Customer Reviews

Sea of Tranquility: Polydor Years 1974-1997

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'Sea of Tranquility' is by far the best collection of BJH songs ever to grace a CD. Polydor circumvented the restriction of using any of their EMI output by culling them from live performances while the band recorded under the label. One track in question is 'Medicine Man' which is taken from a 1976 live recording and sounds better than the studio version with beefed up guitar and rhythm section.

Their first album with Polydor was 'Everyone is Everybody Else' with 5 tracks featured, 3 of which were remastered in 2003 and sound bigger for that. The tour de force from that album was 'For No One' (not the Beatles song) but mysteriously did not get the remastered treatment. The following 3 live tracks are all from the 1974 live album and represent material from their days on EMI's Harvest label, 'She Said She Said' along with concert favourite 'Mocking Bird' and 'Galadriel', a song eluded to in later years on the song 'John Lennon's Guitar'. The superb self mockery of 'Poor Man's Moody Blues' appears in its' full 7 minute glory and a surprisingly good live version of 'Suicide' from 'Live Tapes'.

To make it interesting for long time fans some tracks appear in their single release form and actually sound better than the original album versions. The much maligned 'Face to Face' album is well represented and it has to be said that the compiler(s) have selected the strongest material from every album.

It's all presented in a beautiful package complete with copious and infromative liner notes. This is the best of to buy if you have little of no BJH in your collection and given it's a triple CD set the price is pretty fair.

Enjoy this highly recommended set.