LINK: Chris Thompson interview

Chris Thompson's majestic and soulful vocals have been entertaining classic rock fans now for almost four decades, and thankfully he's showing no sign of slowing down anytime soon. Chris' rise to worldwide prominence began in the mid 70's when he took over the front man duties for Manfred Mann's Earth Band, a gig which he held off and on well into the 90's. While primarily known as the voice behind the signature Earth Band classics "Blinded By The Light", "Davey's On The Road Again" and "Runner", to name just a few, Chris has been diligently carving out his own identity as a solo artist in the years following his departure from the band. In fact he's assembled quite a formidable band of his own, which includes his close collaborator, Norwegian guitar wizard Mads Eriksen.

These days the British born, New Zealand raised Thompson makes his home in Belgium and continues to tour Europe with his band, performing his own material right alongside a wide variety of material that he helped make famous from the Earth Band's back catalogue. His latest release is a fantastic new CD / DVD package that combines a live radio concert along with a show that was filmed in Aschaffenburg Germany. However, the concert film was not without its problems, as technical difficulties meant that much of the material had to be scrapped. Undaunted Chris decided to release the show and along with the radio concert, which is featured on the CD portion, together makes one hell of a great package for his fans.

Ryan: This is a fantastic new DVD / CD collection that you've just released. The DVD portion of the package was filmed in Aschaffenburg Germany, and I know that things didn't go originally as planned, as you weren't able to present the whole concert due to technical issues. What's interesting though is that rather than scrap the whole project, you decided to release the material that was salvageable. Great idea, but can you tell me why you decided to do this?

Chris: Well like I said in the liner notes, I think anyone else would have given up. Everybody had put so much effort into it that I thought it would be just stupid to let it die without any of it seeing the light of day. As there were seven tracks that were in order, I thought I might as well just do that, but we came up with lots of different plans to include videos and other bits. It just came to the point where once we'd done the live CD in Berlin and we'd gotten permission to use that, I thought that we just needed to give everybody a taste of what we do video wise, and then we'll just do something like that again in the near future. So that's the real reason behind it. Then the other part of it is we played in Dexheim, and I had a look at that stuff and thought that it kind of had the hits on it, so I thought that it made sense to do something at least.

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