Van Halen The Studio Albums 1978-1984' - new box set

Box of six albums: £23.81

Buy on Amazon

Look, I’m not going to tell you if the music is any good. You’ve had about thirty years to make up your mind about Van Halen. If you are a dedicated fan, you’ll already have these discs. If (like me) you know their singles but are less familiar with the albums, this set may be just the thing to help your rock your way through the bleak, cold days of February and March…

So what do you get? The set comprises Van Halen’s first six albums. Each disc is contained in a card sleeve showing the original album cover, and these are all packed inside a sturdy cardboard box. The downside of reproducing the album covers in CD format is that the credits on the sleeves are printed in such tiny characters that they are almost unreadable – this is especially so on the sleeve of Van Halen II where the tiny text is printed in an almost illegible light pink over dark blue!

The discs all contain the original track listings and there are no extras: no alternative or extended tracks and no additional goodies in the box such as booklets or photos. What you get is just the plain vanilla editions of the six albums, exactly as they were originally released.

The albums are: Van Halen, Van Halen II, Women and Children First, Fair Warning, Diver Down and 1984. These are all from what many fans regard the ‘classic’ period when the band was fronted by Dave Lee Roth. This set ends with Dave Lee Roth’s  final album before he was replaced by Sammy Hagar. There are lots of the band’s most popular songs here – including several songs from the first five albums that were chart hits in America and Canada – such as ‘(Oh) Pretty Woman’, ‘Dancing In The Street’ and ‘You Really Got Me’. However, it wasn’t until the release of the sixth album, ‘1984’, that Van Halen really made a big impression on the UK singles charts. That album contain several international hits ‘Panama’ and ‘Hot For Teacher’. But undoubtedly their biggest and, to this day, their most memorable hit was ‘Jump’. And if you need any reminder of that, here it is…

Duran, Yazoo and Hazell - new collections

CD collections of 80s music seem to be released almost daily these days. So I wasn't overly excityed when I heard about a batcch of double-CD colections of Yazoo, Hazell Deane and Duran Duran. In fact, having now received some review copies, I have to say that these are definitely better than most.

All the major hits are there. The Hazell Dean set has Whatever I Do, Searchin' (I Gotta Find A Man) and Who's Leaving Who? - and the 2nd disk in the setn has various mega-mixes and extended versions. The Yazoo set has Only You, Situation, Don't Go and Nobody's Diary plus a batch of less known songs and some extended mixes. But, in my opinion, the best of the bunch is the Duran Duran set. There are just so many top songs here - Planet Earth, Girls On Film, My Own Way, Hungry Like The Wolf, Careless Memories,Wild Boys, Save A Prayer... they just keep on coming.

Anyway, a nice batch of records for 80s fans. And cheap at about £5 per two-disk set. If you need to replace those scratched old albums, these could be the answer....

Full track listings can be found here...

Duran Duran: The Biggest and the Best http://www.demonmusicgroup.co.uk/Product.aspx?ProductID=6161

Yazoo: The Collection http://www.demonmusicgroup.co.uk/Product.aspx?ProductID=6182

Evergreen: The Very Best Of Hazell Dean http://www.demonmusicgroup.co.uk/Product.aspx?ProductID=6179

Neon 80s Review

Always nice to et a good review so suffice to say it's great to see a positive  review of my book of 80s interviews on the Kajagoogoo-themed Kajafax site.

And, speaking of Kajagoogoo, this is a good excuse to play this...

I Was A Teenage Toyah Fan - book review

I Was A Teenage Toyah Fan  £9.99/$15.46 (paperback) or $3.08/£2.01 (Kindle)
ISBN: 978-1-4478-8721-8
(Book Review)

If you were ever a teenager (and I presume you must have been!), you’ve probably been through this. For you, maybe it was Kim Wilde or Kylie or Boy George or Freddie Mercury. If you still are a teenager, maybe it’s Lady Gaga or Justin Bieber. But for Chris Limb, it was Toyah. It was 1980, Chris was fifteen, his friends were fans of Debbie Harry and Kate Bush but somehow Debbie and Kate just didn’t do it for him – “Not odd looking enough,” he says, “Not punky enough.” And then he discovered a girl called Toyah. At the time, she was not a huge star. Chris first noticed her in an episode of the TV detective drama, Shoestring. And it was infatuation at first sight.

I Was A Teenage Toyah Fan is a very unusual musical memoire. Even though it has a lot to say about Toyah herself, mainly in the early 80s, it is not a rock star ‘biography’. It is, in fact, a reconstruction of a fleeting but crucial period in the author’s life. It is about a teenager growing up in the 80s. Many teenagers both then and now, have a tendency to feel dissatisfied with the day-to-day dullness of their lives. For some of us, a glimpse of the possibilities of a ‘world beyond’ become focussed through a specific person. In the 70s, Bowie and Bolan with their androgynous ‘glam’ certainly gave me a view of a life that I had yet to experience. For Chris, in the 80s, Toyah had a similar effect.

In essence, Chris Limb’s book is a grown up’s attempt to rediscover his teenage self. “This,” he says, in the book’s introduction, “is primarily a story about two individuals who no longer exist. The versions of Toyah and myself from thirty years ago probably bear little resemblance to the people walking around now with their names…”

If you are, of were, a Toyah fan, this book will obviously have a special appeal for you. But you don’t have to be fixated on Toyah to enjoy it. In many respects, Chris Limb’s book is a description of a common experience: the vague yearning  dissatisfaction of a teenager looking for something, just something to take him (or her) beyond the mundane – and finding that 'something' crystalized in a rock star. For 80s enthusiasts, the book has the added appeal of recalling so many of the defining elements of that decade in the UK. There are recollections of the magazines (Number One, Flexipop, Zig Zag), the TV shows (The Tube, The Russell Harty Show, not forgetting Top Of The Pops) and all kinds of other evocative details.

Chris Limb’s obsession with Toyah was not just a passing phase, however. First he wrote to his idol, then he met his idol; in fact he got to know Toyah very well and eventually ran her official fan club, Tellurian. If you want to know how Chris made the transition from fan to friend, read the book!

For more on I Was A Teenage Toyah Fan go to: http://www.toyah.org/

Jackie: The Party Album

The Jackie brand is still amazingly potent long after the girls’ magazine to which it referred ceased publication. As I’ve said before, I was a regular writer for Jackie back in the ‘80s and so I guess I may feel some kind of personal connection with the various Jackie-branded books and CDs that are still being launched in the 2000s...

The latest, released today, is a three CD collection called Jackie The Party Album. This contains a wide-ranging selection of hits, mainly from the ‘70s and ‘80s with occasional forays into the ‘60s, encompassing everything from ABBA to Black Sabbath. I’m not entirely sure I’ve ever been to a party where both those particular artists have been played and nor, to be entirely honest, am I entire sure that Black Sabbath’s Paranoid is the obvious choice of music to pack the party dance-floor. Anyhow, that gives you some idea of the scope of this collection.

The sheer diversity of the songs is both the strength and the weakness of this set of CDs. As you listen through them there will be some tracks that will surely make you think, with plesaure, “Wow! I haven’t heard that one for a long time!” and others that will make you think, “Eeek! I was hoping I’d never hear that one again.” Personally, I have to admit that I’ve made frequent use of the Next Track button to skip over some teeth-gritting songs (I really could have done without David Bowie’s Laughing Gnome).

There are some definite party classics here: Norman Greenbaum’s Spirit In The Sky, Jeff Beck’s Hi Ho Silver Lining, Little Eva’s Locomotion; plus some Glam Greats: T. Rex’s Children Of The Revolution, Wizzard’s See My Baby Jive, Sweet’s Blockbuster; and some nice tacky pop classics such as Middle Of the Road’s Tweedle Dee, Tweedle Dum and Baccara’s immortal Yes Sir, I Can Boogie.

There is, in short, something for everyone; though bear in mind that there is also pretty sure to be something that just about everyone really doesn’t want to hear too!

Jackie Love Songs CD Set

For a magazine that's been dead for well over a decade and a half, Jackie continues to have a surprisingly long afterlife, not least in the form of a brand-name which, for British girls of a certain age, instantly conjures up a warm glow of nostalgia for times when David Cassidy was every girls’ (and a few boys’) ideal sex symbol and the Bay City Rollers’ half-mast trousers were thought to be quite fashionable, actually...

And now here comes yet CD collection of Jackie-branded songs to help us relive those distant days. This 3 CD set is called ‘Jackie - Love Songs’ and it is what one might call an ‘eclectic’ collection, which is another way of saying there really is no discernable connection between these songs and, what’s more, they have nothing whatsoever to do with Jackie Magazine. Well, apart from the fact that most of the artists no doubt appeared in pictures in the pages of Jackie.

You can find the full track listing here: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Jackie-Love-Songs-Various-Artists/dp/B0033PRSS6/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=music&qid=1265485648&sr=1-1

This is a ‘70s themed collection with some great songs from the likes of ABBA, Bryan Ferry and Lindisfarne (though I’m not entirely sure that Lady Eleanor is my idea of a ‘love song’!) and some not so great songs from The Osmonds. Oh, and there are (of course) a couple of songs from the ever-lovely David Cassidy (swoon)...

David Cassidy also featured on the last Jackie CD set which I reviewed a little while back. You can see that review on the old ‘80s Empire Arena’ site:  http://www.80sempire.com/arena/archive/2009-11-08/jackie__the_annual_2010

 Oh, by the way, welcome to the new blog. The 80s Empire Blog has now moved to this new site on Blogger. The old blog is still online (for now, anyway) but from now all the new Blog-type stuff will appear here so, 80s fans, be sure to update your bookmarks!