Mercury High [Anthology]

Ian Gillan can be frustrating to listen to, not because of any fault with his singing, rather with his choice of material. He is truly amongst the greatest of all rock singers in the last 40 years, but can get involved with some vapid songs. This collection covers both the great and the grate, approach with care.The problem here, to my way of looking at it, is that it would have made sense to stuck all of the Ian Gillan Band material onto one cd and the rest on the other. The first four tracks on CD 1 come from Cherkazoo and do not sit well with the Scarabus material(is this the only IGB album on the Mercury Label????), 6 tracks from this album here. Whilst Gillan can sing a wide range of stuff the hard jazz rock leanings of the Scarabus tracks make the first four sound weak and uninspiring. CD 2 continues with this shoehorning tracks from 3 albums together. It does not gell at all.Maybe the real problem is with me. I expected to be taken on a journey rather than have big chunks of whole albums just threw down in front of me with no apparent reasons for the choice. Maybe someone in Mercury told a lackey to go and pick half a dozen tracks from 5 of Ians outings and then, if there was a bit of space left over to chuck in some Deep Purple Live with the London Symphony Orchestra at the end of each disc.The sleeve notes are good, the sound quality of the music included is first class and there is a pleasing amount of band info for each of the sessions included, so for that I do not feel that it would be fair to go below 3 stars.

Brilliant artist fantastic CD...Thank you

Great !

This CD clearly isn't a comprehensive anthology and most certainly isn't the CD to buy if you're new to Gillan and wondering what all the fuss is about. Now, it isn't comprehensive not because it missed such-and-such a classic that I or any other reviewer might have a particular subjective fondness for, but because it doesn't include Gillan's most famous bands or works AT ALL. In other words, there's no 'Gillan the band' (who recorded Glory Road, Mr Universe and the like) and there's no Deep Purple on here.So what is there? A very good cross-section of all the other (grown up) stuff. Songs from the Ian Gillan Band, from various other solo Gillan outings and from the Gillan & Glover album. And it's surprisingly, refreshingly, good. Without actually looking at the cover, there's probably a span of over 30 years, with songs from the Jazz-rock IGB to near-pop with Gillan & Glover and a fair smattering of blues.The album isn't the best or most representative introduction to Ian Gillan. But it is a very good introduction to what he's been up to when not fronting one of the biggest bands of all time or riding the charts with a bullet and appearing on TISWAS during the NWOBHM (who remembers that then?) with Gillan.