R&b Fake Book

Following the success of the Tabu individual expanded editions, we have subsequently received enquiries about putting some packages together on Alexander O’Neal and The S.O.S. Band which encompass all of the original albums together with the 7” versions of the singles plus some of the 12” mixes we were unable to feature on the individual expanded editions. So who better to curate these packages than Ralph Tee, curator of the Philadelphia International Box Set and all-round Soul Music expert. So here are all 6 of Alexander O’Neal’s original Tabu albums as they were originally released together with 2 bonus CDs, one of which contains of all the key 7” singles and the other which contains the 12” versions which were not included on the recent expanded editions.

Let's call a spade a spade. Orion is an Elvis impersonator. No more, no less. That he's a good Elvis impersonator is important, since if he wasn't, Sun probably wouldn't have tried to promote his recordings as if they were genuine Elvis material, even going to the extremes of overdubbing Orion's voices on recordings by such Sun stalwarts as Jerry Lee Lewis and Carl Perkins. This doesn't make him any better, but it sure makes him fascinating, particularly because he is gifted at mimicry and these are pretty good evocations of Elvis at his peak…