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Airplane takes flight again
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Music buff's choice
| Jefferson Airplane’s ‘Bless Its Pointed Little Head’ and ‘Volunteers’...
were released in the same year as the Woodstock festival and capture the period when Sixties optimism and revolutionary fervour started to give way to Seventies disillusion and retrenchment.
By the mid-Seventies the Airplane had become the Starship and though ‘Spitfire’, from 1976, has its moments, hippie idealism had largely been replaced by corporate cynicism. All three albums are released through BMG, the two Airplane albums featuring bonus tracks. |
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Borrowed and blue
The Blues Brothers began as a sketch on the cult American show ‘Saturday Night Live’, but rapidly took on a life of its own, spawning two movies - the first a massive hit, the second a complete turkey - concert tours and hit records. Though the original film was part homage, part pastiche (and part utter mayhem), the music was nearly always terrific, which makes ‘The Definitive Blues Brothers Collection’ (WSM) an excellent buy, featuring, as it does, such R&B giants as Steve Cropper and Donald ‘Duck’ Dunn getting their teeth into a stack of soul standards. Great stuff. |
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| The Platinum Collection, Cliff Richard (EMI)
Sir Clifford releases greatest hits albums with casual abandon these days, and who can blame him? He has, after all, had rather a lot of them - there are more than 70 on this triple CD set alone, all of them having featured in at least the top 15. Why the compilers limited themselves to this rather arbitrary cut-off point only they will know - but at least it means such often-ignored early Seventies nuggets as ‘Sing a Song of Freedom’ and ‘Goodbye Sam, Hello Samantha’ make an appearance. For Cliff completists the collection also includes recent hits ‘Somethin’ is Goin’ On’ and ‘What Car’. |
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Joe goes back to his roots
Joe Cocker is another Sixties survivor who reinvented himself for later generations. His new album, ‘Heart and Soul’ finds Joe going back to his roots with cover versions of, amongst others, Nina Simone’s ‘I Put A Spell On You’ and Aretha Franklin’s ‘Chain Of Fools’. Songs by James Taylor, John Lennon and Paul McCartney are also given a typically idiosyncratic spin, making this Joe’s most enjoyable album in a decade. |
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| The Essential Barbra Streisand
From her legendary tantrums to dropping an ‘a’ from her Christian name, the moniker ‘pop diva’ could have been invented for Barbra Streisand. Her career has been a remarkable, if uneven one, ranging from the torch songs of her early albums through Seventies disco, Eighties pop, and on to sometimes desperate collaborations with Bryan Adams, Celine Dion and Donna Summer. All, and more, are represented on ‘The Essential Barbra Streisand’ (Columbia), but the real gems are two rarely heard tracks from her 1963 debut album. |
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Lindisfarne
Roll On Ruby/Live
Lindisfarne (EMI)
It’s Jack The Lad/The Old Straight Track/Rough Diamonds
Lindisfarne (EMI)
Pipedream
Alan Hull (EMI)
After the success of ‘Fog On The Tyne’, Lindisfarne lost their way in the mid-Seventies and split in a flurry of ill-feeling, much of it directed at principal songwriter Alan Hull. The latter’s faction continued under the Lindisfarne brand name, while the other half put out a series under the moniker Jack The Lad. Two Lindisfarne albums from this period, the pre-split ‘Live’ and underrated ‘Roll On Ruby’, have been re-released by EMI, along with three Jack The Lad albums - ‘It’s Jack The Lad’, ‘The Old Straight Track’ and ‘Rough Diamonds’. Also out is Alan Hull’s debut solo album, ‘Pipedream’, the only one to have been on CD before. ‘Pipedream’ is the pick, containing some of Hull’s finest work, though ‘When The War Is Over’ from ‘Roll On Ruby’, is also a gem. ‘Live’ catches Lindisfarne in concert in 1971, doubled in length by the discovery of the original tapes, while all the Jack The Lad albums, though uneven, have their moments. Much care has been lavished on all these reissues, with copious bonus tracks. |
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| More than just bare feet...
To her eternal chagrin, Sandie Shaw is probably best remembered as the girl who won the Eurovision Song Contest and had a penchant for singing barefoot. A new box set, ‘Nothing Comes Easy’, and reissues of the albums ‘Reviewing The Situation’ and ‘Hello Angel’, all on EMI, suggest there was more to Sandie than fatuous Euro-pop and a headline-grabbing gimmick. ‘Nothing Comes Easy’ features assorted singles, B-sides and rarities spread over four discs, while ‘Reviewing The Situation’, from 1969, and ‘Hello Angel’, her Eighties ‘comeback’ album, find Sandie casting off the Sixties dolly bird iamge. ‘Reviewing The Situation’ features cover versions of songs by Bob Dylan, Led Zeppelin and the Stones, while ‘Hello Angel’ included songs by The Smiths, The Waterboys and The Jesus and Mary Chain. Both are, in their different ways, period pieces, and were overdue for re-release, especially in this expanded, annotated form. |
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‘Simon and Garfunkel Live in New York City’
- the long overdue release of a pristine 1967 concert, featuring just two angelic voices, a guitar, and some of the greatest songs of the Sixties. Pure magic. |
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| Platinum Frank and the Animals
Released towards the end of 2004, EMI’s definitive three-CD set, ‘Frank Sinatra: The Platinum Collection’, gathered up the pick of Old Blue Eyes’ Fifties and early Sixties output, and a new batch of Sony mid-price ‘2 on 1s’ from Jim Reeves, Mario Lanza and Harry Belafonte, with Henry Mancini’s classic ‘Our Man In Hollywood/Dear Heart’, being the pick of the crop. A pair of albums from the ill-fated Animals early Eighties reunion were also released from Sanctuary: ‘Ark’ was a better-than-could-have-been-expected studio album from the original line-up, while ‘Greatest Hits Live’ updated several of the band’s early recordings to some effect. |
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Tift Merritt
Tift Merritt is one of the most exciting new voices in country music and her album ‘Tambourine’ finds the North Carolina singer-songwriter in blistering form, tracks like ‘Stray Paper’ and ‘Wait It Out’ being more akin to Tom Petty or the Jayhawks than standard alt-country fare. |
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