The first time I saw The Flower Kings live was in Utrecht. At that time I only had one of their CDs. They opened the show with a fifty-minute epic "The Garden Of Dreams", a song I didn’t know. I was totally blown away. After this song I immediately decided to visit their show in Tilburg the next day.

Last month The Flower Kings released the official bootleg Live in New York, an audience recording, that should make up for some of the loses of the The Rainmaker-tour. Roine Stolt wrote that the quality of this CD is just a little above an ordinary audience bootleg. This again shows how modest the band is. Live in New York sounds better than a lot of official live albums in my CD collection. Sure, there are some small mistakes and a little background noise here and there.

Then again, this adds to the special live atmosphere the band creates on the road.

The CD contains five tracks. Highlight is of course the opener "Garden Of Dreams" (47:08), a prog-fans wet dream. The album Stardust We Are is represented by two tracks "In The Eyes Of The World" and "Circus Brimstone". "I Am The Sun" is taken from the Space Revolver album. Finally there is a Bass & Drum duet.

Live in New York is not available in the regular shops and can only be bought directly from the band at their web site (http://www.flower-power.org.uk) and probably at their concerts this month.