Anytime! (A Live Set) is a live acoustic album by Steve Harley, released under the name The Steve Harley Band and featuring members of the Steve Harley & Cockney Rebel line-up of the time. It was released in 2004.
Background
Following the early 2003 release of the live album Acoustic and Pure: Live, Harley soon organised a new UK and Irish acoustic tour for May–June 2003, which would feature four members of Cockney Rebel - Barry Wickens, Robbie Gladwell, James Lascelles and Lincoln Anderson. In a June online diary entry, Harley revealed that several shows on the tour had been recorded for a future live CD. He commented:
Later in October, he announced the idea of using tracks from both the Huntingdon Hall and the Jazz Café concerts for the album. He also spoke of the possibility of including one or two newly-recorded studio tracks, as well as an unreleased studio track from Harley's sessions with Mickie Most in the mid-1980s. By November, Harley announced that he was considering mixing the live tracks and getting the album ready for a release in March 2004, to coincide with an upcoming UK tour.
During November, work commenced on the live recordings, with Harley working with engineer Matt Butler. Harley revealed in a diary entry that month:
In January 2004, Harley announced the new album was on schedule for being released at the beginning of the upcoming tour. By the end of that month, the album's title had been decided upon, while the artwork had also been completed. Harley commented: "I like it a lot. Matt Butler has done a fine job of re-mixing the sound and the Worcester and Jazz Café audiences do more than their bit. There is some really brilliant playing from the band. It will be on sale from the first night of the tour, in lobbies around Britain, from Southampton to, well, Glasgow, eh!" Anytime! (A Live Set) was released in 2004. It features eleven live tracks and a bonus track; "Sophistication", which was a previously unreleased studio recording from 1986. To date, it remains exclusive to the album.
In June 2005 interview with Record Collector magazine's Nick Dalton, Harley spoke of his current musical style: "Anytime! is seriously unplugged electro-acoustic. It's similar to original Cockney Rebel – violin, no electric guitar. But I still like playing with my electric band. I'm doing Glastonbury again, headlining the acoustic stage for the first time." In November 2005, Harley would use a similar format to Anytime! on a multiple date acoustic tour of Benelux, although these shows were played without Anderson, and Lascelles was on percussion only (he had played keys at select acoustic shows in February-March 2004, which otherwise kept strictly to the format presented on the album). Harley would return to Benelux around the same time in 2006 with the same lineup.
Years later, Harley would revive the general acoustic format that Anytime! and the subsequent acoustic tours in 2004-2006 took, albeit without keyboards or percussion, amid the release of Harley's 2020 album Uncovered. Furthermore, the 2020 iteration of the acoustic band would feature Oli Hayurst instead of Anderson (who had died in 2014) on double bass, and David Delarre on lead guitar instead of Gladwell. Harley and Wickens remained on lead vocals and violin/viola/acoustic guitar respectively.
Sophistication
The previously unreleased track "Sophistication", from 1986, was produced by Harley and Mickie Most. Like much of Harley's output from the same period, the song was due to be released on Harley's solo album El Gran Senor. However, the album was shelved and left unreleased after RAK Records went bankrupt later in the year. Although many of the songs would later be re-recorded for Harley's 1992 album Yes You Can, "Sophistication" remained unreleased. Despite this, Harley frequently performed the song live during 1989, after Steve Harley & Cockney Rebel made a return to touring with the "Come Back, All is Forgiven" tour.
The song features Andrew Gold on keyboards. Harley later recalled in 2015,