Eagle Records’ series of releases exploring the archives of the Jeff Healey Band continues with this live recording from The Bottom Line in New York City on 13 December 1988. This is an early show by the band following on from the release of their debut album “See The Light” on the Arista label a few months before. Several tracks from that album are included along with classic covers such as ZZ Top’s “Blue Jean Blues” and Cream’s “White Room”. Jeff Healey had a unique style and presence that was clearly already well developed at this early stage in his career.

Billie enjoyed a good band including a very young Stan Getz on sax and Buster Young on piano (the only musician heard up front, or really at all). Billie is in pretty good voice here, and sings many of her greatest tunes, such as "Lover Man", "Strange Fruit", and "Miss Brown To You". All of the tunes are very short versions (19 songs, well under an hour). "My Man", taken at a super slow tempo, and "Strange Fruit" (a rather poetic account of a racial lynching)are especially poignant. The vocal nuances in each tune show why Billie is still revered to this day, while many jazz/blues vocalists of the era have been long forgotten. Strangely restrained audience, polite applause at end of songs. Highly recommended.

The unmistakable voice of has been a constant presence on the dance floor ever since the breakthrough success of with in 1989. Over the years since, her classic tracks have been remixed by the cream of clubland from , and to , and . This remastered three-disc anthology brings together over thirty sought-after and previously unheard full-length mixes, with a 28-page booklet featuring photos, memorabilia, lyrics and brand new sleeve notes.

An album which changed the way soundtrack albums were created was released this week in 1984, with the movie released the next day. Two million copies of this album were sold within a year of release, which is no surprise, given that it contained such hits as 's and 's and 's Another notable aspect of the recording is the small-print admission "Contains additional songs that are not in the film." In other words, this is more of a compilation than a soundtrack album per se. It didn't bother anybody, though.

Lovers of high-class traditional heavy sounds already praise the amazing project, led by Alpha Wolves Mark Sweeney (ex-Crystal Ball) and Michael Voss (Michael Schenker, Casanova, Mad Max) since day one. It’s not only that the two are very good songwriters; due to connections from being in the business for many years, they always managed to gather many big names and exceptional musicians to join the ‘pakk’ and contribute to WOLFPAKK’s albums.

Since Packed! (at least), each new record from the Pretenders has been hailed as Chrissie Hynde's return to form (praise that was thrown at Learning to Crawl, by the way), and it's hard not to resist to say the same of Viva el Amor!, the seventh studio album from the Pretenders. So, we won't say that, even though it may be true…