DREAM LETTER: LIVE IN LONDON 1968

Tim's rare tours outside North America were in England (and Denmark once) for a few days around the end of 68 which included a few concerts and a radio session and fortunately they were taped, and finally released in the early 90's. Actually this low-budget tour was still under the Elektra label patronage and the immense Joe Boyd had to worry about this venture, in which some members of Tim's group where not able to fly over due to budgetary reasons. It is Joe Boyd himself who talked Pentangle's giant (both musically and physically) Dany Thompson to rehearse and play with Buckley for these concerts, since he had the right jazz-folk feeling coming form Pentangle, and later he will play with John Martyn's most essential albums on the same jazz-folk realm.

While the full concerts might appear a big lengthy (there are doubles since there is more than one gig on here, it's a really remarkable album, where you can see just how much a giant Thompson is, as he fills the shoes with just one or two practices beforehand. And Tim obviously felt comfortable enough to get into the more adventurous tracks of his, even though he doesn't have a full group. Most likely Tim was kindly asked to "get a bit commercial" as well in order to brake a new market, as there are few early tracks in the sets that wouldn't have normally stood in his repertoire at a similar local gig somewhere in California of that era.

The extraordinary thing is that while this double live set is not even that representative of Tim's career, its release in the early 90's sparked a new interest in his works, thus provoking a bunch of compilations and live albums throughout the 90's and 00's, in part helped by his son's success (different and almost impossible to compare, but Grace probably sold more copies than all of Tim's albums together did in the 70's), but the opposite is true as well.