British Band

Before making history together with the Move and then ELO, Roy Wood and Jeff Lynne both did time in the British psych-rock oddity the Idle Race. Though they were only in the band together briefly, the Race proved to be a testing ground for many of the ideas the two would bring to fruition–both together and separately–with their many subsequent projects. BACK TO THE STORY, originally released in 1996, collects the band's three studio albums, as well as alternate takes, demos, and rarities. It's a must-have for fans of Wood and Lynne, yet is also a key piece for those attempting to complete the vast and complicated puzzle that is British rock in the 1960s and '70s.

CD reissue of this odd group's 1971 album, a competent mix of 1970 British pop and progressive styles, with dashes of blues, funk, and country-rock. It's not bad – kind of like a somewhat poppier spin on much of the rock you would have heard on FM radio around the early '70s – but neither is it much of a sparkling find…

In the late '70s, the British Lions recorded a second album, but could not get it released in either the U.S. or the U.K., and the band broke up. The LP did appear on Cherry Red in 1980; this reissue adds a bunch of demos, live cuts, and radio promo commercials…

Three CD set. 2022 instalment of Grapefruit's popular year-by-year overviews of the more melodic end of the early 70s UK progressive rock scene. A four-hour compilation featuring big hits, key album tracks, cult classics and rarities from 1973. 1973 was another significant year in British pop, with the recent arrival of glam inspiring many underground bands to adopt a more streamlined sound. That more song-based approach helped give the 1973 singles chart a new energy, with memorable 45s from Mott The Hoople, Manfred Mann's Earthband, Faces, Status Quo, Medicine Head and Nazareth.

Long-established as a hugely popular radio format, the Classic Rock sound was established – though not codified and canonised until some while later – in the Seventies, when numerous British bands from a pop or blues-based background pioneered a muscular, riff-based sound that dominated American FM airwaves and led the most successful practitioners to fame, fortune and all manner of related excess.

Serving to embrace the floral heavens of British pop, this ceremonious edition combines the first ten prized volumes of the acclaimed Piccadilly Sunshine series. Celebrating the obscured artefacts of illustrious noise that emerged from the Great British psychedelic era and beyond, it is the essential guide to the quintessential sound of candy-coloured pop from a bygone age Pop is NOT a dirty word!

New Wave of British Heavy Metal band Demon were known for their shocking and elaborate performances (quite unique, considering the no-fuss, stripped-down philosophy characteristic of the movement), but never sounded as extreme as their name might suggest. Instead, they forged a mainstream hard rock/metal style, which, though it didn't stand out from the pack, has managed to keep them in business for several decades. Singer Dave Hill and guitarist Mal Spooner had already cut their teeth with various amateur acts in their native Staffordshire, England, by the time they decided to join forces and found Demon midway through 1980.