Awakening… (1969). From the legendary hard rocking South African psych rock scene, alongside such greats as Freedom’s Children, and Suck, comes The Third Eye. Awakening is the Third Eye’s debut full length, originally released in 1969, and is a masterful and complex album of late sixties South African heavy psych, featuring fuzzed out guitars, great brass arrangements and virtuosic organ work, provided by the young Dawn Selby, who, at the time of recording was all of 14 years old!…

Operation: Mindcrime (also known as: Geoff Tate's Operation: Mindcrime) is a progressive metal band that is fronted by the former lead singer of Queensrÿche, Geoff Tate. It is named after Queensrÿche's 1988 album of the same name…

Mark is the new smooth king of "Love Pop", the german invention of the '80s. With his wonderful voice and tender ways of singing, Mark captures the hearts of millions of fans around the world.

Queensrÿche started as The Mob in 1981, by guitarist Michael Wilton, drummer Scott Rockenfield, guitarist Chris DeGarmo and bassist Eddie Jackson. Without a singer, they recruited Geoff Tate to sing for them at a local rock festival…

Formed in Birmingham, UK in 1982, by Nik Bullen. Napalm Death were originally one of the bands that defined the UK hardcore thrash/punk sound of the mid-late 1980s, along with bands such as Extreme Noise Terror, Doom and Sore Throat. The band has gone through countless line-ups and many former members have gone on to become significant figures in a variety of musical scenes…

Although they surely qualify as one of England's most successful thrash metal bands, Lancashire's hapless Xentrix ultimately came to epitomize all of Great Britain's relatively insignificant contributions to speed metal – as compared to the genre's utterly dominating American bands. Formed in 1986 (as Sweet Vengeance, in the town of Preston) by vocalist/guitarist Chris Astley, guitarist Kristian Havard, bassist Paul MacKenzie, and drummer Dennis Gasser, Xentrix started life, not surprisingly, as a Metallica cover band, gradually drawing attention to themselves on the U.K. pub circuit and with their 1988 demo, Hunger For…. Fledgling Roadrunner Records soon took notice and signed the band, releasing their debut album, Shattered Existence, in 1989, and, later that year, the now infamous Ghost Buster EP…

Rainbow (also known as Ritchie Blackmore's Rainbow or Blackmore's Rainbow) are a British rock band led by guitarist Ritchie Blackmore. Estabilished in 1975…

Exumer was an early German thrash metal band with close ties to Angel Dust (their labelmates on the Desaster imprint) and a raw, vicious, unsophisticated style derived chiefly from influences like Venom, Exodus, and Slayer…

Jethro Tull was a unique phenomenon in popular music history. Their mix of hard rock; folk melodies; blues licks; surreal, impossibly dense lyrics; and overall profundity defied easy analysis, but that didn't dissuade fans from giving them 11 gold and five platinum albums…

Stone the Crows was a tough-luck, working class, progressive soul band that came out of the pubs of Scotland in the early '70s. They had everything going for them at the start: not one, but two gritty singers, a talented guitarist, a rhythm section that had played with John Mayall, and the name recognition of having Led Zeppelin manager Peter Grant as their producer. Despite favorable reviews by the critics, however, they never managed to sell their hybridized soul music to a large audience. In addition, they lost two of their key members early on, one of whom was tragically electrocuted, and the group broke up after four albums. Their biggest contribution to rock was the immense vocal talent of one Maggie Bell. Winner of several Top Girl Singer awards in Britain, Bell had a raunchy, gutbucket voice that, although it fell short of the naked emotion and range of Janis Joplin's, came probably closer to her style than any other female singer.

Blind Melon is an American rock band formed in formed in Los Angeles, California by two musicians from Mississippi and one from Indiana. Best remembered for their 1993 single "No Rain", the group enjoyed critical and commercial success in the early 1990s with their neo-psychedelic take on alternative rock.