Rebel Bakes

Cockney Rebel was an English band that ran for a few years in the early 1970s. Despite the odd hit single, it disbanded (seemingly for good) in 1974. Despite this, frontman Steve Harley reformed the band with drummer Stuart Elliot and a few new musicians.
Recorded in just two months at the end of 1974, The Best Years of Our Lives marked the band’s first album under its new name Steve Harley & Cockney Rebel. It was another co-production between Harley and Alan Parsons (Abbey Road, The Dark Side of the Moon).
It was this album and its two singles that catapulted Steve Harley & Cockney Rebel to mainstream success. They epitomised that era: glamorous, sordid yet highly interesting as some amazing music came out.

The first volume of Tempesta di Mare's series on Chandos, Comédie et Tragédie, offers period-style performances of orchestral music by Jean-Baptiste Lully, Jean-Féry Rebel, and Marin Marais. The orchestral suites drawn from Lully's music for Le bourgeois gentilhomme, Rebel's symphonie nouvelle Les élémens, and Marais' suite from the tragédie en musique Alcyone give a taste of theater music in the court of Louis XIV and Louis XV, and these pieces show how inventive composers were with instrumentation and their combinations of dances with dramatic scene painting. Tempesta di Mare, which is also known as the Philadelphia Baroque Orchestra, gives bright and energetic performances, and the musicians have a fine sense of the swung rhythms, distinctive tone colors, and lively ornamentation in French Baroque music. The recording is clear and well-balanced, though the percussion in Lully's March for the Turkish Ceremony (track 4) is a bit startling, and the dissonant opening of Rebel's Le Chaos (track 13) has its own shock value. Highly recommended.

Indulging for the first time in Cockney Rebel's debut album – and one uses the word "indulging" deliberately, for like so much else that's this delicious, you cannot help but feel faintly sinful when it's over – is like waking up from a really weird dream, and discovering that reality is weirder still. A handful of Human Menagerie's songs are slight, even forced, and certainly indicative of the group's inexperience…