Sides

As part of The Stranglers' celebration of their Ruby Anniversary, the definitive collection of the B-side recordings they made whilst signed to Epic is released for the first time, via their own label. Appropriately, as befits a band marking forty years together, Here & There: The Epic B-sides Collection 1983-1991 gathers 40 tracks across 2 CDs and is also released as a 40 track digital package. The Stranglers released no less than 13 singles in the UK during this period, which saw them produce five albums: four studio and one live. The Stranglers signed to Epic Records in 1982 having been with United Artists / Liberty since 1977. The change of label coincided with changes in marketing policy across the UK industry - often dubbed "the Frankie Goes to Hollywood effect". Previously, The Stranglers' had released only one 12" single - an extended version of Bear Cage in 1980 - but from 2nd Epic single, Midnight Summer Dream until 1990, each release had a 12" version which required extra studio or, increasingly, live tracks to "add value" to the package.

Returning to the stark, melancholy sounds of Face Value, Phil Collins delivers a personal album with Both Sides in more than one sense of the word. Collins played all of the instruments on Both Sides, and the songs are troubled, haunting tales of regret, romance, and society…

Phil Collins has spent the last few years meticulously revisiting his catalog. Last year, he delivered his career-spanning collaborations box set Plays Well With Others, and he recently released remastered expanded editions for all eight of his solo records. Now, he’s expanding upon those expansions with a pair of new digital-only compilations, Other Sides and Remixed Sides.

Like the Lost and Found collection of unreleased material that was released alongside it, Rare B-Sides comes as both a blessing and a curse to the Cliff Richard collector – a blessing, because its 25 songs serve up a fine snapshot of his B-side activity between 1963 and 1973 (plus three flips from the '80s that do feel out of place); and a curse because anybody who bought the 50th anniversary box set on the strength of its quotient of rarities and unreleased material is probably feeling a little sore right now…

III Sides to Every Story was an overambitious project and an often times pretentious album, I think Extreme succeeds here anyway. This album is just as strong and adventurous as Pornograffitti. Extreme successfully mixes hard rock and heavy metal with funk, pop and prog. Extreme has always had progressive tendencies in their music, even though most do not consider Extreme to be progressive. Prog is about musical innovation, not technical masturbation. And Extreme was certainly innovative. Hell, even those of you who have been misled into thinking that progressive bands need be technical, try and find a guitarist more technical than Bettencourt.

Since Marc Bolan's own label issued its first greatest-hits package back in 1973, there has been no shortage of collections rounding up the peerless sequence of 18 singles (some with multiple B-sides) released between January 1972 and Bolan's death in September 1977. Indeed, this set was itself just a few months old when its contents were redistributed across two box sets' worth of CD singles, each one replicating the original U.K. 45. As a simple one-stop chronological gathering of the Bolan jukebox at its born-to-boogie best, however, this two-disc package is hard to beat. In common with the two single-disc collections that it supersedes, the discs are divided neatly between A-sides (disc one) and B-sides…