Screwed (2000)

Stiff Upper Lip, AC/DC's 15th studio album, may not reach the heights of Back in Black or Highway to Hell, but it delivers strongly and satisfyingly. It's the record that the highly touted, Rick Rubin-produced Ballbreaker should have been: a simple, addictive, hard album, bursting with bold riffs and bolstered by a crunching, thrillingly visceral sound. Sure, there are absolutely no new ideas, but that's the point. AC/DC know their strengths and they embrace them. And why shouldn't they? Nobody writes a better riff than Malcolm and Angus Young; each song has a riff so catchy, it feels like you've heard it for years.

The story of Mick Farren? If only that were true. But one of the most ferociously determined careers of the past four decades has twisted down far too many alleyways for a single disc to sum it up. There's nothing here from either the Ork days or the Stiff EP (although there is a live version of the killer "Screwed Up"), while the latter years of the re-formed Deviants and sundry Farren spin-off projects are also absent. Look back at the two Total Energy comps that appeared during 2000-2001, and the same story was told with a lot more precision by either. That said, what People Call You Crazy does, it does well. All three original Deviants albums are represented with undeniable highlights - the Zappa-esque "Billy the Monster" and a superbly subversive rampage through "Papa-Oom-Mow-Mow" included…

Brothers Ron and Russell Mael from Los Angeles, USA have been making diverse music since 1969 under various incarnations of Sparks. In 1979 they ditched the guitars and keyboards of glam geek rock and started working with Italian producer Giorgio Moroder, beginning a love affair with electronic music. Since then they have worked with a variety of people including Finitribe, Les Rita Mitsouko, Erasure and Faith No More.

A 3-CD, four-hour celebration of the post-Brumbeat late ‘60s/early ‘70s rock scene in the West Midlands. Tracing the evolution and development of that scene as local musicians embarked on an epic journey that embraced mod pop, psychedelia, blues, progressive rock, glam-rock and heavy metal, inspired by the emergence of chief catalysts The Move.

The cast list is a dream come true. The diversity of the players and pieces is what makes this album special to me. The album structure could be labelled Prog before there was Prog. Split this into the written piece "Hair in a G-String" (about 46 minutes) & "Songs not in G" (About 36 minutes) and you'd have a prog album and a melodic rock album I guess. We didn't do that. We mixed it up. See it as musical interludes between the main action.