DONNIE VIE – Plain Jane / Instant Karma

For power pop fans, singer songwriter Donnie Vie will need no introduction. With Enuff Z’Nuff, he lent his vocal and songwriting chops to a string of great albums, released at a time when a blend of Cheap Trick obsessions crossed with a 60s inspired, flower power cool was decidedly uncool. Their first three albums (‘Enuff Z’Nuff’, ‘Strength’ and ‘Animals With Human Intelligence’) are cast iron classics which still play brilliantly, decades after the fact. During the second half of the nineties and beyond, the band’s tendency to take a cut ‘n’ paste approach to making albums could be frustrating, but for the more patient fan, there was always a little more gold to be mined, and an on-form Vie continued to show his very natural melodic gifts on tracks like ‘There Goes My Heart’, ‘Believe In Love’ and ‘What Can I Do?’

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The Beatles: Super deluxe box set of Abbey Road incoming?

Over the past couple of years, we’ve been spoilt for Beatles products.  Although the 50th anniversary of their peerless ‘Revolver’ came and went in 2016 without a reissue to mark the momentous occasion, the world was treated to lavish box sets of both ‘Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band’ in 2017 and ‘The Beatles’ (aka ‘The White Album’ in 2018.

With a pattern established, fans quickly speculated whether a 50th anniversary box set of ‘Abbey Road’ would emerge.

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It Was Fifty Years Ago Today… The Continuing Saga of Sgt. Pepper

It was fifty years ago today…that the world was first introduced to Sgt. Pepper. It’s hard to imagine, at this point, that there was even a time when the album didn’t exist. Whether you consider yourself a fan or not, for the past two generations the album has become omnipresent. Two generations of people have loved it and hated it, while those who have yet to hear the record itself will still be aware of it’s presence. Visiting a record shop, there’s a good chance that its technicolor collage artwork will be seen. It’s always there; for most of us, it’s always been there.

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