Pond—The Early Years 2008-2010 (2025)

The best of the band's first three albums smooshed onto an 11-song double album

Now and then, The Great Escape festival in Brighton uses a literal garage as a venue down a nondescript courtyard belonging to Republic of Music called Shipwright’s Yard. You couldn’t imagine a more grassroots setup. Picnic tables with luke warm beer, no stage, no lighting. Just the band, their amps, their instruments and space for about 60 people stood outside. Proper garage rock.

At the 2012 festival there was a disproportionately cracking lineup one afternoon, featuring Electric Soft Parade’s Thomas White (now of White Magic For Lovers) doing his latest solo stuff, Friends (of I’m His Girl uber banger fame) and Pond, ripping it up, doing material off their new Beards, Wives, Denim album. Like a lot of the festival in those days, you just had to do your research and hope you could get into these tiny venues.

But me and my faithful gig buddy Andy did manage to squeeze our way in, and Nick Allbrook and the boys put on a show like their lives depended upon it. As introductions to a band go, this was off the chart. I doubt I’ve seen many more thrilling sets in my life, and it ensured I’d go and see the band whenever I could. Turns out the next opportunity was the very same day, at a proper venue, playing at the old Corn Exchange, a comparatively cavernous hall, in front of a fairly large audience of soon-to-be-fans. This is the magic of city festivals like The Great Escape, right there.

Having Beards, Wives, Denim in the collection obviously sent many of us to check out what else the band had put out. Turns out the new one was actually their 4th, but god damn getting hold of any of the others on a physical format was tough. The first two, Psychedelic Mango (2008) and Corridors Of Blissterday (2009) in particular, appeared to have been released on 200 CDs only, meaning sourcing the mp3s illegally, while 2010’s Frond was the first to get a proper release, but still only in small quantities (500 only on vinyl).

Despite the band building up quite a following over the last 15+ years, these early releases have been essentially the preserve of the superfan. Rumours were that the original source recordings were lost, and it never seemed likely those early gems would get the wider audience they deserved.

So imagine my delight when this one-off Record Store Day release was announced, compiling the 11 best songs off those first three albums onto two slabs of vinyl. With 1700 copies for the world, I wasn’t hugely confident of bagging one, but the gods of record collecting smiled down upon me.

As you may know about Pond and their alter ego Mink Mussel Creek, they were proper jam-heavy psych rock gods of the era. But this set leans into the kinds of songs they would slip into their later live sets, such as Don’t Look At The Sun Or You’ll Go Blind, and songs that signposted later albums, such as the epic Frond, Torn Asunder and the peppy Annie Orangetree.

I guess some would still have preferred Pond just fully reissued those first three albums, but the truth is they’re the work of a band still finding its feet, and as such they’re a tad patchy, which is no doubt why they went down the road of distilling their best early work into one extremely strong package. If you’re that fussed, you can still go and hear the tracks they left off, and then come back and acknowledge that they definitely made the right call.

The unfortunate thing is you can’t sample any of this stuff on your regular streaming services right now. For now, you can simply visit your friendly neighbourhood unofficial YouTube upload, and add to the 125,000 streams. Given how good this stuff actually is, you wonder how many plays it would have had on the major platforms. We may well find out soon if this compilation gets a full release sometime. Here’s hoping.