Last month Universal Music’s enormous Moody Blues Timeless Flight 17-disc super deluxe box set was released, and like a few recent box sets (Wings Over America, Smashing Pumpkin’s Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness) it retails at well over £100 (nearer to £200 on amazon UK at the time of writing).
Unlike those sets, Timeless Flight celebrates an entire career, and Mark Powell (who researched, compiled and produced this set) has done an incredible job in terms of the audio within (14 discs of it, including three DVDs with six albums in 5.1 surround sound), the video content (a further three DVDs) and the supporting content of which the 124-page hardback book is the outstanding element.
The book is one of the very best we’ve seen in a super deluxe music set, with a seemingly endless amount of archive photography, sitting alongside words which tell the story of the band.

Long Distance Voyager is the tenth album by The Moody Blues, first released in May 1981 on the group's Threshold record label. It was the group's first album featuring keyboardist Patrick Moraz (in his past he worked with bands such as Refugee and Yes) in place of co-founder Mike Pinder, who left after Octave in 1978.

The album reached No. 6 on Billboard's Pop Albums chart, the first of Dylan's LPs to break into the US Top 10. It also topped the UK charts later that spring. The first track, "Subterranean Homesick Blues", became Dylan's first single to chart in the US, peaking at No. 39. Bringing It All Back Home has been described as one of the greatest albums of all time by multiple publications. In 2003, it was ranked number 31 on Rolling Stone's list of the "500 Greatest Albums of All Time", later repositioned to number 181 in the 2020 edition.

Producer Bob Johnston, who had overseen the recording of Highway 61 Revisited, started work with Dylan and the Hawks at Columbia Studio A, 799 Seventh Avenue, New York, on October 5. They concentrated on a new arrangement of "Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window?", a song recorded during the Highway 61 Revisited sessions but not included on that album. Three further numbers were attempted, but none progressed into completed songs. Both the fragmentary "Jet Pilot" and "I Wanna Be Your Lover", a quasi-parody of the Beatles' "I Wanna Be Your Man", finally appeared on the 1985 box set retrospective, Biograph. Also attempted were two takes of "Medicine Sunday", a song that later evolved into "Temporary Like Achilles".

Dylan later left for Europe, completing a few performances in England before traveling to Paris where he was introduced to a German model, Christa Paffgen, who went by the name of Nico. After treating Dylan to a meal at her flat, Nico accompanied Dylan across Europe, a trip that passed through Germany before ending in Vouliagmeni, a small village outside of Athens, Greece. Dylan stayed at Vouliagmeni for more than a week, finishing many of the songs that would appear on his fourth and upcoming album. Nine songs of these would be recorded upon his return to New York: "All I Really Want to Do", "Spanish Harlem Incident", "To Ramona", "I Shall Be Free No. 10", "Ballad in Plain D", "It Ain't Me, Babe", "Mama, You Been on My Mind", "Denise Denise", and "Black Crow Blues". Dylan also completed another song called "I'll Keep It With Mine", which, according to Nico, was "about me and my little baby". Dylan gave the song to Nico, who would eventually record it for her own album, Chelsea Girl, released in 1967.

Planet Waves is the fourteenth studio album by American singer-songwriter Bob Dylan, released on January 17, 1974, by Asylum Records in the United States and Island Records in the United Kingdom.
Dylan is supported on the album by longtime collaborators the Band, with whom he embarked on a major reunion tour (documented on the live album Before the Flood) following its release. With a successful tour and a host of publicity, Planet Waves was a hit, enjoying a brief stay at No. 1 on the US Billboard charts—a first for the artist—and No. 7 in the UK. Reviews were generally positive; critics were not as negative as they had been with some then-recent Bob Dylan albums (namely Self Portrait and Dylan) but still not enthusiastic for the album's brand of laid-back roots rock, but it was nevertheless considered an improvement over those albums.

New Morning is the eleventh studio album by the American singer-songwriter Bob Dylan, released on October 21, 1970 by Columbia Records.
Coming only four months after the controversial Self Portrait, the more concise New Morning received a much warmer reception from fans and critics. Most welcome was the return of Dylan's familiar, nasal singing voice. While he has a slightly nasal tone to his voice on "Alberta #1" from Self Portrait, this was the first full album with his familiar voice since John Wesley Harding in 1967, after which he began singing with a country croon.

John Wesley Harding is the eighth studio album by the American singer-songwriter Bob Dylan, released on December 27, 1967, by Columbia Records. Produced by Bob Johnston, the album marked Dylan's return to semi-acoustic instrumentation and folk-influenced songwriting after three albums of lyrically abstract, blues-indebted rock music. John Wesley Harding was recorded around the same time as the home recording sessions with the Band known as The Basement Tapes.

Highway 61 Revisited is the sixth studio album by the American singer-songwriter Bob Dylan, released on August 30, 1965, by Columbia Records. Dylan continued the musical approach of his previous album Bringing It All Back Home (1965), using rock musicians as his backing band on every track of the album in a further departure from his primarily acoustic folk sound, except for the closing track, the 11-minute ballad "Desolation Row". Critics have focused on the innovative way Dylan combined driving, blues-based music with the subtlety of poetry to create songs that captured the political and cultural climate of contemporary America. Author Michael Gray argued that, in an important sense, the 1960s "started" with this album.

Blood on the Tracks is the fifteenth studio album by American singer-songwriter Bob Dylan, released on January 20, 1975, by Columbia Records. The album marked Dylan's return to Columbia after two albums with Asylum Records. Dylan began recording the album at an A & R studio in New York City in September 1974. In December, shortly before Columbia was due to release the album, Dylan abruptly re-recorded much of the material in Sound 80 studio in Minneapolis. The final album contains five tracks recorded in New York and five from Minneapolis. The songs have been linked to tensions in Dylan's personal life, including his estrangement from his then-wife Sara. One of their children, Jakob Dylan, described the songs as "my parents talking". Dylan denied that the songs were autobiographical.

Blonde on Blonde is the seventh studio album by the American singer-songwriter Bob Dylan, released as a double album on June 20, 1966, by Columbia Records. Recording sessions began in New York in October 1965 with numerous backing musicians, including members of Dylan's live backing band, the Hawks. Though sessions continued until January 1966, they yielded only one track that made it onto the final album—"One of Us Must Know (Sooner or Later)". At producer Bob Johnston's suggestion, Dylan, keyboardist Al Kooper, and guitarist Robbie Robertson moved to the CBS studios in Nashville, Tennessee. These sessions, augmented by some of Nashville's top session musicians, were more fruitful, and in February and March all the remaining songs for the album were recorded.

The Times They Are a-Changin' is the third studio album by the American singer-songwriter Bob Dylan. It was released on February 10, 1964, through Columbia Records. Whereas his previous albums, Bob Dylan (1962) and The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan (1963), combined original material and cover songs, this was the first to feature only original compositions. The album consists mostly of stark, sparsely arranged ballads concerning issues such as racism, poverty, and social change. The title track is one of Dylan's most famous; many feel that it captures the spirit of social and political upheaval that characterized the 1960s.

Bringing It All Back Home is the fifth studio album by the American singer-songwriter Bob Dylan, released in April 1965 by Columbia Records. In a major transition from his earlier sound, it was Dylan's first album to incorporate electric instrumentation, which caused controversy and divided many in the contemporary folk scene.

The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan is the second studio album by the American singer-songwriter Bob Dylan. It was released on May 27, 1963, through Columbia Records. The record marks the beginning of Dylan's writing contemporary lyrics to traditional melodies. His debut album Bob Dylan contains only two original songs, whereas eleven of the thirteen songs on Freewheelin' are Dylan's compositions. It opens with "Blowin' in the Wind", which became an anthem of the 1960s, and an international hit for folk trio Peter, Paul and Mary soon after the release of the album. The album featured several other songs which came to be regarded as among Dylan's best compositions and classics of the 1960s folk scene: "Girl from the North Country", "Masters of War", "A Hard Rain's a-Gonna Fall" and "Don't Think Twice, It's All Right".

Desire is the seventeenth studio album by American singer-songwriter Bob Dylan, released on January 5, 1976, through Columbia Records. It is one of Dylan's most collaborative efforts, featuring the same caravan of musicians as the acclaimed Rolling Thunder Revue tours the previous year (later documented on The Bootleg Series Vol. 5). Many of the songs also featured backing vocals by Emmylou Harris and Ronee Blakley. Most of the album was co-written by Jacques Levy, and is composed of lengthy story-songs, two of which quickly generated controversy: the 11-minute-long "Joey", which is seen as glorifying the violent gangster "Crazy Joey" Gallo, and "Hurricane", the opening track that tells a passionate account of the murder case against boxer Rubin "Hurricane" Carter, who the song asserts was framed. Carter was released in 1985, after a judge overturned his conviction on appeal.