Although confined to a wheelchair and less than a year from his death, Charles Mingus supervised the recording sessions that resulted in this LP and its companion Me Myself An Eye. The music on this set utilizes a 27-piece band (including 11 saxophones and four guitars) on the 31-minute "Something Like a Bird" and a smaller 21-piece orchestra (only nine saxes and three guitars) for "Farewell Farwell." It seems that everyone wanted to play with (or at least for) Mingus during his last few years and such musicians as Lee Konitz, Charles McPherson, George Coleman, Mike Brecker, Ricky Ford, Pepper Adams, Randy Brecker, Jack Walrath, Slide Hampton, Jimmy Knepper, Larry Coryell and bassists Eddie Gomez and George Mraz help out on this spirited if overcrowded music.

OMD's first full album won as much attention for its brilliant die-cut cover - another example of Peter Saville's cutting-edge way around design - as for its music, and its music is wonderful. For all that, this is a young band, working for just about the last time with original percussionist Winston; there's both a variety and ambition present that never overreaches itself. The influences are perfectly clear throughout, but McCluskey and Humphreys would have been the last people to deny how Kraftwerk, Sparks, and other avatars of post-guitar pop touched them. What's undeniably thrilling, though, is how quickly the two synthesized their own style. Consider "Almost," with its dramatic keyboard opening suddenly shifting into a collage of wheezing sound beats and McCluskey's precise bass and heartfelt, lovelorn singing and lyrics…

Wild Horses is the debut studio album by the British rock band, Wild Horses, co-produced with Trevor Rabin at Konk Studios in London, and released on 14 April 1980 on EMI Records. It peaked at No. 38, and spent four weeks in the UK Albums Chart. It was subsequently issued on CD in Japan in 1993 on Toshiba-EMI, and by the now defunct UK labels Zoom Club in 1999 and Krescendo Records in 2009, respectively, both with the title The First Album. The most recent re-issue came in February 2013, courtesy of UK-based Rock Candy Records, and includes a host of unreleased studios demos as bonus tracks not found on previous re-issues.

Anyone's Daughter was a late-'70s, early-'80s symphonic prog rock band heavily influenced by Genesis as well as by German bands such as Elroy and Grobschnitt. After breaking up in the mid-'80s, the group reformed in 2000. Consisting of Uwe Karpa (guitars), Matthias Ulmer (keyboards, vocals), Harald Bareth (bass, lead vocals), and Kono Konopik (drums), Anyone's Daughter was formed in 1978. Their first record, Adonis (1979), featured English vocals, epic tracks with reflective and aggressive moments, and a prominent keyboard sound with heavy use of Moogs in particular. Anyone's Daughter (1980) found the band moving towards shorter material, but 1981's Piktors Verwandlungen, on which the band first sang in German, was their most experimental work…

Living in a Fantasy is the last album to yield hits for Leo Sayer in America, closing out the terrific '70s run as the '80s began. A-ha/Bow Wow Wow/Squeeze producer Alan Tarney chooses to keep the production slick and sparse, the large mix of musicians who helped craft albums like Thunder In My Heart, Endless Flight, Here, World Radio, and others vanishes as the singer goes back to the pared-down format of his Just a Boy period. The big difference is that Sayer had gone beyond the singer/songwriter personality of those early recordings to having marquee value, as well as his own TV show.

Manfred Mann's 1980 album is a strange mix of topical songwriting, progressive rock, and power pop – from its opening seconds, the Earth Band is pressing serious messages and social commentary on their listenership amid swirling prog rock keyboards and catchy guitar hooks and choruses. The whole package is challenging in ways that should have put them on the cutting edge of rock music at the outset of that decade, but one suspects that Mann and company were too musically adept and sophisticated for their own good – a little dumbing down and maybe a little less musicianship on display would have made them more accessible to the coming MTV generation.

Founded in Toronto, Canada in 1976 - Disbanded in 1989 - Reformed in 1994-1996, 2006 and again since 2011.
This trio came from Toronto around the end of the 70's but got slightly over-shadowed by the profusion of bands exploding all over the album charts, with Rush, Triumph, Saga, Max Webster etc.. It is no wonder some could not get their share of sunlight, among which Goddo, Moxy, Zon, Santers and most certainly FM. Their first LP full of a weird sort of hard rock with strange studio tampering alerted most potential fans that this was a very particular band with their lead violinist Nash The Slash playing as a mummy and Martin Deller at the drum seat as well as Cameron Hawkins on bass…

Unhappy with the slicker approach of Setting Sons, the Jam got back to basics, using the direct, economic playing of All Mod Cons and "Going Underground," the simply brilliant single which preceded Sound Affects by a few months. Thematically, though, Paul Weller explored a more indirect path, leaving behind (for the most part) the story-song narratives in favor of more abstract dealings in spirituality and perception - the approach stemming from his recent readings of Blake and Shelley (who was quoted on the sleeve), but more specifically Geoffrey Ash, whose Camelot and the Vision of Albion made a strong impression. Musically, Weller drew upon Revolver-era Beatles as a primary source (the bassline on "Start," which comes directly from "Taxman," being the most obvious occurrence), incorporating the occasional odd sound and echoed vocal, which implied psychedelia without succumbing to its excesses…

Although glam had long slipped off the radar by 1981, that year found Suzi Quatro releasing one of her finest albums. With Nicky Chinn and Mike Chapman (the producers behind her biggest hits) at the controls, Quatro and her band craft a series of songs that blend the hard rock power that fueled her glam rock era hits with a new soundscape that tarts up the songs with some ear attracting new wave hooks. The tone is set by the title track, which starts the album with a blast thanks to its effective combination chugging guitar riffs, a stomping beat, and a shout-along chorus that praises the song's tough female heroine.

Since Neil Peart joined the band in time for 1975's Fly by Night, Rush had been experimenting and growing musically with each successive release. By 1980's Permanent Waves, the modern sounds of new wave (the Police, Peter Gabriel, etc.) began to creep into Rush's sound, but the trio still kept their hard rock roots intact. The new approach paid off – two of their most popular songs, the "make a difference" anthem "Freewill," and a tribute to the Toronto radio station CFNY, "The Spirit of Radio" (the latter a U.K. Top 15 hit), are spectacular highlights. Also included were two "epics," the stormy "Jacob's Ladder" and the album-closing "Natural Science," which contains a middle section that contains elements of reggae.

The former Deep Purple bassist Nick Simper's two long deleted Fandango albums are reissued here for the very first time. Taped in 1979 and 1980, both are no highly sought after albums. Future Times epecially so as it only received limited release first time around. The CD has been compiled with Nick Simper's help, and the fold out inlay details the history of the band in full. One track from each LP is omitted for timing reason. These will appear on a future RPM CD of Simper rarities from the '60s to the '80s.