Customer Reviews

Yardbirds - Greatest Hits

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The Yardbirds are certainly one of the most unstable British rock groups of all time, reflected by the fact that it produced three of the greatest guitarists in history: Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck, and Jimmy Page. It is mostly because all three started out with the Yardbirds that the group is regarded so highly even though they only had a half-dozen Top 40 hits in 1965-1966: "For Your Love" (#6), "Heart Full of Soul" (#9), "I'm A Man" (#17), "Happening Ten Years Time Ago" (#30), "Over Under Sideways Down" (#13), and "Shapes of Things" (#11). I provide the list to show the shortcomings of this 25 track collection from Repertoire. You get only four of their top six hits and there are several "hits" collections which rectify this problem. True, most of those are multi-disc collections, but we are talking about one of the pivotal rock 'n' roll groups of the Sixties.

Although the Yardbirds started off doing covers of R&B and Blues songs they eventually turned to the moody pop-rock that would define their sound as Clapton, Beck, and Page experimented with sounds that human beings could produce from an electrical guitar. Along with the Byrds, the Yardbirds were the pivotal pioneers in terms of psychedelia, so they are one of the rare groups whose impact outweighs their music. You should have a solid Yardbirds collection in your music library, but this is just not it. Trivia point: the group's original guitarist was Anthony Topham, who was forced to leave the group by his parents (he was 16 at the time) and was replaced by Clapton, an art college classmate of lead singer Keith Relf.