The Prophet Song

The only band to use the Beatles, Whitney Houston, Mission Impossible, Petula Clark, Doctor Who, ABBA, and the French national anthem as art statements. Circa 1987: Shag Times, one of the many deliberate cash-ins released in the wake of the Timelords, confirmed Bill Drummond and Jimi Cauty's supremacy over every last imitator and pop stunt plagiarist.

Formed in 1991, The Spacious Mind have since become known as one of the world's leading psychedelic bands. Their music owes as much to the acid haze of the San Francisco ballrooms in the late 60's, as it does to the unknown areas of space, heart and time. The twin guitars are battling over a steady drums/bass background, while the atmospheric keyboards are swirling in and out of your mind, and together they create a melancholic tapestry of sounds that should please anyone into consciousness raising or simply the message of Love.

Here's an excellent Shostakovich chamber program, combining music from different phases of the composer's career as well as introducing two fairly unusual works in combination with a great masterwork, the Piano Trio No. 2 in E minor, Op. 67. This work, written in 1944 as the tide had begun to turn against Hitler's armies in Russia, is perhaps the definitive musical response to the horrors of the Second World War. Its final movement, evoking klezmer music gradually overtaken by darkness, is almost unbearably moving.

These are the two most popular LPs by this Dixieland octet, which saw huge success in 1963-1964, including a number two hit single with "Washington Square." The albums stand better together than they did on their own - Washington Square was heavily weighted toward folk-based repertory, as a kind of Dixieland/folk revival crossover that worked well in early 1964. The dozen songs from their follow-up album are more derived from pop and jazz sources (though there is a Dylan tune thrown in). The bonus tracks, bringing the song count up to 26, are "From Russia With Love" and "Fiddler on the Roof," both modest hits that originally appeared on subsequent LPs, thus making this CD a kind of best-of, or at least a one-stop location for the group's most familiar records. The sound is excellent, the annotation is fairly complete, and it's unlikely there will ever be much more out on CD in connection with this group.

The A Night at the Opera Tour (advertised as A Night at the Opera with Queen) was a concert tour by Queen to promote A Night at the Opera. It spanned 1975 and 1976, and covered the UK, the US, Japan, and Australia. It marked the debut of "Bohemian Rhapsody", which would be played at every Queen gig thereafter.
Also in September 1976, already during the session of the album A Day At The Races, the band played several concerts in the UK. This little tour was called Summer '76.

It's a mystery if Queen played both I'm A Man and Mannish Boy during this tour or not. These two songs are similar to each other and while it seems very likely they played I'm A Man as the first encore, rumours say the band also played Mannish Boy in Glasgow (the second night).

The last night of this North American tour was very special - it was shortly before Christmas (December 22) so the band performed an acoustic version of White Christmas during the acoustic set. Also several crew members and friends (incl. John Reid and Peter Straker) sang backing vocals in the first encore (Sheer Heart Attack). An audio recording exists and is available on the bootleg market.