It’s been a while since I was fascinated with Caravan. Their approach to prog was never too full-on, happy to mix pastoral pop-rock with longer jams that were loosely dressed up as suites. As a result, their music could sound like a bit of a compromise, so I never had this particular Canterbury group high on my list of favourite prog groups, although I could appreciate much of their output from 1970-75.
Now, Madfish are releasing a new live omnibus of Caravan material, exclusively on vinyl, to complement their gargantuan 37-disc Caravan anthology Who Do You Think We Are?. On the twenty sides are audio from five different concerts, spaced out between 1976 and 2001, some of them previously released on obscure box sets and some of them newly unearthed.
As is usual and expected these days, I wasn’t furnished with the original LPs but instead with digital downloads of the music (which actually made the listening easier for me, as I prefer to listen to music when walking – I’m not sure when I’d have time to actually put on ten vinyl LPs these days, but maybe you have more time than I do, dear reader). Due to some mislabelling of the files, I accidentally began my journey through this boxset with the 1980 concert in Paris, believing that I was listening to the 1976 concert.
I was appalled. I was only familiar with four songs from the 85-minute setlist, including an extremely tepid rendition of Golf Girl, while the rest of the songs revealed a bleak vision of mediocrity that Caravan had become after a decade together as a band. Boring pop song after boring pop song – most of which come from the 1980 studio monstrosity The Album (yes, that’s really what they called it) – made me question if I could really stomach another eight LPs worth of this. Still believing this was 1976, I wondered how Caravan could have gone so far downhill just a couple of years beyond their heyday. The concert finishes with the highly repetitive, ironically-titled The Same Old Blues Again, which Pye Hastings had fun singing in French: le même vieux blues encore. Give me a break.
Shortly after, I discovered my mistake and was treated to the actual 1976 concert, taken from keyboardist Jan Schelhaas’s personal tapes, which sadly only span one LP. There are some uninteresting cuts from Blind Dog at St. Dunstans on Side One, but Side Two has the real treasure. The band launches into their longest and best-remembered suite, Nine Feet Underground, but the tape stops short just eleven minutes into the performance. The second half was missing from the soundboard, but it is a shame not to hear the full thing, especially as it features both Schelhaas and Dave Sinclair on keyboards. Some compensation comes, however, in a full performance of the rarely-heard The Love in Your Eye, which the band realised magnificently on their New Symphonia live LP two years earlier. With these two long-form tracks, one really gets a sense of how the band constructs frameworks with which to mess around and experiment whilst simultaneously entertaining the audience by providing something familiar.
The next two LPs comprise a set from Attleborough in East Anglia in 1990, where the original line-up of the band (including Richard Sinclair and Jimmy Hastings) had certainly started leaning more into their nostalgic material after a lengthy hiatus and no new studio material to promote. As a result, we return to classics such as Nine Feet Underground (this time presented in full), For Richard and Winter Wine, whilst also getting staples such as Headloss and Golf Girl. The last song of the set was fascinating; the band unearthed Place of My Own, the very first song from their debut album, which is often callously divorced from Caravan’s classic albums the same way Dream Theater’s debut When Dream and Day Unite or Genesis’s From Genesis to Revelation are also dismissed. I appreciated hearing this track again, as I do actually quite like it, just not in the same way I like most Caravan songs.
Roughly ten miles away, and roughly eight years later, Caravan would play a longer set in Diss, Norfolk, still softly promoting The Battle of Hastings, which had been released in 1995. Unlike with The Album in 1980, Caravan were cognisant of the fact that most fans weren’t there to hear their latest album, and would only be able to withstand so much of it before getting pissed off. The first side of the three LPs that comprise this concert give us the favourites Hoedown and Headloss once again, but after three times hearing it without Memory Lain, Hugh this box set, the band finally satisfy my soul by putting the two tracks together the way they were on For Girls Who Grow Plump in the Night. Another full rendition of Nine Feet Underground takes up the next side… I see that this was a regular feature of theirs.
The fourth side of this set reintroduces the cheeky The Dog, the Dog, He’s At It Again before taking us into a stunning medley that opens with a (painfully) short excerpt from The Dabsong Conshirtoe before continuing with another song that I didn’t recognise from the band’s debut: Where But for Caravan Would I?. Most surprising was the inclusion of O Caroline, which Dave Sinclair originally recorded with Matching Mole but is nonetheless welcome here. Pye Hastings once again croons the intro to The Love in Your Eye, but we don’t have time for the full thing. Instead, we get the second half of A Hunting We Will Go, the instrumental suite from … Plump in the Night that interpolates a theme from Soft Machine’s Slightly All the Time, proving further that the Canterbury Scene was all one big incestuous mess. The band don’t skip the outro, providing a satisfying resolution to this well-conceived medley.
For the third LP of the Diss concert, Caravan include what they feel to be their favourite track from The Battle of Hastings, a rather bitter track called Liar. The lyrics are full of malice and regret, seemingly towards a former manager who ripped them off, but the chorus is laughably childlike: “LI-AR! You’re just a LIIIIII-AR”, repeat ad nauseam. Next, the band play For Richard, a common song in their itinerary, but ruin it by having Richard Coughlan play a straight rhythm over the top, simplifying the song unnecessarily and shortening it by several minutes. I checked, and it was the same lineup that performed this song properly in the 1990 Attleborough concert. I honestly wonder why the band decided to play it so much worse… was Coughlan simply not as nimble anymore?
The last two LPs bring us to Wavendon on the outskirts of Milton Keynes in 2001, with still no new album in sight. As a result, there’s quite a bit of overlap with the Diss concert, including The Dog, the Dog, He’s At It Again and, for the fourth time, Nine Feet Underground. I don’t get tired of hearing that suite, though; it’s just that good. However, the band opens with All the Way, an underrated track from Blind Dog at St. Dunstans that originally stretched to nearly nine minutes in length (with a lengthy repetitive outro), but here stops at only four. We also get another round of Liar, further cementing this song in the ‘guilty pleasure’ centre of my Caravan appreciation.
The Dabsong Conshirtoe excerpt rings out again, signalling time for another rendition of the medley, but I’m glad to hear that the band have modified it somewhat to include different underrated songs, such as Better by Far and even The Mad Dabsong, which opened The Dabsong Conshirtoe on Cunning Stunts. The medley once again concludes with The Love in Your Eye and A Hunting We Will Go as before.
For the third time in this box set, Caravan play a song called Nightmare from their Better by Far album, which I’m not familiar with. Listening to repeated live renditions of a song (especially when recorded years apart) does make me think I had missed something by never venturing beyond Blind Dog at St. Dunstans, although the 1980 set has me convinced that I never need to pick up The Album.
The band play the final song from The Battle of Hastings – I Know Why You’re Laughing, which seems like a decent, catchy song, before checking out with their regular encore, For Richard, once again played in the underwhelming manner it was played in Diss. I’d always wondered why Caravan hadn’t played For Richard live when I saw them in 2013; I’d believed that they played this song at every concert, but the performances from Diss and Wavendon lead me to believe that I dodged a bullet by missing it.
It’s a disappointing end to the set, but overall I had a very good time getting reacquainted with this group that had a more significant impact on me than I ever realised. Hearing and remembering songs I hadn’t listened to in over a decade made me hurry to listen to the rest of the albums I had spent my time as a young adult pouring over and even gave me the confidence to try some of their later works, now with a sense of expectation from having heard Nightmare and Better by Far live.
The sixty-page, vinyl-sized booklet is filled with a plethora of photos, memorabilia and press clippings along with a very waffly essay by Sid Smith that only starts to mention the actual concerts included in the set towards the end. For the casual reader, it’s a case of too much information. Along with the tracklistings for each LP, there are concert photos to give listeners an extra taste of the atmosphere on the night, as well as tour itineraries for the five years documented in this box set, in case anybody wants to read about those too.
Are these the best live recordings of Caravan around? Probably not, as Caravan and the New Symphonia represents the band in their prime, performing a lot of their best material. But that was a tarted-up, special version of the group, whereas the reality of the group’s live output over the years has been a lot more like this. Combining these five concerts with my own experience of seeing the band live gives me a fuller sense of how the band were beyond their heyday, still delighting audiences with old and new material alike. One also realises that Caravan really had such a special, unique appeal to them, quite unlike any other in the prog or Canterbury sphere, where even simple ditties could feel profound and poignant. Flawed and imperfect, this box set offers listeners a chance to hear the real Caravan as they sounded at five points in their history. It’s just a shame that the band didn’t play The Show of Our Lives in any of the recordings, given the boxset’s title.
TRACK LISTING
Disc 1: Keele University, 24th November 1976
– Side 1
01. Headloss (4:54)
02. Here Am I (6:13)
03. Chiefs & Indians (5:48)
– Side 2
01. Nine Feet Underground (11:15)
02. The Love in Your Eye (14:07)
Time – 42:09
Disc 2: Bobino, Paris, 1st December 1980
– Side 1
01. Behind You (5:46)
02. Heartbreaker (3:32)
03. If I Could Do It All Over Again, I’d Do It All Over You (3:24)
04. It’s Never Too Late (6:32)
05. Clear Blue Sky (6:18)
– Side 2
01. Piano Player (5:17)
02. Corner of Me Eye (3:28)
03. Golden Mile (5:27)
04. Bright Shiny Day (6:12)
Time – 46:01
Disc 3: Bobino, Paris, 1st December 1980
– Side 1
01. Golf Girl (5:53)
02. Nightmare (9:58)
03. Keepin’ Up De Fences (7:12)
– Side 2
01. Hoedown (6:30)
02. Headloss (5:35)
03. Same Old Blues Again (6:42)
Time – 41:53
Disc 4: Old Buckenham High School, Attleborough, 28th September 1990
– Side 1
01. Behind You (5:30)
02. Headloss (4:52)
03. Golf Girl (5:52)
04. Videos of Hollywood (6:37)
– Side 2
01. Nine Feet Underground (19:50)
Time – 42:39
Disc 5: Old Buckenham High School, Attleborough, 28th September 1990
– Side 1
01. Winter Wine (8:53)
02. In The Land Of Grey & Pink (4:46)
03. Nightmare (9:13)
– Side 2
01. For Richard (15:28)
02. Place Of My Own (5:02)
Time – 43:21
Disc 6: Park Hotel, Diss, 23rd May 1998
– Side 1
01. Hoedown (3:51)
02. Memory Lain, Hugh (4:58)
03. Headloss (4:55)
– Side 2
01. Nine Feet Underground (18:03)
Time – 31:50
Disc 7: Park Hotel, Diss, 23rd May 1998
– Side 1
01. It’s a Sad, Sad Affair (9:24)
02. Somewhere in Your Heart (12:04)
– Side 2
01. Travelling Ways (4:01)
02. The Dog, the Dog, He’s At It Again (6:53)
03. Medley (Where but for Caravan Would I? / O Caroline / The Love in Your Eye / Backwards) (13:07)
Time – 45:33
Disc 8: Park Hotel, Diss, 23rd May 1998
– Side 1
01. Liar (6:46)
02. For Richard (11:19)
– Side 2
01. Golf Girl (6:53)
02. If I Could Do It All Again, I’d Do It All Over You (3:38)
03. Hoedown Encore (4:32)
Time – 33:11
Disc 9: Stables Theatre, Wavendon, 16th November 2001
– Side 1
01. All the Way (4:04)
02. A Very Smelly, Grubby Little Oik / Bobbing Wide (8:02)
03. Liar (6:45)
– Side 2
01. The Dog, the Dog, He’s At It Again (6:26)
02. Nine Feet Underground (18:43)
Time – 44:02
Disc 10: Stables Theatre, Wavendon, 16th November 2001
– Side 1
01. Medley (The Dabsong Conshirtoe / All Aboard / Better by Far / The Mad Dabsong / The Love in Your Eye / Backwards / A Hunting We Shall Go) (16:05)
02. Nowhere to Hide (9:12)
– Side 2
01. Nightmare (8:45)
02. I Know Why You’re Laughing (5:36)
03. For Richard (12:07)
Time – 51:48
Total Time – 7:02:53
MUSICIANS
Pye Hastings – Guitar, Vocals
Richard Coughlan – Drums, Percussion
Dave Sinclair – Keyboards, Vocals (All discs except Disc 1 Side 1)
Geoffrey Richardson – Guitar, Viola, Backing Vocals (Discs 1-3, 6-10)
Jan Schelhaas – Keyboards (Disc 1)
Mike Wedgwood – Bass, Congas, Vocals, Backing Vocals (Disc 1)
Dek Messecar – Bass, Backing Vocals (Discs 2 & 3)
Jimmy Hastings – Flute, Saxophone (Discs 4 & 5)
Richard Sinclair – Bass, Vocals (Discs 4 & 5)
Jim Leverton – Bass, Vocals (Discs 6-10)
Doug Boyle – Guitar (Discs 6-10)
ADDITIONAL INFO
Record Label: Madfish
Catalogue #: SMABX1241
Country of Origin: UK
Date of Release: 22nd August 2025
LINKS
Caravan – Website | Facebook | YouTube | X | Instagram | Boxset info at Burning Shed/Madfish
