Summer Magic 1985 is a 20CD collection featuring seven previously unreleased concerts from the legendary band’s 20 Years So Far tour.The Dead’s magic in the summer of ’85 was plentiful, and the large box will include all three of the band’s 20th anniversary concerts at Berkeley, California’s Greek Theater (6/14-6/16/85) which kicked off the tour, as well as dates from Saratoga Performing Arts Center (6/27/85); Hersheypark Stadium (6/28/85); and Merriweather Post Pavilion (6/30/85).
All of the gigs were recorded by the Dead’s longtime sound engineer Dan Healy and mastered for this release by David Glasser at Airshow Mastering. Typical for the Dead sets of this magnitude, it’s a lavish affair with original artwork by Marcos Alvarado…
Category: box-set
The dawn of the British folk revival broke in 1965 when Bert Jansch’s “folk-baroque” finger style revolutionised tradition, providing the early morning light for a burgeoning psychedelic scene which, by 1972 had traveled from folk clubs to the high-concept landscapes of progressive rock, exemplified by the Eastern-tinged sitar-guitar on Yes’s ‘Siberian Khatru’.
Western artists utilised Eastern forms as a new musical bedrock. The Byrds transitioned from folk-rock into the uncharted territory of ‘Eight Miles High’, a track widely cited as the first true U.S. “Raga Rock” single. Driven by Roger McGuinn’s solos – inspired by Ravi Shankar and John Coltrane – it proved pop could embrace complex modal structures. Similarly, The Yardbirds’…
In the decades leading up to its release there had been loads and more loads of excellent collections of girl group and related music that originated in the U.K., but Strawberry Records’ 2026 collection Really Into Somethin’: Brit Girl Sounds & Styles 1962-1970 is one of the best. It gathers up a few names familiar to semi-casual music fans like Dusty Springfield and Lulu and a handful of artists that medium speed collectors of the style might know and love like P.P. Arnold, Sharon Tandy, Barbara Ruskin, and Julie Driscoll, but most of the three discs are made up of singers and groups that were more or less lost to the sands of time unless you were super devoted to digging up the rarest of the rare. Luckily for those who don’t want to spend hours searching and many…
The Riot Squad only released seven singles on the U.K.’s Pye label between 1965 and 1967. But thanks to the discovery of Joe Meek’s Tea Chest Tapes, the story of the band that might be best known for a short-lived collaboration with David Bowie can now be told in full. I Take It That We’re Through: Anthology 1965-1967 arrives from Cherry Red’s Strawberry imprint, with 3 CDs and 83 tracks (40 of which are previously unreleased and another 14 of which are new to CD).
Ron Ryan (guitar), Graham Bonney (vocals), Bob Evans (saxophone), Mark Stevens (keyboards), Mike Martin (bass), and future member of The Jimi Hendrix Experience, Mitch Mitchell (drums), formed The Riot Squad in late 1964. The group’s lineup was notoriously fluid; the band’s…
Cherry Red previously anthologized shoegaze and dream pop with the expansive multi-disc sets Still in a Dream: A Story of Shoegaze 1988-1995 and Cherry Stars Collide: Dream Pop, Shoegaze & Ethereal Rock 1986-1995, neither of which included anything by My Bloody Valentine, presumably due to licensing restrictions.
In both cases, the compilations started near the beginning of when the genres were beginning to crystallize, then firmly stopped in the mid-’90s, after the music press stopped giving shoegaze attention, and most of the genre’s big names either disappeared or changed their sound. With We Are the Beautiful: Two Decades of Shoegaze 1991-2011, the compilers start right when shoegaze’s definitive releases were…
4CD sequel to Heaven Sent: The Rise of New Pop 1979-1983, documenting the influence of jazz and ’50s/’60s black American music (including retro soul) on modern pop in the UK between 1982 and 1987. Featuring Everything But the Girl, Robert Wyatt, Working Week, Joe Jackson, Blue Rondo A La Turk, Matt Bianco, Carmel, Fine Young Cannibals, The Blow Monkeys, The Style Council and Swing Out Sister.
…In 1982 a new jazz era was dawning and Soho, a hotbed since the ’50s, was where the renaissance began. Blue Rondo A La Turk, who had the first ‘New Jazz’ hit, were led by Chris Sullivan who opened The Wag Club in Wardour Street in April 1982, a vital catalyst for the ‘New Jazz’ scene.
Vic Godard, singer with Subway Sect,…
…Four albums from the McAuley Schenker Group from the late ’80s and early ’90s. All with bonus material.
After making his debut at a mere 17 years on Scorpions’ first LP ‘Lonesome Crow’ in 1972, guitar maestro and mad axe-man Michael Schenker spent five years as lead guitarist with the inimitable UFO, before forming The Michael Schenker Group (MSG for short) with singer Gary Barden in 1979. With four studio albums and two live records under his belt between 1980 and 1984, Michael returned in 1987 with the ‘Perfect Timing’ album, fronted by former Grand Prix and Far Corporation singer Robin McAuley, and a change of name to the McAuley Schenker Group – but still conveniently shortened to MSG. The new look MSG…
…5CD box set anthology of B-Sides, rarities and archive material from Toyah’s recording history for the Safari label (1979-1983).
…Revelations provides an alternate history of the Toyah Wilcox-fronted new wavers by way of B-sides, outtakes, instrumentals, alternate versions, home demos and live tracks.
Record label Cherry Red say that “it has been designed to perfectly complement the album catalogue reissue programme”.
Remarkably, given how comprehensive the individual album reissues were, 50 of the 102 tracks on Revelations are previously unreleased. The box has been compiled by by Toyah archivist Craig Astley alongside Joel Bogen, co-founder, composer and guitarist with the band.
Remastered 3CD boxset gathering together the three albums by Adrian Belew released by Atlantic Records between 1989 and 1992.
…The run of solo albums capped off a remarkable decade for Adrian Belew. In 1977, he was playing in a Nashville covers band called Sweetheart when Frank Zappa – acting on a tip-off from his chauffeur (naturally) – asked him to join his band. Zappa’s exacting standards and crack backing band added up to a crash course in experimental music and Belew flourished. The guitarist caught Brian Eno’s eye, who recommended him to David Bowie. When Bowie approached Belew after a gig in Berlin with an offer to join his band, Zappa was apparently furious. “Quite a guitar player you have here, Frank,” Bowie said, according…
Omnivore Recordings and The International Pop Overthrow Music Festival present International Pop Overthrow: Volume 27, a three-disc compilation featuring 68 tracks by artists from all over the world who have played the International Pop Overthrow (IPO) festival, along with some who haven’t — at least, not yet! The IPO compilations go back as far as the festival, to 1998 when Volume 1 was a single disc. Since then, the collection expanded to two discs the following year, and then three discs in 2002 for Volume 5, and it has remained a three-disc set since. International Pop Overthrow: Volume 27 showcases artists from across the globe, doing just about every sub-genre of pop music, including power pop, pop/rock, folk/pop, psychedelic pop, garage,…
…this new deluxe edition contains two additional discs inclusive of rare remixes and a complete previously unreleased live show recorded on the Meso-America tour in 1982.
In 1982, the B-52’s teamed up with David Byrne for an album and ended up putting out the Mesopotamia EP instead. Rumors swirled that the band didn’t like working with the Talking Heads frontman, but Kate Pierson told us a few years ago that their manager had been “pushing us, pushing us, to get the next record out” and they “felt rushed.” The deluxe edition arranges the tracklist as originally intended, pairing newly remastered versions of the original six songs with three outtakes: unreleased recordings of “Big Bird” and “Adios Desconocida,” plus…
…Includes rare mono version of third album, ‘Ma Kelly’s Greasy Spoon’, various singles and B-sides, outtakes and alternative versions, plus a version of The Doors’ ‘Roadhouse Blues’.
On August 23, 2024, this much-loved British rock institution played what is likely to be their last ever show. In a career that goes back to 1962, after several name changes, they settled on Status Quo in 1968. Signing to Pye Records for their breakthrough hit single, ‘Pictures of Matchstick Men’, Francis Rossi (guitar and vocals), Rick Parfitt (guitar and vocals), Alan Lancaster (bass and vocals) and John Coghlan (drums and percussion), had a psychedelic sound and image in keeping with the fashion of the time.
Quo eventually found their signature,…
CD 83-track box set tracing the development of indie music from the height of the Britpop explosion in 1995 through its aftershocks to the post-Britpop period in 1999, on the cusp of the new millennium. This box continues the story of indie/Britpop from Cherry Red’s Popscene: From Baggy to Britpop 1989-1994.
…1995 was the year that Britpop exploded into mainstream consciousness due to the infamous Blur vs Oasis chart battle that was even covered on the national News at Ten. Both bands had already scored UK number one albums in 1994 but going head-to-head in the singles chart ensured maximum media coverage. Their success focussed attention on a revolution in music that included acts such as Elastica, Paul Weller,…
The Lovin’ Spoonful were one of the most popular American bands of the 1960s; they were also one of the most confounding. They were a thoroughly modern band capable of transcendent pop moments like “Do You Believe in Magic,” beautiful ballads like “Didn’t Want to Have to Do it,” hot rockers like “Summer in the City,” and songs like “Rain on the Roof” that niftily anticipated country-rock, but they also padded out their albums with old-timey jug band and blues songs that made them seem like fogeys before their time. This split made them a brilliant singles band, while their albums were more hit and miss.
The whole unruly mess is available for view in one sprawling package on Strawberry Records’ complete retrospective What a Day for…
To celebrate 50 years since the formation of Rainbow and the release of the debut album Ritchie Blackmore’s Rainbow, Demon Music present a comprehensive box set covering the years 1975-1976.
As well as including the seminal first two studio album, the box set includes a trilogy of live albums from Rainbow’s debut world tour and documenting the band’s first shows in Europe with shows from Cologne, Dusseldorf and Nurnberg. The final disc of this 9 disc set features a multitude of rare mixes, edits and studio rehearsal performances all newly mastered by Andy Pearce & Matt Wortham.
…Rainbow was initially formed as a Ritchie Blackmore solo project in the early months of 1975, after a Deep Purple tour of the previous…
Freddie & the Dreamers were the clowns of the British Invasion, playing their pop music for laughs while the other groups of the time were dead serious. Lead singer Freddie Garrity began playing in skiffle groups in the late ’50s, switching to rock & roll in the early ’60s.
After the Beatles broke the American market wide open, Freddie & the Dreamers followed in the flood of acts that tried to duplicate the overwhelming success of the Fab Four. The group’s hits were more numerous in the U.K. than in America, where they had only one Top Ten hit, the number one “I’m Telling You Now.” As 1965 turned into 1966, the group stopped charting in the U.S. and the hits began to dwindle in the U.K.; by 1968 the original group disbanded.
