For Robin Trower, stage and studio are two sides of the same coin. If you’ve followed the six-decade career of the award-winning British bluesman, you’ll know every song on One Moment In Time: Live In The USA. But unless you’ve pushed your way to the front of his sell-out shows, you’ve never heard them like this before. “I’m a different player on the stage,” considers the 80-year-old. “It’s almost impossible to get to that point in the studio. It’s the sound of the guitar, it’s the volume, it’s the crowd. For what I do, it takes one hundred per cent commitment for it to work. But if you do it well, it’s life-affirming.”

Rewind to summer 2025. Riding high on the acclaim for his latest solo album, Come And Find Me (“Trower is to be treasured,” wrote Classic Rock), the guitarist blasted select UK venues including the Shepherds Bush Empire, before crossing the Atlantic for a 25-date run in the nation that has welcomed him since the start. Almost 60 years have passed since Trower first performed in the Land Of The Free, but as a British gunslinger raised under slate-grey South London skies, he still remembers the culture shock.

“I first came here with Procol Harum in the late-Sixties. Back then, it was a different world. We started off in New York and that was pretty scary, police sirens going all through the night. And then, when we got to California, you thought you’d landed in paradise. Amazing times. I think my US profile started to grow from there…”

A lifetime later, with sound engineer James Kane rolling tape at multiple venues on the 2025 tour, it fell to Trower to decide which performances would be immortalised for One Moment In Time: Live In The USA. Every show was cooking, but after countless hours of intense study, Trower honed in on the material caught at the Music Box At The Borgata, Atlantic City, New Jersey (14 June) and the Tupelo Music Hall in Derry, New Hampshire (24 June). “The new album is the best take of each song from those two nights,” he explains. “It’s about the performance but also down to the sound quality. You have to choose carefully – I did a lot of listening.”

The 14-song setlist represents a whistlestop guide to Trower’s fabled career, the bluesman striking a keen balance of all-time classics and new songs that reflect where he stands as an artist in modern times. You’ll find no fewer than four songs from 1974’s gold-selling masterpiece, Bridge Of Sighs, still universally hailed amongst the greatest albums from the golden era of blues-rock. “Those songs have to be in there, because they’re the audience’s favourites,” he says of these roaring renditions of Too Rolling Stoned, Day Of The Eagle, Little Bit Of Sympathy and Bridge Of Sighs’ title track. “That album is still a very powerful piece of music.”

Other old favourites include Daydream (from 1973’s solo debut, Twice Removed From Yesterday) and Somebody Calling (from 1977’s In City Dreams). Elsewhere, Trower plays the aces up his sleeve with surprise airings of Rise Up Like The Sun (from 1994’s 20th Century Blues) and Distant Places Of The Heart (from his 2007 collaboration with the late Cream bassist Jack Bruce, Seven Moons). “I particularly get into that one,” he says. “It’s such a buzz to play. You pick up a lot of energy from the crowd – the audience reaction over there in America is really inspiring. Predominantly, this crowd is the same people who came early on in my career – but a lot of them now bring their kids too.”