Stationary Traveller

Released April 13, 1984 via Decca, Stationary Traveller is Camel's tenth studio album and their last for the label, produced by Andy Latimer, recorded at Riverside Studios, mixed in Los Angeles and mastered at The Mastering Lab. Latimer built it around East Germans trying to cross from East to West Berlin, and the two ideologies facing each other over the Wall. Five years later, in January 1989, Erich Honecker said the Wall could stand another fifty years. It fell that November.

Synthesizers carry more of the weight than on any earlier Camel record. Ton Scherpenzeel, formerly of Kayak, and Haydn Bendall's Fairlight paint the border in cold digital colour, with Paul Burgess on drums and David Paton on bass. "Vopos," named for the East German People's Police, is dense, synth-led noir, "Refugee" carries a Supertramp lilt, and "Cloak and Dagger Man," the March 1984 single with Chris Rainbow singing, goes edgy new wave. The title track is a slow instrumental with Latimer's guitar out front, Mel Collins' saxophone slides through "Fingertips," and Rainbow returns on "Long Goodbyes," one of the band's most affecting ballads.

The grandest suite band of the 70s shrinking its epics into four-minute dispatches from a divided city, and the more fully realised of Camel's two 80s pop-leaning records. Forty minutes, ten tracks. It reached No. 16 in the Netherlands, 33 in Spain, 48 in Sweden and 57 in the UK.

CD album, new and sealed.