Michael Chapman

Pleasures takes us back to the live album of that name culled from two evenings of concerts in Hamburg in August 1975 and is a reissue of that album together with five extra cuts from the same sets (three of which duplicate songs featured earlier in alternate performances). This is definitive mid-70s Chapman, here featured first in solo acoustic mode then from track five onwards with a band (Keef Hartley, Steffi Stephen and Achim Reichel), arguably at the zenith of the soulful-rockin’ phase of his career.

Includes the albums Deal Gone Down, Savage Amusement, The Man Who Hated Mornings plus bonus tracks.

Harvest Festival is a genuinely comprehensive and thorough look at the one British major label venture into psychedelia and progressive rock that actually worked, commercially and artistically; it's a panoramic journey though a major part of British rock as it developed over a period of just under a decade. Over the five CDs and 119 songs, more than two dozen acts are featured, ranging from purely English phenomena like Michael Chapman, Quatermass, and Pete Brown to mega-arena acts like Pink Floyd, and the set comes complete with a built-in 120-page book that would be worth 35 dollars by itself.

Although there are those who nail their spirals to Vertigo as the prog label of choice, EMI’s Harvest certainly vies with it for pole position. With Harvest, the detail was everything. Loaded with the bizarre, striking and the strange, turns abounded like the Third Ear Band, Kevin Ayers and The Greatest Show On Earth. From the bad acid of Edgar Broughton’s There’s No Vibrations, But Wait through the squiffy majesty of Dave Mason’s You Shouldn’t Have Took More Than You Gave, to Be- Bop Deluxe’s future pop of Jet Silver and the Dolls Of Venus, this collection is impressive and nostalgic – its very lack of a house style providing its consistency.