Black Panther Album

Colin Vearncombe will forever be preserved in pop aspic as the maker of 1987’s melancholy worldwide hit Wonderful Life – No 1 in Austria! – but he hasn’t stopped working, despite his not having breached the top 40 for 27 years. Blind Faith, his seventh album under the Black flag, is a marvellous little thing – a less temperamental, less self-regarding cousin to Scott Walker’s first four solo records. Like them, it’s steeped in European balladry, and filled with delicious arrangements – the swooping strings and jazzy shuffles of Womanly Panther are a delight. Vearncombe’s slightly frayed baritone is a perfect match to the music, steering it clear of pomposity, filling it with humanity, even when the regrets well up – “I am not the man you want me to be,” he sings on Not the Man, “Here comes the talking / Slamming doors you then have to throw open.” Pop stardom is a long way in the past for Vearncombe, but Blind Faith is an album by a man very much in control of his gifts.

The box contains CDs with the ten albums of the blues group from The Hague, from "Hell's Session" from 1969 to "Out Of The Blue" from 1995. Two bonus CDs complete the collection (see tracklist below). The box appears on July 22.
Around 1970 Livin ’Blues, along with the band Cuby + Blizzards, was counted among the absolute top of the Dutch blues world. The fixed core consisted of Ted Oberg (guitar), John Lagrand (harmonica) and Nicko Christiansen (vocals). The group scored hits such as "Wang dang doodle" and "L.B. Boogie. The band performed throughout Europe, from England to Italy.

This Dutch blues band was formed in the Hague around 1967, becoming a regular outfit from 1969. The early line-up included Bjorn Toll (vocals), John Lagrand (harmonica), Ted Oberg (guitar), Ruud Fransen (bass) and Niek Dijkhuys (drums) but although the name remained wholesale changes soon took place, bringing in a new singer, Nicko Christiansen, and new bass and drums, Peter Kleinjan and Beer Klaasse, the latter pair being swiftly replaced by Gerard Strutbaum and Cesar Zuiderwijk, while keyboard player Henk Smitskamp was added. Other changes followed through the 70s, by which time the band’s repertoire was more inclined towards rock. Musicians involved included bass players Ruud van Buuren, Jan van der Voort, Jaap van Eijk and André Reynen, drummers John Lejeune, Herman van Boeyen, Cor van Beek, Michel Driessen, Kenny Lamb and Arjen Kamminga; the latter pair played in the band simultaneously for a spell…

The album shows how the ideals of the civil rights movement, black power and black nationalism influenced the evolvement of radical African-American music in the United States of America in the intensely political and revolutionary period at the end of the 1960s following the assassinations of Malcolm X, Martin Luther King and the rise of the Black Panther party.