Thursday, November 25, 2010

Bon Jovi

Bon Jovi is an American hard rock band from Sayreville, New Jersey. Formed in 1983, Bon Jovi consists of lead singer and namesake 'Jon Bon Jovi' (John Francis Bongiovi, Jr.), guitarist Richie Sambora, keyboardist David Bryan, drummer Tico Torres as well as current bassist Hugh McDonald.The band's line-up has remained mostly static during their history, the only exception being the departure of Alec John Such in 1994, who was unofficially replaced by Hugh McDonald. The band became known for writing several rock anthems, and achieved widespread recognition with their third album Slippery When Wet, released in 1986.
After touring and recording non-stop during the late 1980s, the band went on hiatus following the New Jersey Tour in 1990, during which time Jon Bon Jovi and Richie Sambora both released successful solo albums. In 1992, the band returned with the album Keep the Faith. Their 2000 single "It's My Life", which followed a second hiatus, successfully introduced the band to a younger audience. Bon Jovi have been known to use different styles in their music, which has included country for their 2007 album Lost Highway. Their latest album, The Circle, was released on 10 November 2009 in the United States.
Throughout their career, the band have released eleven studio albums, three compilation albums and one live album, and have sold 130 million records worldwide.They have performed more than 2,600 concerts in over 50 countries for more than 34 million fans,and were inducted into the UK Music Hall of Fame in 2006.The band was also honored with the Award of Merit at the American Music Awards in 2004,and as songwriters and collaborators, Jon Bon Jovi and Richie Sambora inducted into Songwriters Hall of Fame in 2009.

Sunday, November 14, 2010

Roxette

Roxette are a Swedish pop music duo, consisting of Marie Fredriksson and Per Gessle. They enjoyed worldwide success from the late 1980s until the mid-1990s, gaining nineteen UK Top 40 hits and four US nr1 singles with, "The Look", "Listen to Your Heart", "It Must Have Been Love" and "Joyride".Two further singles "Dangerous" and "Fading Like a Flower" hit nr2.After a hiatus in the mid-1990s, their popularity continued in other territories such as Europe and South America, where they earned various Gold and Platinum awards until the beginning of the new millennium. The duo took a hiatus from recording and touring, when in 2002, Fredriksson was diagnosed with a brain tumour.Roxette took to the stage together again for the first time in 8 years, in 2009, during Gessle's European Party Crasher tour.Their songs continue to receive radio airplay. "It Must Have Been Love" and "Listen to Your Heart" have both recently received awards from BMI, with both songs achieving four million radio plays.They have sold an estimated 60 million records worldwide,with over 3.5 million record sales in the United States achieving platinum for Joyride and Look Sharp.

Wednesday, November 10, 2010

Alice Cooper

Alice Cooper (born Vincent Damon Furnier; February 4, 1948)is an American rock singer, songwriter and musician whose career spans more than four decades. With a stage show that features guillotines, electric chairs, fake blood, boa constrictors and baby dolls, Cooper has drawn equally from horror movies, vaudeville, and garage rock to pioneer a grandly theatrical and violent brand of heavy metal that was designed to shock.Alice Cooper was originally a band that started recording in the late 1960s, consisting of Furnier (who also went by the name Alice Cooper) on vocals and harmonica, lead guitarist Glen Buxton, Michael Bruce on rhythm guitar, Dennis Dunaway on bass guitar, and drummer Neal Smith. The original Alice Cooper band broke into the international music mainstream with the 1971 hit "I'm Eighteen" from the album Love it to Death, which was followed by the even bigger single "School's Out" in 1972. The band reached their commercial peak with the 1973 album Billion Dollar Babies.
Furnier's solo career as Alice Cooper began with the 1975 concept album Welcome to My Nightmare. In 2008 he released Along Came a Spider, his 18th solo album. Expanding from his original Detroit rock roots, over the years Cooper has experimented with many different musical styles, including conceptual rock, art rock, glam metal, hard rock, new wave, pop rock, soft rock, experimental rock, heavy metal, and industrial rock.

Sunday, November 7, 2010

Milli Vanilli

Milli Vanilli was a pop/dance music project formed by Frank Farian in Germany in 1988, fronted by Fab Morvan and Rob Pilatus. The group's debut album achieved high sales internationally which earned them a Grammy Award for Best New Artist Feb. 21, 1990.The act became one of the most popular pop acts in the late 1980s and early 1990s. However, their success turned to infamy when their Grammy was revoked after it was revealed that the lead vocals on the record were not the actual voices of Morvan and Pilatus.In 1998, ten years after Milli Vanilli's initial debut, Rob Pilatus was found dead in a Frankfurt hotel of an apparent drug overdose.
When Frank Farian developed the concept of Milli Vanilli, he chose to feature vocals by Charles Shaw, John Davis, Brad Howell, and twin sisters Jodie and Linda Rocco; however, he felt that those singers lacked a marketable image. He then recruited Robert Pilatus and Fabrice Morvan, two younger model/dancers he found dancing in a Munich dance club, to front the act. Milli Vanilli's debut album All or Nothing, was released in Europe in mid-1988, with Rob and Fab's pictures on the front and center of the albums, but no mention of who actually sang the songs. The success of the record caught the attention of Arista Records who signed the duo. Arista deleted several tracks from the original album, added several new ones (including a new track written by Diane Warren, "Blame It on the Rain"), remixed many of the tracks and renamed the album to Girl You Know It's True for release in the American market in early 1989.This version of the album went six times platinum and led to the re-release of the title track, which peaked at number 2 on the Hot 100 in April of that year and was certified platinum.The U.K. release featured the original first album and the remix album together as "2 X 2". Even greater commercial success followed, as the pair's next three singles "Baby Don't Forget My Number", "Girl I'm Gonna Miss You" and "Blame It on the Rain" all reached number 1. A fifth and final single "All or Nothing", also made the Top 5 in the beginning of 1990 in a remixed form which sampled the "Keep On Movin'" beat from UK soul act Soul II Soul. Milli Vanilli's meteoric rise to pop music superstardom culminated with a Grammy Award for Best New Artist on February 22, 1990.

Saturday, November 6, 2010

Candy Dulfer

Candy Dulfer (born 19 September 1969) is a popular Dutch smooth jazz alto saxophonist. She started to play saxophone at the age of six. She has had her own band, Funky Stuff, since she was fourteen. Her debut album Saxuality (1990) received a Grammy Award nomination. Over the years she released nine studio albums, two live albums, and one compilation album. She has performed and recorded songs with several other musicians, such as her father Hans Dulfer, Prince, Dave Stewart, René Froger, Van Morrison, and Maceo Parker.
Candy Dulfer was born on 19 September 1969 in Amsterdam in the Netherlands, as the daughter of saxophonist Hans Dulfer.She played drums at the age of five.On her own initiative, and never pushed by her father, she wanted to play the saxophone. As a six-year-old she started to play on a soprano saxophone, because her father's tenor saxophone was too heavy.She switched to alto saxophone at the age of seven, and played in the local concert band Jeugd Doet Leven in Zuiderwoude.Apart from some basic musical training in a concert band and a few months of music lessons, she taught herself how to play the sax.

Tuesday, November 2, 2010

Modern Talking

Modern Talking was a German dance pop duo consisting of Thomas Anders and Dieter Bohlen.Genre-wise they were often classified under Europop.They have been referred to as Germany's most successful pop duo,and have had a number of hit singles reaching the top-5 in many countries. Some of their most popular and widely known singles are "You're My Heart, You're My Soul", "You Can Win If You Want", "Cheri, Cheri Lady", "Brother Louie", "Atlantis Is Calling (S.O.S. for Love)" and "Geronimo's Cadillac".
Modern Talking's first period of activity was from 1984 to 1987. After the breakup they reunified in 1998 and made a successful comeback, releasing more music from 1998 to 2003. To accommodate central European music markets of the late 1990s, they changed their original 1980s mellow Europop sound to an up-tempo Eurodance. The duo released singles which again entered the top-10 not only in their home country but also abroad. Some of those singles were "You're My Heart, You're My Soul '98", "Brother Louie '98", and "You Are Not Alone".

Sunday, October 31, 2010

Sandra

Sandra Ann Lauer (born 18 May 1962 in Saarbrücken), professionally known as Sandra, is a German Euro disco singer who became popular in the 1980s with the help of Michael Cretu whom she had married in 1988. The two met when Sandra was part of a group named Arabesque which saw little success, and he was a musician. She is currently living in Ibiza, Spain with her husband and two children, Nikol and Sebastian.
After enjoying a little success as a lead singer of the disco trio Arabesque, Sandra began performing solo , with Michael Cretu as manager, producer and composer for her first international 1 hit-single "(I'll Never Be) Maria Magdalena" in 1985. Sandra has topped the charts from as far afield as Sweden, Egypt, France, South Africa, Israel, Japan and Brazil with even more singles in the '80s. She still remains very popular in Europe, being considered one of the most popular singers of the 1980s in the mainland Europe, and had performed in Romania in the spring of 2010.
Beside "Maria Magdalena", her greatest hits are "In the Heat of the Night" (1985), "Everlasting Love" (1987), "Hi! Hi! Hi! (1986)" and "Hiroshima" (1990). Her top-rated albums are 1988's Into a Secret Land and 1992's Close to Seven.