Clarke is and will forever be a hero, but you've gotta wonder about the message of The Message. It reads more like a calling card for all things Clarke, without it ever getting beyond the merest wave at what makes him the icon he is. It's great he calls out to lost souls like Al Jarreau, Chuck Berry and Larry Coryell, but you’d think they’d deserve more than the two-minute riff and rap that is ‘And Ya Know We're Missing You’. We're soon into classic Clarke material with (yet another) re-hash of ‘After the Cosmic Rain’. ‘Combat Continuum’ revels in his sci-fi apocalypse boogie which was embarrassing enough in the 1970s. All his slaps, bends and harmonics are to the fore, but so is his love for a ditzy pop toon like ‘Lost In A World’. Gochiashvili is a class act, notably on ‘The Rugged Truth’, and it's interesting that it's Clarke's young ensemble that's foregrounded on the sleeve. But there's rarely a sense that this is more than a sophisticated cover band. On his own, like the solo ballad of the title-track, or even scraping through the prelude to a Bach cello suite, there's a glimpse of Clarke's soul, but he's so much more than this. That's the real message.