I became a Queen fan the winter before my 14th birthday; a friend let me borrow his well-worn Greatest Hits cassette, and by the time I got to song #2 — “Bohemian Rhapsody” — my life had been changed. Obsessive music freak that I was, even at age 13, I promptly set about obtaining all the Queen material I could find — a task made slightly easier by the recent “20 Years of Queen” reissues by their new American record label, Hollywood Records. The pity, though, was that it was February of 1991, and within 9 months, Freddie Mercury would be dead. The band I suddenly wanted to follow forever was silenced.
Since Mercury’s death, “new” Queen releases have been a mixed bag: on the positive side, Queen fans have been presented with the band’s “final” album (Made in Heaven), two relatively strong live albums from the ’80s, a couple of accompanying live DVDs, and the Freddie Mercury Solo Collection. On the negative side, fans (American ones in particular) have been bombarded with seven — seven! — greatest hits compilations (the eighth will be released later this month) and have had to endure the relatively depressing “Queen + Paul Rodgers” incarnation, including mediocre studio and live albums that nobody asked for. Queen fans still wait patiently for archival releases, including a long-anticipated, endlessly-postponed box set of rarities.
The one piece of excellent news for Queen fans arrives in the form of a new coffee table book, Queen: The Ultimate Illustrated History of the Crown Kings of Rock. I can say without exaggeration that it’s the most exciting Queen release of the past 15 years.
Lovingly written and compiled by journalist Phil Sutcliffe, Queen: The Ultimate… is 287 pages’ worth of illustrated beauty, featuring multitudes of photos of the band throughout their career — many of them previously unpublished — and scores of memorabilia: concert programs, posters, domestic and foreign 45 singles, LPs, backstage passes, ticket stubs…you name it, it’s here, and there are over 500 photos in all. (more…)
If Howard Jones wasn’t the definitive poster boy for synthpop during the 1980s, he was certainly one of the leaders of the pack, spending many a week in the charts during the course of the decade. We won’t waste our time by listing off every single hit single the man had, but…oh, sorry, perhaps some readers do need a brief refresher course. For those of us who may not have lived through the decade in which Mr. Jones saw his greatest success, we speak of the man responsible for such memorable ditties as “
Puberty is bad. Very bad. If you didn’t know that then you haven’t been following Menudo at all. Menudo is a rotating cast of children that got fired when they reached puberty to keep the group young looking. It must have been great for the gaggle of kids that were in this band at one point or another to sing for a while and then have your dreams shattered when you got a little hair on the family jewels. They’ve had like 40 records or so – which I guess isn’t so hard when you’re simply a corporation. “Hold Me” was their only US hit and one of the voices on here is courtesy of the most famous of all members of Menudo, Mr. Ricky Martin.
In 1984, famed disco producer Giorgio Moroder got it into his head that Fritz Lang’s silent 1927 masterpiece Metropolis needed to be restored with colored tint, a new edit, and heck, a new soundtrack filled with the hottest pop and rock artists of the day. And who else to produce that soundtrack than, say, Giorgio Moroder?