Progressive RockJazz
MoonJune Records · 1 September 2026
The tapes came out of Robin Lumley’s attic almost fifty years after they were made: two-track stereo reels prepared at the time for broadcast. Percy Jones has remastered them himself. What comes out is a two-disc set holding a complete show from the autumn 1977 North American tour: ten pieces, from “Smacks of Euphoric Hysteria” to “Nightmare Patrol”, with the stage banter between numbers left exactly where it fell.
Phil Collins couldn’t make that tour because of Genesis, and Kenwood Dennard took the drum chair. With Jones on bass, John Goodsall on guitar, Lumley on keyboards and Morris Pert on percussion, Glenn Astarita describes in All About Jazz a five-man unit that can turn on a sixpence and shift metre without losing its loose feel. Until now that tour existed only as bootlegs and badly dubbed FM broadcasts: the one official live document from those years, “Livestock”, came from the British tours of 1976 and 1977.
Three of the ten pieces didn’t exist on record the night they were played. “Access to Data”, “Earth Dance” and “Deadly Nightshade” only reached a studio with “Masques”, released on 8 September 1978, and on that album Lumley no longer played: he produced it and the keyboard chair went to J. Peter Robinson. These live versions are therefore the only surviving ones of those three pieces with the keyboard player who premiered them on stage. Two are Pert’s and the third is Goodsall’s.
The second disc doesn’t match the clarity of the first, and Astarita flags it: you hear it straight away. What weighs more is how the thing has been issued. “Theory of Nothing” is sold in physical format only, two CDs in a six-panel wallet, $24.95 plus shipping, exclusively through the band’s own Bandcamp and with no digital distribution of any kind. The logic holds up (they never saw a dollar from the bootlegs, and this is the first time a live album of theirs belongs to the legitimate owners of the name), and it also shuts out anybody who no longer buys compact discs.
Of the five men playing, three are dead: Pert in April 2010, Goodsall in November 2021 and Lumley on 9 March 2023, aged seventy-five. The proceeds go to Percy Jones and to the estates of Goodsall and Lumley.
Rating: 8.0/10
Text by Guillem Cardós