ACTION REPLAY

The sole live album from Red Jasper is a fascinating document, since it doesn't quite reflect any particular phase of their studio work. Recorded in early 1992, after an attempt to record a late 1991 gig was foiled by technical difficulties. Given that we're dealing with a lean, hungry group here who hadn't achieved much in the way of commercial success, working with temperamental equipment, a caveat has to be added here: the sound quality of this isn't amazing. It's good enough that you can tell what they are playing and certainly better than bootleg quality, but you'd never mistake this for anything particularly pristine. Fortunately, the band at this stage were playing in a somewhat rough and ready style which can arguably be enhanced by slightly fuzzy recording quality, but at the same time it's a shame that the best live document we have of them pre-hiatus is a little murky in places.

Notably, Action Replay has only a light smattering of songs from the band's studio efforts. Specifically, Go For It and Come and By are from the England's Green and Pleasant Land demo album, England's Green and Pleasant Land is from the Pull That Thumb EP, and Old Jack, Second Coming, and The Magpie all come from the Sting In the Tale album. Add to that an early version of The Shamen's Song - eventually released on the Winter's Tale album - and you've only accounted for seven of the fifteen tracks here; the remaining eight are exclusive to this release.

Perhaps this reflects the way the band's evolution was continuing rapidly at this point in time - the product in part of significant line-up changes, with only frontman, whistle-blower, and mandolin wrangler Davey Dodds, lead guitarist Robin Harrison, and drummer Dave Clifford remaining from the Sting In the Tale lineup. Jonathan Thornton joined on bass and Lloyd George joined on keyboards, and the band simply did without a dedicated fiddle-player or saxophonist.

The early Red Jasper sound found the group bouncing between punk, folk rock, and neo-prog - imagine Jethro Tull infused with the more politically angry moments of early Marillion or Twelfth Night, then have a punk group play what you just imagined, and you might end up somewhere in the right ballpark. The harder edges of the group would fade away around this point in time, yielding a neoprog-folk mixture which would be showcased on their next studio albums, but the old style is still evident here and there on Action Replay.

It's notable, in fact, that the punkier songs - Hostage To Fortune, Go For It, and Come and Buy - are clustered towards the start (and two of those three are from their demo album), the band perhaps deciding to put their simpler material earlier in the setlist to prompt the audience to sit up and take notice. The progressive quotient starts gently increasing with World Turned Upside Down, a song named for an old-style broadside ballad from Civil War days (though lyrically it is original to Red Jasper), whilst by the end of the running order they are covering the odd folk standard like The King of the Fairies.

Listening, it's evident that there's been edits here and there to the album - some of Davey Dodds' between-song banter has been faded out here and there. This was presumably necessary to cram down the material to a CD running length, but it does mean that it's hard to assess whether this reflects the full setlist, either in terms of the balance of the material or the running order. The running order we get does capture the band in the process of saying farewell to their perhaps slightly unfocused past and pointing the way towards their future direction.

At the same time, it is a bit of a shame we don't get the full, uncut concert here, complete with between-songs patter, because it's evident from the snippets we get here that Davey Dodds was a fine frontman with a good rapport with his audience - comparable in that respect to Fish, to take an example from the same general scene that Dodds seems to have been at least somewhat influenced by in terms of his delivery. Indeed, shortly after this release Red Jasper would end up playing support to Fish himself - a good pairing, considering how the big man was working elements of Celtic folk into his own music at the time, whilst Red Jasper's approach to doing so had just the right mixture of similarities and differences to complement what he was doing without being overly derivative.

It was on the strength of this release that Red Jasper ended up signing with SI Music - first to distribute Action Replay, then to record some studio albums. Red Jasper were one of a clutch of UK groups of the era who'd release material through that Dutch label only for their hard work to become outright hard to track down in their home country in the wake of the label's collapse. Fortunately, the Angel Air label has rereleased the backbone of the Red Jasper discography, including this release, and listening to it in the present it's evident why SI chose to take on the group off the back of this one.

Whilst much of the SI stable ended up playing very straight-down-the-line neo-prog, Red Jasper were serving up something much more original here, and it's a shame that they've ended up one of the more overlooked groups of the UK prog scene - having the bad luck to rise too late to ride the original neo-prog wave and too early to get much of a boost from the coalescing online prog fanbase. The addition of traditional folk to a neo-prog ethos was as fresh in the early 1990s as the addition of folk ideas to a classic prog style was when Jethro Tull did it back in the 1970s, after all. A tip of the hat to Angel Air, for rescuing this gem and others from the vaults!