339 viewings and just 1 reply and that was by yourself as well Jack, it doesn`t surprise me! AOR bands in general don`t get too much love on these forums, but its without doubt one of my favourite rock genres.
Magnum though are an enigma for a number of reasons. I`ll tackle the music after but they were real oddities. Firstly, looking at pictures of this band in the 70s and 80s, some of the pictures had them looking like a leather dressed metal band with some of the members looking more like members of a hair metal outfit, whilst other pictures had them looking more like Foreigner, despite one or two members still looking like they should be in a hair metal band. Secondly, the name Magnum evokes a real 1970s hard rock/heavy metal outfit rather than an AOR one. Thirdly, despite trying to fill the niche left here in the UK by prog giants such as Yes they ended up churning out a sound more akin to American prog/pomp bands such as Kansas and Styx, along with sounding similiar to Survivor, instead of a more Yes sound (which was surprising as the Kansas and Styx sound was never ever popular here in the UK) and to be fair they didn`t do it that well either initially. Finally, when one thinks of an AOR band, one thinks of the band coming from glam locations such as LA and not Birmingham
All that aside though, main man Tony Clarkin who was indeed talented stuck to his guns and put out the AOR/pomp rock sound that he believed in and after a slow start, the group really got into gear with the
Chase the Dragon album produced by Jeff Glixman who had produced all those classic Kansas albums several years before. They reached their creative heights with
On A Storytellers Night which is a great AOR album and since then their discography has grown to a very large amount of albums and I`m actually surprised they are still going and even more surprised that you are recommending their latest album!