The best-known alter ego of the Harry Vanda/George Young songwriting team (the creative force behind the Easybeats), Flash and the Pan began simply as a between-production project in 1976. By 1979, the project had turned out a novelty hit with the single "Hey St. Peter." A second single, "Down Among the Dead," also became a hit throughout Australia and Europe, inspiring the release of the album Flash and the Pan. American radio began playing import copies which led to a deal with Epic Records. The album would soon reach the Top 100 in the U.S. despite the lack of a supporting tour.
Erasure's self-produced 17th studio album, World Be Gone finds the duo honing in on a reflective synth pop befitting the wind-down portion of the dance. Affected by the political upheaval of the period leading up to its release in the spring of 2017, it features a few calls to action amid selections that are more generally about the need for love. The rousing opener, "Love You to the Sky," is a straight-up love song (and classic earworm) that begins with Krupa-like drums, establishing a thumping drumbeat that makes it the closest thing to a club track on the record. More sociopolitical in nature are "Lousy Sum of Nothing," a plea for political engagement and caring, and "Oh What a World"…
The Police never really broke up, they just stopped working together – largely because they just couldn't stand playing together anymore and partially because Sting was itching to establish himself as a serious musician/songwriter on his own terms. Anxious to shed the mantle of pop star, he camped out at Eddy Grant's studio, picked up the guitar, and raided Wynton Marsalis' band for his new combo – thereby instantly consigning his solo debut, The Dream of the Blue Turtles, to the critical shorthand of Sting's jazz record. Which is partially true (that's probably the best name for the meandering instrumental title track), but that gives the impression that this is really risky music, when he did, after all, rely on musicians who, at that stage, were revivalists just developing their own style, and then had them jam on mock-jazz grooves – or, in the case of Branford Marsalis, layer soprano sax lines on top of pop songs.
Chrissie Hynde took a long, hard road to rock & roll stardom, but when her band, the Pretenders, finally broke through in 1979, they wasted no time, growing from promising newcomers on the British music scene to major international stardom with a pair of smash albums to their credit in a mere three years. But the Pretenders' meteoric rise came to a crashing halt in 1982, when drug abuse claimed the life of guitarist James Honeyman-Scott and forced Hynde and drummer Martin Chambers to dump bassist Pete Farndon, who would also succumb to an OD in April 1983…
During four marathon recording sessions in 1953-55, Norman Granz recorded Art Tatum playing 119 standards, enough music for a dozen LPs. The results have been recently reissued separately on eight CDs and on this very full seven-CD box set. Frankly, Tatum did no real advance preparation for this massive project, sticking mosty to concise melodic variations of standards, some of them virtual set pieces formed over the past two decades. Since there are few uptempo performances, the music in this series has a certain sameness after awhile but, heard in small doses, it is quite enjoyable. A special bonus on this box (and not on the individual volumes) are four numbers taken from a 1956 Hollywood Bowl concert.
First ever officially licensed CD release by Fingerprintz brings together 22 tracks from their 1979 debut single to the final recordings of 1981. All 22 tracks, over 78 minutes, have been dynamically remastered from original master tapes from the Universal Music archive for the best possible sound quality.