Twenty years on and Hard Hat Area gets a deserved re-mastering. Somewhere along the line ‘Prelude’ gets one second shorter and ‘Low Levels, High Stakes’ six longer. We'll leave the geeks to figure that. What's not hard to figure is that this ecstatic classic sounds as good now as ever. Holdsworth, like all the wisest artists, hates looking back, but he's always favoured this release which is up there with his all-time best. What made it different was this was very much a band release, put out after six months road testing. So all that famed Holdsworth obsession with detail (thousands of takes to get those solos ‘perfect’) is still here, but it doesn't stifle the energy or the telepathic interplay of a band whose only limits were that of its imagination. Bookended by the yearning ‘Prelude’ and the mysteries of ‘Postlude’ come the singing, soaring ‘Ruhkukah’, the industrial clatter of Husband on the title track and the long and lissom lines of ‘Tullio’. Many try to emulate Holdsworth: why bother? Here's the real deal in excelsis.

None Too Soon is really Beck's album. It was the idea of Holdsworth's old mucker to release an album that was more, um, accessible. Some hope. But the resulting ‘standards’ album is another example of Holdsworth in his prime. Holdsworth's first release recorded in his home studio The Brewery, it has an intimate sound, with plenty of piano from Beck (notably on ‘How Deep Is The Ocean’ and Joe Henderson's ‘Isotope’). There's also less synthaxe than on Holdsworth's previous releases. But fear not, this is no sop to a more ‘straightahead’ voice: Holdsworth was born to turn Django's ‘Nuages’ inside out, while the Gnarly Bloke revels in the fun and freedom of Beck's arrangements, turning ‘Norwegian Wood’ into a perpetual motion, post-bop delight. That half-supped pint on the cover, from Holdsworth's own micro-brewery, was well deserved.