Various - Legacy: A Tribute to Fleetwood Mac's 'Rumours' (Atlantic/Lava) The latest record company idea for a handy money-spinner comes in the form of a tribute to a record, not even to the band responsible for it.
Fleetwood Mac's Rumours clocked up two decades last year, and with the anniversary came The Dance, a live album made up largely of numbers from Rumours - probably the biggest-selling disc in the cosmos.
But at least The Dance was by the Mac themselves. When you have an entire work re-recorded by other people, why bother buying it? Why not just go for the real thing, which will always be better? (It must be, otherwise the original artists would sue for professional embarrassment).
There can be no point to a project like Legacy save to fleece the fans. No change there, of course. Most tracks are too close to the 'proper' versions to be anything other than lazy reworkings. Honourably excepted are The Cranberries' Go Your Own Way, with singer Dolores O'Riordan sounding like nobody but herself, and Duncan Sheik with a rearranged, although hardly radically different Songbird.
For the rest, including Elton John with Don't Stop and Jewel on You Make Loving Fun, imitation seems the sincerest form of flattery. But then the producer was Mick Fleetwood.
- Stephen McCarty Jimmy Page and Robert Plant - Walking into Clarksdale (Mercury) For Led Zeppelin fans, the partnership of Jimmy Page and Robert Plant looks like the closest they will get to a Zep refloatation. Rumours of a reformation persist, even though drummer John Bonham died in 1980. But what makes a Zeppelin Mk II more unlikely than even the time elapsed since the forced landing is that Page and Plant are doing nicely the way they are.