British Band

There have been previous attempts to marshal a lot of British psychedelia into one compilation, but Real Life Permanent Dreams is a little different from those. This four-CD, 99-song box set isn't a best-of, but more like an attempt to assemble a very wide (though still representative) cross section of material, most of it pretty obscure to the average listener. For the most part, it succeeds in delivering a high-quality anthology that manages to offer a lot to both the collector and the less intense psychedelic fan, though it's by no means the cream of British psychedelia.

Glenn Prangnell’s Trouserphonic Records label is home to Groovy Uncle and Suzi Chunk and has done an excellent job keeping the flag flying for the beat and R&B sounds of the Sixties. This release, the first on the label that doesn’t feature Prangnell or Chunk, makes it clear from the off with the band's name that record producer Jim Riley has taken a slightly different route with his debut for the label.

It's now half-a-century since British folk rock became A Thing, with the early practitioners breaking new ground and inspiring an entire scene that peaked in the late Sixties/early Seventies. Earnest young post-Dylan singer/songwriters moved away from the intimacy of the folk clubs in favour of the nascent college/university circuit. Counter-cultural iconoclasts The Incredible String Band became a seismic influence on a whole raft of bands now categorised as acid-folk, Pentangle's use of acoustic instrumentation within a nominally rock framework attracted many emulators (though arguably no real equals), while Fairport Convention graduated from their initial American West Coast-indebted sound to explore their own country's musical heritage, thus establishing the concept of indigenous English folk rock (a baton that would be picked up by the likes of Ashley Hutchings' post-Fairport venture Steeleye Span and many others).

Unique four CD anthology of British and Irish Folk 1955-78. This collection includes many songs that have been previously unavailable on CD. 83 tracks from the likes of Lonnie Donegan, Ewan MacColl & Pete Seeger, Michael Chapman, Al Stewart, Ralph McTell, Incredible String Band, Tyrannosaurus Rex, Trees, Heron, Steeleye Span and many others.

Acrobats British Hit Parade series has been established for well over a decade as a unique range of completist original artist collections comprising every record that appeared in the UK record sales charts in every year since the charts began in 1952. In recent years Acrobat has introduced parallel collections which consist of the B sides of all the records included in the main compilations, and these have proved hugely popular with collectors, since many of the records concerned have never been available on CD and are very rarely heard.

Boasting 92 tracks, ‘Box Of Pin-Ups’ takes in the market leaders as well as the year’s hard-up heroes and nowhere men. Established Top Ten acts like Manfred Mann, The Hollies and The Yardbirds are joined by cult names and such glorious one-shot unknowns as Glenn Athens & The Trojans and Irish band The Spectres, both now legally included on CD for the first time.

• Following the success of the first two volumes of the series I’m A Freak Baby, Grapefruit returns with a third instalment of pioneering hard rock sounds from the nascent British underground.
• As with its predecessors, I’m A Freak Baby 3 includes many of the acts who were synonymous with the stoner, free festival element of the English counterculture, with key tracks from such seminal underground stalwarts as Mick Farren and The Deviants, Edgar Broughton Band, Pink Fairies and Hawkwind.
• We also include musicians and bands who were honing their sound before finding huge success: the embryonic Deep Purple, the teenage Free, first album Thin Lizzy, Lemmy (fronting Sam Gopal) and a pre-fame Mott The Hoople are joined by old-stagers The Yardbirds, represented by an incendiary 1968 live version of “Dazed And Confused”, a song that Jimmy Page would take with him to his next band.

Volume 3 in the highly acclaimed “Just about as good as it gets!” series. Includes early Cliff Richards and Shadows (The Drifters) recordings. British rock ‘n’ roll still has some harsh critics, despite the huge improvement in sound mastering and the discovery of so many genuine gems included on this compilation. Yet, on the other side, interest continues to grow in this hybrid of the original. Rock ‘n’ roll and Jive clubs now often pulsate to the sounds of the Southlanders, Ray Ellington, Tony Crombie and Wee Willie Harris and many others, bringing home to so many that quite a large chunk of those 50’s British rockers were really good. So enjoy some of the best one more time.