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1984 (Rick Wakeman Album)
''1984'' is a studio album by the English keyboardist Rick Wakeman, released in June 1981 on Charisma Records. After reforming his band The English Rock Ensemble in 1980 and completing a European tour, Wakeman entered a recording deal with Charisma and began preparing material for a studio album. He decided on a concept album based on the dystopian novel ''Nineteen Eighty-Four'' by George Orwell. The lyrics are by Tim Rice. The album received a warm reception, and peaked at No. 24 on the UK Albums Chart. Wakeman promoted it further with a world tour throughout 1981. Recording After leaving Yes in early 1980, Wakeman resumed his solo career and reformed his band, the English Rock Ensemble, and completed a European tour. For his next project, Wakeman secured a recording deal with Charisma Records which granted him an advance and without a deadline to complete an album. Wakeman estimated the album took around two-and-a-half years to produce from conception to completion. It st ...
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Rick Wakeman
Richard Christopher Wakeman (born 18 May 1949) is an English keyboardist best known as a former member of the progressive rock band Yes across five tenures between 1971 and 2004, and for his solo albums released in the 1970s. Born and raised in West London, Wakeman intended to be a concert pianist but quit his studies at the Royal College of Music in 1969 to become a full-time session musician. His early sessions included playing on "Space Oddity", among others, for David Bowie, and songs by Junior's Eyes, T. Rex, Elton John, and Cat Stevens. Wakeman became a member of The Strawbs in 1970 before joining Yes a year later, playing on some of their most successful albums across two stints until 1980. Wakeman began his solo career in 1973; his highest-selling solo albums are his first three, '' The Six Wives of Henry VIII'' (1973), ''Journey to the Centre of the Earth'' (1974), and '' The Myths and Legends of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table'' (1975), all concept ...
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Aldwych Tube Station
Aldwych is a closed station on the London Underground, located in the City of Westminster in Central London. It was opened in 1907 with the name Strand, after the street on which it is located, and was the terminus of the short Piccadilly line branch from Holborn that was a relic of the merger of two railway schemes. The station building is close to the Strand's junction with Surrey Street, near Aldwych. During its lifetime, the branch was the subject of a number of unrealised extension proposals that would have seen the tunnels through the station extended southwards, usually to Waterloo. Served mostly by a shuttle train and having low passenger numbers, the station and branch were considered for closure several times. Service was offered only during weekday peak hours from 1962 and discontinued in 1994, when the cost of replacing the lifts was considered too high for the income generated. Disused parts of the station and the running tunnels were used during both world ...
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Steve Barnacle
Visage were a British synthpop band, formed in London in 1978. The band became closely linked to the burgeoning New Romantic fashion movement of the early 1980s, and are best known for their hit " Fade to Grey" which was released in late 1980. In the UK, the band achieved two Top 20 albums ('' Visage'' and '' The Anvil'') and five Top 30 singles before the commercial failure of their third album ('' Beat Boy'') led to their break-up in 1985. The band has seen various line-up changes over the years, all fronted by vocalist Steve Strange, who resurrected the band name in the 2000s. In 2013, the most recent line-up of the band released '' Hearts and Knives'', the first new Visage album in 29 years. The band's fifth and final album, '' Demons to Diamonds'', was released in 2015, nine months after Strange had died following a heart attack. History First incarnation (1978–1985) Founding members Midge Ure and Rusty Egan started working on Visage to produce music to play at the cl ...
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Synclavier
The Synclavier is an early digital synthesizer, polyphonic digital sampling system, and music workstation manufactured by New England Digital Corporation of Norwich, Vermont. It was produced in various forms from the late 1970s into the early 1990s. The instrument has been used by prominent musicians. History The original design and development of the Synclavier prototype occurred at Dartmouth College with the collaboration of Jon Appleton, Professor of Digital Electronics, Sydney A. Alonso, and Cameron Jones, a software programmer and student at Dartmouth's Thayer School of Engineering. Synclavier I First released in 1977–78, it proved to be highly influential among both electronic music composers and music producers, including Mike Thorne, an early adopter from the commercial world, due to its versatility, its cutting-edge technology, and distinctive sounds. The early Synclavier I used FM synthesis, re-licensed from Yamaha, and was sold mostly to universitie ...
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Yamaha CS80
The Yamaha CS-80 is an analog synthesizer released in 1977. It supports true 8-voice polyphony, with two independent synthesizer layers per voice each with its own set of front panel controls, in addition to a number of hardwired preset voice settings and four parameter settings stores based on banks of subminiature potentiometers (rather than the digital programmable presets the Prophet-5 would sport soon after). It has exceptionally complete performer expression features, such as a layered keyboard that was both velocity-sensitive (like a piano's) and pressure-sensitive (" after-touch") but unlike most modern keyboards the aftertouch could be applied to individual voices rather than in common, and a ribbon controller allowing for polyphonic pitch-bends and glissandos. Production of the instrument ceased in 1980. Vying with the Sequential Circuits Prophet-5 and Oberheim OB-X polysynths for the title, the CS-80 is often described as the pre-eminent polyphonic analog synthesize ...
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Mini-moog
The Minimoog is an analog synthesizer first manufactured by Moog Music between 1970 and 1981. Designed as a more affordable, portable version of the modular Moog synthesizer, it was the first synthesizer sold in retail stores. It was first popular with progressive rock and jazz musicians and found wide use in disco, pop, rock and electronic music. Production of the Minimoog stopped in the early 1980s after the sale of Moog Music. In 2002, founder Robert Moog regained the rights to the Moog brand, bought the company, and released an updated version of the Minimoog, the Minimoog Voyager. In 2016 and in 2022, Moog Music released another new version of the original Minimoog. Development In the 1960s, RA Moog Co manufactured Moog synthesizers, which helped bring electronic sounds to music but remained inaccessible to ordinary people. These modular synthesizers were difficult to use and required users to connect components manually with patch cables to create sounds. They were ...
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Oberheim OB-X
The Oberheim OB-X was the first of Oberheim's OB-series polyphonic analog subtractive synthesizers. First commercially available in June 1979, the OB-X was introduced to compete with the Sequential Circuits Prophet-5, which had been successfully introduced the year before. About 800 units were produced before the OB-X was discontinued and replaced by the updated and streamlined OB-Xa in 1981. The OB line developed and evolved after that with the OB-8 before being replaced by the Matrix series. The OB-X was used in popular music by Rush (on '' Moving Pictures'' and '' Signals''), Nena, Styx member Dennis DeYoung (used frequently from late 1979 to 1984), Queen (their first synthesizer on an album), Madonna for her debut album, Prince, and Jean-Michel Jarre who used it for its "brass" sounds. Specification The OB-X was the first Oberheim synthesizer based on a single printed circuit board called a "voice card" (still using mostly discrete components) rather than the ...
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Hammond Organ
The Hammond organ is an electric organ invented by Laurens Hammond and John M. Hanert and first manufactured in 1935. Multiple models have been produced, most of which use sliding drawbars to vary sounds. Until 1975, Hammond organs generated sound by creating an electric current from rotating a metal tonewheel near an electromagnetic pickup, and then strengthening the signal with an amplifier to drive a speaker cabinet. The organ is commonly used with the Leslie speaker. Around two million Hammond organs have been manufactured. The organ was originally marketed by the Hammond Organ Company to churches as a lower-cost alternative to the wind-driven pipe organ, or instead of a piano. It quickly became popular with professional jazz musicians in organ trios—small groups centered on the Hammond organ. Jazz club owners found that organ trios were cheaper than hiring a big band. Jimmy Smith's use of the Hammond B-3, with its additional harmonic percussion feature, inspired a ...
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Prophet-5
The Prophet-5 is an analog synthesizer manufactured by the American company Sequential. It was designed by Dave Smith and John Bowen in 1977, who used microprocessors, then a new technology, to create the first polyphonic synthesizer with fully programmable memory. This allowed users to store sounds and recall them instantly rather than having to reprogram them manually; whereas synthesizers had once created unpredictable sounds, the Prophet-5 moved synthesizers to producing "a standard package of familiar sounds". Between 1978 and 1984, about 6,000 units were produced across three revisions. In 1981, Sequential released a 10-voice, double-keyboard version, the Prophet-10. Sequential introduced new versions in 2020, and it has been emulated in software synthesizers and hardware. The Prophet-5 has been widely used in popular music and film soundtracks. Development The Prophet-5 was created in 1977 by Dave Smith and John Bowen at Sequential Circuits. At the time, Smith ...
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Steve Harley
Steve Harley (born Stephen Malcolm Ronald Nice; 27 February 1951) is an English singer and songwriter, best known as frontman of the rock group Cockney Rebel, with whom he still tours, albeit with frequent and significant personnel changes. Early life Harley was born in 1951 in Deptford, London, the second of five children. His father was a milkman and his mother a semi-professional jazz singer. During the summer of 1953, Harley contracted polio, causing him to spend four years in hospital between the ages of three and 16. He underwent two major surgeries in 1963 and 1966. After recovering from the first operation at the age of 12, Harley was introduced to the poetry of T. S. Eliot and D. H. Lawrence, the prose of John Steinbeck, Virginia Woolf and Ernest Hemingway, and the music of Bob Dylan, which inspired him to a career of words and music. From the age of nine, Harley began taking classical violin lessons and would later play as part of his grammar school orchestra. ...
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Kenny Lynch
Kenneth Lynch, OBE (18 March 1938 – 18 December 2019) was an English singer, songwriter, entertainer, and actor. He appeared in many variety shows in the 1960s. At the time, he was among the few black singers in British pop music. He was appointed an OBE in the 1970 New Year Honours list. Early life Lynch grew up in Stepney, East London, as one of 13 children; his sister Gladys (stage name Maxine Daniels) was a jazz singer of some note. His father was born in Barbados and his mother was mixed-raced British and Jamaican. After leaving school at 15 and working various jobs, he did national service in the Royal Army Service Corps and was the regimental featherweight boxing champion. Career Before Lynch had several UK hit singles in the early 1960s, he released "Twist Me Pretty Baby" with Bert Weedon in 1962 ( HMV-45 POP 989); the label's credit reads "Shouts by Kenny Lynch". Two top ten hits were " Up on the Roof", in January 1963; and "You Can Never Stop Me Loving You", in ...
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Jon Anderson
John Roy Anderson (born 25 October 1944) is an English singer, songwriter and musician, best known as the lead singer of the progressive rock band Yes, which he formed in 1968 with bassist Chris Squire. He was a member of the band across three tenures until 2008. Anderson was also a member of ARW along with former Yes bandmates Rick Wakeman and Trevor Rabin from 2016–2020. Together with bassist Lee Pomeroy and drummer Lou Molino III, they toured under the name Yes Featuring Jon Anderson, Trevor Rabin, Rick Wakeman. Anderson is also noted for his solo career and collaborations with other artists, including Vangelis as Jon and Vangelis, Roine Stolt as Anderson/Stolt, and Jean-Luc Ponty as AndersonPonty Band. He has also appeared on albums by King Crimson, Tangerine Dream, Iron Butterfly, Milton Nascimento, Battles, Mike Oldfield and Kitaro. Anderson released his first solo album, ''Olias of Sunhillow'', in 1976, while still a member of Yes, and subsequently rele ...
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