Billy Thorpe - Children Of The Sun

[irock]

Not sure what you'd call this, space age rock maybe? This is a largely forgotten rock classic, although why we forgot it is beyond me. It's an excellent tune and I think it had a strong influence on the so-called hair-metal bands of the 80s. Unfortunately, very few of those hair-metal songs came anywhere close to this in terms of quality.

While I'm speaking of this, let me put in a plug for iTunes. They do an excellent job of finding flawless remixes of these old songs. In the present case, many of the musical nuances that were hidden in the background of the record album are now in the foreground where they can be heard clearly. The song sounds better than I've ever heard it before. The same can be said for a couple other hard rock classics I've downloaded in recent days: Do You Feel Like We Do by Peter Frampton (the live version, of course) and Intro / Sweet Jane by Lou Reed (also recorded live). The clean-up sound is so much better that it's almost as if these tunes are brand new again.

[billcs]

I do remember this song from 1979 - rock music from albums that generally had a conceptual theme that ran throughout the songs, sort of along the lines of Saga and others - but I remember a more pop-oriented tune from Thorpe better, called "In Your Room" from 1981, which charted locally where I live but not in the U.S. "Children" got to #41 on BB. I would say that it was good for its time, though I would argue that other 'conceptual' rock songs and albums were more influential.