You can trust Louder Our experienced team has worked for some of the biggest brands in music. From testing headphones to reviewing albums, our experts aim to create reviews you can trust. Find out more about how we review.

For a brief flicker in the early 70s, Ducks Deluxe ruled the pubrock circuit. Their sweat-soaked energy and straightforward rock’n’roll had no gimmicks attached, nor a discernible image. All these guys wanted to do was get on stage, plug in and take the music and the fans to the limit.

People now often cite the Ducks because various members went on to achieve a higher profile in more successful bands like The Motors and Graham Parker & The Rumour. But this lot should be honoured in their own right. And this three CD box set does exactly that.

Both early Ducks Deluxe albums are here – their self-titled debut from 1974 and Taxi To The Terminal Zone the next year – plus EP tracks and the A and B-sides of all their singles. There are also demos, plus 2009 reunion mini album Box Of Shorts and live material from a 2012 gig at the Half Moon in Putney.

Here’s clear affirmation that Ducks Deluxe were one of the UK’s best bands over four decades back, and can still back many others into a corner.

Malcolm Dome had an illustrious and celebrated career which stretched back to working for Record Mirror magazine in the late 70s and Metal Fury in the early 80s before joining Kerrang! at its launch in 1981. His first book, Encyclopedia Metallica, published in 1981, may have been the inspiration for the name of a certain band formed that same year. Dome is also credited with inventing the term "thrash metal" while writing about the Anthrax song Metal Thrashing Mad in 1984. With the launch of Classic Rock magazine in 1998 he became involved with that title, sister magazine Metal Hammer, and was a contributor to Prog magazine since its inception in 2009. He died in 2021.