Rainbow

With Ronnie James Dio having moved on to explore new pastures, Rainbow returned in 1979 with a new lead vocalist (Graham Bonnet), a new keyboards player (Don Airey), and a new(ish) bassist (Ritchie's former band mate Roger Glover).
After the relatively disappointing "Long live rock and roll", Ritchie Blackmore took the opportunity to lead the band in a subtle(?) change of direction, the result being a sort of cross between the accessible pop rock of Asia, and the heavy driving rhythms of Deep Purple. While some see this as a step backwards, for me this is one of the band's most accomplished albums…

Rainbow Serpent are one of the best Electronic Music bands to emerge from Germany having a rare talent for infectious sequences and sublime melodies. At one moment they can produce tracks overflowing with the joy of life and then in the next turn their hands to growling menacing stuff. Frank Specht is one half of the awesome Rainbow Serpent and as with Gerd Wienekamp's (the other half of Rainbow Serpent) album 'Der Laborant - Kontakt' what we get is a mixture of very recognisable Serpent characteristics as well as a different angle identifying the individuality of each member.

On Saturday, August 16th, 1980 Rainbow took to the stage to headline the first rock festival to be staged at Castle Donington. It was the culmination of the band s tour in support of the hugely successful Down To Earth album, released in 1979, and would prove to be the last live show featuring this particular line-up of the band: Ritchie Blackmore (guitars), Don Airey (keyboards), Graham Bonnet (vocals), Roger Glover (bass) and Cozy Powell (drums)…

As one of the cornerstones of British Rock, Rainbow, led by the never-predictable but ever-astonishing guitarist, Ritchie Blackmore, became synonymous with some of the most well regarded and popular charting Rock songs of the seventies and eighties…

On their second effort, Fly to the Rainbow, the Scorpions begin to establish their trademark hard-rock sound while exorcising the last of their remaining psychedelic hippie tendencies. In fact, the band bursts out of the gate in surprisingly straightforward fashion with the hard rocking "Speedy's Coming" before resorting to the aforementioned bad habits on otherwise promising tracks such as…

No, not *that* Nirvana… long before Kurt and Courtney were more than a glint in their parents’ eyes, there was a psychedelic British band of the same name. Their first two albums will be re-released, with a wealth of unreleased material, in a new double-set Rainbow Chasers: The ’60s Recordings (The Island Years) on 18 May.