R.I.P. Roy Thomas Baker

I had missed the news of Baker's passing, but checked in on the Monk's website today and discovered this typically insightful remembrance:

[postpunkmonk.com]

As Monk says in his piece, Baker is most associated with Queen, but give me Candy-O and Panorama any day. Any guy who could craft albums that sounded so good you could ignore Ocasek's WTF lyrics was okay in my book.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 05/04/2025 08:44AM by breno.

…And I was late to the game. His Wikipedia says he actually died on April 4th, but it wasn't announced until a week or two later. If I had to pick a fave rave RTB production it just might be "Clones [We're All]" for Alice Cooper! The comment thread on my posting is unusual because one commenter was the keyboard player/MD for Berlin 2000-2008 and liked "Clones [We're All]" so much he had made a great cover version and sent it along for good measure. So I embedded the link in his comment.

Former TP subscriber [81, 82, 83, 84]

[postpunkmonk.com]
For further rumination on the Fresh New Sound of Yesterday®

I looked on his Wikipedia page for a list of the albums he produced and came across a band I didn't know called Espionage. I found this on YouTube...watch and listen at your own risk:

Espionage - "The Sound of Breaking Hearts"

No risk involved in listening to Espionage… they’re the type of cheeseball no-name unheard-of new-wave / poorman’s-AOR that make up a shocking amount of my record collection….

For me as a listener, I’ve recently. had more fun finding these types of innocuous bands (who somehow got on major labels) instead of listening to Husker Du again!

Same here. The jury is still out on whether the internet has been a net positive or negative for mankind, but in my personal plus column, I love the ability to now go back and listen to vintage bands that either I knew of but didn't bother with at the time, knew of but it was impossible to find their records, or bands that I was completely unaware of and never would've known of their existence without the web.

I've especially enjoyed digging up obscure Eurosynth bands of the early 80s and C86 bands - both genres that the U.S. almost entirely missed out on except for a small handful of token bands.