First-ever career anthology of Blackpool-based psychedelic / progressive pop group Complex who self-released one of the world’s rarest, most expensive albums. In 1970-71, Lancashire quartet Complex pressed 99 copies of their self-titled debut LP and instant follow-up The Way We Feel in an unsuccessful attempt to land a major label recording deal. Based around the songs of their teenage organist Steve Coe (later the mastermind behind Monsoon’s Top 20 hit ‘Ever So Lonely’), both albums are now hugely collectable, with a copy of their much-eulogised psych-pop first LP (“the strongest tracks are as good as anything I’ve heard”, claimed a review in UK prog / psych guide book Galactic Ramble) selling in 2015 for an astonishing 10,000. Live For The Minute: The Complex Anthology brings together all of their recordings under one roof for the first time, with those two albums (bolstered by various contemporary out-takes, including the previously-unissued original demo of ‘Green-Eyed Lucy’) joined by a third CD of subsequent recordings that now gain their first-ever issue. That third disc includes their semi-legendary, 25-minute unreleased acetate LP from early 1972, when Coe’s replacement Mike Proctor (collectable in his own right for his 1967 EMI mod/psych single ‘Mr Commuter’) took the band in a slightly heavier direction – as can now be heard for the first time on the eight-minute progressive rock epic ‘No Title (We Don’t Know Yet)’ and the equally heavy ‘To Make You See Me’. Featuring roughly 75 minutes of previously unreleased music alongside newly remastered upgrades of those two albums, Live For The Minute is a long-overdue anthology of the band’s body of work that includes the full Complex story, with new quotes and many previously unpublished photos.
