I reviewed one of these Jools Holland, 'Later' DVD's previously ('Giants'). In that review I laid out the pro's and con's of the whole 'Later' programme. For me the downside is often Jools Holland feeling unable to resist joining in on piano with just about anything that takes his fancy. On the plus side you usually find that the bands involved try to put on a good performance and the production values (usually good sound and camera work) are also of a high standard.

ARTIST - SONG TITLE - DATE 1ST BROADCAST

As you can see from the tracklisting there are quite a variety of bands performing a variety of tracks (mostly the hits but also some album tracks). The earliest performance coming from 1993 and the latest from 2003.

THE GOOD STUFF
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- British Sea Power: put on a good performance, a lot of people will be unaware, and pleasantly surprised by the band.
- Coldplay: are a marmite band, loved and hated in equal measure. The one thing they do do though is write excellent tunes and put a lot of effort into their performances.
- Echo and The Bunnymen: singing 'Nothing Lasts Forever'. A brilliant performance of a great song.
- Elastica: loads of energy and now a timeless song.
- Elbow: grow on you! I bought the album 'Cast of thousands' and couldn't get into it, but with repeated listens it really grabs you. Brilliant performance of a great song.
- Embrace: great at writing anthems and always put a lot of energy into the performance.
- The Darkness: Great camp performance (Justin climbing onto a piano at one stage) and brilliant playing.
- The Verve: Excellent. A classic song which gets a great performance.

The fact that Jools doesn't get involved much is also a great bonus!

There are also some middling performances of run of the mill songs on here ('22-20's, 'The Beta Band', 'The Libertines').

OVERALL
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For the price (£6.99 with free delivery at Play.com) this is a bit of a bargain. You're pretty much guaranteed to find something you'll like here. This is a DVD that you can dip in and out of.
The extras are a bit thin on the ground (couple of short interviews and the ability to program your tracks being the main ones) but I find that this is in keeping with the 'Later' DVD's.
The menus are fairly easy to navigate (especially if you have other titles from the Later library). You can also choose a particular track or play all.
As mentioned previously the sound quality is not totally brilliant and this has been picked up by other reviewers on other sites. For me personally I didn't have to much of a problem with it (though Ash have suffered quite badly from the bad mixing).