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Galahad — Alive at Loreley
(Bandcamp GHCD17, 2025, CD / DL)

by Peter Thelen, Published 2025-11-15

Alive at Loreley Cover art

Friday, September 3rd, 2010 at The Night of the Prog V festival in Germany, Galahad gave this outstanding performance of six of their best pieces. It would be the last time that bassist Neil Pepper, who at the time had been diagnosed with cancer, played with the band — the disease took his life almost exactly one year later. The rest of the band that night would include lead singer Stuart Nicholson, keyboardist Dean Baker, guitarist Roy Keyworth, and drummer Spencer Luckman, with a special guest appearance by Mark Spencer of Twelfth Night on guitar and backing vocals on “Termination.” Engineer Karl Groom deserves a lot of credit for making this live set sound as great as it does. For those who may not know, Galahad emerged out of the fertile neo-progressive movement of the mid-80s that brought us groups like IQ, Pallas, Marillion, Pendragon, and others, though Galahad was a few years behind them, not releasing their first CD Nothing Is Written until 1991. I can’t say if these six songs represent the entire live set at Loreley, or if it’s a sampling thereof, though it does represent some of Galahad’s best work (and those more long-ish tracks we all love) up to that point in time, and would nicely fill a double-LP if they ever chose to release it that way. From that first CD we get “Richelieus Prayer” and the title track from the 1995 album Sleepers; we have “Bug Eye” from 1998’s Following Ghosts, and “Seize the Day” from 2012’s Battle Scars. Both the title track and “Termination” were played from their 2007 masterwork Empires Never Last. The performance is outstanding, and I suppose a fair question might be: Why did they wait fifteen years to release it? For whatever reason, it’s finally here today, and it represents a superb starting point for anyone unfamiliar with Galahad’s work up to that point in time. There are probably a few more songs I would have like to have heard, but one can’t complain about what’s on offer here.

Filed under: New releases, 2025 releases

Related artist(s): Galahad

More info
http://galahad1.bandcamp.com/album/alive-at-loreley

 

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