Flash: Flash Featuring Ray Bennett & Colin Carter

You’ll see glimpses.

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A Yes offshoot band in the early 70s, Flash were known as much for their sexist album covers as for their music. Forty years on, they’re back without the dodgy sleeves or the offshoots.

Ray Bennett has switched from bass to guitar, in place of the late Peter Banks, and his playing is adequate, without breaking new ground. Much the same could be said of singer Colin Carter.

If you enjoy trekking prog’s ley lines, you’ll be fine. But there’s little that lingers and their cover of Nine Inch Nails’ Hurt fails to turn your head around the way Johnny Cash’s version did. And why they try to reinvent Manhattan Morning (from their third album) as a blues ballad is a mystery.

Hugh Fielder

Hugh Fielder has been writing about music for 47 years. Actually 58 if you include the essay he wrote about the Rolling Stones in exchange for taking time off school to see them at the Ipswich Gaumont in 1964. He was news editor of Sounds magazine from 1975 to 1992 and editor of Tower Records Top magazine from 1992 to 2001. Since then he has been freelance. He has interviewed the great, the good and the not so good and written books about some of them. His favourite possession is a piece of columnar basalt he brought back from Iceland.