British Standar

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.

Released in 2015, Grapefruit’s 3-CD multi-artist British underground folk compilation Dust On The Nettles was widely praised, with a five-star review in The Times hailing it as “a delight from beginning to end”. A long-overdue follow up to that set, Sumer Is Icumen In tightens the mesh by focusing on the point when traditional folksong and the burgeoning late Sixties counterculture collided, largely courtesy of seminal acts like the Incredible String Band, Fairport Convention and Pentangle.

Crawling Up A Hill is a fascinating document of a genre that, though relatively short-lived, would have a seismic influence on the subsequent development of rock music.

Curated by Acid Jazz Records and Modcast founder Eddie Piller, “British Mod Sounds of The 1960s Volume 2: The Freakbeat & Psych Years” is the follow up to the hugely successful “British Mod Sounds of The 1960s”, featuring 95 original tracks across a 4CD set - a deep dive into the post-Mod scene in '60s Britain. Featuring a selection of classic and rare tracks, tracing the scene from early '65 to the dawn of a new decade.

Three CDs. Four-hour anthology of recordings that anticipated the late 70s Power Pop movement. Featuring Badfinger, Slade, The Move, Stealers Wheel, Pilot, Dave Edmunds, Brinsley Schwarz, Honeybus, The Kinks, The Who, etc. While the early 70s musical landscape in Britain was largely dominated by introspective singer/songwriters, Bubblegum Pop and underground Rock bands, a handful of acts bravely continued to pursue the classic mid-60s group sound. With the aid of increasingly sophisticated recording studios, they majored in crisp, muscular, hook-laden three-minute pop songs, bursting with chiming Rickenbacker guitars, irresistible choruses and Beatles/Beach Boys-inspired close harmonies. A few (Slade, Pilot, the ill-starred Badfinger) found commercial success, but the likes of Starry Eyed And Laughing, Shape Of The Rain and Octopus proved to be the right bands at the wrong time - too late for the British Invasion that had swept America in the mid-60s, too early to hitch a ride on the late 70s Power Pop bandwagon.

Issued in 2020, ‘Bubblerock Is Here To Stay’ shone a spotlight on the lost and often murky world of early 70s British Pop, a scene largely controlled by old-fashioned, Denmark Street- based production/songwriting teams as the Rock world concentrated on the album market. Another four-hour 3CD set, ‘Bubblerock Is Here To Stay Volume Two’ treads the same neglected path to deliver more mouldy old dough from the era's backroom boys: crack songwriting teams (Cook/Greenaway, Carter/Lewis, Chinn/Chapman), hit-or-bust producers (Phil Wainman, Jonathan King), session singers (Tony Burrows, Sue And Sunny), and writers-turned-performers (Lynsey de Paul, Barry Blue, Phillip Goodhand- Tait).

With a band patched together from the remnants of Mott the Hoople, British Lions is all swagger and little substance; music performed as though it's very important and vital, but with little in the way of memorable tunes or attitude. That's the late-'70s hard rock mainstream for you, and it's easy to imagine these guys slogging it out in arenas as a support act, which in fact they did for Blue Öyster Cult and UFO…

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!