Classic Rock Buying Guides

Buying guide Thin Lizzy: A charismatic frontman, a glorious twin-guitar attack, and some of the most enduring anthems in rock

Buying guide The hard-working, fuzzed-up Detroit rock’n’rollers who became blue-collar America’s – and Homer Simpson’s – favourite band

Buying guide The self-proclaimed heroic kings and defenders of True Metal: How to buy the very best of Manowar

Buying guide Europe took the classic hard rock template and made it 'continental'. Here's the countdown of the Scandi-rockers' best albums

Buying guide With Stone Temple Pilots and Velvet Revolver, Scott Weiland fronted some of the best hard rock albums of the early 21st century

Buying guide A guitarist who helped define the sound of a genre, both pre- and post- Deep Purple, Ritchie Blackmore has a formidable back catalogue of classics

Buying guide Can's classic releases sound only like themselves, yet the band's influence lives on. These are their best albums

Buying guide Deep Purple's albums ranked, from patchy Purple to purple patches, from iconic albums to the one Ritchie Blackmore dubbed "cattle grazing" to the one with the new chap

Buying guide Foreigner blended hard rock and atmospheric ballads to the tune of more than 80 million sales - and now they're in the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame

Buying guide From surf guitars to psychedelia, peace to paranoia, the 60s sound of Los Angeles and San Francisco was bright and multicoloured

Buying guide Stevie Ray Baughan hot-wired the 80s blues revival and launched a new generation of players

Buying guide One of rock’s great frontmen, Sammy Hagar is a master of good-time rock’n’roll, in big-name bands and also as a solo artist

Buying guide Tom Petty crossed and blurred boundaries, making him impossible to pin down – and these are his best albums

Buying guide Not only are The Kinks credited with creating the heavy metal blueprint, they also recorded some of rock’s most enduring songs. Here are their best albums

Buying guide From stadium-filling rock to the ultimate lighter-waving ballads, AOR titans Journey and their various frontmen have done it all

Buying guide A group of talented musicians with a bunch of tracks among the top of the AOR pops, Toto are among the genre’s big boys - and these are their best albums

Buying guide Hanoi Rocks' early records and electrifying live shows saw them tipped for superstardom, but fate dealt them a catastrophic blow

Buying guide One of the great British prog bands, a power trio and a supergroup, ELP left a legacy that includes some classic prog-rock albums

Buying guide With a pair of pretty boys and a pair of geeks and some glorious songs, Cheap Trick once ruled the pop-rock world