As the last scheduled titles of Pink Floyd's "Why Pink Floyd?" archival campaign -- expanded Immersion and Experience versions of The Wall -- hit stores on Feb. 28, the band says it's considering what else can be culled from the group's vaults. "The idea was always to see whether people like these things or not. If they do, of course we could do more," drummer Nick Mason recently told Billboard. "I think it's an exercise that bears repeating... but I think there might be things to be done that would be rather different to what we've done so far." Mason added he'd like to see a package from Floyd's early hears rather than more expanded editions of a particular album. "Maybe we'll take Saucer (Full of Secrets) and Piper (at the Gates of Dawn) and maybe one other one and do an early years thing -- partly because there just isn't the material in some cases. That might be a more interesting exercise," Mason added. The new 7-disc Immersion set includes a remastering of 2000's Is There Anybody Out There: The Wall Live 1980-81, and a DVD featuring a performance clip from that tour, a Behind the Wall documentary and an interview with The Wall cover artist Gerald Scarfe. - Billboard....
Bruce Springsteen has unveiled the video for "We Take Care of Our Own," the first single from his forthcoming album with the E Street Band, Wrecking Ball. The Boss also announced that Jake Clemons, the nephew of beloved late E Street saxman Clarence Clemons, will be taking over some of his deceased uncle's duties on the upcoming tour behind the new album. It was also announced on the official Springsteen site that longtime collaborater Eddie Manion will "share the saxophone role" with Jake Clemons. The tour starts March 18 in Atlanta. - USA Today/AP...Elton John and Paul McCartney will be among some of the world's biggest pop stars performing in front of Buckingham Palace on June 4 to celebrate Queen Elizabeth II's Diamond Jubilee. Palace officials announced the lineup will also include Shirley Bassey, Cliff Richard, Tom Jones and the popular boy band JLS. The event is a centerpiece in the queen's Diamond Jubilee celebrations, which have already kicked off to mark her 60 years on the throne. At a raucous Golden Jubilee concert in 2002, Queen guitarist Brian May performed "God Save the Queen" in the open air on the palace roof. In other Elton news, in a new interview with Britain's Attitude magazine, John revealed he and his partner David Furnish have sought out advice from counsellors over fears their son Zachary will be "stigmatized" for having two gay dads. "I think he's going to have a lot of attention thrust upon him. He's going to be potentially doubly stigmatized, because one of his parents is extremely famous and because he comes from two dads," Elton said. The Rocket Man went on to say that he and Furnish have taken advice from counsellors. "We've put a whole scrapbook together about his creation, the people who were involved in the process and how the intent was about love. We're going to raise him to be proud of who he is," he said. - AP/WENN.com....
Meat Loaf describes his upcoming album Hell in a Handbasket as "the most honest record I've ever done." The followup to 2010's Hang Cool Teddy Bear, Hell in a Handbasket is due Mar. 13 and, according to Meat Loaf, deals with social and political views and his sense that the world is, as the title suggests, "going to hell in a handbasket." Including some unique collaborations with such artists as rapper Chuck D and his son-in-law, Scott Ian of Anthrax, the album also includes a cover of the Mamas & The Papas' "California Dreamin'," which Meat Loaf feels "is really, really dark." "It's not the happy pop ditty everyone thinks it is. I think John Phillips wrote this about... the fear that people have of following their dreams which fit the album's theme really well," he said. Meat Loaf says he hopes to line up some TV appearances to promote the new CD, but he's not sure about hitting the road again anytime soon: "We toured through 2010 and up to August of 2011, and I would say it was the best year and a half of touring I ever had in my life (but) in Australia I just got tired and exhausted and I had a swollen vocal cord, and in New Zealand it started bleeding. Now it's fine...but I'm looking more at TV and other things than anything else." Meat Loaf says he also has a Christmas album and another album "completely different" from the new one already written. - Billboard...
Deep Purple drummer Ian Paice says he's "almost positive" the classic rock veterans will hit the studio n 2012 to cut their 19th studio album. "I believe that we have another good record in us and I believe we'll make it this year. A couple of years ago there were a couple of guys in the band who just didn't see the point. And when it's like that there's no use trying to push it. But there's been a change of heart," said Paice. He added that he doesn't "care how successful it is... financially, most people know that making records is not what it used to be." - QMI Agency......
Attending a conference about digital media in New York , Neil Young said he's working on a device that can offer digital music without sacrificing quality as iTunes, Amazon and others have done. "Steve Jobs was a pioneer of digital music, but when he went home he listened to vinyl," Young said at the AllThingsD Dive Into Media Conference. "I have to believe if he lived long enough he would have tried to do what I'm trying to do." Young's device will download each song at the highest possible resolution, but that also takes 30 minutes to complete a single download. He disagreed with some that such a long download time would make using the device inconvenient, saying "while you're sleeping, your device is working for you." Young revealed that he had been in talks with Apple co-founder Jobs about the project, but since Jobs's death in October there is "not much going on now." Meanwhile, Young has just posted a 37-minute long collaboration with his band Crazy Horse online, which is currently streaming at Neilyoung.com. Horse Back was recorded at Audio Casa Blanca studios on Jan. 6 and it is not known if the jam is a preview of the new album that Young recently announced he was working on with Crazy Horse, or old material that was previously unreleased. - Reuters/New Musical Express.....
Late Grateful Dead mastermind Jerry Garcia will be the subject of a new feature-length documentary from filmmaker Malcolm Leo, who has previously made biopics about Elvis Presley and the Beach Boys. Leo and his partner John Hartmann (who has managed such bands as the Eagles and CSN&Y and is the brother of late Saturday Night Live star Phil Hartmann) say they've secured the music rights to tell Garcia's story, something that's eluded other potential filmmakers over the years. Jerry Garcia died of a heart attack at age 53 in 1995. - Rolling Stone.
A 1954 Les Paul Custom guitar beloved by Peter Frampton that the British rocker thought he'd lost forever has been found. The guitar, which Frampton played on his landmark concert album Frampton Comes Alive!, was on board a cargo plane that crashed en route to Panama in 1980, and Frampton says he felt sure he'd never see the axe again. But now two fans have stumbled across the instrument following an exhaustive search on the Dutch island of Curacao in the Caribbean Sea, and they teamed up with local tourism bosses to get the guitar back to Frampton. "I am still in a state of shock, first off, that the guitar even exists, let alone that it has been returned to me," Frampton says, while expressing his condolences for the plane crash victims. "I know I have my guitar back, but I will never forget the lives that were lost in this crash. I am so thankful for the efforts of those who made this possible," he said. Frampton said he intends on insuring the guitar for $2 million and will never let it out of his sight again. "It was always my number one guitar and it will be reinstated there as soon as possible. Some minor repairs are needed," he said. - WENN.com......
Kiss guitarist Paul Stanley says the famous shock-rockers have completed their new album, called Monster. Recorded in The Nook studios in Hollywood, Calif., Monster is being co-produced by Stanley and Greg Collins, who also worked on Kiss' last album, 2009's Sonic Boom. Stanley has said the next Kiss effort is an attempt to get back to the band's classic '70s sound, and in that context it's being recorded on analogue equipment, 24-track tape and an old Trident board. Truly, the album kicks major ass and we're very very proud of it," Stanley says. Monster is due in the spring. - Undercover...
Former Journey frontman Steve Perry says he'll begin work in earnest on a new solo album after he finishes a new deluxe recording studio he's building in his southern California home just north of San Diego. Perry, who left Journey in 1998, says he's "written a whole bunch of ideas and directions, all over the map, in the last two, three years" and he "plans on getting in the studio at some point and start trying to track these things and see where they go." Although the 62-year-old Perry says he'd "love to" play live again, he says he's "no spring chicken... the same arthritis that ate up my left hip that finally got replaced hasn't stopped there... and touring is a lot of work." "I'm impressed when I see people like Eric Clapton out there. Gee whiz, Eric, give me a break! It's amazing. I know it's gotta hurt somewhere," Perry added. Perry says the newly released Journey hits collection that he helped compile, Journey's Greatest Hits Vol. 2, "was one of the most wonderful and emotional experiences I think I've had thus far, probably more emotional than putting together the original Greatest Hits." "I'm able to look back at the forest now, because I've certainly walked out of the trees," he said. - Billboard...
A massive collection of almost 700 unreleased songs by 1970s rockers Thin Lizzy has just been discovered. The unearthed songs were on 150 tapes given by band's former frontman, the late Phil Lynott, to a friend before he passed away in 1986 at the age of 36. Universal Music has obtained possession of the tapes and plans to release some of the songs in a new box set. The songs span the band's formation in 1971 until their 1981 album Renegade, and also include alternative takes of classic Thin Lizzy tracks. Two surviving members of Thin Lizzy, Scott Gorham and Brian Downey, will be choosing which songs will appear on the eventual release and will also make a decision on the artwork. Thin Lizzy announced in 2011 that they'll launch a 12-date comeback tour of Europe on Jan. 19 in Glasgow, with former The Almighty frontman Ricky Warwick filling in for Lynott. The tour will run through Feb. 4, when the band headlines London's HMV Hammersmith Apollo. The reconstituted Thin Lizzy, which has not released a studio album since 1983's Thunder And Lightning, indicated last that they are also considering recording new material together, which would be their first new music without Lynott. - New Musical Express.
Queen have announced plans to release a new album of old demo recordings featuring their late singer Freddie Mercury. Guitarist Brian May recently told the U.K. publication Uncut that he's been going through the band's old material with drummer Roger Taylor to compile a selection of previously unreleased tracks for a new album. The last Queen album made when Mercury was alive was 1991's Innuendo, released before his death that same year. May says he and Taylor are also working on the follow-up to the long-running Queen-based threatrical production "We Will Rock You," which continues its long run on London's West End. - Uncut UK.....
Director Ron Howard's production company has snapped up the rights to Steven Tyler's 2011 autobiography Does The Noise In My Head Bother You?, meaning the Aerosmith frontman likely will see his life turned into a bigscreen biopic. "This whole thing with Aerosmith has been like a dream come true," Tyler recently said in an interview with women's fashion magazine. "It's like it's been plotted out and planned and written about before. Every time something happens, I think, 'Is this a movie?'," he said. Tyler's book, which was published in May, notoriously revealed that he had once tried gay sex, but only one time because he "didn't dig it." - New Musical Express...... Meanwhile, Cable TV's HBO channel is reportedly close to sealing a deal for a new series about a fictional record executive in the late '70s that is being developed by Mick Jagger, acclaimed director Martin Scorsese, and Boardwalk Empire creator and former The Sopranos writer Terence Winter. Winter has already penned a pilot script for the show, which was orignially conceived by Jagger as a concept for a feature film. Meanwhile, the Showtime channel is developing another program, Vinyl, that is also set in the record industry of the 1970s. - Rolling Stone......
Rod Stewart is the latest classic rocker to jump on the memoir-writing bandwagon, promising he'll "hold nothing back" in detailing a legendary music career which saw him sell more than a 100 million records, survive cancer, and romance a string of blond bombshells. Stewart's yet to be titled book is due out in Nov. 2012 and will be published worldwide by Random House. The 66-year-old rocker's book comes as he has toned down his rock act, instead concentrating on remaking a string of successful covers albums of standards by everyone from Cole Porter to George Gershwin. Stewart's book comes on the heels of bestselling autobiographies by the Rolling Stones' Keith Richards, Aerosmith's Steven Tyler, and the recent announcement by Neil Young that he is also planning on penning a memoir. - Reuters.....
The Who's Pete Townshend has blogged that the Who will stage another Quadrophenia tour in 2012. "The reason I am not on the road with Roger is that this is entirely Roger's adventure, one that is bringing him great joy," Townshend wrote. "I don't belong on this Tommy tour. I wish him well, sincerely, and I look forward to playing with Roger again doing Quadrophenia next year." Townshend also disputed Daltrey's recent statement that the reason Townshend didn't participate in the Tommy tour was because of his hearing problems. "My hearing is actually better than ever," Townshend wrote. "Because after a feedback scare at the O2 Indigo in December 2008 I am taking good care of it. I'm 66, I don't have perfect hearing, and if I listen to loud music or go to gigs I do tend to get tinnitus. DON'T WE ALL????" Townshend also confirmed reports that he's prepping a remastered edition of Quadrophenia for release sometime in the near future. Quadrophenia is the only major Who album to not get re-released as a deluxe edition over the past decade. - Rolling Stone....
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