‘d:tour 1997 live’ by Delirious?

By a quirk of alphabetical organisation, we come to this immediately after the four Cutting Edge albums, but miss out ‘King of Fools’, the anchoring album that ties this record to them. Ah well.

Once the Cutting Edge band had changed their name to Delirious and decided to go full time, lots of things happened. All of a sudden, there was a full album, singles, a tour of proper venues, even TV appearances. The first phase of their new lives was concluded with this, a recording from a date on the tour, released, if memory serves, through mail order? I may be making that up.

As it stands, it’s certainly a good document of how things were at the time. Most of ‘King of Fools’ is represented here, as well as a handful of later Cutting Edge tracks. At the time, the tracklisting was a mild disappointment –the ‘King of Fools’ tracks were pretty much as recorded, and the rest had been recently released on the ‘Live and in the Can’ collection, but separated from this context, everything sounds pretty good. The between-song banter from Martin Smith is mildly awkward at points, but full of optimism for the future which proved to be fairly well founded – Delirious would certainly go from strength to strength over the years, though not always in the way they had planned or expected.

Thirteen years later, it’s hard to regard this album as essential. It isn’t – but it does remain a decent listen, and it retains a nostalgic glow for anyone caught up in their trajectory at the time.