Music Banter - View Single Post - I Can Tell By That Look in Your Eye: Toto reviewed 1978-2015

Unknown Soldier · 03-08-2015, 05:17 PM

My Testimonial

I discovered Toto sometime in 1982 by way of the “Africa” single and its video and quite liked it, so I went out and bought the album with my pocket-money and chose Toto IV over the other potential buys that would’ve also appealed to me. I would always after school every Friday, go down to the high street about a 20 minute walk (my local shopping area of London) and go to the same couple of record shops that of course only ever sold vinyl or cassette (no cds back then) but I always liked vinyl as you always got more for your money, or so I thought. I’d always rush home thinking does the album have the lyrics on the inner sleeve and even additional photos of the band (you never really knew back then what the inner packaging was going to be like) needless to say after a million plays I was hooked on the band which meant that I now had to find the rest of the earlier albums, which was always exciting as there was no internet back then and I certainly didn’t have any rock books either just loads of music press to help me with my investigation and of course going to other record shops.

Whenever I think of Toto I think of a very special band, a band that takes me back to certain periods in my life, I view the band as one of the most magical sounding rock acts to have ever existed. The smooth lines of their music drifted between soul influenced soft rock tracks and at a simple shift the band would enter into powerful hard rock territory, all this was often punctuated by that epic juddering keyboard sound unique to the band, which was provided by both David Paich and Steve Porcaro. Whenever you heard Toto playing you instantly knew it was Toto regardless of which vocalist was singing, as their whole sound was underpinned by those special Toto musical attributes, that will be mentioned in more detail in these reviews. I first heard Toto circa 1982 the year that their biggest selling album Toto IV came out and I quickly fell in love with them, despite the fact that the biased UK press at the time would have you believe that this was ‘faceless mid-western American rock’ that was best avoided. Most people I knew at the time didn’t much care for them, but as far as I was concerned I was listening to something very special and as years went by I met converted Toto fans that seemed to be falling out of the woodwork, as the greatness of the band dawned on them too.