![]() The second disc here contains a live recording from a show in a small club-cum-bar in Cincinnati in early 1983, and is another very pleasant surprise. The version of Brenda Lee’s Sweet Nuthins is something I could have lived without, while the two-minute ‘cockney wide boy’ of Poor Man’s Rich Man is simply dreadful, but the rest of the stuff here is good enough to be ranked quite respectably in the overall Pie chart. Ain’t You Glad New York Can’t Talk and Middle Age Anxiety are both top-class songs, with the opening Heartbreaker, Lonely No More and the rip-roaring closer Happy Birthday, Birthday Girl not far behind. ![]() The classic Marriott / Pie formula of soulful, bluesy rock is right on point, with Marriott’s voice still in fine form, if a little more raspy in a Rod Stewart sort of way than his Small Faces beginnings. There are nine tracks here, which would have made quite a short album if released on their own as they were, but what is here is for the most part surprisingly good. The musicians involved here are unlisted in the album notes, which may be because it might not be certain who played on which track, as there was much shuffling of personnel during the various recording sessions, with only Marriott and drummer Fallon Williams III around for the whole time. The story here begins when Marriott – now based in Atlanta, hence the name of this collection – and his eager band of new pies headed to Tennessee to record some tracks for a proposed new album, which some claim was to have been credited as a Marriott solo recording – though as it was never released, this is conjecture. What we have, in essence, is a document of eighteen months or so of ‘lost’ Humble Pie history, when Steve Marriott assembled a new band after the latest incarnation of Humble Pie had dissolved in 1981, originally to be billed under suggested names as The Official Receivers or simply The Pie, but unsurprisingly when they started playing the clubs in the US, promoters with dollar signs for glasses began billing them as Humble Pie, so – unofficially perhaps – so they were. It wasn’t exactly a high profile release, however, and in all likelihood escaped the notice of all but a few die-hards, so it’s well worth having it available again. This rather interesting two-disc set has, in fact been released before, albeit with slightly different tracklisting and completely different packaging, some fifteen years ago.
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