Bangles – Bangles
This is the 1983 release (on Miles Copeland’s Faulty Records) of The Bangles’ first record, just titled “Bangles.” (No “the” on title or band at that point. In fact, there’s a radio promo that...
Category: Pop
Bananarama – The Greatest Hits Collection
This greatest hits collection came out in 1988, and it’s just what it says — the biggest hits from Banarama’s first four albums. They had big US hits with their cover of “Venus” and...
Bananarama – Wow!
I’m not gonna have a lot to say about Bananarama, a British girl group. In those cruel summers of the mid-’80s, they seemed like pure pop perfection, and I enjoyed the heck out of...
Badfinger — Straight Up
Less than two months after I found “Magic Christian Music,” another nice Badfinger record turned up in the Forever Changes bins: 1971’s “Straight Up.” This is a classic, with “Day After Day” and “Baby...
Badfinger — Magic Christian Music
For the longest time, there has been a Badfinger-sized hole in my record collection. Back when we were initially collecting records, in the early ’80s, my roommate Danny had several Badfinger albums, including this...
Bacharach & Costello – The Songs of Bacharach & Costello
I lived long enough to go from thinking that Burt Bacharach’s songs were the squarest songs in the world – probably solely because they were appreciated by the older generation – to thinking they...
Eric Burdon & The Animals – Eric Is Here
The ‘60s are hard to explain sometimes. There was all that excitement and revolutionary change, and at the same time, there was the embrace of weird “old-timey” stuff and non-ironic backsliding. And as the...
Tori Amos – Ocean To Ocean
Still playing catch-up: I definitely had a Tori Amos phase, but as with most things, it was after she’d had her moment with the “Little Earthquakes” and “Under the Pink” albums. I was aware...
Marc Almond – Something’s Gotten Hold of My Heart
The second single from Marc Almond’s “The Stars We Are” was the sensational “Something’s Gotten Hold of My Heart,” a duet with the amazing Gene Pitney. Pitney had a string of hits in the...
Things We Said Today