Elmer Gantry / Velvet Opera - Long Nights Of Summer: Elmer Gantry's Velvet Opera [CD]

First-ever complete career anthology of highly-regarded late 60s UK psychedelic band Elmer Gantry's Velvet Opera. Mono and stereo versions of much-loved 1968 debut album plus their post-Elmer follow-up LP, several studio out-takes and numerous BBC radio session tracks. In the spring of 1967, London Mod/Soul act The Five Proud Walkers staged a musical volte-face after supporting underground sensations The Pink Floyd. They duly re-emerged that summer as irrepressible psychedelic adventurers Elmer Gantry's Velvet Opera, making an immediate splash with debut single 'Flames', which appeared on popular CBS label sampler 'The Rock Machine Turns You On' and was added to the set-list of many young British bands including the embryonic Led Zeppelin. 'Flames' was sufficiently successful to justify a debut LP, a strikingly original offering that remains one of the freshest, most consistently entertaining albums to emerge from the British psychedelic scene. Charismatic frontman Elmer and guitarist Colin Forster then left, with rhythm section John Ford and Richard Hudson joined by singer Johnny Joyce and guitarist Paul Brett for a second Velvet Opera album, the more Folk/Blues-oriented 'Ride A Hustler's Dream'. The band split in early 1970 when the Hudson-Ford partnership joined Strawbs, although original guitarist Forster briefly revived the name later that year for a one-off single with his former Tintern Abbey colleague David MacTavish. The first-ever complete EGVO and VO anthology, 'Long Nights Of Summer' naturally includes both albums as well as a US promo-only mono mix of that incendiary debut LP that now makes it's first-ever CD appearance. Also including numerous studio out-takes, demo versions, non-LP singles and a revelatory 50 minutes of BBC session tracks (the bulk of which have never been released before), 'Long Nights Of Summer' features a new 6000 word essay on the band and many rare images.