Rarebird's Rock and Roll Nest

The second Spotlight Album Review that I wrote for my website Rarebird’s Rock and Roll Rarity Reviews was for a Various Artists live album called Concerts for the People of Kampuchea , released in 1981. This double-LP, which has never been released on CD, was culled from four nights of concerts at London’s Hammersmith Odeon in December of 1979. These concerts were organized by Paul McCartney and Kurt Waldheim (who was then Secretary-General of the U.N.) to benefit victims of Pol Pot’s reign of terror in Cambodia. More information about the concerts and the album can be found on the review page . There was a documentary film called Rock For Kampuchea made about the event, but to the best of my knowledge it has never been available on DVD. For the first eight years after I created the review page for the album, my review ended with the words: “So how about a DVD release?” Apparently, my wish has never been granted. Some are predicting that the DVD format will soon be obsolete anyway. B

Rarebird's Spotlight Album Review #22 is complete. The subject is an album which Meat Loaf recorded in 1971, a good six years before the release of his mega-selling Bat Out Of Hell album from 1977. It was a duet album with a singer/actress called Stoney, a stage name for Shaun Murphy. Murphy later worked as a back-up singer for Bob Seger and Eric Clapton, and became a full-time lead singer for Little Feat from 1993 until 2009. My review of the 1971 Stoney and Meatloaf album is here: http://rarebird9.net/stoney.html

Continuing their unconventional methods of music distribution, Radiohead released a digital single today. The two songs, "The Daily Mail" and "Staircase" were recorded live for producer Nigel Godrich's From The Basement series . Both songs are quite impressive, not only because they could easily pass for studio recordings, but also because they have the classic Radiohead sound, more so than the songs on their recent album The King Of Limbs . The entire performance is scheduled for release on DVD and Blu-Ray on January 31, 2012 as The King Of Limbs: Live From The Basement . The band performed all eight songs from The King Of Limbs as well as "The Daily Mail" and "Staircase" in Godrich's basement. Naturally, a digital-only version of the audio album from the BBC program is available from iTunes as of today. The two tracks from the single can be purchased as downloads from Thekingoflimbs.com , Amazon.com, or iTunes.