A Queen For All Seasons

Between 1968 and 1974, amateur songwriters, musicians and home taping enthusiasts Peter Howell and John Ferdinando - aka H & F Recordings - retreated to their makeshift home studio in East Sussex to mastermind a series of privately-issued albums that were attributed to semi-fictitious groups such as Ithaca and Agincourt. Only pressed in double-digit quantities, those albums are now amongst the most valuable vinyl artefacts of the era, with copies selling for upwards of £2,000 on the extremely rare occasions that they surface. A Game For All Who Know: The H & F Recordings Box gathers together all four albums and adds an unreleased-at-the-time fifth, the Friends LP Fragile, which was abandoned at acetate stage after Howell accepted an invitation in 1974 to join the BBC Radiophonic Workshop on a full-time basis. The first four albums are presented in miniature card sleeve replicas of the original vinyl artwork, while the Friends album recreates the duo's original plans for the artwork had the LP reached pressing stage.

The Top 100 '60s Rock Albums represent the moment when popular music came of age. In the earliest part of the decade, bands were still regularly referencing earlier sounds and themes. By the middle, something powerful and distinct was happening, which is why the latter part of the '60s weighs so heavily on our list. A number of bands evolved alongside fast-emerging trends of blues rock, folk rock, psychedelia and hard rock, adding new complexities to the music even as the songs themselves became more topical. If there's a thread running through the Top 100 '60s Rock Albums and this period of intense change, it has to do with the forward-thinking artists who managed to echo and, in some cases, advance the zeitgeist. Along the way, legends were made.

2013 limited edition 100 CD box set on the premiere classical label Deutsch Grammophon. Subtitled from Gregorian Chant to Gorecki.
• It starts with Gregorian Chant and Machaut chansons and ends with Gorecki and the Minimalists.
• The greatest composers have as many as five CDs devoted to them (Bach, Mozart, Beethoven);
• 20th-century music is well represented with no fewer than 20 CDs.
• Operas and major choral works are represented by highlights, but otherwise the edition presents, as far as possible, only complete works throughout.
• Altogether, there are more than 80 composers in the set, with over 400 works for a total of around 120 hours of music.