Fighting Tatsu, The Rickshaw Man (1964) Tai Katô, Ryôhei Uchida, Jûshirô Konoe, Hiroko Sakuramachi

Too Late for Edelweiss, The Tallest Man On Earth – the project of Swedish musician Kristian Matsson weaves together a sparse collection of home recordings made in Sweden and North Carolina, captured fresh off a 39-date run with the adrenaline of tour rattling through his veins. His first release since 2019’s I Love You. It’s A Fever Dream, and his signing to ANTI-, the songs on Too Late For Edelweiss have been with Matsson since he started playing music as The Tallest Man on Earth in 2006. In those early years, Matsson used to perform “Lost Highway” before he had enough songs to flesh out a full set.

Ray Russell has had quite the glittering career. Setting off at age 15 with the John Berry Seven, the guitarist went on to play with the Graham Bond Organisation and then Georgie Fame & the Blue Flames. Eventually, Russell would lend his talents on-stage and/or in the studio to a plethora of performers, from Tina Turner to Lulu, the Bee Gees to Phil Collins, and branching out in the '70s to compose for the small screen. Amidst this busy career, Russell also put together the odd band, like the Running Man, whose sole, eponymous album was released with little fanfare in 1972. The core trio of Russell on both guitar and bass, vocalist/organist Alan Greed, and vocalist/drummer Alan Rushton was supplemented by Harry Beckett on trumpet and flügelhorn and the late Gary Windo on tenor sax.

Kristian Matsson has never remained in one place for very long. Having spent much of the last decade touring around the world as The Tallest Man on Earth, Matsson has captivated audiences using, as The New York Times describes, "every inch of his long guitar cord to roam the stage: darting around, crouching, stretching, hip-twitching, perching briefly and jittering away…

Del Shannon's second and third albums appear (after a fashion) together on this BGO reissue. Actually, what BGO has re-created is the song lineup of the U.K. version of the Little Town Flirt album, which is a plus, as it contains several songs - including "Runaway" - that were repeated from earlier releases on the U.S. version. In either configuration, Little Town Flirt was one of the better rock & roll LPs of its period and holds up well. Shannon and his producers probably thought they were playing it safe by loading the record up with a fair number of covers, including "Dream Baby" and "Runaround Sue"; they never dreamt that one of his other covers from early 1963, of the Beatles' "From Me to You," would have put him for a moment on the cutting edge of music in England (where the record wasn't issued until later) as well as in front of the leading edge by almost a year in America…

The most comprehensive collection of the Pretty Things’ BBC ‘live’ recordings on the market, with several previously unreleased tracks, now all together for the first time on this newly remastered 4CD set, assembled with the assistance of the BBC. Sourced from the BBC archives, this newly updated 60-track set covers numerous songs from the 1960s & 1970s period - including smash hits such as ‘Rosalyn’, Don’t Bring Me Down’, ‘Midnight To Six Man’, R&B standards ‘Road Runner’ and ‘Route 66’, and later classic album tracks ‘Defecting Grey’, ‘S.F. Sorrow Is Born’, ‘Singapore Silk Torpedo’ and ‘Dream / Joey’. These sessions were recorded by the world renowned broadcasting organisation for radio and TV. Our CDs explore all the Pretty Things’ BBC Radio One output, including 1960s ‘Top Gear’, ‘Saturday Club’, the later ‘Peel Sessions’ and ‘Sounds Of The 70s’…