News Round-Up: Steve Winwood, India.Arie and The Stooges

• There’s some new info to post about Revolutions: The Very Best of Steve Winwood, the upcoming four-disc Steve Winwood box that may or may not be as good as the last Winwood box. This comes from a comment by an admin on Winwood’s official Web site. Also, note that the Amazon selling price is a not-terrible $39.98:

All the material in this box set was transferred from the original analogue master tapes at 24-bit, 192k resolution in 2010 using the highest quality Prism A-D conversion.

The albums “About Time” and “Nine Lives” have been entirely re-mixed and re-mastered, and these new mixes will appear for the first time on this box set.

Steve has recorded a brand-new version of “Spanish Dancer” which will also be exclusively available on the Revolutions Box Set coming June 7th 2010.

• Universal has another catalogue title on the slate for May 18: a two-disc special edition of India.Arie’s Voyage to India (2002). No firm word on the extras yet.
• A poster on our favorite reissue-centric message board reports that Rhino Handmade’s new collector’s edition of The Stooges (1969) has a pretty glaring technical error: each disc is labelled incorrectly (Disc 1 is labelled as Disc 2 and vice versa). The label is ready to ship replacement discs and has also given buyers an upcoming promo code to another upcoming release. We won’t spoil it here, but you can pretty much figure out which out-of-print Rhino Handmade set won this year’s earlier poll (and will thus go back into print) if you click the link above.

Reissue Theory: Martika

The recent realization that Cherry Pop has been remastering and expanding the Kim Wilde catalogue to considerable reaction (enough to warrant two waves of reissues, at least), it makes you wonder what other female pop acts might get the same treatment someday. If you’re an ’80s fan and you’re wondering the same thing, there’s little doubt that Martika is probably near the top of your list of must-haves.

To many, Martika is at best a footnote in pop history. Her simple yet powerful “Toy Soldiers,” a No. 1 hit in the U.S., shot her to international fame, but after two albums in 1988 and 1991, she faded mostly into obscurity until her signature song was sampled for Eminem’s “Like Toy Soldiers” in 2004.

But that glossy history overlooks a few important factors. For one, her bubblegum pop was quite catchy in a Latin-Madonna sort of way (“Toy Soldiers” in fact kept “Express Yourself” from topping the charts). And although her vocal range didn’t expand much past Madonna’s herself, Martika could carry a tune quite well.

Then there are her other pop hits; despite being considered a one-hit wonder, she had a few other hits to her name, including the peppy “More Than You Know,” a house-ready cover of Carole King’s “I Feel the Earth Move” and – perhaps best of all – the gorgeous “Love…Thy Will Be Done,” a Top 10 hit from her second LP, Martika’s Kitchen, and one of the tracks on that album written and produced by none other than Prince.

With just those two LPs on Columbia, it’s quite a surprise that no label has sought them out for reissue. Granted, Legacy put out quite a nice compilation – Toy Soldiers: The Best of Martika – after Eminem sampled her, and it actually included a few 12″ mixes and non-LP tracks (including a rare version of “Toy Soldiers” in Japanese!). But if a label took on the original records, Reissue Theory-style, they might look like what you’ll see after the jump.

Review: “Batman – The Movie: Original Motion Picture Score”

It’s somewhat ironic that a man so closely associated with the lush, timeless music of Frank Sinatra would find such great fame (or notoriety?) as a composer scoring one of the ridiculously over-the-top television series ever. I’m speaking of Nelson Riddle, who as arranger and conductor was a chief sonic architect of Sinatra’s unprecedented run of Capitol concept albums and beyond. His television credits included such groundbreaking programs as The Man from U.N.C.L.E., Naked City and Route 66. In 1966, the esteemed Mr. Riddle picked up the baton from Neal Hefti (another Sinatra veteran, having provided the exuberant charts for 1962’s Sinatra and Swingin’ Brass, and also the composer of such TV themes as The Odd Couple) to score Batman after Hefti composed the now-classic theme song. Much to the chagrin of comic book readers, the series brought Pow! Bam! Zonk! and Holy (insert-your-favorite-exclamation-here), Batman! into the lexicon, and they’re still recognizable turns of phrase today. 

With the great success of the campy series, it was no surprise when Twentieth Century Fox announced Batman: The Movie would premiere in the summer of 1966, with Bat-Mania at its height. (Producer William Dozier had actually hoped to launch the TV series with the film, but Fox wouldn’t commit until the success of the show was proven.) The movie featured Adam West’s Batman and Burt Ward’s Robin facing their rogues’ gallery in a series of predictably outlandish situations. Chewing the scenery were Cesar Romero as The Joker and Burgess Meredith as The Penguin, joined by Frank Gorshin’s Riddler and Lee Meriwether’s Catwoman. Nelson Riddle’s soundtrack to this camp classic has just been reissued in a remastered edition courtesy of our friends at La-La Land Records (LLL CD 1130). The new disc expands on all previous CD reissues of Riddle’s score, including the fine, out-of-print version released by Film Score Monthly (FSM Silver Age Classics Vol. 3 No. 7). When Neal Hefti withdrew from the series after penning the insistent theme, Riddle picked up the slack, scoring all episodes in Seasons 1 and 2. (Hefti would return to the Bat-fold in Season 3 with Warren Barker and another Sinatra arranger, Billy May, also contributing scores.) Riddle was thus tapped by Dozier to score the film.