Classic Rock

Free CD with Classic Rock magazine 248. Foreigner, Blackberry Smoke, Dizzy Reed, Monster Magnet and others.

This instalment of the popular 'NOW 100 Hits' series comprises a number of guitar-filled anthems, ranging from Meat Loaf's 'Bat Out of Hell' and Rainbow's 'Since You Been Gone', to Rod Stewart's 'Maggie May' and The Clash's 'Should I Stay Or Should I Go'.

The London Symphony Orchestra (LSO), founded in 1904, is the oldest of London's symphony orchestras. It was set up by a group of players who left Henry Wood's Queen's Hall Orchestra because of a new rule requiring players to give the orchestra their exclusive services. The LSO itself later introduced a similar rule for its members. From the outset, the LSO was organised on co-operative lines, with all players sharing the profits at the end of each season. This practice continued for the orchestra's first four decades.

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.