Ten Years After - Think About The Times: The Chrysalis Years (1969-1972)

They actually Woke Up This Morning; they went there

Back when this kind of thing really mattered, Alvin Lee of Ten Years After was your playground Top Trump when it came to “fastest guitarist”. Not necessarily “best” or “most tasteful”, y’understand: there was little of Peter Green’s soulfulness or Clapton’s finesse about Lee’s scattergun playing, but then TYA tended to favour thrills over feel.

By the time these Brit blues boom beneficiaries played (and slayed) Woodstock in 1969, they were four albums into their career: Think About The Times covers the era from 69’s Ssssh up to ’72’s Rock & Roll Music To The World, and runs the gamut from sweetly gauche 12-bar bottom-feeders such as Woke Up This Morning, to heavy-browed, coyly knowing spliff wavers (50,000 Miles Beneath My Brain, Stoned Woman), occasionally dandified with late-psych ruffles.

Ten Years After reportedly attributed their name to coming along a decade after Elvis (though Russ Conway would have been funnier) and there’s definitely something of The King’s hip-dislocating flashiness, pride and hauteur about them. This approach was often irresistible – hear them butting aside a live Sweet Little Sixteen from 1970’s Watt, for example – but it’s the acoustic material from 1971’s A Space In Time which really lasts the course.

3 stars 3 stars 3 stars

Chrysalis/EMI | 642 1472 (3-CD)

Reviewed by Marco Rossi
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