LIVE IN KRAKOW 1996

Recorded before a very receptive audience in Poland - where Pendragon are several orders of magnitude more popular than they are in their home country! - Live In Krakow 1996 is one of my favourite Pendragon live albums. Part of this is because it presents what I consider to be definitive renditions of just about all of The Masquerade Overture aside from the intro track and the brief interlude of The Pursuit of Excellence. As well as trimming back those two compositions from the album, the versions here also spark with energy and rock out a bit more than the ones on the studio album, which is beneficial.

The fact that the album also includes two well-chosen snippets from The World and an absolutely scorching version of Leviathan from The Jewel - which blows the original studio version out of the water - is the cherry on the top. This is by far Pendragon's best live album of the 1990s - and indeed of their career to that point; it's about as good an outing as this material can get.