Madonna changed the trajectory of popular music not long after "Borderline" became her first Top Ten hit in 1984. Fusing post-disco dance with effervescent pop, the song was unexpected and fresh, a trick that soon became her signature. Over a career that lasted for decades, Madonna ushered underground sounds into the mainstream, specializing in trends percolating in dance clubs. As she arrived at the dawn of the MTV era, she seized the possibilities of music videos, creating a series of sexy, stylish clips that earned her the reputation of a provocateur while also establishing the network as the bastion for hip culture in the 1980s. Madonna recorded many of the pop anthems that defined that decade – "Like a Virgin," "Material Girl," "Live to Tell," "Papa Don't Preach," "Open Your Heart," "Like a Prayer," "Express Yourself" – and in the process she created the archetype of a modern pop star: one whose music was inextricably tied with its visual representation, and one who was loathe to trade upon past glories.

Tool established themselves as one of America's most enduring and unpredictable acts with an ever-evolving brand of muscular but mind-altering sonics, a wry sense of humor, and a mystical aesthetic that attracted a cult-like following of devoted fans with just a handful of albums spread across decades. Their greatest breakthrough was to meld dark underground metal with the ambition of art rock, crafting multi-sectioned, layered songs as if they were classical composers. While embracing the artsy, they also paid musical homage to the relentlessly bleak visions of grindcore, death metal, and thrash. Even with their post-punk influences, they executed their music with the sound and feel of prog rock, alternating between long, detailed instrumental interludes and lyrical rants in their songs.

Filmed at the BBC Radio Theatre, Sir Van Morrison performs an intimate In Concert show. The Belfast born Van the Man performs a selection of tracks, old and new, from his iconic back catalogue through to Keep Me Singing. Tracks include the classic hit Brown Eyed Girl, Wild Night and Cleaning Windows. This intimate show is an up close and personal performance by the Grammy award winning Celtic soul troubadour who is arguably one of the most influential songwriters and performers in the history of popular music.Also included is the 60-minute bonus concert Up on Cyprus Avenue, recorded on his 70th birthday to celebrate this milestone. The 12-song show is set on the Belfast Avenue Cyprus Hill, made famous through Van's iconic 1968 album Astral Weeks. Van plays hits including Moondance, Brown Eyed Girl and Baby Please Don't Go.

Born Don Vliet, Captain Beefheart was one of modern music's true innovators. The owner of a remarkable four-and-a-half-octave vocal range, he employed idiosyncratic rhythms, absurdist lyrics, and an unholy alliance of free jazz, Delta blues, latter-day classical music, and rock & roll to create a singular body of work virtually unrivaled in its daring and fluid creativity. While he never came even remotely close to mainstream success, Beefheart's impact was incalculable, and his fingerprints were all over punk, new wave, and post-rock. Don Vliet was born January 15, 1941 in Glendale, CA (he changed his name to Van Vliet in the early '60s). At the age of four, his artwork brought him to the attention of Portuguese sculptor Augustinio Rodriguez, and Vliet was declared a child prodigy.

Pianist Eric Le Sage, often praised for his ‘precious, noble and tonally subtle playing’ (Rondo), dedicates himself here to two unusual chamber music works from the French late Romantic period that are rarely heard in the concert hall. There is the Concerto for Violin, Piano and String Quartet, op. 21 by Ernest Chausson (1855-1899), a string sextet with a particularly virtuoso violin part (the dedicatee was the Belgian violin legend Eugene Ysaÿe) - which is indeed what its title suggests: a violin concerto with chamber music accompaniment. And the equally rare Piano Quintet op. 42 by Louis Vierne (1870-1937), who was primarily known for his organ music, but who wrote a touching and melancholy chamber music work here - out of personal sadness, as his son was killed in the First World War. Eric Le Sage is supported by Daishin Kashimoto, long-time concertmaster of the Berliner Philharmoniker, on the violin and the Schumann Quartet in Chausson's work, and by Yuri Zhislin (viola) and Claudio Bohórquez (cello) in Vierne's work, alongside Kashimoto and Natalia Lomeiko (violin).

Jack White is one of the great rock conceptualists of the 21st century. He came to fame as the leader of the White Stripes, the Detroit-based garage-punk duo who were unexpectedly one of the biggest rock acts of the 2000s. The White Stripes established White as a roots rocker – he made sure they covered blues chestnuts from Son House – to such a degree that his modernist art instincts were somewhat overshadowed during the band's peak. These dueling, sometimes complementary instincts, fueled White's myriad artistic pursuits both within and without the confines of the White Stripes. He started stepping out on his bandmate Meg almost immediately after White Blood Cells gave the group a blockbuster in 2001, producing Loretta Lynn's Van Lear Rose and forming the Raconteurs with Brendan Benson, then the Dead Weather with Alison Mosshart of the Kills. His voracious musical appetite and strict work ethic flourished once the White Stripes called it a day in 2011, as he divided his time between his Third Man Records empire, the Raconteurs and Dead Weather, and a solo career that grew increasingly idiosyncratic with each new album.

Bruce Springsteen once said he intended to make an album with words like Bob Dylan that sounded like Phil Spector with vocals like Roy Orbison's, a nifty summary of many, but not all, of his artistic ambitions and a key to his appeal. Unlike any other singer/songwriters saddled with the appellation of "the new Dylan" in the early '70s, Springsteen never hid how he was raised on '60s AM radio. He loved rock & roll, whether it was the initial blast from the '50s or the mini-symphonies from the days before the Beatles or the garage rockers that surfaced in the wake of the British Invasion, and all this could be heard within his wild, wooly collective E Street Band, a group who debuted on his second album, 1973's The Wild, The Innocent & The E Street Shuffle, and who would support him throughout most of his career.

The 18th release in the King Crimson Collectors' Club series recorded live in Detroit, MI on December 13, 1971 Bass, Lead Vocals - Boz Burrell, Drums, Vocals - Ian Wallace, Flute, Saxophone, Mellotron - Mel Collins, Guitar, Mellotron - Robert Fripp

Metallica is the definitive heavy metal band, the group that brought the gnarly underground sounds of thrash metal into the mainstream, then reshaped the contours of heavy music and hard rock once they became the biggest rock band in the world after the release of their self-titled "black album" in 1991. By that point, Metallica already had experienced enough upheaval for two careers. Emerging from the feverish metal underground of the early '80s, Metallica became a word-of-mouth sensation with their indie releases Kill 'Em All and Ride the Lightning, records that helped them land a contract with Elektra.

One of the greatest figures of the 20th century, Bob Dylan helped shape the sound and form of popular music in the rock & roll era. Dylan emerged from the Greenwich Village folk scene in the early 1960s, earning a reputation as a perceptive, powerful songwriter, equally capable of penning a protest anthem or a romantic love song. His flair for impressionistic, stream-of-conscious lyrics marked a shift within folk music, an evolution Dylan also introduced to rock & roll when he picked up an electric guitar in 1965. Over the course of 18 months, he released Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde on Blonde, a trio of records that broadened the vocabulary of rock & roll, placing Dylan at the cutting edge of popular culture. Although he subsequently stepped away from the zeitgeist, his restless, occasionally messy work of the '70s and the '80s expanded his formidable songbook through a combination of classic albums (Blood on the Tracks) and intriguing detours (Empire Burlesque).

Prince taught himself how to play music at an early age and his first original songs arrived not much later. Music remained a mainstay after his parents' divorce, a period where he bounced between both households. For a while, Prince stayed with his neighbors the Andersons, whose son Andre would later adopt the stage name Andre Cymone. The pair became friends and then collaborators, forming a covers band called Grand Central with Morris Day while the three attended high school together. Prince and Cymone's first big break arrived when Pepe Willie, the husband of Prince's cousin, brought the duo into the funk band 94 East. Prince played guitar on a few tracks on a 94 East demo and co-wrote "Just Another Sucker" with Willie, a song composed in 1977.

Guns N' Roses are the bridge separating 1980s and 1990s hard rock, the band responsible for ushering in an era of grim, gritty rock & roll. Where such peers as Mötley Crüe reveled in the decadence of Sunset Strip sleaze, Guns N' Roses focused on the grimy underbelly of the urban jungle, with guitarists Slash and Izzy Stradlin cranking out mean riffs that matched the dark fantasies of Axl Rose, the vocalist who led GNR with a serpentine charm. Rose countered his nasty tendencies with a romantic side, one that flourished on "Sweet Child O' Mine," the soaring ballad that went to number one in 1988, turning the band into superstars in the process. Over the next few years, GNR's 1987 debut album, Appetite for Destruction, sold in monstrous numbers, with "Welcome to the Jungle" and "Paradise City" both reaching Billboard's Top Ten and "Patience," from the 1989 EP GNR Lies, also reaching that exalted position.

By the time the Rolling Stones began calling themselves the World's Greatest Rock & Roll Band in the late '60s, they had already staked out an impressive claim on the title. As the self-consciously dangerous alternative to the bouncy Merseybeat of the Beatles in the British Invasion, the Stones had pioneered the gritty, hard-driving blues-based rock & roll that came to define hard rock. With his preening machismo and latent maliciousness, Mick Jagger became the prototypical rock frontman, tempering his macho showmanship with a detached, campy irony while Keith Richards and Brian Jones wrote the blueprint for sinewy, interlocking rhythm guitars. Backed by the strong yet subtly swinging rhythm section of bassist Bill Wyman and drummer Charlie Watts, the Stones became the breakout band of the British blues scene, eclipsing such contemporaries as the Animals and Them.

Bruce Springsteen once said he intended to make an album with words like Bob Dylan that sounded like Phil Spector where he sang like Roy Orbison, a nifty summary of many, but not all, of his artistic ambitions and a key to his appeal. Unlike any of the other singer/songwriters saddled with the appellation of "the new Dylan" in the early '70s, Springsteen never hid how he was raised on '60s AM radio.

Bruce Springsteen once said he intended to make an album with words like Bob Dylan that sounded like Phil Spector where he sang like Roy Orbison, a nifty summary of many, but not all, of his artistic ambitions and a key to his appeal. Unlike any of the other singer/songwriters saddled with the appellation of "the new Dylan" in the early '70s, Springsteen never hid how he was raised on '60s AM radio.