As a founding member of the much lauded '70s group, Swell Maps, Nikki Sudden, together with his brother, Epic Soundtracks, helped define a new form of musical freedom and experimentation which helped usher in the post-punk revolution. After the demise of the Swell Maps at the dawn of the '80s, Sudden enjoyed a very fertile period in which he began releasing solo albums, as well as albums with Dave Kusworth as the Jacobites, and the monumental collaboration with Rowland S. Howard (the Birthday Party, Crime & The City Solution). Drawing on the sounds of the Rolling Stones and T. Rex, Sudden made some of the most raw and inspired albums full of double-edged melancholia and twentieth century malaise this side of Neil Young & Crazy Horse and Johnny Thunders. The Secretly Canadian reissue campaign of Sudden's entire recorded output from the '80s covers ten full-length albums, which includes each of his eight proper full-lengths from that time period plus the classic THE RAGGED SCHOOL (the collection which Twin/Tone used to introduce Sudden and the Jacobites to American record buyers) and the ultra-rare Italian-pressed CROWN OF THORNS lp. Each of the ten full-lengths (some of which come packaged as a pair in a double disc set) has been fully remastered, comes with new liner notes, and has been expanded to include non-album B-sides, EPs and previously unreleased material (including the SHAME FOR THE ANGELS EP, LOST IN A SEA OF SCARVES, and WEDDING HOTEL EP, to name but a few). Also available for the first time are some of Sudden's commercial videos as enhanced cd content, and an audio recording of a 1987 live performance in Augsburg, Germany, with Rowland S. Howard. Many of the ten titles have been unavailable -- and never before on cd -- since they were initially released, and those that have seen the light of day since their initial release were so hastily put together that it may well have been better to leave them out of print (re-packaged titles were riddled with such .......
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