Colin Blunstone - One Year And More Live album - photo of Colin by Andrew Eccles
Colin Blunstone is marking the legacy of his 1971 debut LP One Year with a deluxe release built around the night he finally performed the album in full. One Year and More: Live from Union Chapel arrives on 21 November and captures the concert he gave at the north London venue on 25 November last year.
That showsaw Blunstone revisit songs that have long been part of his musical identity: Say You Don’t Mind, Misty Roses, Caroline Goodbye as well as the quieter corners of the record. He was backed by members of the current Zombies touring band, former Strawbs bassist Chas Cronk, and the Q Strings, with the arrangements expanded but still true to the album’s mixture of baroque pop, melancholy and lightness.
Blunstone has said the performance was far from straightforward, given the way One Year shifts between styles. “Looking back this was not an undertaking to be taken on lightly knowing that ‘One Year’ encompasses so many different genres of music,” he reflected. “With very little rehearsal time my solo band and the incredible Q Strings took on the challenge without a moment’s hesitation.”
The new box set is aimed squarely at fans who have followed his work across The Zombies’ original run, his solo albums and their recent revival. It includes two CDs, a full concert DVD, a gold-foil box and a booklet of unseen photographs from the night. Each box set is signed and numbered.
One Year has grown in reputation since its release. It has been cited by musicians ranging from Thurston Moore to Neil Tennant, and featured in The Guardian’s 1,000 Albums to Hear Before You Die.
Among its best-known songs is Say You Don’t Mind, which Blunstone discussed with Jason Barnard in 2015 for The Strange Brew Podcast:
The original Zombies loved ‘Say You Don’t Mind’. We didn’t record it but we used to play it in concert and used to close the show with it. When I started recording my solo album I was produced by Rod Argent and Chris White from The Zombies. We remembered that song and thought it would be a great twist to do it in a very different way. We were introduced to Chris Gunning, an absolutely brilliant arranger, who suggested that we did it in that very avant garde way with a 21 string orchestra. I just think it is so original, to think of that song being done in that way. I have to be honest and say I didn’t see it as a commercial project. I was incredibly pleasantly surprised that it was really quite a big hit.
