#3: Ian Lynn's Celebration (1986), last of the trilogy [limited time only]

Note the difference in CD and LP album covers.  Shockingly and perhaps for the first time in my long life of listening to music, the CD cover (top) is almost as good an image as the original LP cover.  Obviously it has been long enough for me to go through 4 very annoying modulations from vinyl to cassette to CD to ethereal digital and, for the last, back to LP fittingly enough.  There are albums I've owned in every format, like Deep People In Rock.  It goes without saying the original, especially when I used to play it very loud on our big-ass speakers in the basement, was the most enjoyable, but also for the tactile feel of those big sleeves with their incomparable attempts at beautiful art.

Anyways, this album came out in the early days of CD and so was released in both formats, though the vinyl is listed as 2 years earlier at 1986.  Predictably, the LPDP (The law of postseventies declining progressiveness) holds here.  The negative effects or should I say vast malign influence of Vangelis' Chariots of Fire, an execrable composition few from that period could forget despite the nausea-inducing, almost chemotherapy-like effects of horror vacui it elicited in any intelligent music fan, can be discerned here and there in the album.  That theme combined with the slow-motion running of some black-haired white guy dressed in white shorts is almost like population-wide post-traumatic stress disorder for the everyday individual-- perhaps an early synthetic-keyboards-pandemic would be the most apposite way in which to describe it.  Today, for those who don't remember, perhaps only the novel coronavirus experience can compare in terms of sheer apocalyptic agony to the experience of listening to the Chariots of Fire theme music.

Anyways, this album is not at all like the soundtrack to Chariots of Fire except in the use of digital keyboards and synths.  I don't think a drum machine was used either.  The blurb on the back from Ian Lynn as usual describes the ideas behind the work.  The second side serves as a conclusion to the whole trilogy.  The title refers to a celebration of the other two albums (!).   The song called Time Was seems to be a kind of summing up of the whole endeavour, though it falls just a little bit flat in my honest opinion:





I would be hating it too if they had played it a million times a day on the radio like they did Chariots of Fire.
As usual there are numbered instrumental interludes separating tracks, some of which are quite lovely albeit too short perhaps.

So overall, thanks for recommending this trilogy, plus the Pete Brown album, a nice surprise.
More requests to come in the next little while, as I said earlier, the LPs from all over the world are pouring in now, meaning the pandemic troubles, always in alignment with the international post. are lifting.  Yay, we survived!
If only...