EMERSON, LAKE & PALMER - KING BISCUIT FLOWER HOUR [AKA: LIVE]

Here we have a great album by ELP at the top of their game. He have some songs of Works without the orchestra (Pirates, C'est la vie, The enemy god), which IMO sound better. Also "Tiger in a spotlight" and "Watching over you" give a better feeling played live. The piano improvisations are very good, as usual. Lake's voice sounds very clear, in great shape. This album (I have the one CD edition) was digitally remastered and sounds just great! Buy it, you won't be disappointed!

Lovely biscuits?

The version I have of this album is a European release from 2002 on the Disky label, simply entitled "Live". This is a single disc collection, which omits the contents of the second disc completely, thus there is no "Karn evil 9" here. The tracks on the first disc are identical to the 1997 version, but the running order is completely different.

ELP live releases are notorious for overlapping with each other, and this is no exception. Unlike most King Biscuit releases, the tracks included here are not always unique. The recordings are actually sourced from two concerts from 1974 and 1977. The 1974 recordings, which include the aforementioned "Karn evil 9" plus "Lucky man" and "Still you turn me on" are from the Tulsa USA performance. They previously appeared on the bands' first live album "Welcome back my friends..".

The 1977 recordings are from the "Works" tour, but contrary to some reports elsewhere, they are not taken from the "In concert" album. These versions were recorded at The Coliseum, Wheeling, West Virginia USA without an orchestra.

In terms of recording quality, the sound here is excellent, Greg Lake's acoustic guitar passage sounding particularly clear. The bias of the song selection towards the "Works" (Volumes 1 and 2) albums means that many favourites are missing, while space is found for other more prosaic songs such as "Pirates". The "Piano improvisations" are rather clumsily extracted from the "Take a pebble" suite, and certainly do not benefit from being presented in isolation.

Better than the numerous bootlegs which the band have recently gathered together and given official releases, but one for dedicated fans of the band only.

This album is mostly useless, featuring tracks that appeared already on their famous live Welcome Back My Friends. But I can't recommend strongly enough the version of Pirates featured here. The trio plays it without orchestra, and the epic gets much better this way. Greg Lake has (actually, I mean he had) one of the most powerful and beautiful voices I've heard, and this epic song showcases it like few others (I can think of In the Court of the Crimson King, I Talk to the Wind, Tarkus, Trilogy... ok, not so few, but you know what I mean).

The rest is pale by comparison: C'est la vie is a beautiful ballad, Palmer is brilliant in Maple Leaf Rag and in his short drum solo (it ends when you start getting tired... a good quality, lacking on most drum solos), but the live rendition of Pirates is what really matters.

This is not a bad live album from ELP, especially if you like their lighter fare. Most of the tracks are from the Works albums, so don't expect much of the deep dark ELP of the earlier albums.

There are two "piano improvisations" on this recording. One is piano solo selections from Emerson's Piano Concerto No. 1, and the other is almost exactly the same as the improv from Welcome Back My Friends.... Is it still an improvisation if you play it exactly the same way in every concert? Just wondering.

Highlights here are the non-orchestral recordings of Pirates and the Enemy God.

Not the best ELP live release. But at least it's listenable.