I still remember the debate over whether Exile was worthy of inclusion or not. Not all of it is easy to listen to as it is completely out of context without the visuals it was intended to accompany but the selection here works more than adequately without it.īy the time the second volume in the series: The Sky Road came to be put together, The Pavilion had been erected and established as Ant's official fan club magazine and it was great to be actively involved in the selection of much of the music for this one. Here you get the first real flavour of the kind of music that is the staple of many a musician's work. The album contains some of my favourite pieces by Ant none more so than the brilliantly evocative Mountain Voices and Lord Of The Smoking Mirror and of course, the truly superb Land Of Dragons suite which graced one of the numerous 'Survival' wildlife programmes that Ant and his cohort, Joji Hirota were to write so much music for in the Eighties and Nineties. Here we have some of Ant's first tentative stabs at working in the field of Library music - an area which has increasingly come to dominate his recorded work since then. Thankfully most of it was spared the use of drum machine which is one thing that is guaranteed to date a recording! Volume One has aged surprisingly well considering that some of it dates to the mid 1970's. Revisiting these albums now brings back so many memories and so my review will be coloured by them I am afraid.

I don't think that at the time that Ant had any intention of this being anything more than a one off idea to keep things ticking over until circumstances improved which thankfully they did in 1990 when Virgin Records took over his back catalogue and ensured it was finally reissued on CD but that is a story already told in both the pages of TWR and The Pavilion. Passport and PRT ( who had released the Private Parts & Pieces albums and Tarka respectively) had both managed to go bust leaving Ant very much in limbo. This was very much a stop gap as Ant was between record labels at the time.

The original album was a cassette album released on the Occasional Records label. It is difficult to believe that the first of these albums Finger Painting, is now thirty one years old! It was a slimmer, trimmer version of me that helped Ant assemble this one back in 1989 from a variety of music previously reserved for library albums. 'Revisiting The Missing Links' - Anthony Phillips' Missing Links 1-4 reissues examined in a slightly biased manner by Alan Hewitt.

Twr the missing link