In 1970 Ten Years After released a single that forced listeners to change their turntable speed: a three-minute edit of Love Like a Man at 45 rpm on one side and a sprawling live jam at 33 rpm on the other. This episode treats the band as a living organism and traces its messy birth in the Nottingham and Mansfield areas of the early 1960s, through names like Ivan Jay and the Jaycats, the Jaybirds, Blues Trip and Blues Yard, the arrival of drummer Ric Lee in August 1965, and a 1966 move to London to back the vocal group the Ivy League. Two competing origin stories for the name, an Elvis tribute or a magazine ad for a book on the Suez Crisis, lead into a Marquee residency and a 1967 Windsor Jazz Festival set that got them signed to Deram without a prior hit single.

The hosts follow the 1968 live album Undead, the first recording of I’m Going Home, and the 1969 festival season that broke genre barriers at Newport and made Alvin Lee a legend at Woodstock on August 17. They cover the UK success of Cricklewood Green, the label move to Columbia and Chrysalis, the layered, atmospheric A Space in Time and I’d Love to Change the World, and the exhaustion behind the 1974 breakup after eight consecutive UK top 40 albums and 12 entries on the Billboard 200. Then the reinventions: Alvin Lee’s Ten Years Later, the 1983 Reading reunion, the 1989 album About Time recorded in Memphis, Lee’s departure in 2003 and death in 2013, and the lineups with Joe Gooch, Colin Hodgkinson, Marcus Bonfanti and the 2024 to 2025 touring band, with Ric Lee the one continuous thread.

• The dual-speed Love Like a Man single and what it reveals about a band torn between radio and the stage
• From the Jaycats to a Marquee residency: the identity crisis that produced the name Ten Years After
• Newport, Seattle and Woodstock 1969 and the ferocity of I’m Going Home
• Why the 1974 split reads more like burnout from the 1970s label machine than an ego explosion
• The Ship of Theseus question and how Ric Lee’s drum stool held the institution together