Helen Shapiro is remembered today by younger pop culture buffs as the slightly awkward actress/singer in Richard Lester's 1962 debut feature film, It's Trad, Dad. From 1961 until 1963, however, Shapiro was England's teenage pop music queen, at one point selling 40,000 copies daily of her biggest single, "Walking Back to Happiness," during a 19-week chart run. A deceptively young 14 when she was discovered, Shapiro had a rich, expressive voice properly sounding like the property of someone twice as old, and she matured into a seasoned professional very quickly.

This is one of nearly a dozen anthologies of Manfred Mann's music that cover their EMI period, and the 25 songs here make it the biggest of them. Additionally, there is an 11-minute interview with the band here, dating from December of 1964, that has never before appeared on record in the United States. The hits are all here, sometimes in more than one version, along with a cross-section of album tracks and B-sides, and it all sounds very good, though EMI's recent 24-bit remasterings of the band's original British LPs are much more impressive. But this CD misses being "definitive" because it leaves out some key B-sides to their early singles and overlooks the contents of several top-selling British EPs.

There are almost more Petula Clark collections than there were actual songs (that's saying something), and Sanctuary's three-disc Songs of My Life: The Essential Petula Clark is one of the better ones. Split into three themes, "Swinging Times," "Mellow Moods," and "Beautiful Sounds," Songs of My Life relies heavily on the English pop sensation's peak '60s and '70s output. All of the key radio hits are here ("Downtown," "I Know a Place," "My Love," "This Is My Song"), as well as countless ballads, uptempo pop gems, and choice covers. Fans looking for a decent career overview (sadly, none of Clark's vast arsenal of French hits are here) may find the 78 tracks that populate Songs of My Life a bit overwhelming, but they're well worth spending some quality time alone with.

This Japanese collection features mostly early Cliff Richard hits, beginning with his first, "Move It," which was released in 1958, through his so-called comeback years in the late 1970s, including his only U.S. hit, 1976's "Devil Woman."

This 22-song compilation features all of the essential recordings cut by the group in 1965 and 1966 after they broke with their original producer Mickie Most, and before Eric Burdon dissolved the core of the original lineup to pursue solo stardom with an Animals group featuring entirely different musicians. These tracks were perhaps more soul-oriented than their previous recordings, but the group still burns on the hits "Inside Looking Out" and "Don't Bring Me Down." Despite the absence of original keyboardist Alan Price, the group continued to showcase Burdon's passionate vocals and burning, vibrant organ (by Price's replacement Dave Rowberry) on both renowned and obscure R&B tunes, with an occasional original thrown in. Besides the entirety of their final British LP Animalisms (from 1966) and the above-mentioned singles, the CD includes the hits "Help Me Girl" and "See See Rider" (credited to "Eric Burdon and the Animals," these were possibly Burdon solo records). The four tracks from their first release, an independently released 1963 EP featuring primitive R&B standards, are small but noteworthy bonus cuts that close this collection.

A straightforward summary of the Shadows' first three years of habitual hit-making, opening with the pounding flurry of "Apache," then tracing through the next eight smash singles, with a handful of attendant B-sides (and one EP cut, the title track from The Boys) to round the package out. There is no denying the sheer brilliance of this early sequence. Hits like "Wonderful Land," "FBI," and "Man of Mystery" utterly rewrote the guitar's role in rock, not only musically, but culturally as well. Unquestionably, the Shadows' importance and impact diminished as the years passed, but at the outset of their career – the period documented here – they were untouchable. It is for that reason that The Shadows' Greatest Hits is still regarded in some quarters as the finest Shadows album of them all, an accolade which no other compilation (and goodness knows, there's been enough of them) has ever been able to dismiss. Even the sleeve screams "masterpiece."

Despite a title that promises, but does not deliver, a taste of the Animals live and sweaty in concert, Animals on Tour was, in fact, the U.S. equivalent to the Animals' second British album, Animal Tracks (whose title then became their third American set). Eight of the British album's cuts made it onto the U.S. version, together with two songs left over from the similarly rearranged first album as well as two more culled from singles: the Top 20 hit "I'm Crying" and the less successful "Boom Boom," re-recorded from the group's first-ever independent release. In either incarnation, it is a less arresting release than its predecessor, all the more so since the group had undergone a seismic change in both style and direction since it was recorded. Keyboard player Alan Price had quit, while the band's latest single, "Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood" evoked a modern mod-blues style that only the Rolling Stones were close to competing for…

During their first two years of recording, the Animals had never quite succeeded when it came to recording LPs - good as some of the songs on their first two albums, done for EMI, had been, there was this sense that single were what this band was really about. Then, newly signed to English Decca, they delivered Animalisms, a truly transcendent collection of a dozen songs, mostly superb covers interspersed with some good originals, principally by Eric Burdon and Dave Rowberry. Burdon was never singing better and the group had developed a bold, tight sound that seemed to lift his soul shouting to ever higher levels of passion and conviction. "Outcast," "Maudie," "You're on My Mind," "Clapping," "That's All I Am to You," "Squeeze Her - Tease Her," "I Put a Spell on You," "She'll Return It," and "Gin House Blues" all rate among the best work the band ever did, passionate, gorgeous, and exciting R&B down to the last note…

The term "lost classic" is applied liberally and often erroneously to unreleased recordings that resurface years later in a maelstrom of hype. However, for the forgotten mod rock also-rans the Action, the term is not only justified, it is painfully bittersweet. On par with such classics of the era as The Who Sell Out or Ogden's Nut Gone Flake but more focused than either, the Action's Rolled Gold goes beyond "lost classic" – it is the influential masterpiece no one was ever allowed to hear. Despite being signed to Beatles producer George Martin's AIR label and benefiting from a strong club following, the Action never scored a chart hit. By the time they recorded these demo tracks in 1967, the band had grown weary of the musically limited mod scene, which was on its last legs. Guitarist Pete Watson had been replaced by Martin Stone, and the band had developed a more mature sound, one only hinted at on such previous cuts as "Twenty-Fourth Hour".

This 25-song CD (originally a shorter LP called The Singles Album) is a handy collection of the band's most well-known English tracks from 1963 through 1966, plus their B-sides and some songs off of EPs that charted high in the U.K. Except for the final three songs – "Groovin'," "Can't Believe It," and "Did You Have to Do That?," none of which are that easy to find on compilations – it's all assembled in chronological order from their debut single "Why Should We Not" to 1966's "You Gave Me Somebody to Love." The notes by John Tobler are a bit superficial, and the American EMI Manfred Mann: The Definitive Collection is a little more adventurous. Also, the sound here doesn't match the presence and clarity of more recent 24-bit transfers. Nonetheless, this is a respectable compilation for the novice or the casual fan. The presence of the B-sides, including lost gems like "What Did I Do Wrong" (a killer Chess-style blues number written by Tom McGuinness) and the Goffin/King-authored "Oh No Not My Baby" (one of Paul Jones's greatest R&B-style performances), assures that one gets a truer picture of the band's output and their focus on R&B, jazz, blues, and folk, than the A-sides by themselves would provide.

If this had only been Kronikles, 1963-1972 instead. It's the same problem with all the '60s greats who aren't named Neil Young. Their work rises like comets shot out of cannons in the early, R&B/Merseybeat beginnings, soaring ever higher toward the more expansive psychedelic era. Then they peak, level off around Woodstock, begin to descend in the earliest '70s, and then they plummet with a thud and a plop. To be fair, the Kinks made the tidiest, least offensive mess of it, and thus you could feel affection for them even when they sucked. Like, say, John Lennon or Pete Townshend, Ray Davies and his husky, Mickey Mouse-voiced sibling were capable of the odd later-'70s (or even later) gems that, if nothing like their fabled past, would remind of their prodigious talents in their early-twenties prime. Nevertheless, over a 35-year chronological presentation, the helpless spiral toward crap city is inescapable. All the more so with the junior Davies, who had such a smaller catalog to start. CD one plucks out the one or two songs Dave sang on each Kinks LP – blues-stomp covers, a few melodies Ray wrote for him, and some of Dave's earliest, best tunes. Most significantly, there's two huge vault-uncovered treats for '60s Kinks heads: a rare 1963 acetate of an unknown Dave number, the early-Beatles-like "I Believed You," the band's earliest unearthed recording from its days as the Ravens; and a 1969 Dave-alone eight-track, "Climb Your Wall," a nice piece of post-Dylan, post-Arthur happy shambles.