Album review: CARAVAN – It’s None Of Your Business

On Sunday 10 October 2021 Pete Feenstra chatted to Pye Hastings for Get Ready to ROCK! Radio.

CARAVAN - It's None Of Your Business

Madfish Music [Release date 8.10.21]

Masters of the snappy album title, Caravan are yet another English Progressive Rock institution.

For a band who kept disbanding and reforming, they’ve racked up a significant number of recordings…studio, live and compilation, and maintained a fervently loyal fanbase over the years since 1968.

It’s None Of Your Business is their fifteenth studio album.

The Lockdown has focused a lot of song writing minds these last 18 months.

It clearly challenged main songwriter, Pye Hastings. On ‘Spare A Thought’ and ‘Every Precious Thing’, serious, and indeed personal, subject matter replaces his normal insouciant cool.

And yet, it seems only right that a band who for many years were the face of uniquely English Progressive Rock, now feels free to plug us back into the seventies. Those years of innovation and progrock warmth are ably resurrected on ‘I’ll Reach Out’ and the capricious title track. Alternately knitting together jazz, folk and alt Rock, hardened now into something more resilient, reflective of the difficult to please, new millennium audiences.

And in case our memories have been erased in the 7 years since the last album, The amusing, artless and remarkably lean vignettes ‘Down From London’ and ‘If I Fly’ pop up to remind us that they still keep their tongue in their cheek for much of the time.

The rockier ‘Wishing You Were Here’ and ‘Ready Or Not’, seem a little lost in transit at first, but soon settle in comfortably. Confirmation, if any were needed, that all roads, in fact, lead back to Canterbury.

The band embark on a 14 date tour of the UK in October. ****

Review by Brian McGowan

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S8NT ELEKTRIC XTC (Long Branch Records)
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KLOGR face The Unknown (Zeta Factory)
BEYOND UNBROKEN Dance With The Dead (FiXT)
REVENGIN Decadent Feeling (Wormholedeath)

Featured Albums w/c 11 November 2024

09:00-12:00 The Best of 2003-2023 (Melodic Rock)
12:00-13:00 The Best of 2003-2023 (Melodic Hard Rock)
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