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• Lists all items that are tagged with the given tag, such as news items, photos, blog items, photo albums, etc.
• Found 33 item(s) tagged with '80s'

• Mötley Crüe - Greatest Hits Friday 16 December 2011

  Omdat dertig jaar geleden het debuutalbum van Mötley Crüe verscheen, brengt de band een sloot oud materiaal opnieuw uit, in exclusieve Europese uitgaves. Behalve de eerste vijf albums, verschijnt ook een nieuw Greatest Hits-album.

• Wham! - The Final Wednesday 30 November 2011

  The Final is effectively the story of 80s pop, and Wham!’s evergreen epitaph.

  The story of Wham! is the story of 80s life – fame, making pots of cash and having amazing hair, a willingness to go BIG and wave two fingers at your non-fun contemporaries while you eat the globe in the time it took them to make their own albums. Originally released 25 years ago, The Final is the duo’s definitive album – possibly even their greatest album ever made (even if it is a compilation). To some people, this is their The Queen Is Dead, their Nevermind, their Tago Mago – an album that distils a key era of their life into a glorious whole.

• The Jesus and Mary Chain - Darklands Thursday 17 November 2011

  A second LP that successfully sidesteps the shadow of its influential predecessor.

  When you’ve opened your musical career with a record as caustic, reactionary and as brutal as Psychocandy, just where the hell do you go next? Jim and William Reid, the brothers whose relationship had given The Jesus and Mary Chain’s debut (and accompanying gigs) much of its bittersweet volatility, chose to surprise everyone, including probably themselves, with Darklands.

• The Smiths - Complete Sunday 02 October 2011

  Muziek / CD-recensies

• Frankie Goes to Hollywood - Liverpool Wednesday 07 September 2011

  The second album from Liverpool’s second most famous sons.

  Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s 1986 follow-up to their Welcome to the Pleasuredome debut was always going to seem like a let-down, so comprehensively did that debut double-album, and its attendant three chart-topping singles (and number two-peaking title-track), dominate 1984-85. If anything, it represented a volte-face after the OTT magnificence of that first foray, as much as a climb-down as ABC’s Beauty Stab and Simple Minds’ Sparkle in the Rain, those other early-80s albums where the bands in question retreated from studio opulence towards a more ‘authentic’ approach that proved they could reproduce the music live; that they were Proper Rock Bands. 

• Prince - Parade Friday 05 August 2011

  Not quite a classic Prince album, but Kiss is a minimalist masterpiece

  Whereas 1984’s Purple Rain had seen Prince merge the on-screen and on-record perfectly, remaining a classic to this day, Parade can’t quite claim to be as essential. Again a soundtrack to one of the Purple One’s excursions into cinema, it supports the movie Under the Cherry Moon – a flop which cleaned up at 1987’s Golden Raspberry Awards. The album, though, is significantly better than the messy flick, which featured Kristin Scott Thomas in one of her most forgettable roles.

• Chaka Khan - What Cha’ Gonna Do for Me? Tuesday 26 July 2011

  Enough of the same, plenty of the different on Khan’s third solo LP.

  By 1981, Chaka Khan was close approaching soul/jazz royalty status in the US. After the best part of a decade spent recording she could, either solo or with her group Rufus, guarantee gold album status with every release. Yet in the UK she remained a one-off delicacy, known for her I’m Every Woman hit.

• Luther Vandross - The Night I Fell in Love Tuesday 19 July 2011

  Dreamy reveries, performed by Vandross at the absolute top of his game.

  Although its successor, Give Me the Reason – Luther Vandross’ fifth solo album – was the one that truly broke him commercially in the UK, The Night I Fell in Love is arguably the point where everything aligned for this remarkable singer.

• Miles Davis - Tutu Tuesday 24 May 2011

  A work of engrossingly fraught atmospheres, and proof that Davis was still relevant.

  Jazz’s most famous son is given godly status for his work in the 50s – as in Kind of Blue – and the 70s – as in Bitches Brew. The 80s remains a dubious period of his discography. Tutu casts doubt on that received wisdom. Although it is still dismissed by many as ‘lightweight’ or, worse still, ‘pop-fusion’, the album, whose striking monochrome sleeve stylized the trumpeter’s austere, sculptural, late-years beauty, had something that captured the imagination of many outside of the world of jazz.

• Scritti Politti - Absolute Tuesday 05 April 2011

  The hits, and newies prove there’s life in the impossibly youthful old dog yet.

  As Green Gartside enjoys another lengthy hiatus between albums, this first career-spanning retrospective in Scritti Politti’s 34-year stint plugs a gap, picking tracks from those sparse decades and throwing in a couple of new ones to sweeten the deal. And Scritti were always about sugaring the pill; candy-cute vocals and light-as-air pop-funk arrangements did a great job of smuggling big ideas and smart wordplay into the charts, at least in the mid-80s. But Gartside could never stick around long enough to keep any momentum going.

• Lionel Richie - Can’t Slow Down Tuesday 01 March 2011

  A masterclass in polished soul balladry.

  By 1983, Lionel Richie had become Motown’s biggest star almost by default. With Stevie Wonder always a law unto himself when it came to releasing albums and Diana Ross, Marvin Gaye and Michael Jackson all departing the imprint, a significant release was needed in the label’s much-lauded 25th year.

• George Michael - Faith Thursday 27 January 2011

  Strip away the nonsense surrounding its maker since, and Faith is an enduring pop classic.

  Even now, by today’s accelerated standards, that in a five-year span George Michael went from singing about having fun on the dole, simultaneously launching a solo career while clocking up a string of global chart-toppers with his mate Andrew, to multi-platinum success in America, is still rather mind-blowing.

• The Fall - This Nation's Saving Grace Monday 10 January 2011

  Their ninth album, remastered, still sounds dense, punchy, lean and surly.

  Anyone caught fondling the pillar-box format of this deluxe triple-CD reissue who was also there at the dawn of punk will raise a smile. 1977's halcyon digest of grubby 7" singles, Xeroxed fanzines and posters, scuzzy venues with scuzzier sound systems; The Fall were part of the thorny furniture of those times. Admittedly, This Nation's Saving Grace – the band's ninth – dates from 1985, when punk survivors such as The Fall could no longer be labelled "shambling" (the clubs were still scuzzy though), but still. I bet Mark E. Smith never envisaged being packaged like a "venerated musical institution," as the beautiful 40 page booklet puts it, in sturdy A-grade cardboard.

• The Smiths - Rank Friday 31 December 2010

  A newfound machismo makes Rank a fascinating, thrilling document.

  It’s highly unlikely that Rank is anyone’s favourite Smiths record. Neither is it eulogised as one of rock’n’roll’s live greats. For starters, it resembled a wake more than a triumph. Released as a contractual obligation a year after the band had split, the October 1986 show at Kilburn’s National Ballroom showcased the nascent and frankly (Mr. Shankly) unrefined five-piece Smiths, with Andy Rourke’s temporary replacement, bassist Craig Ganlon, shunted over to rhythm guitar. In other words, it wasn’t even The Smiths at their most adored.

• Talking Heads - Stop Making Sense Friday 31 December 2010

  The Heads’ coming of age still makes near perfect sense.

  It was a show about enlargement. Whether in David Byrne’s now iconic ‘big suit’ – an outfit better suited to a power-dressing Joan Collins that set the bar for the 80s shoulder-pad obsession at ridiculous heights – or in the way the band builds from a solo Byrne on an empty stage with a boombox and an acoustic guitar for Psycho Killer to a stage full of horn sections, backing singers and ex-Funkadelic players making Take Me to the River a blitz of sound and colour. Or, indeed, in the way the visual and artistic pretensions of this 1984 concert film and its soundtrack (the first rock movie made using entirely digital audio techniques) catapulted post-punk NYC oddballs Talking Heads from the art-funk underground into the mainstream ubiquity enjoyed by Road to Nowhere and Little Creatures the following year.

• Michael Jackson - Michael Friday 10 December 2010

  Op openingsnummer Hold My Hand, van zijn eerste postuum uitgebrachte album, zingt Michael Jackson; “This life don’t last forever, so tell me what I’m waiting for?” Jackson werd niet beloond voor zijn geduld en zijn fans nu evenmin.

• Michael Jackson - Michael Friday 10 December 2010

  New songs from the deceased star – but how many should have seen the light of day?

  For a man who’s now been dead just over a year, Michael Jackson has been awfully productive lately. This is his sixth posthumous release since he collapsed and died on June 25 last year, his body coursing with Propofol and Lorazepam, midway through rehearsals for the This Is It tour. Yet Michael is notable for being the first release thus far with any legitimate claim to containing new, original material. Biographer Ian Halperin claimed that in the March before he died Jackson had recorded over 100 songs he didn’t want released until after he died. The first set of new songs, then; but almost certainly not the last.

• Michael Jackson - Michael Monday 06 December 2010

  This is not a Michael Jackson album. Jackson was one of pop's biggest fussbudgets: Even when his songs were half-baked, the production was pristine. He would not have released anything like this compilation, a grab bag of outtakes and outlines assembled by Jackson's label. And yet, it's a testament to the man's charisma that can be compelling. Jackson gets songwriting credit on eight of 10 tracks, and they are recognizably Michael Jackson songs. "Behind the Mask" is a fiercely funky cousin to "Wanna Be Startin' Somethin'?"; the Lenny Kravitz-produced "(I Can't Make It) Another Day" is a "Dirty Diana"-esque dance-rock song that also features Kravitz on guitar. There are thrilling glimpses into MJ's creative process — check the snippet of him singing and beatboxing his idea for "(I Like) The Way You Love Me" — but 's most amazing moment is the -era ballad "Much Too Soon." The song is full of guitars and strings, but all you really hear is that voice — hovering between child and adult, between male and female, between mournful and ecstatic.

• Joy Division - +- Friday 03 December 2010

  A band of today sucked into a wormhole and spat out at the end of the 1970s.

  Available as either a download (plus video content) or as a limited-edition vinyl box set, collecting 10 seven-inch singles and featuring art from Factory co-founder Peter Saville, +- is the perfect gift for your Joy Division-loving loved one this Christmas. Actually, scratch that – pick this up, and chances are you’ll want to keep it for yourself.

• The Stylistics - The Stylistics Tuesday 30 November 2010

  A sweet soul landmark that’s not exactly what you think it is.

  The Stylistics were formed in 1968 from a union of two Philadelphia groups, The Monarchs and The Percussions. After being well received regionally, they signed to Avco and were put under the artistic control of producer Thom Bell, who had recently enjoyed great success with The Delfonics. With his writing partner Linda Creed, Bell fashioned a remarkable set of high-soul dramas for the group, all built around lead singer Russell Thompkins Jr’s unmistakable falsetto vocals.