July - Complete Recordings

Six CD box set. Released by the Major Minor label in 1968, the self-titled July album has long been acknowledged by genre enthusiasts as one of the classic UK psychedelic one-shots, mixing the ambition and experimentation of "Sgt. Pepper" with a lo-fi charm and endearing garage band artlessness. It is also one of the most hotly-pursued artefacts of the British psychedelic era, with an original UK copy (only graded at VG++) recently selling on eBay for around £3700. This definitive six CD overview of the band's activities includes newly-remastered versions of the album in both mono and stereo formats as well as the various single issues, including a completely different recording of album nugget 'The Way'. Disc Three contains The Second Of July, a collection of pre-album demos that appeared in the mid-Nineties to capitalize on the band's growing reputation as original copies of their LP began to sell for increasingly large sums of money. The remainder of the boxed set consists of more recent July recordings following their triumphant return to live work a few years ago. Disc Four is the aborted album Temporal Anomaly, which was recorded circa 2010 but which gains a first-ever release, while Disc 6 is the appropriately-titled Resurrection, which received a limited release in 2013. Disc Six comprises the latest July magnum opus, The Wight Album, which has been pieced together over the last few years by Tom Newman and Peter Cook at Tom's recording studio on the Isle of Wight. Now finally completed, The Wight Album - described by Tom as "the greatest July album" - brings the July story bang up to date. Housed in a clamshell box, and with a 40-page booklet containing a 7000 word essay on the band featuring new quotes and some priceless period photos, The Complete Recordings is an epic look at the studio activities of one of the biggest cults to emerge from the original British psychedelic scene.