you, so that you don’t have to have to get covered in unsightly crumbs. Next weekend the magazine brings Terrastock, the third annual assembly of the undeservedly obscure artists they’ve championed for the last decade, to Britain for the first time. The hallowed halls of the University of London Union should be shaken to their foundations by three days and nights of performances from 32 grizzled 1960s veterans and earnest contemporary drone rockers.

Described by Wire magazine as “a psychedelic three-ring circus”, Terrastock began life in New Jersey in 1987, as a benefit to clear Terrascope’s debts. “If anything we’re in a worse state now!” says McMullen. “Terrastock 1 lost money because we had to make an unexpected and very large payment to the City of Providence fire department at the last moment – I’d rather not go into it, to be honest.” But the three-day festival had already gathered an unstoppable momentum, unifying separate stratums of the international underground into a hermetic whole. Forgotten American electronic pioneers the Silver Apples were coaxed out of retirement by Terrastock, later playing alongside Blur at last year’s Meltdown festival on London’s South Bank, while some more modern explorers of musical extremities, Bardo Pond and Windy & Carl, shared space with a former Julie Burchill beau and Portobello Road revolutionary, Mick Farren, who scared young children with a revivified version of his 1960s proto-punk group the Deviants.

American noise addicts drove from as far away as Alaska to pay homage, and a rematch the following year in San Francisco became inevitable. “It was nothing less than a gathering of true believers,” wrote one local reviewer in a piece entitled How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Drone, “somehow combining the retro-obsessed nerdiness of a Star Trek Convention with the most open-minded and avant-garde elements of the indie-rock underground, all gathered together under the genre-spanning umbrella of ‘psychedelia’.”

The Bevis Frond, the band fronted by Terrascope’s 46-year-old co-publisher, Nick Saloman, typify Terrastock’s eclectic aesthetic. Saloman’s band, and the record label Woronzow that he runs with his bassist, Adrian Shaw, enjoy considerable international success with a negligible press profile. Indeed, you’re most likely to remember gentle giant Saloman via his fantastic performance in the 1989 series of Richard Whiteley’s TV quiz Countdown. “I won it six times in a row but I fell apart in the semifinals and tried to rewrite the dictionary,” he confesses, drinking tea in his back garden, but still clearly wracked with guilt and shame. In 1984 Saloman was touring the fairs as a second-hand record dealer, but was secretly one of the

finest guitarists, if not in the entire world, then certainly in the Walthamstow area. An insurance payout after a motorcycle accident funded the Bevis Frond’s first album of sprawling, synapse-shredding acid rock, and 17 albums down the line he’s a veritable cult figure. Saloman’s still a refreshingly unashamed music fan, and the respect accorded him enables him to fulfil a string of childhood fantasies: recording with Arthur Lee of Love, playing guitar for Woodstock hero Country Joe of Country Joe and the Fish at his last British show, and once giving the late Randy California of Spirit a lift to West Byfleet in a green Ford Escort.

Saloman went into partnership alongside long-term fanzine contributor McMullen in 1989, to publish the Ptolemaic Terrascope. A recent issue featured the Christian pop star Cliff Richard discussing the early British rock scene alongside an interview with Aleister Crowley acolyte David Tibet, of shadowy English mystics Current 93. “That pretty much sums up the Terrascopic world-view,” says McMullen proudly. “Two extremes whose musical orbits cross paths even less often than that of the moon and the sun, but who have both made equally valid contributions to the musical enjoyment of a great many people down the years.”

Sadly Sir Cliff won’t be getting on stage to sing Mistletoe and Wine in between sets from My Drug Hell, the Supreme Dicks and the Bevis Frond at ULU next weekend, but the festival isn’t without its surprises. The return to recording and performing of the 1960s folk singer Tom Rapp from Pearls Before Swine, who makes his belated British debut at Terrastock, is a coup for which McMullen can justly claim some credit, having tracked him down for the 1997 event and promised him an appreciative audience.

Bailing out of the music business in the mid-1970s to become a civil-rights lawyer, after his manager made off with $150,000, Rapp was unaware of the influence that his group has had on new psychedelic-folk acts such as Japan’s Ghost or softly spoken duo Damon & Naomi. Rapp relearned his old songs from tabulations on an internet fan site. The reaction to his 1997 return, after a 22-year hiatus, astonished him. “I had no idea there were any fans out there.

As far as I knew, all of Pearls Before Swine’s work existed only in the lost language of vinyl – it was as though I had recorded only in Latin or onto wax cylinders. I was amazed. I thought the fans would be my age, with tie-dyed walkers and paisley platform shoes, but the room was jammed with people who offered vociferous support.”

Despite the success of the last two Terrastock events, and an impressive bill that includes the UK debut of the Byrds-inflected Seattle group the Green Pajamas, two performances from the Silver Apples, and the overwhelming epic noise of Bardo Pond, Saloman is characteristically sceptical about the weekend. “I’m worried that some of the younger US bands will be hoping for a bit of coverage out of it, but I’ve a feeling that if there is any press it’ll all be, ‘Hey! Dust your kaftan off, man!’ ” And then he goes back into the house to paste me together a copy of the new Tom Rapp CD, A Journal of the Plague Year, which his label releases next month, and gets sticky-backed photo mounts stuck all over his fingers. Terrastock may be the ancient DIY music ethic in action, but there isn’t a kaftan in sight.