Cherry Red’s long-running RPM imprint announced earlier this year that 2020 would be its final year of operations – but that hasn’t kept RPM from going out with a bang. One of the final titles to arrive from the imprint, Right Back Where We Started From, is a joyous 3-CD celebration of Female Pop and Soul in Seventies Britain. The title is drawn from Maxine Nightingale’s irresistibly bouncy 1975 single, a top ten entry in the United Kingdom and a top five in the States. Not every track on this 77-song collection…
Ace Round-Up, Part One: Helen Shapiro’s “Face the Music” Collects Rare 1967-1984 Singles
Welcome to today’s first installment of our Ace Records Round-Up featuring a number of the label’s latest titles! Helen Shapiro sang her way into the hearts of Britons as a teenager. Inspired by the success of Alma Cogan, Helen was just 14 when she scored a No. 3 hit on the U.K. Singles Chart with “Don’t Treat Me Like a Child.” The same year of 1961, she charted not one but two No. 1 singles, “You Don’t Know” and “Walkin’ Back to Happiness.” Soon, she was appearing in films and appearing with…
Whatcha Gonna Do for Me: Average White Band Releases “On the Strip: The Sunset Sessions,” Reissues “Cupid’s in Fashion”
The opening track of Average White Band’s new/old release On the Strip: The Sunset Sessions couldn’t have a more apropos title: “Let’s Go Round Again.” Following a successful run of albums with producer-arranger Arif Mardin, the funky big band outfit was re-establishing itself. 1979’s Feel No Fret was a self-produced affair on which the band was joined by co-producer Gene Paul; it yielded hit singles in “Atlantic Avenue” and a revival of Burt Bacharach and Hal David’s “Walk on By.” For a follow-up, AWB turned to the up-and-coming David Foster. A composer,…
It’s Magic, You Know: Cherry Red, 7Ts Collect Pilot’s Four Albums on New Box Set
Following Tuesday’s look at Brian Protheroe’s albums collection, we’re exploring another recent box from Cherry Red and 7Ts! “Oh-ho-ho, it’s magic, you know…” With that memorable 1974 international hit, Pilot burst into the public consciousness. While the band founded by David Paton, Billy Lyall, and Stuart Tosh was only able to spin off three more chart singles, “Magic” remains a classic radio staple. 7Ts has collected the band’s first four long-players from 1974-1977 on a clamshell box set entitled, simply, The Albums. Producer-engineer Alan Parsons played a significant role in shaping the…
Review: “Bobby Bare Sings Shel Silverstein Plus” from Bear Family Records
Gather ’round, fellows, I’ll tell you some tales… “If I had known what you were doing in the studio, I would have stopped it,” Bobby Bare recalled RCA Victor’s Jerry Bradley telling him upon hearing the singer’s 1973 double album Sings Lullabys, Legends, and Lies. Happily, Bradley had to live with the album that marked Bare’s return to RCA after a brief sojourn to rival Mercury Records. RCA’s Nashville chief Chet Atkins wanted Bare back on the label, and gave him the freedom to create the sprawling collection of story-songs with one…
I’ve Been on the Pinball: Cherry Red Collects Brian Protheroe’s Chrysalis Albums on New 3-CD Set
This week, we’re looking at two recent albums collections from Cherry Red’s 7T’s label from singer-songwriter Brian Protheroe and the band Pilot. Brian Protheroe’s The Albums 1974-76 collects the three albums the English actor-singer (First Dates, the West End’s Lord of the Rings) released on Chrysalis Records plus a smattering of bonus tracks. In 1973, Protheroe was touring in a production of playwright William Fairchild’s Death on Demand – described in The Oxford Magazine as “not so much a whodunnit as an almostdunnit or a dunnit by accident” – and writing songs…
Everybody’s Smokin’: NRBQ Collect Rarities, Unreleased Material on “in-frequencies”
Omnivore Recordings has enjoyed a long and fruitful relationship with The New Rhythm and Blues Quartet (NRBQ), from 2016’s High Noon – A 50-Year Retrospective through subsequent reissues, new music, and collections. The latest, in frequencies, brings together 16 rarities from the band’s long and diverse discography spanning 1968-2018, with all but four tracks previously unreleased. NRBQ has flourished over the years even as the personnel has shifted numerous times, with only keyboardist Terry Adams remaining from the original lineup. From the time of their 1968 debut album – which featured Adams…
Review: Frank Zappa, “Halloween 81”
“The finest night of the year…” Frank Zappa knew how to throw one hell of a Halloween party. The iconoclastic composer-bandleader counted Halloween as his favorite holiday, and his annual celebratory shows were among his most anticipated. The 1981 stand at the late, lamented Palladium – a once-plush 1927 movie palace sadly demolished in 1998 to make room for dormitories at New York University – was particularly special to Zappa’s fans as he had curtailed the 1980 shows earlier than expected due to illness. (Not to mention that there was no fall…
Review: Prince, “Sign ‘O’ The Times: Super Deluxe Edition”
Tell Me Who in This House Know About the Quake Would a look into Prince’s Crystal Ball ever have predicted this? For the third of its deluxe album reissues – following a 3CD/DVD expansion of Purple Rain and a 5CD/DVD deluxe box of 1999 – Warner Records and NPG have unveiled the most lavish archival project yet to emerge from the Prince archive. In terms of both physical size and its contents, the new Sign “O” The Times Super Deluxe Edition box set is larger in every sense than its predecessors: a…
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Wild Mountain Honey: Ace’s “76 in the Shade” Features Steve Miller Band, Jefferson Starship, Smokey Robinson, Gilbert O’Sullivan, More
Producer-compiler Bob Stanley’s last couple of compilations for Ace have placed him squarely within the 1970s. Earlier this year, Saint Etienne Present Songs for the Fountain Coffee Room (compiled by Stanley, Sarah Cracknell, and Pete Wiggs) conjured “the soundtrack for a bar in mid-’70s Los Angeles,” or a St. Etienne-style spin on “yacht rock” with Stephen Bishop, Ned Doheny, Boz Scaggs, and Seals and Crofts among those featured. Stanley has followed Fountain Coffee Room up with a trip to a more specific time and place. Over 20 songs both familiar and unknown, 76…
Are You Ready to Rock: Esoteric Reissues, Expands Two from Roy Wood and Wizzard
One of Birmingham’s most renowned musical exports, Roy Wood trained listeners to expect the unexpected. The founder or co-founder of The Move, Electric Light Orchestra, and Wizzard, Wood hasn’t been among the most prolific artists of the rock era – with just four proper solo albums to his name – but he’s surely one of the most inventive. Late last year, Cherry Red’s Esoteric Recordings imprint reissued Wood’s second solo LP, Mustard, as an expanded edition. Now, the label has returned to the oeuvre of this sonic auteur with expanded versions of…
The Walrus and Me: “Looking Through a Glass Onion” Collects Pop-Psych Beatles Covers
Let me take you down… The Beatles’ songs were so sturdy and well-crafted that artists such as Matt Monro and Ella Fitzgerald became early adopters. But from the start, John, Paul, George, and Ringo’s contemporaries had been just as likely as the older generation to mine their songbook. As the sixties continued and the Beatles ushered in the shift from pop to rock (minus the “and roll”), similarly youthful artists brought their own increasingly adventurous spins to the lads’ material. Countless various-artists collections of Beatlesongs have proliferated over the years – enough…
Illusions: Kim David Smith Channels Dietrich, Lenya, Minogue, and More on “Live at Joe’s Pub”
The decadent culture of Weimar Germany – itself inspired by the American Jazz Age – has long proved a fertile source of inspiration for artists everywhere. David Bowie, Bryan Ferry, Klaus Nomi, Ute Lemper, and Alan Cumming are just a few of the performers that have mined and reinvented the Weimar era in their music. Based on his new release Live at Joe’s Pub, cabaret vocalist Kim David Smith deserves to be added to that esteemed list. Captured in March 2019 at a midnight show in that intimate New York setting, Smith…
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Review: The Rolling Stones’ “Goats Head Soup 2020” Box Set Is Sure To Satisfy Your Hunger
Goats Head Soup: as far as Rolling Stones albums go, it’s an outlier. It’s not a “landmark album” in the same way as Sticky Fingers, it didn’t defy expectations in the same way as Exile. It didn’t herald a new sound like Beggars Banquet or Let It Bleed. Now, that’s not to say it’s not a great album, but it just feels…different. After the one-two-three-four punches of Beggars Banquet, Let It Bleed, Sticky Fingers, and the magnum opus Exile on Main Street, it makes sense that fans had long considered Goats Head…
Here Comes My Baby: Cherry Red Collects The Tremeloes’ “Complete CBS Recordings”
When they signed to CBS Records in 1966, The Tremeloes were seeking a second act. Founded as a beat group in 1958, the Dagenham band fronted by Brian Poole scored numerous hits on the U.K. Singles Chart including covers of “Twist and Shout,” “Candy Man,” “I Want Candy,” and “Do You Love Me,” the latter of which reached No. 1. But when Poole left the group that bore his name in 1966, his bandmates found themselves at a crossroads. Yet they pressed onward, and a move from Decca to CBS yielded them…
Review: Nick Mason’s Saucerful of Secrets “Live At The Roundhouse” Takes Audiences Back In Time
It’s been said that music is the closest thing we have to time travel. Case in point: the new live album and concert film from Nick Mason’s Saucerful of Secrets. Released today, September 18, Live At The Roundhouse captures the former Pink Floyd drummer and his supergroup of talented friends – guitarists Lee Harris and Gary Kemp, keyboardist Dom Beken, and longtime Floyd associate Guy Pratt on bass – as they tackle some of Pink Floyd’s earliest deep cuts in the famed London venue. The 22-song set is available today in an…
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Watching The Wheels: Kenneth Womack’s New Biography “John Lennon: 1980” Offers A Comprehensive Look At The Artist’s Later Days
John Lennon has been in the news a lot lately, and with good reason. 2020 marks what would have been the musician’s 80th birthday and, sadly, it’s also the fortieth year since his death. But there’s more to that final year of John’s life than the tragic events of December 8, 1980. In his new biography, John Lennon: 1980 – The Last Days in the Life, Beatles expert Kenneth Womack tracks that period of creativity and reinvention, writing in a way that’s simultaneously approachable yet authoritative and thorough. But to say it’s…
A Hundred Million Miracles: Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “Flower Drum Song” Reissued on Vinyl, Hi-Rez Digital
Flower Drum Song occupies a unique position in the Rodgers and Hammerstein canon. The 1958 musical wasn’t one of the duo’s timeless hits (Oklahoma!, Carousel, South Pacific, The King and I, The Sound of Music). Nor was it one of their three commercial misses (Allegro, Me and Juliet, Pipe Dream). Instead, when considering the R&H oeuvre, it resides somewhere in between. It played 600 performances, and yielded a successful London production, a couple of bona fide classic songs, a big-screen adaptation, and one heavily-revised Broadway revival. Now, Craft Recordings has celebrated the…
Review: July, “The Complete Recordings” Traces Over 50 Years of the Beloved Psych-Rock Band
They might not be a household name, but July is a band you ought to know. The U.K. psych-rockers have garnered a cult following since the release of their self-titled 1968 record. Original mono copies sell for more than three grand online, but its not just the scarcity and desirability of the album that raises eyebrows; it’s the high quality of the music. Though their singles may not have charted back in the day, the five-piece Ealing-based group is still considered by psych-rock enthusiasts to be one of the unsung heroes of…
Review: The Doobie Brothers, “Quadio”
“What the people need is a way to make ’em smile/It ain’t so hard to do if you know how,” goes The Doobie Brothers’ “Listen to the Music,” the opening song (and lead single) off the San Jose, California band’s sophomore album Toulouse Street. The Doobies knew how – and so does Quadio, the new, four-Blu-ray box set recently released by Warner Records and Rhino collecting the band’s second through fifth albums in their original quadraphonic and stereo mixes. Quadio follows Chicago’s box set of the same name. The four-channel quad mixes…
Review: Andrew Gold, “Lonely Boy: The Asylum Years Anthology”
The Asylum Records discography of pop polymath Andrew Gold has been well-addressed in the CD era – first via international CD reissues, then individual expanded editions on the U.S. Collectors’ Choice label, and an all-encompassing set in 2013 from the U.K.’s Edsel label. But one thing had eluded Gold: a bona fide box set. Cherry Red and Esoteric Recordings have delivered with Lonely Boy: The Asylum Years Anthology, a 6-CD/1-DVD compendium celebrating the late artist (1951-2011) with remastered versions of all four Asylum albums, a disc of outtakes, another of live performances,…
Review: Neil Diamond, “Hot August Night” Concert Series on Vinyl
Diamonds are forever. And Neil is no exception. Almost 50 years ago, the singer-songwriter captured a Hot August Night at Los Angeles’ Greek Theatre in front of a sold-out crowd. That electrifying 1972 double-platinum double album, in turn, inspired four sequels released between 1977 and 2018. Now, in September 2020, the Greek Theatre is dark as a result of COVID-19. But Capitol and UMe have just released those four sequel albums as newly-remastered 2-LP vinyl sets. Standard black vinyl versions are available everywhere while colorful variants are being sold exclusively through the…
Review: Joe Jackson, “Body and Soul” [Hybrid SACD]
Joe Jackson was never much of a conformist. The singer-songwriter followed up his first two albums (which dovetailed with the new wave movement and also reflected a punk spirit) with two stylistic departures before embracing classic songcraft on 1982’s watershed Night and Day. Basking in the success of the album and its singles “Steppin’ Out” and “Breaking Us in Two,” Jackson turned to film scoring with Mike’s Murder, but most of his score was discarded in favor of one by John Barry. Where would he go next? The answer came in 1984…
This Is Soul: Ace Collects “The Soul of The Memphis Boys” with Elvis, Dusty, Box Tops, More
We’ve already filled you in on Ace’s recent anthology collecting works by Philly soul maestro Thom Bell; now we’re looking to the American South with another release! Way back in 2012, Ace Records collected the multifaceted sounds of Chips Moman and Don Crews’ American Studios on Memphis Boys: The Story of American Studios. The 24-song tribute collection featured such visitors to Memphis as Dusty Springfield, Wilson Pickett, B.J. Thomas, and Solomon Burke as well as Elvis Presley, one of the city’s most famous denizens. Now, the label has returned to the milieu of…
Review: Joel McNeely, ‘Star Wars: Shadows Of The Empire’
For the 42 years Star Wars has been a pop cultural force, musical oddities have followed in the wake of its starship engines. Sure, legendary composer John Williams put an interstellar jazz number in the middle of his almost operatic score to the original 1977 film, but that didn’t predict a chart-topping disco song, or Christmas albums, or quirky EDM, or various other ephemera in the ensuing decades. When Star Wars: Shadows Of The Empire was released in 1996, amid a major comeback for that galaxy far, far away (eventually culminating in…
