Progressive Rock
Esoteric Recordings · January 2026
The second disc of “Earthrise” opens with three tracks that together don’t reach ten minutes: “Rhayader Goes to Town” (five nineteen), “Sanctuary” (one fifteen) and “The Snow Goose” (three nineteen). The album they come from did not yet exist on the night of 30 October 1974, and you can hear Camel rehearsing in public material they hadn’t closed. On “Rhayader Goes to Town”, after the dramatic opening, Andy Latimer, Peter Bardens and Andy Ward drop into a blues structure with a Les Paul tone that points straight at the Pink Floyd of those years, and from there into a far more broken rhythmic passage.
The rest is the “Mirage” and debut repertoire, played by a band that was preparing its first American tour that same week. “Nimrodel / The Procession / The White Rider” takes ten minutes five and is where Bardens runs things: organ and synthesiser out front, with Ward holding it up on drums that push rather than accompany. “Supertwister” (three sixteen) is the only point where Latimer swaps guitar for flute and the show drops in temperature, “Arubaluba” (seven thirty-three) is where the quartet stretches furthest beyond what it had recorded, and “Lady Fantasy”, fifteen minutes twenty-six, stretches well past the “Mirage” version. It closes with “Homage to the God of Light”, eighteen fifty-five, which isn’t even a Camel song: it comes from “The Answer”, the solo album Bardens had made in 1970.
This concert has been released before, and more than once: most of it was on “A Live Record” (1978), more surfaced on the 2002 reissues of the first two albums, and the complete show came out inside the “Air Born” box in 2023. Anyone who owns that box is buying the same sixteen-track master a second time. What Esoteric do now is issue it on its own, across two CDs, with Stephen W. Tayler’s mix and Mark Powell’s notes, and that’s a legitimate decision. What the box never says is that the recording could already be had complete from 2023.
The sound does justify the exercise. The mix places the listener inside the room and lets the audience’s response to every turn come through — and what that audience is responding to, on “Rhayader Goes to Town” and “The Snow Goose”, is music that had no record yet and that the band was trying out in front of them. This was the Latimer, Bardens, Doug Ferguson and Ward line-up that held together as far as “Moonmadness” (1976), and that night catches it between two albums: one released and one still being made.
Rating: 8.0/10
Text by Guillem Cardós