Nearing their 80th birthday, most artists slow down, most – but not former KALEIDOSCOPE member Peter Daltrey, whose recent run of records has never been less than expressive, 2023’s "The Leopard And The Lamb" and "The Rhymer In The Long-Tongued Room" from 2024 demonstrating an ever-increasing scope of the veteran’s reveries and work rate. And still, it’s surprising that November 28th will see the English musician’s next venture.
It’s good to be an Alice Cooper fan in 2025, as it should be for a period when the singer celebrates five decades since the start of his solo career. The veteran’s old band, whose name Vincent Furnier had appropriated, released a new album recently; he’s on a glorious tour at the moment; and now, there’s an archival release scheduled to hit the stores, on CD and vinyl, on November 29th, fifty years to the day after the “Welcome to My Nightmare” film premiered in cinemas.
Considered by many to be THE MONKEES‘ masterpiece, in terms of album conceptuality as opposed to single-oriented thinking, 1967’s “Pisces, Aquarius, Capricorn & Jones Ltd.” found the American foursome finally inhabiting their creative space, something the band started on the same year’s “Headquarters” the sessions for which were barely finished when another bout of work began. This work lasted the whopping ten months, and though the quartet’s fourth longplay featured a mere 13 numbers, the psychedelic sounds they harnessed justified such a long period of the songs’ gestation; and now the scope of what Micky Dolenz, Davy Jones, Michael Nesmith and Peter Tork were trying to achieve will get exposed in the record’s super deluxe edition.
The great Chris Dreja died yesterday at the age of 79. Yes, he was a great musician, although a lot of people would dismiss such a definition, attributing the English performer’s claim to fame to his early stint with THE YARDBIRDS, a trend-setting ensemble Dreja helped cofound. Yet while Chris didn’t seem to demonstrate such strong personality as singer Keith Relf or the band’s main songwriters, bassist Paul Samwell-Smith and drummer Jim McCarty, it was his rhythm guitar that cemented their performances and anchored the legendary rave-ups on studio classics like the “Roger The Engineer” album and on stage.
Mid- to late ’80s didn’t seem to be the best period in the life of SPIRIT. 1984’s “The Thirteenth Dream” saw the reunited ensemble cut afresh a batch of their classics with a few new numbers thrown in for good measure, and then, barren in creative terms, the band disintegrated, with Randy California focusing on a couple of solo albums. It wasn’t before 1989 that they returned with “Rapture In The Chambers” – only the guitarist’s original plan included the appearance of a different opus: “Sea Dream” which he’d been working on for about half a decade. This conceptual undertaking, laid down with the loyal Ed Cassidy and bassist Scott Monahan and built around the titular suite, saw the light of day in 2002, five years after California passed away, and found Randy’s fans relish what would become the collective’s final studio release – unavailable for a long time now but bound to get reissued soon.
