Jools

Who's Jools Holland? I hear you cry - peasants! Jools is a master of keyboards and piano who's been around for ever and has played session on more albums than I can think of. His TV show on the BBC has been running for over 10 years and consists of live performances from everyone and anyone in the music business. The artist listing is on the cover so I won't bore you with them, standouts are Georgie Fame singing Yeh Yeh, Pete Townshend solo singing Magic Bus and Steve Winwood reliving Gimme Some Loving. All the featured artists are stars of the 60's and 70's and all of them sound better today than they did 30 years ago.

The audio mix is simply superb, and unlike most other compilations, is totally consistent throughout both in terms of volume and tonal variations. Even if you don't have a TV, you should still buy this for the musical enjoyment. If you actually watch the performance though, you'll be blown away by the video, it's almost HD quality - I guess the poms are good for something after all.

Since recording these sessions, many of the musicians have passed away and these recordings show them up in as good a performance as they've ever done, Dusty Springfield (Where is a Woman to go), Johnny Cash (Folsom Prison Blues), Lou Reed (Sweet Jane) - OK so he's not dead yet, he just looks that way. If you're under 35 and reading this, you should buy the DVD just to learn how good the musicians were back in the 60's and 70's, I'm not too sure how many of today's pop stars will handle being 60 years old (imagine 50 Cent at 60?) Audio is 2 channel PCM and reference quality, this is 2 hours of musical bliss, go on, buy it!