Freakbeat

Freakbeat is a subgenre of rock music centred on Swinging London in the mid-to-late 1960s, its name referring to hard-edged mod music characterised by a raw, intense, energetic and experimental sound bridging the rhythm and blues and beat music of the British Invasion with early psychedelia. The retrospective term was coined by English music journalist Phil Smee in 1984.

Freakbeat has stylistic origins in surf rock and functioned as the British response to garage rock. The music had links to the early UK underground and the peacock revolution, attracting audiences of mods, beatniks and early hippies. Freakbeat represents a point of contact between the music of the 1960s counterculture and that of the later punk movement in the 1970s, and has been described by Record Collector magazine as "more punk than punk itself". Many popular musicians have played in groups that later were described as freakbeat.