SUNDAY NIGHT AT LONDON ROUNDHOUSE

This was my first Nektar LP, I had it when I was 15 and I kind of regret it. I much more preferred Remember The Future, but the guys at the imports store kept saying this was their best and I bought it. Although the "live" moniker, only side one was a truly recorded show, the second side of the vinyl being made of studio recordings. That meant you only get two tracks over little more than 20 minutes of live music: Desolation Valley, from their second album A Tab In The Ocean, and A day in the life of a preacher featuring the birth of oh Willie from their third, Sounds Like This. Both are well played, but add very little to their studio counterparts.

Side two of the LP is a disappointment: three new studio songs that clearly were leftovers from previous ones, or something like that: Oop's (unindentified flying abstract), Mundetango and Summer Breeze. The best one for me was always the second, which at least has a good melody and a emotional guitar solo, while the last one sounds like a intro to a bigger song that never was. A real waste. I was very angry to waste my hard earned money on such a dud. And got rid of it as soon as I could.

So, if you want to get a "real" early live recording of Nektar, get the remastered double CD of 2011, which includes the whole original LP plus an extra disc of recordings from another show, recorded a few months later (this one with a much better and representative repertoire of Nektar at the period), a much better buy. The old LP or the single CD are for collectors and hardcore fans, only.