Essentially, this 17-track album is a second-volume Queen's Greatest Hits, picking up the story from that album's 1981 release and taking it to the end of Queen's career. But the album also contains a few tracks - "Bohemian Rhapsody," "Keep Yourself Alive," and "Under Pressure" - that appeared on that first set, as well as a couple - "Stone Cold Crazy" and "Tie Your Mother Down" - from the same era. The remaining 12 tracks, culled from The Works, A Kind of Magic, The Miracle, and Innuendo, represent songs that were not big hits in the U.S. Nevertheless, with a resurgence of interest in Queen and the second coming of "Bohemian Rhapsody," courtesy of Wayne's World, this album returned Queen to platinum status and the U.S. Top Five for the first time since the early '80s.
A former member of Betty Carter's band, Green shows on this set that the word on him was correct; he's both an aggressive and sensitive stylist, able to rip through songs and make quick, yet correct chord changes. Yet he can also play a passionate ballad and not rush through it, instead developing and then completing his solos impressively.
Perhaps better known to most as a successful New Zealand, (and NZ's most successful band and hugely popular in NZ and Australia) new wave act from the early 1980s. Split Enz did in fact start life as a prog band formed in 1972 originally spelt Split Ends (the spelling changed to Enz when the band left New Zealand), by friends at Auckland University Phil Judd (Guitar, vocals) and Brian (Tim) Finn (Vocals, piano, guitar), who had an inspired period of song writing together. Their early sound was a mixture of vaudeville and influences of the Beatles, Genesis, Yes, Roxy Music, Jethro Tull and Gentle Giant. Tim's singing style was influenced a little by Brian Ferry while Phil Judd by Roger Chapman of Family.
Klaus Schulze is a founding member of Tangerine Dream and Ash Ra Tempel, two seminal bands in the evolution of synthesizer-based electronic music.
"Royal Festival Hall Vol. 1" is the first album in a trilogy that includes a second volume, also recorded at Royal Festival Hall, as well the third album entitled The Dome Event. On Volume 1, Schulze's 45-minute keyboard suite called "Yen" is broken up into ten different subtitles, but the songs are all fused together by way of single-toned electronic streams and the faint pulsations of analog synthesizer riffs…