Graham Bonnet Line Up (1981) [remastered & Expanded Edition]v

Leading off with the 1981 number six U.K. hit single "Night Games," Line Up is a journeyman, early-'80s cross between hard rock and AOR. It's neither pop nor heavy metal, but somewhere in between…

After the premature breakup of the Marbles, larynx acrobat Graham Bonnet took a stab at movie stardom (landing a role in Three for All), and then returned to mount a solo career with this eponymous outing, an Australian hit distributed by Ringo Starr's label. As with his previous duo, Bonnet exclusively interprets other folks' tunes. One can't really fault any of the songwriting, as most of these numbers are dependable standards; and nothing's ever wrong with Bonnet's sterling voice. But the record definitely betrays its time. The disco-string coda on "Goodnight and Goodmorning" (from Hall & Oates' debut) screams 1970s, which doesn't diminish the entertainment value one iota.

John Carpenter is a rarity among film directors in that he is also a composer who writes the musical scores for his movies as well. Carpenter's 1981 film Escape From New York was a kind of genre hybrid, a science-fiction crime thriller with suggestions of a spaghetti western thrown in. Set in a near future when Manhattan has been converted into a no-man's-land prison, the movie needed an appropriately futuristic soundtrack, and Carpenter came up with a score for synthesizer that he played with his sound designer Alan Howarth. Despite the instrumentation, however, the composer retained a style familiar from such earlier works as Halloween. He favored simple, repetitive keyboard figures, generally two per sequence, set in a fast-slow counterpoint. The Escape From New York score had a few changes of pace, notably a borrowing from Debussy and an ersatz Broadway show tune, "Everyone's Coming to New York" ("Shoot a cop with a gun/The Big Apple is plenty of fun"), but most of the music sounded like earlier Carpenter scores, similarly creating a tense, ominous tone much of the time.

Special Edition 8-CD album set comprised of the albums In The Garden, Sweet Dreams (Are Made Of This), Touch, Be Yourself, Revenge, Savage, We Two Are One and Peace, painstakingly digitally remastered from original master tapes with the supervision of Dave Stewart and featuring 43 bonus tracks including live, extended & acoustic versions, remixes and previously unreleased recordings.

Digitally remastered and expanded edition of this long lost album from the rock vocalist. Although the Skegness-born Graham Bonnet is probably best known for the melodic hard rock he fronted in the 1980s with Ritchie's Blackmore Rainbow, The Michael Schenker Group, and his own band, Alcatrazz, his musical odyssey started with a duo called The Marbles in 1968…