Given how fantastic they were on-stage, always eager to go off on a tangent, it’s rather surprising that there aren’t many concert documents by CACTUS – although a fair share of those have been issued over the last decades. One such album was “Ultra Sonic Boogie 1971” that preserved for posterity the American foursome’s live performance at the titular studio on November 16th of the titular year – and now another similar tape has found its way to the listener.
Stunning listeners with his virtuoso playing and arresting melodies for almost six decades, Gordon Giltrap defies expectations, which apparently makes anthologizing the British musician’s oeuvre quite a challenge. There have been a couple of collections issued over the years, including the “Time To Reflect” comp assembled by Gordon himself on four discs back in 2015, yet now the veteran is taking such a personal approach a few notches higher. On February 19th, a ten-CD box set titled “Heartsongs” will be out to present Giltrap’s favorite albums and add a new entry to his canon.
One of the most underrated British artists, John Hackett inhabits two worlds at the same time: that of progressive rock, especially when he leads a band whose latest platter saw the light of day in 2025, and that of symphonic music – although the flautist’s last solo offering, "The Piper Plays His Tune" from 2020, also drew on pop. Still, his next endeavor, ready to be issued on October 23rd, will present something completely different – perhaps closer in style to "Velvet Afternoon" than to what the veteran has recorded in recent years.
A staggering 55 years ago, Trevor Midgley, aka Beau, a British singer-songwriter of a folk stripe, issued his sophomore album on which he was backed by the musicians of a band called TRACTOR, and their collaboration didn’t end after "Creation" was released. In 2000 Midgley and the ensemble’s drummer Steve Clayton teamed up to work on a musical dedicated to the great Andy Warhol and his motley coterie: Steve penned the play and Trevor wrote the songs. Still, the results of their toil and trouble stalled at the demo stage and eventually got shelved – until very recently. Incensed by seeing promos – discs used to shop it around – crop up on eBay for princely sums, Midgley returned to the original recordings and then, as he puts it, “re-imagined, re-engineered and re-produced them” using today’s studio techniques.
In recent decades a sense of Graham Bonnet getting liberated from the legend he’s been cultivating for ages became quite tangible, and each new album the veteran and his band record makes it abundantly clear. And the ensemble’s forthcoming opus “Circuit Breaker” may represent the culmination of this process, with the presence of guest musicians emphasizing the singer’s readiness to embrace the reality of his 80th year on Earth.
