Radio Times 21 May 2022

"After completing our first tour as a four-piece band in late 1966, Nez perceptively remarked that, 'Pinocchio had become a real little boy.' By the end of March 1967, Pinocchio had actually become quite a cool little dude (if I do say so myself) with the completion of Headquarters, the first studio album that we had been allowed to create entirely amongst ourselves. Monkee music was great music. Terrific songs crafted by gifted writers and produced by skilled producers. But Headquarters will always hold a special place in my heart. I remember the camaraderie, the collaboration, the enthusiasm and the occasional creative angst. And I particularly remember lying on the floor behind my drumkit between takes eating sunflower seeds.” - Micky Dolenz

106-track, 6CD Box Set retrospective from singer/songwriter Iain Matthews. Features 2022 remasters of his four albums with legendary record producer Sandy Roberton (‘Stealin' Home’, ‘Siamese Friends’, ‘Spot Of Interference’ and ‘Shook’) Contains 50% previously unreleased material, including early songwriting demos and multiple live performances. Musician and singer-songwriter Iain Matthews should need no introduction. He was an original member of legendary folk rock band Fairport Convention from 1967 to 1969 before leaving to form Matthews Southern Comfort, who scored a UK number one in 1970 with Joni Mitchell's ‘Woodstock’. In the early 1970s, as well as recording solo for Vertigo and Elektra, Iain played in folk rock “supergroup” Plainsong. Collectively, this body of work established Iain as a master-craftsman of both his own songs and those of others – a tradition he has continued to explore down the decades.

"After completing our first tour as a four-piece band in late 1966, Nez perceptively remarked that, 'Pinocchio had become a real little boy.' By the end of March 1967, Pinocchio had actually become quite a cool little dude (if I do say so myself) with the completion of Headquarters, the first studio album that we had been allowed to create entirely amongst ourselves. Monkee music was great music. Terrific songs crafted by gifted writers and produced by skilled producers. But Headquarters will always hold a special place in my heart. I remember the camaraderie, the collaboration, the enthusiasm and the occasional creative angst. And I particularly remember lying on the floor behind my drumkit between takes eating sunflower seeds.” - Micky Dolenz

The History of Mercury Living Presence. The year was 1950. The record industry was recovering from the 'battle of the speeds', which pitted RCA Victor, with its 45-rpm disc, against Columbia Records, inventor of the microgroove long-playing record. (The 78-rpm shellac disc had just suffered a swift demise.) In the aftermath of the protracted struggle, the unexpected happened. Both sides won: the 45-rpm became the preferred speed for popular music at the time and the LP was adopted as the industry standard for classics and other 'long-playing' programs.

The History of Mercury Living Presence. The year was 1950. The record industry was recovering from the 'battle of the speeds', which pitted RCA Victor, with its 45-rpm disc, against Columbia Records, inventor of the microgroove long-playing record. (The 78-rpm shellac disc had just suffered a swift demise.) In the aftermath of the protracted struggle, the unexpected happened. Both sides won: the 45-rpm became the preferred speed for popular music at the time and the LP was adopted as the industry standard for classics and other 'long-playing' programs.

If there’s any period in modern Springsteen history that continues to grow in admiration it is the 2007-2008 Magic era.

Elton John before his mid-'70s cloudburst of success is a fascinating aural adventure. After the tentative first step of Empty Sky, the muscular songwriting strength of Elton John, the countrified experimentalism of Tumbleweed Connection and the live energy bursting through 17-11-70, Madman Across The Water, now reissued with demos and live tracks for its 50th anniversary, is the first album in what would become an amazing four-year run of varied, resourceful, and artfully brilliant collaborations between John and Bernie Taupin. The pair's trajectory from this point shot skyward into considerable wealth and ever-expanding notoriety.

Piano Man: The Very Best of Billy Joel is a greatest hits album by Billy Joel, originally released on 15 November 2004.

Franz Lehar was the most gifted and successful composer of operetta of the 20th century, and the most important composer of operetta after Johann Strauss Jr. His most famous work, The Merry Widow, may be the most recorded operetta in the world, and is in the repertory of numerous international opera companies; it has also been filmed several times, including three times in America – in 1924 (by Erich Von Stroheim), in 1934 with Maurice Chevalier and Jeanette MacDonald, and in 1952 with Lana Turner and Fernando Lamas. The title waltz is sufficiently well known to middle-class American audiences to have figured as a key clue in the classic 1942 Hitchcock movie Shadow of a Doubt, set in a small California town. But he is also responsible for a half dozen other of the most beautiful operettas ever written.