Rarebird's Rock and Roll Nest

Strontium 90 was a quartet that briefly existed in 1977, and it featured the three musicians who would soon become The Police: Sting (aka Gordon Sumner), Andy Summers, and Stewart Copeland. Who was the fourth member? That would be Mike Howlett, who had previously been the bassist for the progressive rock band Gong from 1973 until 1976, and who had sung the lead vocals on that band's 1976 album Shamal . It was Howlett who assembled Strontium 90, who recorded a half-album's worth of studio demo tracks and performed one live show before disbanding. Twenty years later, long after the Police saga had ended, a CD titled Police Academy was issued in 1997, containing studio and live tracks recorded in '77 by Howlett and the future Police men. According to Howlett's liner notes, the recordings on Police Academy mark the first time the Police trio worked together, in the studio and on the stage. At that time, like Howlett, the three future Police men had progressive rock back...

The Power Station was a supergroup formed in the mid-'80's by two of the unrelated Taylors from Duran Duran -- bassist John and guitarist Andy -- who enlisted solo artist Robert Palmer as their singer, and Tony Thompson from Chic as their drummer. Their self-titled album from 1985 was produced by Bernard Edwards -- also from Chic -- and, like the band, was named after the New York studio in which it was recorded. The booming funk-rock sound of The Power Station was a commercial success, but (like so many other supergroup recordings) the material sounded under-developed. Edwards' reverb-heavy approach seemed designed to cover up shortcomings, but it resulted in a noisy, cacophonous high-tech mess, with every instrument mixed louder than it ought to have been. The album had a strong single in the sexy ska-funk number "Some Like It Hot", but the rest of it (except maybe for the hyperactive updating of Marc Bolan's glam-rock classic "Get It On (Bang A Gong)...