Since Dancing on Frith Street, a 1990 Loose Tubes live album recorded in Ronnie Scott’s that was eventually released in 2011 and its counterpart Säd Afrika, recorded during the same stint at the club just before Loose Tubes broke up six years after forming, a certain momentum has built up.

The anarchic 21-piece band has long held a fascination for the Polar Bear generation and beyond despite the fact that many younger jazz musicians today have had no direct experience of their music. Two out of three of Loose Tubes’ long lost albums are not on CD and are now very difficult to find on vinyl even, and it’s a surprise that Loose Tubes are actually reuniting before these reissues take place. Whether further news develops that the ‘missing’ albums in fact will be reissued is another matter. Surely there is no better time to reissue these records than before May when Loose Tubes play Cheltenham and Ronnie Scott’s. But nobody is holding their breath. 1985’s eponymous debut and its follow-up, Delightful Precipice, put out a year later, with the easier-to-get-hold-of Open Letter (which is on CD but out of print) following two years further on are the records everyone wants to hear. 

Most interest lies in Loose Tubes and its seven tracks: ‘Eden Express', ‘Rowing Boat Delineation Egg’, ‘Descarga’, ‘Descarga Ocurriencia’, ‘Yellow Hill’ (which featured as the opening track of Dancing on Frith Street), ‘Mister Zee’, and ‘Arriving’. Loose Tubes are seen now in some ways as the partial inspiration of forward-thinking big bands as different as Beats & Pieces from Manchester and the London-based Troyk-estra. On Wednesday at midday veteran scene photographer Allan Titmuss (known for his evocative Miles Davis photographs among many others) and who took a period photo of the band back in the day assembles a “here’s how they are now” line-up with Loose Tubes members including Iain Ballamy, Chris Batchelor, Django Bates, and Ashley Slater showing up outside Ronnie Scott’s where the earlier shot was taken to make a bit of history.