Live in London

This is a good-value, well-assembled 80-minute DVD of Strawbs film footage from the 1970s (save for one clip), built around the two mini-features in the disc's title. Live in Tokyo '75, done for Japanese TV, is a decent, straightforward concert document of the band at its commercial peak, the Dave Cousins/Dave Lambert/John Hawken lineup performing ten songs crossing the boundary of folk-rock and prog rock. The Strawbs weren't flashy stage performers, so what you get is just professionally filmed, sung, and played material, with a bit of a light show, an on-stage statue of a flute-playing woman, and dry ice covering their feet in fog near the end. Grave New World: The Movie is a far more peculiar item, as it's something of a video (all the music mimed) of the entire 1972 album Grave New World, with Cousins the only member of the band who'd still be with the Strawbs by the time of the 1975 Tokyo show. Produced solely for cinema use, it's a little cheesily dated (though not unentertainingly so) in its occasional semi-psychedelic special effects and, more particularly, some contrived costumes and sets. At various times you see the band superimposed above London traffic in vaudevillian suits and singing in robes above clouds; a slinky bell-bottomed girl dancing in tripped-out bliss in the middle of a sun; stained glass windows with religious scenes; footage of then-contemporary war and conflict; and the like. The music, as you'd expect, is a lot different from that of the 1975 version of the band, with a far heavier bent toward their brooding folk and folk-rock roots. As bonus clips, there's a yet different lineup of the group doing "Til the Sun Comes Shining Through" on TV in 1970, with Rick Wakeman on piano and (in his final appearance with the band) Lindsay Cooper on double bass; a 1974 news interview with Dave Cousins, who discusses the single "Grace Darling" aboard a lifeboat; and a video of "The Young Pretender," from Cousins and Wakeman's 2002 album Hummingbird (with Ric Sanders on violin).