Caravan: All Over You And You Too

Canterbury legends revisit their early classics.

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Having defined their deft and seductively bucolic sound in the late 60s and early 70s, Caravan’s definitively English prog folk always stood apart.

A casualty of the punk revolution, they were sufficiently buoyed by the reaction to 1995 comeback The Battle Of Hastings to return to their Canterbury lair and take a typically leisurely, yet keenly weighted, trip through their past.

Lily gilding is a speciality on such favourites as Golf Girl and In The Land Of Grey And Pink. But their judicious restraint and all-consuming tenderness also endures contrasting with the electrifying lift-off that propels the For Richard medley and much that follows, giving a keenly heightened impact.

Gavin Martin
Gavin Martin

Late NME, Daily Mirror and Classic Rock writer Gavin Martin started writing about music in 1977 when he published his hand-written fanzine Alternative Ulster in Belfast. He moved to London in 1980 to become the NME’s Media Editor and features writer, where he interviewed the Sex Pistols, Joe Strummer, Pete Townshend, U2, Bruce Springsteen, Ian Dury, Killing Joke, Neil Young, REM, Sting, Marvin Gaye, Leonard Cohen, Nina Simone, James Brown, Willie Nelson, Willie Dixon, Madonna and a host of others. He was also published in The Times, Guardian, Independent, Loaded, GQ and Uncut, he had pieces on Michael Jackson, Van Morrison and Frank Sinatra featured in The Faber Book Of Pop and Rock ’N’ Roll Is Here To Stay, and was the Daily Mirror’s regular music critic from 2001. He died in 2022.