The Golden Cage

SHAKE STEW is Austria‘s jazz band of the hour. After playing more than 25 gigs during the first months since premiering at Jazzfestival Saalfelden 2016 and selling out their first record „The Golden Fang“ within half a year, the unique septet is conquering the music world with a hypnotic mixture of afrobeat and jazz grooves shaken up by the intense and mysterious soundscapes created with a combination of two drummers and two double bass players! With „Rise And Rise Again“ Shake Stew are releasing their highly anticipated second album in May 2018, which also features Shabaka Hutchings on 2 of the tracks. Everywhere they went so far, the press has been more than enthusiastic, often trying to create new terms and genre-labels to put their live experiences into words and this new release will only further establish their status as one of Europe's most upcoming Jazzbands.

Nostradamus – The Fate of Man is the twelfth studio album by the Dutch progressive rock band Kayak. This concept-album tells the story of French doctor and seer Nostradamus, but from the viewpoint of a Flemish monk, Yves de Lessines. The (unproven) theory behind this is that Nostradamus was not the writer of his famous "Centuries". These poems were in fact written 200 years earlier by De Lessines, and they were a secret code to find the treasures of the Knights Templar. On one of his journeys, Nostradamus found the book that De Lessines wrote, and interpreted the poems in his own way, turning them into predictions. This theory was launched and motivated by Belgian professor and historian Rudy Cambier in his book "Nostradamus and the lost Templar legacy" (2003). Kayak found this approach much more interesting than the usual Nostradamus-stories, and decided to take this theory as a starting point for their second rock-opera.

Long before he'd evolved into a fully-fledged cult figure, Joe Meek was the UK's first fully independent record producer. This unique 2CD set traces his career from his earliest sessions, as a sound balance engineer in the mid-'50s, to his emergence as a major songwriter and hit maker in the early '60s. It includes many of Meek's biggest records, including five UK # 1s by, Anne Shelton, Lonnie Donegan, Frankie Vaughan, Emile Ford and John Leyton, plus several other major million selling hits! Indeed, more than half of the sixty sides included herein were significant UK hits. This set also includes several collectors' rarities, previously unavailable on CD, most notably Gary Miller's unfeasibly-rare 'Moby Dick'. John Fraser's 'Golden Cage' and Geoff Goddard's 'Girl Bride'. If you are looking for what is by far the most interesting Joe Meek-related compilation for years then this is it!