Prog Legends Nektar to Release Live Album After Unearthing 1973 TV Performance
A performance on Swiss TV has come to light featuring founding guitarist/vocalist Roye Albrighton.
Thank you for spending part of your day with Michael’s Record Collection. As always, I appreciate your time. I hope you’re enjoying what I do here and would appreciate your feedback. You can write to me at MichaelsRecordCollection@gmail.com with any questions or comments you have.
For this issue, I was excited to talk to Derek “Mo” Moore and Ryche Chlanda from the legendary progressive rock band Nektar. They have a “new old” release coming out on Oct. 1 after unearthing a 1973 recording from a Swiss television appearance that was thought to be lost.
Let’s get to the story…
There is no shortage of live recordings of prog giants Nektar. The band, when active (the group was disbanded from 1982 to 2000), has made a living as a live act since 1969 and even loves to record its studio albums as live performances.
Nektar’s discography contains 16 official live releases and there’s a 17th on the way. But, rather than releasing something from the most recent tour, Nektar is going almost all the way back to the band’s beginning with …Sounds Like Swiss, a two-CD, one-DVD package that is set for an Oct. 1 release.
A long-lost performance from the Swiss television program Kaléidospop has recently been unearthed and will soon see the light of day. The release plays on the title of the band’s third studio album, …Sounds Like This (1973), because it comes from the tour of that album. The …Sounds Like Swiss set features video of the one-hour performance from the Kaléidospop appearance on the DVD and the two CDs contain the audio from the TV show as well as a complete show soundboard recording from a concert at the Pavilion des Sports in Lausanne, Switzerland in May 1973.
“We, we went into the Swiss studios to do the recording, and I knew there was a recording made because it was Swiss TV, but I could never find it,” said bassist and founding member Derek “Mo” Moore. “And it just turned up within the last few months. And it is amazing to look back on it and see a show like that from 1973. It’s something that we've not seen before.”
The band was only a few years into what is now a run of more than half a century of creating innovative — and lengthy — musical compositions. Nektar is known for its love of longform songs and conceptual pieces, its willingness to push boundaries, and especially its immersive live performances. (The group holds visuals as such an essential part of what they do that Mick Brockett (“visual environment”) is listed as a member of the band.)
“We tell a story. So, a song might be 40 minutes long or 30 minutes long, but it's a story, and we have a light show,” Moore said. “And the light show tells the story in lights. In Europe, where you play in a lot of different countries, it enables the people who are watching (who speak) a different language to understand what's going on without understanding English. That was the premise when we started Nektar in 1969. That was the intention. It was a music and light theater.”
One of the biggest treats for longtime Nektar fans is the opportunity to once again see (and hear) founding guitarist/vocalist Roye Albrighton, who passed away in 2016 after a long illness. Albrighton was an integral part of the Nektar sound on such classic 1970s albums as A Tab in the Ocean, Remember the Future, and Recycled.
After a brief introduction, the live set kicks off with a 22-minute excerpt from the band’s 1971 debut album, Journey to the Centre of the Eye. The band plays a sizable chunk of its A Tab in the Ocean album from 1972, starting with “Desolation Valley/Waves” and later returning with “Crying in the Dark/King of Twilight” after a 14-minute side trip into “A Day in the Life of a Preacher” from …Sounds Like This. A “new song” follows as the band launches into “Let it Grow,” a part of “Remember the Future II” on side two of the second of Nektar’s two 1973 releases, Remember the Future, which came out that November. The first CD concludes with a run of three consecutive songs under five minutes “Odyssee," “Ron’s On,” and “Never, Never, Never” — all three are a part of the same suite from …Sounds Like This.
There are some repeat tracks on the second CD due to the album containing the recordings from two different live shows. There are two versions of “1-2-3-4” off of …Sounds Like This, and additional recordings of “A Day in the Life of a Preacher,” “Desolation Valley/Waves,” and “Crying in the Dark/King of Twilight.” Mixed in among those are “Do You Believe in Magic?,” “Cast Your Fate,” and “Good Day” — all from …Sounds Like This.
The recordings aren’t pristine. …Sounds Like Swiss is a document of the band’s live history, not the overdubbed, polished-up, more-studio-than-live type of release that so many bands prefer to represent their actual performances. However, the album stands as an honest time capsule of a key moment in the band’s history, and the quality is good enough that it should appeal to the band’s many longtime fans.
Nektar’s music strains against the chains of categorization, even within the progressive rock world. It’s difficult to put it into any particular box, with elements of prog, jam band, and rock melting together and undergoing a strange alchemical transformation into a completely different audio compound. But the Nektar sound has endured for five decades.
“The band has an appeal not only to prog (fans), but also to rock,” Moore said. “We actually were a rock band before (the term “prog rock”) was even invented. We have a varying style, and we play what we feel, really. I mean, we don't say ‘Oh let's play this because it's in.’ We play what we feel we want to play. And usually it's got several time signatures, you know, but it's just the way we play. It’s the way that we've always played.”
Nektar, as a band, is still going strong. They released a new album in 2020 entitled The Other Side (named due to Albrighton now being ‘on the other side’), but the band lost any momentum from the release of The Other Side by not being able to tour it due to the pandemic. That album is going to be re-released with a bonus DVD. There’s a special moment on the album because it includes a guitar part Albrighton recorded in 1974, which is used in the song “Devil’s Door.”
“‘Devil’s Door’ we wrote in 1974. I think we were in Chicago when we played it the first time,” Moore said. “We decided we were going to revamp that, finish it, because it was never finished, and we were going to use it on the album. We sat down to listen to the original version that we did in 1974 and the guitar (by Albrighton) was so crystal clear that we decided we would use it on that track. We all felt that Roye was in the studio with us. It was amazing.”
“It was Mo’s idea and it worked out beautifully,” guitarist/vocalist Ryche Chlanda added.
The current lineup includes the original rhythm section of Moore on bass and original drummer Ron Howden, with Chlanda on guitars and vocals, Randy Dembo on 12-string guitar, bass, and bass pedals, Kendall Scott on keyboards and vocals, and the aforementioned Brockett on visual environment. The band’s driving force are the two classic-era musicians, Moore and Howden, who lay down a rock solid foundation for the music.
“When these guys get together — Ron being the drummer and Mo being the bassist — you can feel that history,” Chlanda said. “You can really feel those decades of knowing and feeling this thing happening. It's really pretty amazing when you get to see what they're doing. You can see they know each other. They know each other's moves like a psychic connection they have. That's really cool.”
What else is really cool is that Nektar fans can soon see and hear the band in all of its glory from its youthful days in 1973 and follow that up with seeing the current band tour the U.S. in the spring.
For my entire interview with Nektar, please see the video below. Mo and Ryche were gracious with their time. When the interview was set up, I was only expecting Mo on the Zoom call but he happened to be staying with Ryche at the time, so he jumped in as well. I will admit to forgetting to ask Ryche how to pronounce his name before we started and, as such, there is an awkward start to this one before he finally jumps in and then I ask him to pronounce it for me. That’s on me. Brianfarts happen.
Mo and Ryche also discussed more about their live shows and upcoming tour, as well as their backgrounds and influences in the interview.
Great interview. This old fan loves hearing these stories!