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Jo-Ann Greene
The Nektar reissues keep coming! Regular readers will already be familiar with the fabulous sequence of remastered repackages unleashed by Eclectic over the last few months. Now, Sunday Night At The London Roundhouse arrives to remind us of the band at its absolute peak. Recorded at the most legendary of London venues, a disused railroad building that had more recently seen service as a gin warehouse, Sunday Night was recorded in November 1973, just as Nektar were preparing to celebrate the release of their masterpiece, Remember The Future .
Excerpts from the show were released the following year in Germany only; however, the original Sunday Night At The London Roundhouse features just two tracks from the show itself (''Desolation Valley'' and a harshly edited ''A Day In The Life Of A Preacher''), with the remainder of the LP consisting of live-in-the-studio material from a few months later. This new package eschews those latter cuts but more than compensates by restoring the entire Roundhouse show, spread across two CDs and remastered from the original 16-track tapes. The result is one of the best-sounding live albums of the age and one of the most atmospheric.
Another Roundhouse veteran, Deke Leonard, resurfaces this month, courtesy of his first solo album in, wait for it, 28 years. Freedom And Chains (Angel Air, offers up 16 tracks from the man who once helmed Man, with many of them tracing back deep into Leonard's past in search of songs he always intended doing something with but never got 'round to. One highlight, ''Tahitian Thunder,'' was cowritten with Sean Tyla; others reunite him with past co-conspirators such as Martin Ace and Keith Hodge. The result is an album of great songs, all carved firmly in the classic Leonard mold, and though his liner notes suggest he is confining his solo albums to once-every-quarter-century, Freedom And Chains is so good that we hope he may well relent.
Angel Air has another treat in store, as it serves up All I Ever Needed , a self-styled anthology that has a stab at tracing the career of Greg Ridley, ex-VIPs, Art, Spooky Tooth, and Humble Pie and a well-respected solo musician as well. (Ridley died in 2003.)
It's not an authoritative collection...