Career retrospective from Pub Rock’s angriest man Graham Parker, spread over 6 CDs with a DVD featuring a live set at the Brook Southampton from last year’s final tour with the Rumour…LTW’s Ian Canty looks at 40 years of Camberley’s very own Punk Soul brother….. It wasn’t very promising on the face of it. A resentful 25 year old garage pump attendant with a run through the 60s from Mod to Hippy behind him and a headful of dreams about Van Morrison and Dr Feelgood, matched up with what might have been the cream of the Pub Rock scene. But this was after all of their respective bands had singularly failed to make an impact, so together, in 1976, they stood at the doors of the Last Chance saloon. What wasn’t expected was that with their musical power allied to the petrol pump punk’s lyrical smarts and alarming stage presence, they would blow the doors off the hinges. Ladies and gentleman, I give you Graham Parker and the Rumour.
It's no secret that there's a deep animosity between Van Halen – particularly their leader, guitarist Edward (formerly Eddie) Van Halen – and their former frontman, David Lee Roth. His 1985 departure was acrimonious, and while his solo career paled in comparison to Van Halen's continued success with Sammy Hagar as their frontman, the group never escaped the shadow of Diamond Dave…
A compilation board released as part of the "Disco Fever" campaign jointly held by record companies in commemoration of the 40th anniversary of the movie "Saturday Night Fever" in Japan. It is good to dance and fever but I also want to reconfirm the height of the musicality where the melody, the beat and the chorus come together to create the groove.
Helen Shapiro is remembered today by younger pop culture buffs as the slightly awkward actress/singer in Richard Lester's 1962 debut feature film, It's Trad, Dad. From 1961 until 1963, however, Shapiro was England's teenage pop music queen, at one point selling 40,000 copies daily of her biggest single, "Walking Back to Happiness," during a 19-week chart run. A deceptively young 14 when she was discovered, Shapiro had a rich, expressive voice properly sounding like the property of someone twice as old, and she matured into a seasoned professional very quickly.
Best known for his string of late-'80s MOR blues-pop hit singles, Middlesbrough's biggest musical export Chris Rea has spent the best part of the noughties reinventing himself as a Tom Waits-esque troubadour with a series of ambitious and often gargantuan-sized albums focusing on the vintage slide guitar blues sounds that influenced his hugely successful 30-year career. More up to date than 1994's The Best Of and more extensive than 2005's Heartbeats, Still So Far to Go is the husky-voiced guitarist's first hits collection to place as much emphasis on his later more revered and prolific output as his more familiar and commercial airplay staples. Spanning four decades, the comprehensive two-CD, 34-track compilation features material from his 1978 debut Whatever Happened to Benny Santini? (his biggest U.S. hit, "Fool [If You Think It's Over]") right up to 2005's mammoth 11-disc offering Blue Guitars ("Somewhere Between Highway 61 & 49"), including the 1996 soundtrack La Passione ("When the Grey Skies Turn to Blue") to his self-penned film of the same name.