Andrew Ridgeley Son of Albert (1990, Epic # 466717 2)

Although they remained largely without peer when it came to pure Germanic thrash metal, by the time of 1990's Coma of Souls, Kreator's very successful formula had begun to grow a little tired. The fact that they were coming off perhaps their biggest album yet in 1989's Extreme Aggression didn't help matters, and despite its overwhelmingly solid songwriting, Coma of Souls still sounded somewhat repetitive to all but the most unquestioning of fans…

Albert Hammond is one of the more successful pop/rock songwriters to come out of England during the 1960s and 1970s, and has also enjoyed a long career as a recording artist, his work popular in two languages on three continents across four decades. Hammond was born in London in 1944 – his family actually came from the British colony on Gibraltar, but wartime considerations caused his mother to be evacuated to London, where she gave birth. He spent his childhood and youth on Gibraltar, where he became fluent in both English and Spanish – that bilingual ability would serve him well in his later career. His family lived modestly on his father's fireman's pay, and one of his early diversions was music – he sang in church and became head choir boy. He also became interested in popular music, sang for his own enjoyment, and also took up the guitar.

In 1597 John Dowland (1563-1626) published his first collection of music, The First Book of Songs or Airs of Four Parts with Tableture for the Lute. A groundbreaking work in several respects, not least in that it was the first published collection of English lute songs, it success was immediate, and was reprinted several times. His Second Book of Songs or Airs (1600) shows the increasingly solo nature of the lute-song, as Dowland left the first eight songs as lute solos.