Indian Summer were a progressive rock quartet, formed in Coventry, UK, in 1969. The members were Malcolm Harker on bass, Paul Hooper on drums, Bob Jackson on keyboards and lead vocals and Colin Williams on guitar. Their manager was Jim Simpson who was managing Black Sabbath at the time. Simpson signed Indian Summer with the same production team to record their debut album. Indian Summer's album of the same name was released two and a half years later, in 1971. But Indian Summer disbanded in the same year.
Gorgeous, collector's edition 24CD singles box set that collates the singles originally released on Geffen and Atlantic Records, from across Donna Summer's international releases, presented in replica mini-sleeves, accompanied by a very fancy mini-book, with photos, liner notes, and interviews with collaborators of DS, and with the lady herself…
Donna Summer's contribution to Universal's mid-priced 20th Century Masters – The Millennium Collection series is a decent, concise look at the queen of disco's career, including such natural choices as "Love to Love You Baby," "I Feel Love," "Bad Girls," "Hot Stuff," and "On the Radio," as well as early-'80s hits like "She Works Hard for the Money" and "Love Is in Control." 1995's Endless Summer remains the best single-disc introduction, since it covers more territory, presents a more rounded look, and includes many other singles that charted, but this works perfectly for those who want to stick to the basics.
Donna Summer's title as the "Queen of Disco" wasn't mere hype. Like many of her contemporaries, she was a talented vocalist trained as a powerful gospel belter, but she set herself apart with her songwriting ability, magnetic stage presence, and shrewd choice of studio collaborators, all of which resulted in sustained success. During the '70s alone, she topped the Billboard club chart 11 times with high-quality, often-high concept material that included the rapturous "Love to Love You Baby," the innovative "I Feel Love," and a radically transformed "MacArthur Park." These crossover hits embodied the disco era with audacious musicality and uninhibited eroticism. After her subgenre was declared dead, Summer was very much part of the evolution of dance music. Through the feminist anthem "She Works Hard for the Money," she became an MTV star, and she continued to top the club chart with disco-rooted house singles through 2010, 35 years after her breakthrough. Indeed, she was the ultimate disco diva.
The Summer Collection is a compilation album by Donna Summer released in 1985 by Mercury Records. Summer had made her name during the era of disco music in the 1970s when she was signed to Casablanca Records. In 1980, she signed to Geffen Records but her success there was not what it had been on Casablanca. In the early 1980s, Casablanca was bought out entirely by Polygram Records, and Summer had returned to them for one studio album. Mercury, another division of Polygram and a sister company to Casablanca, released that album entitled She Works Hard for the Money in 1983. It also released this compilation album in 1985, containing seven of her original disco hits from Casablanca, plus three songs from the aforementioned Mercury Records album.
The follow-up to Donna Summer's first big Geffen album did reasonably well and proved to be the lull before the storm. "State of Independence" just missed being a hit, and "Woman In Me" cracked the pop and R&B Top 40, although it wasn't a smash. But the album mostly reaffirmed that Summer was back in stride and hadn't merely scored a fluke with her previous release.