It Sky Pig

Having documented the British psychedelic scene with anthologies devoted to the years 1967, 1968 and 1969, Grapefruit's ongoing series fearlessly confronts the dawn of the Seventies with a slight rebrand. New Moon's In The Sky: The British Progressive Pop Sounds Of 1970 features (appropriately enough) seventy tracks from the first year of the new decade as the British pop scene adjusted to life without The Beatles. The 3-CD set concentrates on the more song-based recordings to emanate from British studios during 1970, whether from a pure-pop-for-then-people perspective or the more concise, melodic end of the burgeoning progressive rock spectrum.

It Looks Sad. is a band that has a period at the end of their name so its use here is not an error. It Looks Sad. released an album in 2018 called Sky Lake and it was released by Tiny Engines.

Rare! compiles tracks from four Crack the Sky albums from 1983–1990, two of John Palumbo's solo albums, and previously unreleased live and demo recordings. It was released in 1994 on CD.

Time In London is a 2004 bootleg CD by British progressive rock band The Pink Floyd. It consists of a full performance of The Dark Side Of The Moon and an encore featuring "Echoes", recorded at Empire Pool in Wembley on 16 November, 1974. This was released by The Swingin' Pig because it is the best.

When they started making bootleg compact discs in 1988 and 1989, this was one of the first I bought. It's a Pink Floyd disc on The Swingin' Pig called The Embryo, consisting of songs performed for BBC Radio in 1968 and 1969. While Syd Barrett is shown on the cover, he was already out of the group by the time he did these sessions. The Embryo is only eight songs in length running just over 30 minutes, but I always liked this one quite a bit, especially for "Murderistic Woman" (also titled "The Murderotic Woman" on other discs), which would become "Careful With That Axe Eugene". (As was the case with most CD's from the mid to late 80's, volume levels are relatively low so I raised the peak levels for each track. No adjustments to the EQ has been done.)

Esoteric Recordings are pleased to announce the next release in their series of compilations celebrating the so-called “underground” rock music – “Taking Some Time On – Underground Sounds of 1970”, is a 4 CD clamshell boxed set which gathers together over five hours of music from 1970, the first year of a new decade that would see Progressive music in all its forms become a dominating force with the album-buying public. The innocence of psychedelia and the optimism expressed by such vast expressions of the Hippy ideal as the Woodstock Festival in New York State and the Hyde Park Free Festivals of 1969 in London were shattered by the violence of the Altamont Festival in California at the end of the year. As 1970 dawned, a more cynical tone began to appear in the counter-culture which was also reflected in some of the music by “Progressive” artists as some music got heavier or more anarchic. Jazz, blues, hard rock, folk and classical music influences melded together to form a diversity of music among so-called Underground artists, championed by “underground” figures of the day such as John Peel on his BBC Radio One show Top Gear.

Born Robert Hicks in Georgia in 1902, Barbecue Bob was an early exponent of the Piedmont style of blues, and was a contemporary around the Atlanta scene of artists like Blind Blake, Josh White, Curley Weaver, Blind Willie McTell, Buddy Moss and others. He had a distinctive guitar style, using the frailing technique as well as using a bottleneck on a 12-string guitar, and acquired his stage name because he was working as a barbecue chef when he did his first recordings, and publicity shots featured him in his chef's outfit. His career was tragically curtailed when he died from tuberculosis and pneumonia in 1931 at the age of 29. This 47-track 2-CD collection comprises a significant proportion of his career recordings on the Columbia label, and includes recordings with his brother Charlie Laughing Charley Lincoln, and with Curley Weaver and Buddy Moss as The Georgia Cotton Pickers. It includes his Motherless Child, a song regularly performed by Eric Clapton, along with his famous song Mississippi Heavy Water Blues, inspired by the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927. He is one of those blues artists who is not widely known but whose music helps to appreciate the nuances of the Piedmont blues tradition.

We continue our highly popular and successful America’s Greatest Hits series as we work back through the 1950s, now reaching the point at the turn of the decade, this time with an expanded 4-CD edition to sit alongside the existing single CD 1950 edition (ACRCD176) originally released in 2006 before we introduced the 4-CD format in recent years. This great-value 104-track collection comprises every record which charted in the Top 15 of the Billboard Best Sellers and Honor Roll Of Hits and the Top 10 in the Cash Box chart during 1951. It omits certain records which peaked in 1951and which have already appeared in our America’s Greatest Hits 1951 collection and some which were big hits in 1949, and had already peaked, so will appear in that collection. As with all these collections it features all the biggest hits of the year and all the biggest names in American pop of that era, at a time when the USA was emerging from post-war austerity into a more optimistic decade but was about to become embroiled in the Korean War, and it very much captures the spirit of the times. It also includes a number of lesser known records which are not heard very often and which have not been readily available on CD. As always, it includes a substantial 15,000-word booklet with a commentary on every track, and it’s a must for collectors of our completist chart-based anthologies.