On the face of it, Elmer Gantry’s Velvet Opera should have been a shoo-in for success. A popular, dynamic live act who were equally at home in the studio, their early recordings were bursting with wit, intelligence, melody, style and, perhaps more than anything else, a sense of fun.
· The sole album to be made by the original line-up, Elmer Gantry’s Velvet Opera was one of the most original and consistently entertaining albums to emerge from the British psychedelic scene. The band also cut a couple of hugely commercial singles – and yet, somehow, the glittering prizes eluded them (although Elmer did subsequently score a hit as the lead singer on Stretch’s ‘Why Did You Do It’, while rhythm section Richard Hudson and John Ford would later flourish in the Strawbs before branching out on their own) .
· This definitive release of that self-titled 1968 album adds their three contemporaneous singles (including the minor hit ‘Flames’, an EGVO song that the embryonic Led Zeppelin included in their live set), various studio outtakes (such as their title song to the little-known 1967 Swinging London horror movie short Talk Of The Devil) as well as hitherto-unreleased early demo versions of ‘Flames’ and ‘Salisbury Plain'.

- Colin Forster / guitar
- Richard Hudson / drums
- Elmer Gantry / guitar, vocals
- John Ford / bass