Golden

Limited 11CD box set from Dutch rock legends Golden Earring. Together with Red Bullet, the band collected seven live albums, plus some unique recordings previously only available as B-sides. Also included are several recordings from the Five Zero Show from 2015, which were only available on DVD before…

For anyone in their mid-teens in the mid-5Os, and into music, it had to be rock'n'roll - American rock'n roll. There was no British equivalent to the sound. In the UK, it was Chuck Berry, Elvis Presley, The Platters, Alan Freed, Radio Luxembourg, Voice Of America.

Dutch group Golden Earring has always inhabited a strange and twisted territory between hard rock and straight-ahead pop that's also home to Blue Oyster Cult and modern acts like Monster Magnet. On Bloody Buccaneers, Golden Earring doesn't come up with any real surprises, but manages to deliver a surprisingly consistent record of the same sort of hooky, roots-influenced heavy guitar music that made the band famous. Despite the lack of any songs as good as "Radar Love," Golden Earring's career-making mega-hit, the material is pretty decent and played with panache. Barry Hay's powerful vocals are still wonderfully sandpaper tough and George Kooymans' guitar playing is as ballsy and filled with punk rock 'tude as ever.

After spending much of the late '70s and the early '80s as a cult band, Golden Earring returned to an international level of popularity in 1982 with the hit single (and popular MTV attraction) "Twilight Zone." This song and seven others are featured on Cut, a solid album that found Golden Earring starting to deviate from the pop/rock formula they perfect on No Promises…No Debts and Prisoner of the Night. Like those albums, Cut works its way through a series of guitar-based rock songs built on strong hooks. However, the band allows themselves to instrumentally stretch out a bit on some of the songs this time out.

Another serious project in vein of Time Life Music, the "24 Golden Hits" is a compilation series of the world famous hits, released on CD circa 1987-1988. Here is the complete series packed into five boxes and each box was re-released separately. Each Volume-set contains the five discs and titled as "120 Golden Oldies". 600 "Golden" songs total and over than one day of the continuous listening!

Best known in the U.S. for their hard rock material, Golden Earring have been the most popular homegrown band in the Netherlands since the mid-'60s, when they were primarily a pop group. The group was founded by guitarist/vocalist George Kooymans and bassist/vocalist Rinus Gerritsen, then schoolboys, in 1961; several years and personnel shifts later, they had their first Dutch hit, "Please Go," and in 1968 hit the top of the Dutch charts for the first of many times with "Dong-Dong-Di-Ki-Di-Gi-Dong," a song that broadened their European appeal. By 1969, the rest of the lineup had stabilized, with lead vocalist and multi-instrumentalist Barry Hay and drummer Cesar Zuiderwijk.