If 1976 was year zero for punk rock in the U.K. with the Sex Pistols and Clash blowing up and taking over the music press, 1977 was the year record shops were flooded with singles by all sorts of bands capitalizing on the sound, fury, and attitude of punk. Cherry Red's 1977: The Year Punk Broke is a chronologically chosen three-disc selection of singles that touches on some of the biggest releases of the year plus loads of tracks that still sound rough and ready by bands who didn't stand the test of time.
Here's the guy everybody knows for his monster rock/reggae/electro hit "Electric Avenue." What did he ever do after that? Almost nobody knows, and that's what this Music Club collection attempts to inform the world of for a budget price. Personally, I love Music Club reissues; they are priced super reasonably, they have lovely packages that feature enough tracks to give a representative sample with a few rarities tossed in, and they offer an adequate set of liner notes to educate the listener. This is helpful in the case of Grant, who, at least in the U.S., is a one-hit MTV wonder. Eddy Grant had an awesome band of rockers and soulsters together in the 1960s called the Equals who had a string of modest British hits – including "Police on My Back" – that everybody identifies with the Clash.
…Released in June of 1978, a month before the first album by Akron’s finest deserters DEVO, The Akron Compilation attempts to document the wave of creativity that swelled in the Rubber City. There’s no doubt, however, that DEVO’s visibility is what brought attention to the Akron bands documented on this disc—and no small coincidence that it was a Stiff Records release, the label that brought DEVO’s first three singles out to the world outside of Ohio. Hell, the cover art even echos the iconic shot of the “Shine On America” mural in Akron that had been immortalized in DEVO’s 1975 film “The Truth About De-Evolution”…