Large Afternoon is Greenslade’s unlikely comeback — the first new album in twenty-five years, made by two of the founders with a new singer and drummer. Released in 2000, it keeps the band’s guitar-less, twin-keyboard identity intact, and divides listeners as sharply as anything they ever recorded.

The short version

Large Afternoon (2000) is a reunion album by Greenslade, their first studio record since 1975’s Time and Tide. Founder members Dave Greenslade and Tony Reeves are joined by keyboardist and singer John Young, formerly of Asia, and drummer Chris Cozens; original vocalist Dave Lawson and drummer Andrew McCulloch are absent. Written entirely by Dave Greenslade and largely instrumental, it is warm and melodic, if noticeably more synthetic than the band’s vintage sound.

Twenty-five years later

Greenslade had folded in 1976, undone by trouble with their management rather than any shortage of ideas. Dave Greenslade spent the following decades composing, releasing solo albums and, in the 1990s, rejoining a reformed Colosseum — the band from which Greenslade had originally sprung. Tony Reeves was part of that reunion too, and in time Dave Greenslade’s thoughts turned to reviving the group that bore his name. A full reunion proved impossible: Dave Lawson did not return, and Andrew McCulloch had largely left music behind for a life of sailing. Instead came John Young on keyboards and vocals and Chris Cozens on drums. The title, charmingly, is a phrase Dave Greenslade remembered from his grandmother.

The sound

The essential shape survives: no guitarist, two keyboard players, and Tony Reeves’s bass moving melodically through the middle. Roughly every other track is an instrumental, and it is on these that the album feels most itself, with echoes of Dave Greenslade’s long career writing music for television. What has changed is the palette. The great organic voices of the 1970s records — Hammond organ, electric piano, Mellotron — give way to brighter, glossier synthesizers, and the drums sound thin beside the muscular playing of old. It is unmistakably Dave Greenslade’s music, heard through the production values of a different age.

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The songs

The instrumental ‘Cakewalk’ opens with a driving keyboard riff that reaches back toward the band’s heyday. ‘Hallelujah Anyway’ is the one song Dave Greenslade did not write the words for: they come from Patrick Woodroffe, the illustrator with whom he had collaborated years earlier. The title track and ‘No Room - But A View’ are lighter, almost cinematic, and ‘Anthems’ could pass for a television theme. Most listeners single out ‘In the Night,’ a sedate, beautiful piece in which the synthesizers conjure Mellotron strings over a jazzy figure, with John Young’s voice soaring above. ‘Lazy Days’ and ‘May Fair’ close things gently.

Reception and legacy

Opinion split at once. Detractors found the songwriting slight and lamented the loss of the vintage keyboards, hearing a polished demo where a Greenslade album should be. Others welcomed John Young’s clear, unfussy singing — easier for many ears than Dave Lawson’s acquired taste — and praised Tony Reeves’s bass and the strength of the instrumentals. It was received warmly enough to send the band back on stage, with John Trotter taking over on drums, and a 2001 concert in Yorkshire was issued as a live album. Then Greenslade disbanded once more, and Large Afternoon remains their final studio record.

The verdict

Large Afternoon is one for the faithful, not the curious — begin with the debut or Bedside Manners Are Extra, where the band’s magic is undiluted. Judged on its own terms, though, as a warm late statement from a fine composer surrounded by sympathetic players, it has genuine pleasures. Come for the drive of ‘Cakewalk’ and the quiet beauty of ‘In the Night,’ and hear a twin-keyboard band, still without a guitarist, returning after a quarter of a century to see what they could still do.

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