MADFISH 22nd August 2025
Ten albums of live shows is a lot but then, this is a band with over fifty years behind them and sixteen studio albums. It’s a relaxed jaunt through lightly jazzy playing, easy-going songs, plenty of improvisation and some terrible puns. This box of concerts spanning twenty-five years with a sixty-page booklet, is a time machine.
Slicing out five concerts from 1976, 1980, 1990, 1998 and 2001, there is a lot to go at here. One of the key Canterbury scene bands, Caravan always seemed quiet and self-effacing, making them accessible if you stumbled across them but never heavily hyped. The big album to dig out is “The Land Of Grey and Pink” though I think live shows are the true home of a band like this. Songs are gentle and often of their time (eg longing for a girl selling cups of tea on a golf course) but the playing is the thing, interweaving guitar, flute, sax, organ and bouncing bass (depending on the era) set up long instrumental passages where the head-nodding pleasure lies. Listening to these live sets also avoids the Seventies time warp of reading the titles of the studio albums (the Seventies were a different world) “Girls Who Grow Plump In The Night”, “If I Could Do It Over Again, I’d Do it All Over You” and “Cunning Stunts”.
The 1976 is an obscurity for the fans, a personal tape of the band’s, documenting part of a fairly early show. The 1980 show is from Paris. It’s an audio recording rather than a soundboard, so it lacks a little in body but has audience atmosphere and the chilled soloing and jamming extended pieces make up for mild audio deficiencies, with cascades of guitar notes. 1990 documents a reunion concert after taking a decade off. Songs move from the gentle to furious jamming in an organic way, for example the twenty-minute long “Nine Feet Underground”. The audience is very excited and I can feel the pleasure. Eight years later that same piece is a highlight of the 1998 gig with an epic jam making me forgive a couple of rather soppy songs. These shows inevitably contain multiple versions of the same thing but music like this is about enjoying the recorded evening as a whole, soaking in the flow, hearing what happens as each song turns out different. There’s happiness in trying to figure out the ‘best’ version of any piece. The 2001 set, recorded in the Dankworth’s intimate Stables venue in Milton Keynes benefits from the purpose-built sound and natural band-audience synergy.
A trip to different times, the shows here document a quiet-spoken, polite and very English band, at ease with themselves and their audiences. There’s little showmanship but plenty of virtuosity. A tea-fuelled band rather than boozy showboating. Quiet appreciation is the mode here and, while casual listeners are unlikely to start here, nothing will frighten the horses and anyone could spend a relaxed couple of hours with any one of these evenings.
We were lucky enough to catch the band just after lock-down: