While The Bee Gees have never truly faded from the popular consciousness, it’s fair to say the group founded by Barry Gibb and his late brothers Maurice and Robin is currently experiencing a renaissance. Director Frank Marshall’s documentary How Can You Mend a Broken Heart earned acclaim for its candid chronicle of the group’s ups and downs while Barry has reaffirmed his legacy with the new album Greenfields: The Gibb Brothers Songbook Vol. 1. On the latter, he’s joined by an array of country artists to reinvent the Bee Gees’ venerable songbook. …
Release Round-Up: Week of April 5
Welcome to this week’s Release Round-Up! David Bowie, Spying Through a Keyhole: Demos and Unreleased Songs (Parlophone) (Amazon U.S. / Amazon U.K. / Amazon Canada) Spying Through a Keyhole: Demos and Unreleased Songs is the new box set with four seven-inch vinyl singles of some of Bowie’s earliest material. It will feature nine rare, monaural recordings, including mostly solo vocal-and-guitar versions of familiar songs (“Space Oddity” in its earliest known version, “London Bye Ta Ta,” “In The Heat Of The Morning”) as well as the heretofore-unknown “Love All Around,” a lyric of which…
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Sugar and Spice: Cherry Red Collects The Searchers’ “Complete Pye Recordings” On New Box
Last year, John McNally and Frank Allen of The Searchers announced that the Merseybeat band would be retiring in 2019, some 60 years after McNally co-founded the group and 55 years after Allen first joined up. The Searchers will play their final show on Sunday in Milton Keynes, about 50 miles northwest of London. But the music lives on, and today, Cherry Red’s Grapefruit label releases an impressive tribute to the band’s body of work with When You Walk in the Room: The Complete Pye Recordings 1963- 67. The new 6-CD box…
Release Round-Up: Week of March 29
Welcome to this week’s Release Round-Up. Here’s what’s due for March 29! John Coltrane, Coltrane ’58: The Prestige Recordings [5 CD] (Craft Recordings) (Amazon U.S. / Amazon U.K. / Amazon Canada) The year 1958 was a breakout one for saxophone legend John Coltrane. It marked the year when Coltrane–already well-established as a talented sideman–began to make a name for himself as a solo musician and developed his signature “sheets of sound” style while exploring many other routes. To mark the 70th anniversary of Prestige, Coltrane’s complete 1958 recordings are released today on…
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Got My Mojo Working: Cherry Red, Grapefruit Collects Alexis Korner and Baroque Pop On Two Box Sets
Periodically this month, we’ll be looking at titles released in the latter part of 2018 that we either didn’t cover, or only covered briefly, the first time around! We hope you enjoy this look at “some nice things we’ve missed”… Cherry Red’s Grapefruit imprint has recently released a pair of 3-CD box sets touching on two very different aspects of the sixties British music scene. One of the fathers of the British blues boom, Alexis Korner (1928-1984) has been celebrated on Every Day I Have the Blues: The Sixties Anthology. This handsome…
“Harmony in My Head: UK Power Pop and New Wave, 1977-81” Collects Costello, Squeeze, Nick Lowe, Searchers, More
In recent years, Cherry Red Records has made waves with their box set celebrations of music eras gone by. From late-’70s Scottish independent releases and ’60s Baroque pop, to ’80s shoegaze and even the avant-garde sound explorations of Edgard Varese and Karlheinz Stockhausen, the label has a reputation for their meticulous deep-dives into music subcultures. In November, Cherry Red put the spotlight on the late-’70s U.K. pop-rock scene with Harmony In My Head: UK Power Pop & New Wave, 1977-81. The 3-CD set is a musical exploration of the development of British New…
Review: “Fab Gear: The British Beat Explosion and Its Aftershocks 1963-1967”
“Yesterday’s Gone”: the song by folk-pop duo Chad and Jeremy opens the first of the six discs comprising Cherry Red and RPM’s new box set Fab Gear: The British Beat Explosion and Its Aftershocks 1963-1967. It’s a most appropriate opener, as yesterday really was gone for an entire generation of artists swiftly rendered obsolete by the emergence of The Beatles. As the box eloquently explains, the Fab Four “in name, song, band structure, image, defined this new Beat music…Until 1967, when The Beatles reinvented pop again with Sgt. Pepper’s, Beat music –…
Release Round-Up: Week of December 8
Welcome to this week’s Release Round-Up! Debby Boone, You Light Up My Life: 40th Anniversary Expanded Edition (Real Gone Music) (Amazon U.S. / Amazon U.K. / Amazon Canada) Finally, the platinum LP containing the biggest hit of the 1970s arrives on CD! Real Gone’s new edition expands Debby Boone’s original You Light Up My Life album by a whopping thirteen tracks, tracing Debby’s career back to her earliest recordings with her sisters as The Boone Girls. You’ll hear their effervescent covers, originally released on labels including Motown and Warner Bros./Curb, of songs by John Denver, The Marvelettes, The Supremes, Mary…
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Hearts In Her Eyes: The Searchers’ Sire Recordings Collected By Omnivore
The Searchers will always be remembered as a leading light of the British Invasion, thanks to such infectious hits as “Needles and Pins,” “Don’t Throw Our Love Away,” “Love Potion No. 9,” “When You Walk in the Room,” “Sugar and Spice,” and “Sweets for My Sweet.” Their Merseybeat reinventions of classic American songs and fresh British originals earned them a deserved following and berth on radio that’s lasted to this very day. All told, the band notched eleven top 40s in the U.K. (including three chart-toppers) and eight in the U.S. –…
David Bowie, Moody Blues, Procol Harum, The Move Featured On “Let’s Go Down and Blow Our Minds” Box
Cherry Red’s Grapefruit imprint has continued its series of box sets – including Love, Poetry and Revolution and I’m a Freak Baby – with another musical journey through the world of British psych and rock. Let’s Go Down and Blow Our Minds is a more focused collection than either of those past two releases, concentrating solely on the U.K.’s psychedelic sounds of 1967. Of course, you won’t find selections from two of that year’s landmark psych-rock releases, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band or Their Satanic Majesties’ Request, here, but you will…
Release Round-Up: Week of September 23
Welcome to this week’s Release Round-Up, packed with heavy hitters! David Bowie, Who Can I Be Now (1974-1976) (Parlophone) 12-CD: Amazon U.S. / Amazon U.K. / Amazon Canada 13-LP: Amazon U.S. / Amazon U.K. / Amazon Canada David Bowie – Who Can I Be Now? (1974-1976), the second in the late artist’s series of deluxe albums box sets, will contain the following albums plus a 128-page booklet in the CD edition (or 84 pages in the vinyl edition. You’ll find more details here, and watch for Joe’s review soon! Diamond Dogs (Remastered) 1-CD…
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Release Round-Up: Week of July 3
Jellyfish, Live at Bogart’s (Omnivore) A fine 1991 gig from the criminally underrated power pop band, captured on CD and three sides of vinyl. Bob Dylan, Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits (Audio Fidelity) The Bard’s first compilation gets the 24K gold disc treatment. Elton John, Classic Album Selection (Universal U.K.) Elton fans have a neat little budget compilation of studio albums to look forward to (from 1970’s self-titled album to 1973’s Don’t Shoot Me I’m Only the Piano Player). Small Faces, Odgens’ Nut Gone Flake: Deluxe Edition (Snapper Music) A triple-disc expansion of the seminal 1968 album,…
Needles and Pins: Searchers Box Set Finally Back on Schedule
Back on July 26, 2010, we reported on Sweets, Spice, Sugar, Pins and Needles, a 4-CD, 120-track boxed retrospective dedicated to The Searchers, the second-most famous band to emerge from Liverpool during the British Invasion! We wrote: One of the best and most successful bands to come out of Liverpool, The Searchers may have toiled in the shadow of that other band from Liverpool, but hits like “Sugar and Spice,” “Pins and Needles” and “When You Walk in the Room” remain some of the strongest recordings to come out of the mid-1960s….
British Invasion, Redux: New Sets Due from The Searchers and Petula Clark
While the original British Invasion is now just a few years south of 50, its music continues to endure. The Second Disc is pleased to report on a trio of new releases coming our way from two of the U.K.’s seminal artists, The Searchers and Petula Clark. One of the best and most successful bands to come out of Liverpool, The Searchers may have toiled in the shadow of that other band from Liverpool, but hits like “Sugar and Spice,” “Pins and Needles” and “When You Walk in the Room” remain some…
