Finally: The Alabama Box
5 Jan
Another BE-Sharp box of 1950s & 1960s Oddball Labels
Following The Texas Box, The Michigan Box and The Florida Box comes The Alabama Box – another fabulous collection of rare rockabilly, wild instrumentals and rockers, featuring hundreds of Alabama acts from independent labels like REED RECORDS, JUDD, LOYAL, SANDY, TUNE RECORDS and many more. The stunning hardcover book presents the original 7“ labels, information about the artists, producers and record companies, and collector’s guides (including current values) for every song.
The box includes 8 CDs in jewel-cases, jam-packed with 238 tracks, remastered from the best available sources, plus a big 12 x 12“ hardcover book with 136 pages in glorious colour.
If you’re looking for prime greasy, primitive, stompin’, rockin’ goodies – then you’ve got ten hours of the finest ahead of you!
The box is currently available from Bear Family and JPC.
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Greater American Saturday Night: Bobby Bare and Shel Silverstein Celebrated On Bear Family Box — The Second Disc
12 Aug
What do you get when you combine one of country’s most underrated outlaws and one of the 20th century’s most beloved poets? A new box set from Bear Family will answer that question across eight incredible discs. Bobby Bare Sings Shel Silverstein Plus collects more than 100 tunes the unlikely duo collaborated on during Bare’s…
On The Dole: Destination Unknown!
22 Feb
Clientelle came from St. Albans, UK and in 1981 they released the now extremely hard to find »Destination Unknown« album. Considered a NWOBHM masterpiece the album perfectly blends heavy and loud metal with frenetic powerpop and punk. The local paper described them as »hard rockers with a pop edge«, but with the album becoming a cult item, that was it. Destination Unknown, indeed.
That is, until the good people of Sweden’s On The Dole Records got wind of it.
Last year OTD released three albums – a reissue of the legendary (some say, notorious) Hand Of Doom album and two volumes of »Jobcentre Rejects«: Nuggets-style compilations of rare and mostly obscure singles from UK bands associated with the New Wave Of British Heavy Metal scene. And each of these releases was a thing of beauty (even if we say so ourselves). Not only is the music carefully remastered to sound as powerful as originally intended, there’s informative sleeve notes with rare pictures, extras like posters, badges, T-shirts, colored vinyl editions, and OTD’s eye for detail ensures that the gatefolds come in heavy cardboard – they probably make whoosh when you open them (like we used to say in the 70s).
So it was exciting news when we were asked to design a new sleeve for a proper vinyl reissue of the Clientelle album. The first idea was to clean up and »remaster« all elements of the original cover and rebuild a new one – but this still looked like a DIY job and seemed too austere.
Next we re-arranged some of these elements and added new layers. This, unfortunately, turned out looking a bit like a car crash in Alice’s Wonderland and yer usual mid-70s prog sleeve.
Then OTD suggested trying to come up with something that »looked like it should have looked in 1981« and which would actually represent the music (who’d have thought?). And finally everything clicked and fell into place:
Like the other On The Dole releases, Clientelle’s »Destination Unknown« (OTD 006) comes in vinyl and CD configurations, and is available at your local record emporium or via Bandcamp
Strangely Strange But Now Available
27 Feb
Finally finished, printed and ready for shipping – here’s the definitive book about Irish psychedelic prog* folkies Dr Strangely Strange.
Working with author Adrian Whittaker on this took us from Sixties Dublin to a Danish tour in the early Seventies, with a brief detour to West-Berlin.
Illustrated throughout with fascinating pictures, memorabilia and the band’s artworks, this book (to quote the band’s Tim Goulding) “creates the conviction that we were a band of some cultural significance, which runs contrary to my assessment that we were borderline frauds having a great time…”
Find out more here!
*But are they “prog”? With Roger Dean sleeve design, tracks on the “Vertigo Annual 1970” and “Nice Enough To Eat” compilations, 8-minute songs, and Gary Moore guitar solos they surely tick all the boxes.
