Survival : a career anthology 1963-2015

"In a year of bulging box sets, this career-straddling overview of the UK's longest-serving R&B star has to rank among the most well-conceived and beautifully packaged ... while the accompanying 48-page book sees Paolo Hewitt take the ever-amiable Fame through his whole career, from Eddie Cochran turning him on to Ray Charles in 1959, through being forced by record companies to pander to trends, before striking out on his own with his Three Line Whip imprint.The highlights are seemingly endless, but Fame's sublime mid 70s collaboration with Booker T on California Girl takes some beating. He also uncorks a mean chicken impersonation on the live set".

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"In the early Sixties, Georgie Fame's band The Blue Flames became one of the most potent conduits of both American R&B and the new blue-beat sounds heard in Notting Hill's West Indian community. His repertoire, summarised on the first of these six CDs, mingled Mose Allison cool with Jimmy Smith organ workouts, covers of Memphis grooves like "Green Onions", and the twitching lope of Caribbean ska instrumentals such as "Rik's Tune" - the blend of all these elements ultimately securing his debut chart-topper, the infectious "Yeh-Yeh". Fame's subsequent course included stints partnering Alan Price, and later as Van Morrison's trusted lieutenant, while his own releases confirmed a questing musical spirit, never more so than on "Seven Power", an early-Seventies oddity that finds him declaiming like The Last Poets over electro-funk electronics. He remains the British equivalent of Boz Scaggs, an effortlessly cool repository of blues magic".

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