Musical Career
Aside from his performances on various soundtrack records, Curry has had some success as a solo musical artist. Curry received classical vocal training as a boy. He has mentioned that his musical influences included jazz vocalists such as Billie Holiday and Louis Armstrong and idolized The Beatles and The Rolling Stones as a teenager. In 1976, he recorded a 9-song album for Lou Adler's Ode Records which was unreleased in its entirety until February 2010, when it was made available as a legal download (4 tracks from these sessions had been released on a 1990 Rocky Horror box set). In 1978, A&M Records released Curry's debut solo album Read My Lips. The album featured an eclectic range of songs (mostly covers) performed in diverse genres. Highlights of the album are a reggae version of the Beatles song "I Will", a rendition of "Wake Nicodemus" featuring the Pipes and Drums of the 48th Highlanders of Canada, and a bar-room ballad, "Alan", composed by Canadian singer/songwriter Tony Kosinec.
The following year, Curry released his second and most successful album Fearless. The LP was more rock-oriented than Read My Lips and mostly featured original songs rather than cover versions. The record included Curry's only US charting songs: "I Do the Rock" and "Paradise Garage".
Curry's third and final album, Simplicity, was released in 1981, again by A&M Records. This record, which did not sell as well as the previous offerings, combined both original songs and cover versions.
In 1989, A&M released The Best of Tim Curry on CD and cassette, featuring songs from his albums (including a live version of "Alan") and a previously unreleased song, a live cover version of Bob Dylan's "Simple Twist of Fate".
Curry toured America with his band through the late 1970s and the first half of the 1980s. He also performed in Roger Waters' (of Pink Floyd fame) 1990 production of The Wall in Berlin, as the prosecutor. Curry's voice also appeared on the Clash's Sandinista!, on the track "Sound of Sinners".
The writing, production and musician roster for Curry's solo albums included an impressive list of collaborators, including Bob Ezrin and David Sanborn.
Read more about this topic: Tim Curry/Archive 1
Famous quotes containing the words musical and/or career:
“Then, bringing me the joy we feel when wee see a work by our favorite painter which differs from any other that we know, or if we are led before a painting of which we have until then only seen a pencil sketch, if a musical piece heard only on the piano appears before us clothed in the colors of the orchestra, my grandfather called me the [hawthorn] hedge at Tansonville, saying, “You who are so fond of hawthorns, look at this pink thorn, isn’t it lovely?””
—Marcel Proust (1871–1922)
“He was at a starting point which makes many a man’s career a fine subject for betting, if there were any gentlemen given to that amusement who could appreciate the complicated probabilities of an arduous purpose, with all the possible thwartings and furtherings of circumstance, all the niceties of inward balance, by which a man swings and makes his point or else is carried headlong.”
—George Eliot [Mary Ann (or Marian)