THE EUROPEAN TOUR 2011 - LIVE AT SHEPHERDS BUSH EMPIRE

LET ME SAY THIS FIRST .... I LOVE THIS BAND! .... and I'm still giving this 1 star!

I LOVE THIS BAND! ... But this.... this is awful.

Major mastering faults: why, why,why? ends after less than 2 mins mid-performance,mid-bar .. jolting into spoken intro for next track. There also 2 or 3 garbled 1/2 second glitches on both disks. Track order and starting points all over the place....... total mess

And sadly .. on the performance ...And the vox .... oh dear .... weak as hell and well out of tune in places. Sounds like a bad covers band.

Don't buy this! Please! Theres a few passable bits on this 2CD set (Nine Feet Underground is good .... and always is ..its my fave track from the back catalog)but most of these performances are NOT Caravan at their best - far from it. (Although Richardson's Viola is sublime as always.)

I know its a 'straight from the desk' recording ... but it shouldn't be this bad.

mastering faults, poor vocals, duff songs performed.... NO!

Avoid

If you're a completist - you are gonna buy this anyway.

If not - buy just about any other Caravan recording out there - it will be better than this.

I hate to bitch about a band I genuinely love - but this recording is legacy damaging stuff

Instead, go buy ALL their albums up to the mid-70's - those are gold dust ... thats my advice FOR THOSE FEW OF WHO DON'T ALREADY OWN THEM AND LOVE THEM ANYWAY!

I just read Matt-T's review on this very forum so let's start saying it one more time: technically speaking, this is a relatively bad bad work! Never has the tune "Why Why Why?" deserved a better title! 1:16 cut abruptely without any logical reason; on the track list from the back cover, you'll have to shift "Golf Girl" and "Smoking Gun", the latter coming first as track 4; a few short glitches will also test your ear here and there and finally, yes, Pye doesn't sing too good ... at times! It depends on the range used for the tune. But giving this album one star is maybe just the price of frustration! Because this concert is NOT a bad concert; in fact it is still impressive to hear them playing with such positive energy; kudoos to the rhythm section! The new man on drums, Mark Walker, does a solid job and Jim Leverton on bass is wailing with a contagious enthusiasm; both Jan Schelhaas on keyboards and Geoffrey Richardson provide us with great soloing, the former even emulating at times Dave Sinclair's classic organ sound (the one in family with Dave Stewart's and Mike Ratledge's). So let's face it relaxed: if you want to check what Caravan is doin' to date, you'll get the right answers here or in other of the live recordings from about the same period flourishing on the market (the entire Caravan at the Metropolis studios is uploaded on You Tube, 87 minutes in all, a shameless lack of moral when you think the DVD is officially marketed!). If you're new to the band, then it would be - like nearly always - better to check them chronologically, there are plenty of possibilities for you, from the super anniversary edition of "In the Land of Grey and Pink" to Japanese papersleeves or several compilations. So, taking into account those guys have been entertaining us in more than 40 years and globally still deliver the goods, make us smile or get relaxed, I honestly feel that a rating between two and three would be more appropriate and I'll go up to three, as two and a half are not featured here.

This Caravan live release sees Mark Walker take over as the band's live drummer - though co-founder Richard Coughlan was still officially a member of the band, he was suffering from ill health at the time and would pass away shortly before the release of the next album, Paradise Filter. By and large it draws its track list from the band's classic years, with only a small proportion of recent picks - as has largely been the case for Caravan live shows for the past few decades - but with material this good and performed this well it's hard to go wrong.

That said, the set comes perilously close to going wrong. The original issue of this was through Concert Live, who also were responsible for the recording. Concert Live's schtick is "instant live recording" - they take the soundboard feed and use it to knock out a live album right there on the spot, burning the first few CDs in time for punters at the concert to buy on their way out. This is a fun gimmick in theory, but in practice it means that there really isn't any time for any care and attention to be given to adjusting the mix or performing any of the other functions which can make a live recording sound better. In addition, it seems like their technology didn't work perfectly this time - other reviewers have reported glitches on the original CD issue of this live set, including one of the songs (Why? Why? Why?/And I Wish I Were Stoned) cutting out at 1:16.

As far as tracks being cut off, the latest rerelease of this live set as part of the Who Do You Think We Are? box corrects this, so perhaps a corrected standalone release is on the cards. Still, there's the odd bit of feedback and other technical glitches which are still here, and which largely seem to be artifacts of the way Concert Live's recording practices don't really leave much room for later corrections.

Interesting though it is to have Mark Walker playing on some of these tracks, the fact is that as far as the vast majority of this set goes, there's already plenty of better live recordings of the songs - and the newer material isn't enough to make this one a keeper. Perhaps a more polished presentation would help, but the speed-over-quality approach of Concert Live dooms this one.