Camel
Dust and Dreams

Release Date: 1991 | Tracklist

“Dust And Dreams” is the eleventh studio album of Camel and was released in 1991. The line up on the album is Andrew Latimer, Ton Scherpenzeel, Colin Bass and Paul Burgess. The album had also the participation of some other musicians: David Paton, Mae McKenna, Don Harriss, Christopher Bock, Neil Panton, John Burton and Kim Venaas.


After release their second live album “Pressure Points” in the late of 1984, the band disappeared from the media without ads. For a few years Latimer was fighting with lawyers to get some due royalties and to resolve the problems with their former manager. Changes inside their record company Decca made it also clear that Camel had to try and put an end to their contract, which had already started ten years earlier. Both amicably agreed to do so on April 10th, 1985. Latimer, who had already started a new project, which will become "Dust And Dreams", was free to sign with another record label. However, after the end of the contract with Decca and after some contacts with other record labels, soon became clear to Latimer that he wasn’t interested in other record labels. To avoid more waste of time and energy, Latimer decided to sell his London house and with his wife Susan Hoover moved from England to California to set up there and Camel be able to create their own label, what was done, and which was called the Camel Productions. At this time, he decided to rewrite the second half of "Dust And Dreams”. He used the money from the sales of his house to build a small studio where "Dust And Dreams" was recorded and produced. With the sales that took off, the company organized a world tour and got the license to release the old Camel’s works, into the new CD format.

So, after seven years of a hiatus of time, Latimer revived Camel and recorded “Dust And Dreams”, another concept album. Lyrically, the concept is an evocation of “The Grapes Of Wrath”, the great literary work of the famous American writer John Steinbeck. It’s important to write a few lines about the book, because the conceptual story of the album is based on it. “The Grapes Of Wrath” was a novel published in 1939 and which was awarded with the Pulitzer Prize in 1940 and the Nobel Prize in 1962. The oeuvre was also immortalized by the movie, with the same name, directed by John Ford in 1940 and starring the actor Henry Fonda. This American classic is due to the effects of the Great Depression of the small family farms of the American West. It tells the story of a poor family in the state of Oklahoma, who during the Great Depression of 1929 was forced to abandon the lands occupied by them for decades, on a sharecropper regime, due to arrival of progress and including the purchase of tractors and machinery for the owners of those lands, and the born of a new property regime of lands. This factor has made obsolete the manual labour of plowing and planting the land and forced them to head toward the false Eden called California in search of a better life.

Musically, “Dust And Dreams” is another very emotional album with excellent compositions and nice melodies. With this album, we are brought back to the early Camel’s sound and to their great quality musical level. As happened with “Nude”, “Dust And Dreams” initially divides its time between songs and instrumental before ceding halfway, through purely instrumental music. The music is largely kept very quiet, and there are only four vocal tracks. As a concept album, the eighteen tracks are all interconnected as if it’s a single theme. "Dust And Dreams" can most likely be regarded as a mixture of elements of the previous Camel's albums, "The Snow Goose" and "Nude". Not in the sense that the old ideas are new warmed up, but the stylistic elements are somehow similar. Most on the album are keyboards in the foreground, not bombastic, but always attentive and appropriate to the original novel, mostly of the melancholy kind. There are many beautiful songs here, all of them with instrumental pieces in between. In fact the album finishes with several fine instrumental sequences. Again Latimer, as a producer, a composer, a guitarist, a keyboardist and a singer, did a fine job. His guitar playing always brings joy to the listener, sometimes invoking the goose bumps, sometimes a big smile on our face. This is a very beautiful album from Camel with music for our sense, soul and heart.


Conclusion: "Dust And Dreams" is a fantastic artistic interpretation of the Steinbeck's "The Grapes Of Wrath", and it thoroughly explores the theme of “The Joads’ journey”, into the false Eden. With “Dust And Dreams”, Latimer returns to Camel’s great albums. Many years ago, Camel had released their really last great work, “Moonmadness” in 1976. So, what did Camel, or I should say Latimer do, in meantime? In meantime, they released two very good albums, “Rain Dances” and “Nude”, a good album “Stationary Traveller” and three weak albums, especially for Camel’s standards, “Breathless”, “I Can See Your House From Here” and “The Single Factor”. So, “Dust And Dreams” marks the return of Camel and Latimer. But, despite be a return, it represents a different version of Camel, a more modern version, I think.


Music was my first love.
John Miles (Rebel)

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3.5 great

Rank: #183 for 1991