Eight-X (27)

Hello, Generation Eight-X still manifesting here, makes me wonder how enormous the output would have been, had the cheap/easy recording facilities been available as is now. Oh well today we have to do with, Bill Nelson's Red Noise, a band that rose from the ashes of Be Bop De Luxe, EMI their label thought nothing of it..(now there 's a endorsement..wink) and their second album never materilised as such..after Nelson finally got those tapes back he reworked some and released it as his soloalbum, Quit Dreaming And Get On The Beam, which landed in the UK top ten...(those know nothing record execs again). ...Now, Tears For Fears need little introduction getting their name from a Primal therapy treatment , the cover and title of the album revealed what was to become the successful launch of their career with a serious concept pop album...Finallly Prefab Sprout their classic Steve McQueen album produced by Thomas Dolby put them on the map, since they've released a limited number of quality albums, unfortunately main man Paddy McAloon has to cope with serious dissabilities..visual and aural impairments..well im sure some have pointed him to Beethoven who wrote a lot of his best work under the same impairments...

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Bill Nelson's Red Noise - Sound On Sound (79 ^ 273mb)

After the breakup of Be Bop Deluxe, Nelson immediately formed a new band, 'Bill Nelson's Red Noise', retaining Andy Clark on keyboards, and adding Nelson's brother Ian, who had previously contributed to Be Bop Deluxe albums, on saxophone. The only album to emerge from this lineup, Sound on Sound (1979) can be seen as the last Be Bop Deluxe album, as it amplified and extended the trends on 'Drastic Plastic', and was the last rock band album Bill Nelson made before moving into the introspective solo projects that were to dominate his subsequent career. Sound on Sound was a fluid, expert document that demonstrated Nelson's ability to experiment, though at the cost of jarring both the audience and the record company -- EMI, looking for moneymakers and easy understanding, dropped Nelson. A second Red Noise album had been finished, but was never released in its original form. After Nelson finally got these tapes he reworked the album and released Quit Dreaming and Get On the Beam via Mercury Records.

Nelson eventually settled into a career as a solo musician, recording iconoclastic albums in the early electropop vein such as The Love That Whirls and Quit Dreaming and Get On the Beam (both recently remastered and reissued). Many of these albums also shipped with bonus records featuring experimental ambient instrumentals, and this was a genre of music Nelson would embrace more fully in the future.

Nelson had his share of troubles with major labels in the 1980s. A deal with CBS Records went sour, leaving one admired album, unreleased, Getting the Holy Ghost Across . Nelson and his manager Mark Rye formed the Cocteau Records label in 1981, and for many years this label handled the majority of Nelson's output, which often included multiple albums per year. Among the more ambitious Cocteau releases were the four-record boxed set of experimental electronic music, Trial by Intimacy (The Book of Splendours), and the later ambient collection, Chance Encounters in the Garden of Lights, which contained music informed by Nelson's Gnostic beliefs. As the 1980s ended, Nelson suffered a tremendous series of personal setbacks, including a divorce, tax problems, and a nasty falling-out with his manager over his back catalogue rights.
Nelson channelled his troubles into his music, with the result that the 1990s proved an even more prolific period for him he released multiple cd-box sets. Check the link at the bottom for an extensive expose of his work.



01 - Don't Touch Me, (I'm Electric) (1:49)
02 - For Young Moderns (4:23)
03 - Stop - Go - Stop (3:08)
04 - Furniture Music (3:30)
05 - Radar In My Heart (1:35)
06 - Stay Young (3:08)
07 - Out Of Touch (3:27)
08 - A Better Home In The Phantom Zone (4:24)
09 - Substitute Flesh (3:26)
10 - The Atom Age (3:00)
11 - Art - Empire - Industry (2:42)
12 - Revolt Into Style (3:20)

Holyground label

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Tears For Fears - The Hurting ( 83 ^ 434mb)

Orzabal and Smith met as children in Bath, England. Both boys came from broken homes, and Smith was leaning toward juvenile delinquency. Orzabal, however, turned toward books, eventually discovering Arthur Janov's primal scream therapy, a way of confronting childhood fears. Orzabal turned Smith on to Janov, but before the duo explored this theory further, they formed the ska revival band Graduate in the late '70s. After releasing a handful of singles, including "Elvis Should Play Ska," Graduate dissolved in the early '80s, and the duo went on to form Tears for Fears, the name is derived from the Primal therapy treatment of the same name developed by Arthur Janov, which was made famous after John Lennon became Janov's patient.

Riding in on the tail end of new wave and new romantic, Tears for Fears landed a record contract with Polygram in 1982. The following year, the band released its debut, The Hurting, which became a major hit in Britain, generating no less than three Top Five hit singles. The album, produced by Chris Hughes and Ross Cullum, showcased synthesizer-based songs with lyrics reflecting Orzabal's bitter childhood and upbringing. The Hurting can be considered Tears for Fears' only true concept album, as references to emotional distress and primal therapy are found in nearly every song. The album itself was a big success and had a lengthy chart run (65 weeks) in the UK. Two years later, the group released Songs From the Big Chair, which demonstrated a more streamlined and soul-influenced sound. Songs From the Big Chair became a huge hit in America, rocketing to the top of the charts on the strength of the singles "Everybody Wants to Rule the World" and "Shout," which both hit number one, and the number three "Head Over Heels," which were all supported by clever, stylish videos that received heavy MTV airplay.

Instead of quickly following Songs From the Big Chair with a new record, Tears for Fears labored over their new record, eventually delivering the layered, Beatlesque The Seeds of Love in 1989. Featuring soulful vocals from Oleta Adams, who dominated the hit "Woman in Chains," the album became a hit, while the single "Sowing the Seeds of Love" reached number two in the U.S. Again, Tears for Fears spent several years working on the follow-up to Seeds of Love, during which time they released the collection Tears Roll Down: Greatest Hits 82-92. Smith and Orzabal began to quarrel heavily, and Smith left the group in 1992, making Tears for Fears' 1993 comeback Elemental essentially a solo record from Orzabal. On the strength of the adult contemporary hit "Break It Down Again," Elemental became a modest hit, yet was hardly up to the group's previous levels. Smith, meanwhile, released a solo album in 1993, Soul on Board, which went ignored. Orzabal returned with another Tears for Fears album, Raoul and the Kings of Spain, in 1995, which failed to make much of an impact. In late 1996, the group released a rarities collection. In 2004, Orzabal reunited with Smith for the colorful and Beatlesque Everybody Loves a Happy Ending, their first collaboration in over a decade, and a natural successor to The Seeds of Love, featuring vibrant Beatles-esque melodies, solid songwriting, and turns of phrase.



01 - The Hurting (4:15)
02 - Mad World (3:30)
03 - Pale Shelter (5:24)
04 - Ideas As Opiates (3:46)
05 - Memories Fade (5:04)
06 - Suffer The Children (3:49)
07 - Watch Me Bleed (4:14)
08 - Change (4:10)
09 - The Prisoner (2:54)
10 - Start Of The Breakdown (4:56)
Now with bonus
11 - Pale Shelter (Long Version) 7:09
12 - The Way You Are (Extended) 7:44
13 - Mad World (World Remix) 3:43
14 - Change (Extended Version) 6:00

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Prefab Sprout - Steve McQueen (85 ^ 319mb)

Prefab Sprout was formed in Newcastle, England, in 1977 by McAloon (who sings and plays guitar and piano) and his bass-playing younger brother Martin. In the group's early days, McAloon spun several fanciful tales about the origin of their odd name (one favorite was that the young McAloon had misheard the line "hotter than a pepper sprout" in Nancy Sinatra and Lee Hazlewood's "Jackson"), but the prosaic truth is that an adolescent McAloon had devised the meaningless name in homage to the longwinded and equally silly band names of his late-'60s/early-'70s youth. Drafting an early fan, Wendy Smith, into the lineup to sing helium-register backing vocals, the trio released their first single, "Lions in My Own Garden (Exit Someone)," on their own Candle label in July 1982.

Prefab Sprout's first album, Swoon, was released in March 1984. Containing neither of the first two singles (but leading off with the delightful "Don't Sing," their third), Swoon is in retrospect a surprisingly brittle record, full of difficult songs that take unexpected left turns and have all but impenetrable lyrics. Shortly after Swoon's release, drummer Neil Conti joined the group, and in a rather brilliant move, Thomas Dolby was tapped to produce the second Prefab Sprout album, 1985's Steve McQueen (retitled Two Wheels Good in the U.S. due to litigation from the late actor's estate). Dolby smoothes out the kinks a bit, and his keyboards help enrich the album's sound; it also helps that the songs are much better, lyrically opaque but not impenetrable and melodically satisfying.

Prefab Sprout returned to the studio without Dolby in the summer of 1985 and quickly recorded an album's worth of material that was initially meant to be released in a limited edition as a tour souvenir. However, several months after Steve McQueen was released, its song "When Love Breaks Down" became a hit, and CBS feared a new album would hurt its predecessor's sales, so the project was shelved. The "proper" follow-up to Steve McQueen was 1988's From Langley Park to Memphis. Although it was their biggest hit, thanks to the massive U.K. chart success of "The King of Rock and Roll". In 1990, Jordan: The Comeback, again produced by Thomas Dolby, was nominated for a BRIT Award. Though the music was more accessible than their earlier material, the lyrics and subject matter remained characteristically oblique and suggestive.

Early in the nineties McAloon alluded in interviews to several albums-worth of songs that he had written, amongst others, concept albums based on the life of Michael Jackson (Behind the Veil), the history of the world (Earth: The Story So Far) and Zorro the Fox about a fictional superhero. Their greatest hits, Life of Surprises: The Best of Prefab Sprout, gave them their biggest U.S. hit, "If You Don't Love Me" (92) Prefab Sprout released Andromeda Heights in the UK in 1997, while a short UK tour followed in 2000. This tour, and the subsequent album, did not feature Wendy Smith, who by this time had reportedly left the band, to focus on her motherhood. By now Prefab Sprout consisted of the McAloon Brothers they released The Gunman and Other Stories a concept album themed on the American West in 2001. After being diagnosed with a medical disorder which impaired his vision Paddy McAloon released the album I Trawl The Megahertz under his own name in 2003 on the EMI Liberty label. As of 2006, McAloon had suffered another setback: his hearing had deteriorated, reportedly due to Ménière's disease. In early 2007 a remastered Steve McQueen was released in a 2 CD package, containing new versions of eight of the songs from the original album, in radically different arrangements performed by McAloon on acoustic guitar.



01 - Faron Young (3:42)
02 - Bonny (3:46)
03 - Appetite (3:59)
04 - When Love Breaks Down (4:05)
05 - Goodbye Lucille #1 (4:29)
06 - Hallelujah (4:18)
07 - Moving The River (3:56)
08 - Horsin' Around (4:40)
09 - Desire As (5:19)
10 - Blueberry Pies (2:25)
11 - When The Angels (4:26)

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