The Golden Cage

Long before he'd evolved into a fully-fledged cult figure, Joe Meek was the UK's first fully independent record producer. This unique 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!

Long before he'd evolved into a fully-fledged cult figure, Joe Meek was the UK's first fully independent record producer. This unique 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!

A lavish package celebrating the myriad bumps, bruises, and highlights of the Stranglers' earliest and best, the boastfully titled Old Testament is a four-CD set (five, in some editions) that spans the group's first six albums (up to 1981's La Folie), also including a number of non-LP singles and B-sides. (Physical editions of the box also contain an exhaustive – if blindly…er, boastful – 112-page book, which makes the package all the more attractive for longtime fans who have long since hunter-gathered the rarities.) It would be a major gamble to make this your first Stranglers purchase, especially due to the 1997 release of The Hit Men, which runs through the band's stylistically varied singles and doesn't indulge too much in the Stranglers' lengthy deterioration phase(s). They were productive from 1977-1981, discounting the number of album tracks that really shouldn't have seen the light of day. Make no mistake, nearly every good thing they did can be found within these four discs, save for the odd later hit like 1984's soft rock gem "Skin Deep." The 80-plus songs on The Old Testament definitely prove the Stranglers to be worthy of a box set.
© Andy Kellman /TiVo

Belfast-based, 'The Mad Dalton' is independent Scots /Canadian writer /musician Peter GW Sumadh.
His debut"The Little Belfry EP" was released in Nov 2015 & he's been recording & gigging throughout the UK/Ireland ever since.

Exciting, colorful and gigantic score for the fantasy film with special effects by Ray Harryhausen. Lengthy, spectacular re-recording features all of the music for Herrmann's various outlandish orchestral requirements, such as the huge brass section (including four tubas!) for the giant bronze statue Talos and multiple harps plus expanded woodwinds for the flying Harpies. Prepared from Herrmann's own original manuscripts and magnificently recorded in stunning detail. Bruce Broughton conducts the Sinfonia Of London.