The Shadows ~ Guardian Angel [1984]

Guardian Angel was the group's first album to be released on LP and CD simultaneously and only the group's second CD release. It had the distinction of being the group's 1980's album, consisting entirely of original material, except for one track. The album wasn't promoted with Polydor's marketing machine fully behind it and the album failed in commercial terms, spending just one week at number 98 on the British charts. Also, only two tracks were performed live by The Shadows and then only during the January to March 1985 "down-under" tour in Australia and New Zealand; the two tracks being "How Do I Love Thee" and "Hammerhead".

tracks:

01. How Do I Love Thee
02. Hammerhead
03. The Saturday Western
04. Look Back On Love (from the film 'Terminal Choice')
05. Johnny Staccato
06. I Will Return
07. (I'm gonna be your) Guardian Angel
08. Can't Play Your Game
09. On A Night Like This
10. Turning Point
11. Our Albert

turning point 

The Shadows ~ Greatest Hits (1963)

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."

tracks

01. Apache
02. Man Of Mystery
03. The Stranger
04. F.B.I.
05. Midnight
06. The Frightened City
07. Kon-Tiki
08. 36-24-36 [0:01:42.27]
09. The Savage
10. Peace Pipe
11. Wonderful Land
12. Stars Fell On Stockton [0:02:18.08]
13. Guitar Tango
14. The Boys
15. Dance On!