After the explosion of punk rock in the U.K., the underground split off in many directions including synth pop, dance punk, post-punk, new romantic, and many others. Most groups, no matter the style they played, were looking to experiment or make a statement, often political, and generally treated the pop charts like a curse to be avoided. Around the time that the 1970s turned to the ’80s, there were a number of groups and journalists who decided the time was ripe to remake pop music, not ignore it, and to storm the charts, not disdain them. Chief among the writers was Paul Morley in the NME and his thoughts helped direct many bands to set aside the gray abrasiveness of their music in favor of something shiny and technicolor that wasn’t built for student bedsits, but for…
Category: box-set
On April 2, 1994, Bruce Springsteen scored his biggest ever UK singles chart hit, when ‘Streets of Philadelphia’ climbed to Number 2. In all, it spent five weeks in the Top 5 and a further two in the Top 10. Written specifically for Jonathan Demme’s landmark Aids movie Philadelphia, this shattering monologue from a dying man also went Top 10 in the US Billboard Hot 100, and proceeded to win four Grammy awards – including Song of the Year. It had already won the 1994 Academy Award for Best Original Song.
A case can be made for ‘Streets of Philadelphia’ as the song that saved Bruce Springsteen’s career. It certainly returned to him a substantial measure of the critical and commercial status he’d lost with the 1989 break-up of the E Street Band…
…A 3CD box set including Rock Workshop’s self-titled 1970 debut album and 1971 follow up ‘The Very Last Time’ remastered from the master tapes with bonus tracks and including single versions, previously unreleased track, demos and alternate versions.
Rock Workshop’s debut album features legendary singer Alex Harvey as one’s of the band’s two lead vocalists alongside Alan Greed.
Harvey sings lead on ‘Wade in the Water’ and ‘Hole in Her Stocking’ and also on alternate takes of album tracks ‘You to Lose’ and ‘Ice Cold’, single B side ‘Born in the City’ and originally unreleased track ‘Let My Bluebird Sing’.
This box includes several previously unreleased tracks including the instrumentals…
…collects material related to the group’s short-lived American Composers Series project, including remastered and expanded editions of the albums ‘George & James’ and ‘Stars & Hank Forever!’, with additional contemporary studio and live material, and thirteen previously unreleased tracks, including a suite of Sun Ra covers, interpretations of songs by Buddy Holly and Lou Christie, and a never-before-heard Residents original, “Burning with Desire”.
Produced with The Cryptic Corporation, and digging deep into the band’s archive, this set dives into the classic mid-1980s ‘American Composers Series’, featuring material originally recorded by James Brown, George Gershwin, Hank Williams, John Philip Sousa and…
After compiling numerous anthologies charting the evolution of synth pop and post-punk, Cherry Red explores the harder side of alternative dance music with the three-disc Control I’m Here: Adventures on the Industrial Dance Floor 1983-1990. Like a lot of the label’s genre deep-dives, the set touches on several different scenes and movements within a larger whole, aiming to demonstrate the range of styles produced within the era.
Lots of big names and influential figures are present, including groups synonymous with EBM such as Nitzer Ebb and Front 242, but the focus is often on deep cuts or extended 12″ mixes rather than hits. Case in point: the compilers went with Twitch-era Ministry, rather than the group’s early synth pop incarnation or the heavy,…
Things have never been easy for Metallica’s 1996 album Load, a multiplatinum record nobody ever admits to liking, especially the band’s most avid fans. In early 1995, Metallica had a “good problem”: how to follow up The Black Album, the 1991 smash that turned them from metal heroes into global rock stars. It wasn’t an easy question. Featuring their megahit “Enter Sandman,” The Black Album was Nineties metal’s Dark Side of the Moon, the moment when an already stadium-filling band became a household name. Then, in the middle of the three-year tour to support the incredibly popular record, grunge became the lingua franca of mainstream rock, forcing Metallica to reconsider their place in music.
The answer? Lean into the issue by cutting off…
Over the decades, the image of Kompakt as a pirate ship has taken root in our minds, braving the dangers of the seven seas of the music market. Sometimes it glides with a tailwind through calm waters, sometimes it has to survive violent storms. When we set sail in 1993, we never would have dreamt that our journey would still be going on after more than three decades and with 500 releases to date.
In our fast-paced business, the 500 mark is rarely reached, so we want to celebrate it with a lavish 5LP box set. In a democratic process, we have selected 50 pearls from the thousands of tracks released over the last 33 1/3 years and pressed them onto 5 brightly coloured vinyls. Alongside many Kompakt evergreens, there are also some real…
45 classic and rare studio recordings taken from the original master tapes and session reels. Featuring eight previously unissued masters plus the legendary and previously unreleased 1973 Royal Albert hall concert.
Originally planned for release in 2012, this set, authorised by Dame Shirley Bassey herself, is long awaited by her fans as it features some of the most sought-after material from Dame Shirley’s EMI and United Artists catalogue, alongside remastered versions of some of her greatest recordings.
The BBC broadcast excerpts from the 1973 Royal Albert Hall concert on New Year’s Day 1974. This is widely considered as one of Dame Shirley’s best concert recordings. An accompanying album release was planned but left unfinished – until now.
A deluxe edition of Status Quo’s first concert album will pair the original album – never a favorite of the band’s leader – with the full, newly-remixed shows that it was assembled from.
1977’s Live! found the Quo’s “Frantic Four” – vocalists/guitarists Francis Rossi and Rick Parfitt, bassist Alan Lancaster and drummer John Coghlan (plus longtime touring keyboardist (and future full-time member) Andy Bown and tour manager Bob Young on harmonica) – wowing crowds over three nights at the Apollo in Glasgow, Scotland at the end of October 1976. The boogie rockers, touring in support of ninth album (and third U.K. chart-topper) Blue for You (1976), treated fans to renditions of some of their recent hits, including “Rain,” “Caroline” and “Roll Over Lay Down”…
The Grateful Dead celebrates its diamond 60th anniversary this year with Enjoying the Ride, a sweeping 60-CD collection that maps an epic cross-country road trip along the “Heady Highway” with stops at storied venues where the music, the moment, and the magic of the Grateful Dead reliably converged.
Spanning 25 years of legendary live performances, this expansive collection spotlights defining shows from 1969 to 1994 at 20 venues that consistently inspired the band to new heights — Winterland, Frost Amphitheatre, Madison Square Garden, and Hampton Coliseum, among them. Whether playing the intimate confines of Fillmore West or beneath the open skies at Red Rocks, the Grateful Dead never played the same…
Nonesuch Records releases Steve Reich Collected Works, a twenty-seven-disc box set featuring music recorded during composer Steve Reich’s forty years on the label, on March 14, 2025, available to pre-order here.
The collection represents six decades of Reich’s compositions, ranging from It’s Gonna Rain (1965) to first recordings of his two latest works: Jacob’s Ladder (2023) and Traveler’s Prayer (2020). Two extensive booklets contain new essays by longtime Nonesuch President Robert Hurwitz, conductor Michael Tilson Thomas, Steve Reich and Musicians percussionist Russell Hartenberger, producer Judith Sherman, and composer Nico Muhly, as well as a comprehensive listener’s guide by pianist and composer Timo Andres.
Following his dismissal from The Velvet Underground in the Autumn of 1968, Cale acted as a producer and arranger on albums by The Stooges and Nico before venturing out as a solo artist with his debut album ‘Vintage Violence’ in 1970. Following the release of a collaborative album with Terry Riley he signed with Reprise Records and recorded two albums for the label.
In 1974 John Cale relocated to London and signed with Island Records, for whom he was to release three inventive and influential albums within a period of just over a year. ‘Fear’, released in September 1974, was a fine work and featured contributions from Brian Eno and Phil Manzanera (also credited as executive producers) and Richard Thompson. ‘Slow Dazzle’…
Somewhere in the ‘60s, the folk movement and the psychedelic rock scene intersected and a new sound emerged combining mellow acoustic sounds with further-out ideas that broke from folk traditions. This psychedelic folk-rock sound was wide-ranging, from the more straightforward sounds of bands like Fairport Convention and early Jethro Tull to the acid-tripping bliss of communal groups like the Incredible String Band.
The Magic Forest is the second entry in a series of compilations that began with 2022’s Deep in the Woods, again collecting artifacts of enchanted, pastoral psychedelic folk from between 1968 and 1975. Cherry Red’s anthologies generally intersperse obscure acts among the better known artists of the genre or topic they’re focused on,…
Electric Junk: Deutsche Rock, Psych and Kosmische 1970-1978 is Cherry Red’s deep dive into the German underground, mainly focusing on rock music but also delving into spacy, abstract electronic sounds. The liner notes make a point to immediately disavow the K word, though it makes the set’s title slightly misleading, as Deutschrock is actually a much more mainstream, blue-collar form of German rock music than the experimental styles lumped together as Krautrock.
The compilers intentionally avoided Can and Kraftwerk, instead shining light on a lot of more obscure acts, yet also making the case that Faust should be regarded as a pop band. The release doesn’t shy away from including lengthy jams, with a righteous Guru Guru cut starting things…