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the best of britain’s best rock magazine
the ANNUAL Rock’n’Roll 12 months of
high-voltage
INCLUDING
Pink Floyd Queen
The Who
Aerosmith
King sX
led Zeppelin
Jethro Tull
Alter
Bridge
Th L e yd ohn Pr o NW etn OB en HM de rs
AC/DC Metallica Deep Purple
The Cult
genesis
Pr ea ch er J s te eam r
Ma nic th Str ea dr eet
Digital Edition
Steely Dan
Features 6 Led Zeppelin
The making of Led Zeppelin III. “Jimmy would say: ‘This is so different, this is going to shock people.’ And it did.”
16 Deep Purple
All five members look back at the band’s near half-century, and at where their great adventure might take them next.
26 The Magpie Salute
Former Black Crowes guitarist Rich Robinson takes flight again with a brand new flock of rootsy rockers.
28 The Who
Fifty years ago they embarked on their first ever US tour. Cue exploding toilets, stinking fish, cop chases…
34 Alter Bridge
Frontman (and Slash’s man at the mic) Myles Kennedy explains why he doesn’t like fame, didn’t join Led Zeppelin and thinks rock stars are a thing of the past.
39 Mike Rutherford
The Genesis man on school, women and trips of both kinds.
40 Jethro Tull
Living in the past? Ian Anderson recalls the making of the band’s 1977 album Songs From The Wood.
46 Mick Ronson
In 1970 he changed David Bowie’s career, and went on to work with Lou Reed, Bob Dylan, Morrissey and many more. This is the story of rock’n’roll’s most underrated guitar hero.
56 The Birth Of The NWOBHM
That’s the New Wave Of British Heavy Metal (as if you didn’t know!) .We talk to the bands that made the UK heavy again. Starring Saxon, Motörhead, Priest, Maiden and loads more.
69 John Lydon
The former Sex Pistol puts the world to rights.
102 Brian Johnson
We look back at the former AC/DC frontman’s career, from life as a skint car roofer to stepping into the huge shoes of Bon Scott and conquering the world. Then fate intervened and he was ousted from AC/DC. So what happens next?
111 John Mellencamp
The roots rocker takes on celebrity, hypocrisy, being misunderstood and not giving a damn about anything.
112 The Pretenders
“For me, rock’n’roll was always androgynous and irreverent. You weren’t trying to get someone’s dick hard, y’know?” Putting the world to rights with the great Pretender, Chrissie Hynde.
117 Mike Portnoy
“Hearing Dream Theater without me still hurts.” The former DT drummer submits to some heavy questions.
118 Manic Street Preachers
Ten years after its release, James Dean Bradfield and co. look back on Send Away The Tigers and how it saved their career.
122 Metallica
At the start of 1987 they were on the edge of a crisis. Then they recorded The $5.98 E.P. Garage Days Re-Revisited. This is the story of how six days changed Metallica’s world.
127 Greg Dulli
The Afghan Whigs man on supernatural events, Dave Grohl, hard work, Prince’s death and being John Lennon.
128 Uriah Heep
Mick Box - the founding member and stalwart of the band – has been on quite a journey. And he says it isn’t over yet.
134 The Cult
“We lost a lot of the British goth audience,” remembers bassist Jamie Stewart. But it made them stars. We look at the making of Electric, The Cult’s high-voltage rock’n’roll album.
139 Steve Earle
The singer-songwriter talks school daze, lost years, Nashville, politics, survival and supporting an English football team.
70 King’s X
140 Aerosmith
75 Pink Floyd
145 Wayne Hussey
Adored by, it seems, everyone, they should have been the next big thing. Instead they remain the greatest ever cult band.
The greatest Pink Floyd songs – as chosen by us and the stars. And drummer Nick Mason (the only ever-present Floyd member) looks back on six decades of incredible experiences.
94 Danny Worsnop
After dark days and high times with Asking Alexandria and We Are Harlot, the singer returns with a country-rock confessional. getty images
96 Steely Dan
They’re fawned over and derided in equal measure for their slick, precision-crafted albums. This is the story of one: Pretzel Logic.
As they prepared for shows that may or may not be their last, we caught up with Toxic Twins Steven Tyler and Joe Perry.
The man from The Mission on Dead Or Alive, how he’d like not to die and how he’s enjoying living life to the full.
146 Megadeth
That the feral delinquents’ 1986 album Peace Sells… But Who’s Buying? was a classic was a surprise. That they’re still here to tell the tale is an even bigger one.
152 Queen
In the autumn of 1977, it looked as if the band’s reign might be over. Instead they hit back with the globally successful News Of The World and ruled once more.
Sometimes for a bit of variety I won’t eat. I’m a songwriter, so I go off into a dream world frequently.” Glover was born in Brecon, Wales two months after the end of the Second World War. He moved to London with his family at 10 and by his late teens was playing in a jobbing pop group, Episode Six, who in 1965 brought in Ian Gillan as their singer. Four years later the two of them jumped ship to take over from Evans and Simper in Deep Purple and establish the formidable Mark II line-up of the band. Within another four years Purple had made three epochal albums – In Rock, Fireball and Machine Head, not to mention Made in Japan – and otherwise toured relentlessly. By 1973 they were the biggest-grossing act in America. “In seventy-two alone we did six separate tours of America, one of Japan and made Machine Head,” Glover says of the frantic pace Purple kept up. “Recently I was looking down a list of every gig we’ve ever played, and it is exhausting – page after page. And every single line represents twenty-four hours that I spent travelling and then getting on a stage. A lot of it is a blur to me now. I can remember coming in to land in Los Angeles one time and looking down at row upon row of houses and wondering how many of them had a copy of our record inside. That was my way of trying to take in the enormity of it, but I never quite could. “Ian Gillan and I especially are like brothers.
Sometimes we fight and fall apart, yet we’ve always loved and respected each other. He’s a very creative man and also an unusual, idiosyncratic guy. We’re not alike at all, but we complement each other. He’s the unpredictable wild man and I’m the poet. I’m the soft one and he’s hard. When we get together it’s to write, and that’s the way it is.” The ups and downs of Glover and Gillan’s long relationship have been mirrored 10-fold by those in general in Purple. Mostly, the band’s ructions and fractures were sparked by Gillan and Blackmore clashing, each as truculent and unbending as the other. The singer and the guitarist were so at odds during the making of 1973’s Who Do We Think We Are album that they didn’t speak a word to each other. Gillan threatened to quit, and Blackmore contemplated prising Paice away with him to launch a new power trio. Fearing the loss of their cash cow, Purple’s then-managers intervened. They held clandestine meetings with Glover and Lord, encouraging them to bring Paice on side and keep the band going even without their two frontmen. In the event, Gillan went and Blackmore stayed – but only on the proviso that Glover was also cast out. “It was real stab in the back,” says Glover. “I felt Purple had let me down, but not so much Ritchie, strangely enough. He at least was honest with me. At the last gig of the tour, in Osaka, Japan, he
approached me side-stage and said: ‘It’s not personal, it’s business.’ And he left it at that. “Not long after, Purple were crowned Number One Act In America in Billboard. The magazine ran the story with a big picture of David Coverdale and my replacement, Glenn Hughes. That was like having salt put in my wounds – horrible. Probably the hardest thing I’ve faced in my life.” Post-Purple, Glover concentrated his energies on producing, and oversaw albums for Judas Priest, Nazareth and Status Quo, among others, as well as the Ian Gillan Band’s Child In Time and two by David Coverdale: White Snake and Northwinds. In 1979, following a chance meeting with his one-time nemesis at Munich’s Musicland Studios, he accepted an offer from Blackmore to produce Rainbow’s Down To Earth. Soon after, Glover joined the band, indicating either a saint’s capacity for forgiveness or else a coolly calculating streak. “It was a good opportunity for me, and why should I bear a grudge?” he says now. “I’m a huge Ritchie fan. Some of my biggest influences have come from him, and I can’t think of my life without him being in it, or of course Jon, Ian and Ian.” Blackmore’s decision to dissolve Rainbow in 1983 was the catalyst for the Mark II Purple to get back together. Glover cites their Perfect Strangers as “a great moment in time, but as an album it doesn’t quite hang together”. Thereafter it was
“For the first two or three years of Purple I didn’t think about anything other than playing, drinking, chasing ladies and having a party.” Ian Paice
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Still got it: (clockwise from bottom) Airey, Morse, Glover, Paice and Gillan.
getty x3, kevin nixon x2
I thought I would have to leave Purple to do it. Then Steve joined us, and I found myself in a studio in Orlando one day to make Purpendicular, and literally the five of us were stood there and exchanging ideas. The band blossomed again.” Describing himself as an incorrigible optimist, Glover, like Paice, believes Purple could carry on yet for three, perhaps four more years, and also that InFinite will not, in fact, be their final album. “The record company came up with that title anyway,” he defers. “They’re hedging their bets. The idea of announcing a final show, like Sabbath has just done, none of us wanted that. So we thought sod it, let’s just keep going. But then no one knows what’s around the corner. It seems the fashion these days is to drop dead. Which is kind of frightening when people younger than you are suddenly gone.” all downhill, and with Blackmore engaged in an internecine 10-year battle of wills with the others. “That was an altogether ugly time of politics, disputes and arguments,” Glover readily admits. “I can remember George Harrison once talking to me about the Traveling Wilburys. He said the five of them would stand around in the studio and someone would say: ‘Let’s do something with a Bo Diddley beat,’ and they would all grab acoustic guitars and a song would be done in ten minutes. “That was the kind of band I wanted to be in, but
summer that Airey eventually got the opportunity to gauge the seamlessness with which he has assimilated into the band – and all thanks to an air-conditioning engineer. “The air-con had broken in my hotel room in Nashville, and this guy came up to fix it,” he recalls. “He had no idea who I was. But I was playing back our rehearsal tapes at the time, and he said: ‘That sounds exactly like Deep Purple.’ I mean to say, I’d be very hurt if they felt they had to get someone else in now, which Paice-y is always threatening to do – in the nicest possible way.” Sunderland-born Airey, these days resident in a village near Cambridge, has now been Deep Purple’s keyboard player for 15 years, which is more than three times longer than the Mark II line-up originally lasted. He first encountered the band when he was a student at the Royal Northern College of Music in Manchester, when a girlfriend took him along to see them play at a local club. “I went in one person and came out another,” he says. “God, I’d never heard such ore times than he can a racket, and especially coming count, Don Airey has from Jon Lord. And that’s all been asked how hard I wanted to do with my life from Roger Glover he has found it to fill Jon Lord’s that moment on.” shoes. So often, in fact, that not By the time he got the call to so very long ago he took an actual pair of Lord’s join Purple, Airey had racked up an impressive CV shoes along to a press conference. Lord had left his as hard rock’s other go-to keyboard player. brogues in Purple’s wardrobe, and Airey meant to Beginning in 1971 with Cozy Powell’s band whip them out and try them on when the Hammer, his list of credits includes stints with inevitable line of enquiry came up. Of course, on Jethro Tull, Gary Moore, Whitesnake and both that one occasion the question wasn’t asked. Sabbath and Ozzy. From 1979 to 1981 he was with It was while Purple were making InFinite last Glover in Blackmore’s Rainbow.
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“It seems the fashion these days is to drop dead. Which is kind of frightening.”
classic rock ANNUAL 23
Food for thought: Ronson and Bowie on the train to Aberdeen for the first gig of the final Ziggy tour, May 15, 1973.
“Mick told me that he alone wrote the main guitar hooks for Starman, The Man Who Sold The World and others.” Morrissey
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be [that] important element, and that somebody was Mick Ronson.” Everyone loved Ronson’s laconic Northern humour too, especially Bowie, whose father and mother came from Yorkshire and Lancashire respectively. He’d send Ronson up and get just as good back. Visconti noticed his pupil’s keen interest. “He floored us. When David and I met him, we knew he’d fit in looks-wise, but we had no idea what was coming until he picked up his Les Paul and played for us. He really didn’t have to be taught the few songs we’d already worked up with John Cambridge. Mick watched our hands on the guitar and bass necks and he just knew what to play, but he didn’t say much. We thought he was just a cool, silent type. Later we found out that our apartment in Beckenham was very ‘big time’ for him and he was simply overwhelmed.” Before this auspicious occasion, bass player Rick Kemp had also scouted Ronno to play on fellow Yorkshireman Michael Chapman’s second album, Fully Qualified Survivor. “Michael said his producer Gus Dudgeon didn’t want
mick rock
Benny Marshall was The Rats’ lead singer and a close friend of Ronson. “Mick was the best guitarist in Hull, so when he left to head down south and join Bowie, I was pretty upset,” he says. “John Cambridge, our drummer, had played with Bowie on [the album] Space Oddity. He was the bloke who went back to Hull in January 1970 with the brief to find Ronson and bring him to London. He found Mick marking out the lines on the municipal football pitch.” Cambridge did as instructed and the pair were introduced at the Marquee club, where Bowie was playing on February 3, 1970. Two days later Ronson had learned the riffs and song structures well enough to back Bowie, Cambridge and Tony Visconti for a John Peel Radio 1 show live in concert at the Paris Theatre in Lower Regent Street in London. They did 15 songs, including a new number, Width Of A Circle, and plenty of material from Bowie’s recently released self-titled second album. Reaction was positive. This was better than Bowie’s regular gig at the Three Tuns pub in Beckenham. Ronson moved into Bowie’s Haddon Hall apartment on Southend Road in Beckenham and became part of the family. Having tired of the hippie collectivism, Bowie wanted to make a hard rock album. As Visconti said later: “We respected groups like Cream, but we didn’t have that in us. We needed someone to
him to play electric guitar,” says Kemp, “and asked me did I know anybody? I mentioned Ronson, which wasn’t a good career move for me, letting this little runt in. Gus told me to find him. I was driving a Morris 1000 with the wings flapping off and I spotted him working, mowing lawns. I put the question: ‘Do you want to play on an album?’ He replied: ‘What do you mean? One that’s in the shops for sale, like? And I get paid?’ I took him down to London, and within minutes of arriving he’d got the runs for glory.” Tony Visconti insists that Ronson came to Trident Studio in September 1969, when the David Bowie album was being finalised: “Mick came to the mix of Wild-Eyed Boy From Freecloud, and was persuaded to play a little guitar line in the middle part and joined in the handclaps on the same section.” If he did, he isn’t credited. Ronno’s first recorded work with Bowie was on the remade and rocked-out single Memory Of A Free Festival Part 1/Part 2, recorded in September 1969 and released in June 1970. It bombed. In April, sessions began for The Man Who Sold The World. It was a brilliant album, but another commercial flop. It was so badly received that Bowie was convinced to ditch the band, and Ronson, Visconti, ex-Rat Woody Woodmansey and Marshall took the collective name Ronno and released a single, 4th Hour Of My Sleep/Powers Of Darkness, a freestyle rock-metal affair that showcases Ronno’s blistering Les Paul playing. It sank without trace,
Mick Ronson
Backstage in Southampton in June ’73 during the Ziggy Stardust tour.
although Vertigo Records later included both sides on their Superheavy Vol 1 and 2 compilations. Later on, Ronson’s crunching heavy metal attack, allied to arcane Wagnerian, dystopian, mind-fuck lyrics, was hailed as a masterpiece. Certainly Ronson’s contributions to Bowie tracks such as She Shook Me Cold, Running Gun Blues and the epic Width Of A Circle cemented his place, leading Bowie to call him, with a smug smile, “my Jeff Beck”. Bowie and Ronson were both huge fans of Beck’s Truth album. Marshall says: “He knew all the licks, except Beck’s Boogie, which he dissected but couldn’t master. It infuriated him. In 1968, The Rats had supported Beck at the Cat Ballou in Grantham, and afterwards Ronno asked him to show him the fast run at the beginning. So Beck plays it, and Mick says, ‘No, play it slower.’ Beck said: ‘If I play it any slower I’ll stop!’ But he was patient, and Mick learnt that riff.”
mick rock; Getty x2
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he machine was beginning to roll, although Ronson wasn’t always aware of the significance. “We played the Roundhouse [the Atomic Sunrise Festival] in 1970 and there were all these hip types hanging round,” Ronson recalled. “I got given a puff on a joint and got so stoned I don’t remember what happened on stage; I was in another world. They said Marc Bolan was there, but I can’t remember that at all. He was around a lot and the bands were starting to rub off on each other. “Just after Hunky Dory and before Ziggy there was a lull in the scene – it needed jarring and excitement. Bowie’s dressing us up and the make‑up was needed. It wasn’t what I usually did but it was exciting. On stage I became someone else. I’d been very shy and nervous as a kid, but in costume I became another person, detached.”
Bowie and singersongwriter Dana Gillespie.
Guitar great: Ronson playing the final show of the Ziggy Stardust tour, Hammersmith Odeon, July 3, 1973.
Bowie’s 1970 album The Man Who Sold The World had not been a commercial breakthrough, but it added to Ronson’s confidence. Visconti and Ronson had masterminded the sound, dashing off arrangements in the Minstrel Gallery or the basement at Hedonism Hall while Bowie canoodled with Angie elsewhere, chucking out lyrical fragments in between romps. She Shook Me Cold, the dirtiest song he ever wrote, was directly about Mrs Bowie, but it was Ronson who provided the Jimi Hendrix-style intro and the power trio setting à la Cream. Later, Angie lamented the fact that Ronson didn’t receive the publishing he deserved: “In terms of kudos and feeling that one is valued, it would have been nice for Mick Ronson to have had publishing credits.” Meanwhile, The Hype, with Cambridge and then Mick ‘Woody’ Woodmansey on drums, took this occult blitzkrieg to those rock strongholds Harrogate and Scarborough. Ronson and Bowie
even performed the songs as a duo at the Marquee club and the Haverstock Hill Country Club, just before bass player Trevor Bolder’s arrival. Visconti’s departure gave Ronson his ‘in’. “He’d done all the string and piano arrangements, so it was my chance to fill the gap,” said Ronson. “I’d never done it before, but I could read and write music and I’d watched Tony at Haddon Hall, writing in the basement, saw how he did the charts, and I’d help out.” Ronson had already written a mini-score for four recorders, used in the break in All The Madmen. It was a start. “I thought: ‘Well, if you can do that then so can I.’ I went out for dinner with Dana Gillespie, who had tracks that needed strings, and David said: ‘Oh, Mick’ll do that!’ I never had, but it was great. It was all done in your head and then straight to piano and guitar. David pushed me forward. That was his thing. He made stuff happen.” classic Rock ANNUAL 49
Coulda, Shoulda…
Didn’t
Adored by the press, rock royalty and fans across the board, King’s X really should have been the next very big thing. Instead they remain the greatest ever cult band. Words: Dave Everley
erry Gaskill has a vivid memory of being chased down the street by Layne Staley of Alice In Chains. Gaskill’s band, the Texan trio King’s X, had rolled into Seattle on the tour to promote their debut album, 1988’s Out Of The Silent Planet. Many of the leading players in the city’s nascent grunge scene had turned out to see them, including members of Soundgarden and Mother Love Bone as well as Alice In Chains. It was after the show that Gaskill found himself accosted by Staley. The Kings’s X drummer was on his way to get some food when he heard footsteps hammering behind him. “I see this guy hurtling down the street towards me, going: ‘Jerry! Jerry! I love your band, man!’” remembers Gaskill, as softly spoken and modest a man as you could ever hope to meet. “It was Layne. For some reason they all were really supportive of us up there. We became friends with a lot of those guys.” Staley wasn’t the only superstar besotted with King’s X. In the early 90s, at the height of his own band’s success, Pearl Jam bassist Jeff Ament declared on MTV that “King’s X invented grunge”. Ament’s rationale was sound. In the era of Guns N’ Roses and Poison, King’s X, with their drop-D guitar tunings, sounded like nothing else around. But even if they had sparked off that movement – which is debatable anyway – that doesn’t tell the whole story. They also drew on a deep well of influences that ran from The Beatles (their effortless melodicism and immaculate harmonies) to Motörhead (the metallic ring of frontman Dug formerly Doug – Pinnick’s bass sound was the heaviest thing this side of Lemmy) and even Joshua Tree-era U2 (their songs possessed an enigmatic, uplifting, spiritual edge). The British music press went into meltdown. Out of nowhere, this trio of unlikely looking men in their greatcoats and military jackets became magazine cover stars. The band’s first three albums – Out Of The Silent Planet, 1989’s Gretchen Goes To Nebraska and 1991’s Faith, Hope, Love – were each individually hailed as the future of rock. But for all the talk and all the column inches, King’s X never broke through. They had the world at their feet, but the world had turned its back and wasn’t listening. Today the band are still here. They have endured the machinations of the music industry, weathered personal turmoil and survived literally near-death experiences. The hype that initially surrounded them dissipated long ago, but the devotion among those who know them has not. But the question remains: why the hell weren’t King’s X the biggest band on the planet? 70 classic rock ANNUAL
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lmost 30 years on, the answer still isn’t clear. As Gaskill, Pinnick and guitarist Ty Tabor all freely admit, King’s X had everything going for them: a supportive label, the weight of the press behind them, and some of the greatest and most emotionally engaging music of the era. Pinnick has one theory. He puts it down, at least in part, to racism. Tall, striking black men with mohawks weren’t exactly common in the rock scene of the late 80s; they still aren’t today. “Black singers in a rock band don’t do that well, because white dudes want to hear a white guy singing about how they’re doing,” says Pinnick, whose ageless looks belie his 66 years. “I just don’t think they related to me. In America we still have that racial thing going on: ‘Oh, I like the band but the singer’s black.’” Pinnick says this with little rancour, even though he is fully entitled to be angry about it. Like his bandmates, the singer and bassist is laid-back and effortlessly friendly, although his mellowness is undercut by what seems to be a deep-rooted insecurity about his own considerable talents. “Totally. I’m one of the most insecure people you’ve ever met,” he says. “I mean, I can barely look in the mirror at myself.” In the 1989 King’s X song Over My Head – the closest thing the band ever had to a hit single – Pinnick paints a vivid, joyous picture of his Christian upbringing, growing up in his greatgrandmother’s house. But the reality was very different. “I had a rough time,” he says now. “She was very religious, like the song says, but she was very, very right-wing. I couldn’t go to parties or go dancing or listen to rock music or anything like that.” Still, Pinnick describes himself as “pretty dogmatic when it came to religion back then”. And it was Christianity that brought King’s X together in Springfield, Missouri in the early 1980s. All three were fully paid-up members of the Christian rock scene, that self-contained if strangely disconnected world where music meets hard-core religion. It’s a place that outsiders don’t get to look into, and insiders rarely get to leave. But despite their strong individual faiths, the trio were aware of the limitations of the Christian scene and wanted no part of it. “We were Christians in that we were trying to be the real deal, the kind of people that tries to help others out, that tries to be an example of goodness,” Ty Tabor says in a southern drawl as wide as the Mississippi River. “But as far as the whole Christian rock
“Black singers in a rock band don’t do that well, because white dudes want to hear a white guy singing about how they’re doing.” Dug Pinnick
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Angus and Brian, doing what they do best.
Rock’n’writin’: Brian signing his memoir.
Below: Brian’s first taste of TV, with Melissa Joan Hart at Silverstone for The Race, 2006.
have to prove anything,” Johnson continued. “I think it’s going to be great. It’s going to be smashing once we’ve done one tour and people start saying: ‘Okay, right, that’s him, that’s the new singer. He’s the one now so we’ve got to accept him.’ “Yeah, I’m going to be nervous at first, no doubt, but I’ll give it my best shot. I mean, once I get up there I don’t give a fuck. I just get on and do my best. I’ve always been lucky enough to have a good rapport with audiences, so I just hope they give us a chance.”
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Who Made Who AC/DC
That’s The Way I Wanna Rock N Roll AC/DC
This track might have soundtracked a lousy Stephen King film adaptation, but it nonetheless represented a return to vintage form for AC/DC. It’s so effortless sounding that one can picture Johnson singing his vocals from a bar stool, a beer in one hand, a fag in the other, and an expression of delight on his face. From Who Made Who, 1986
Increasingly, AC/DC’s mid80s and 90s albums offered slim pickings, but somewhere on them there would most likely be a knockout single. A case in point is this jitterbug burst from the otherwise mundane Blow Up Your Video. Roused to action, Johnson could still sing like a man who sounded in love with his very being. From Blow Up Your Video, 1988
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Boogie Man AC/DC Thunderstruck AC/DC The mark of Thunderstruck’s gonzo genius is how it tantalises the listener before bringing Johnson into the fray. First comes Angus’s spiralling guitar figure, next a gang-vocal chant and a hulking drum battery, and only then does that unmistakeable voice enter the picture. Tellingly, at that precise point this could be the work of no other band. From The Razors Edge, 1990
Moneytalks AC/DC Thunderstruck promised much, only for The Razors Edge album to lead on to dreck like Mistress For Christmas and Got You By The Balls, one as instantly forgettable as the other. However, it also had this joyous romp, 12 bars and a gleeful vocal that shone out among the surrounding greys. From The Razors Edge, 1990
As low‑down and dirty as the Rick Rubin-produced Ballbreaker got, this grinding blues track was the perfect platform on which Johnson could grandstand. Pitching his vocals deep and guttural, he attacks each line with relish and a sense of soul for which he has rarely been credited. Which made it all the more regrettable that Rubin wasn’t elsewhere able to coax the band as a whole to such heights. From Ballbreaker, 1995
getty x3; Chris Terry
ven by AC/DC’s notoriously unsentimental standards, the statement that signalled the end of Brian Johnson’s 36-year tenure fronting the band was brutally blunt: “AC/DC are forced to reschedule the 10 upcoming dates on the U.S. leg of their “Rock or Bust” World Tour,” read the statement on the band’s website on March 7, 2016. “AC/DC’s lead singer, Brian Johnson, has been advised by doctors to stop touring immediately or risk total hearing loss. Tomorrow’s show in Atlanta through Madison Square Garden in New York, NY in early April will be made up later in the year, likely with a guest vocalist.”
The lack of a quote from Johnson, or any acknowledgement whatsoever of the singer’s contribution to the band across four decades, irked and offended many long-term fans, especially as it came after the outpouring of love offered to AC/DC in the aftermath of Malcolm Young’s retirement from the band in 2014 due to his dementia. It was left to Johnson himself to explain the situation and absolve his former bandmates of blame in a statement released the following month: “I had for a time become aware that my partial hearing loss was beginning to interfere with my performance on stage,” Johnson admitted. “I was having difficulty hearing the guitars on stage, and because I was not able to hear the other musicians clearly I feared the quality of my performance could be compromised. In all honesty, this was something I could not in good conscience allow. “Our fans deserve my performance to be at the highest level, and if for any reason I can’t deliver that level of performance I will not disappoint our fans or embarrass the other members of AC/DC. I am not a quitter and I like to finish what I start. Nevertheless, the doctors made it clear to me and
my bandmates that I had no choice but to stop performing on stage for the remaining shows and possibly beyond. “Being part of AC/DC, making records and performing for the millions of devoted fans this past thirty-six years has been my life’s work,” Johnson said. “I cannot imagine going forward without being part of that, but for now I have no choice. The one thing for certain is that I will always be with AC/DC at every show in spirit, if not in person.” Befitting the dignified, respectful manner in which Johnson has conducted his entire professional career, little has been heard from the 69-year-old singer since, save for the occasional pronouncement that he would love to return to fronting AC/DC, even as the band completed their Rock Or Bust world tour with Axl Rose subbing for Johnson with commendable humility and no little charm. As yet, however, there has been no indication that the door remains open for Johnson. This month, though, he returns to the spotlight wearing a different cap – metaphorically, if quite possibly not literally – as a documentary host, fronting a new Sky TV series titled Brian Johnson’s Life On The Road. Having cut his teeth as a presenter in 2014 on Quest TV’s Cars That Rock With Brian Johnson, in the new series Johnson will conduct interviews about music, touring and the rock’n’roll lifestyle, with guests including The Who’s Roger Daltrey, Pink Floyd’s Nick Mason, Metallica drummer Lars Ulrich and fellow Geordie Sting, on whose 2013 album The Last Ship Johnson guested. Although the programmes are structured in a conventional fashion, with archive footage and talking-heads comment spliced with Johnson’s affectionate, conversational one-onone interviews, the format does lend itself to the intensely private Johnson sharing personal
“This band’s the f**king best! Now and again I’ve forgotten I’m singing and I just stop and watch that band, because I think they’re just f**king great. A great band and a great bunch of lads.”
In the autumn of 1977, it looked as if Queen’s reign might be over. Instead the band rose to the challenge, hit back with the globally successful News Of The World album and ruled once more. Words: Mick Wall
riday, October 28, 1977. It should front of the audience, wishing them all have been the day that marked the “champagne for breakfast”. end of Queen’s reign. The future of As if to ram the point home, on the very same their sixth studio album, News Of The day that News Of The World was released came Never World, released that day, looked bleak Mind The Bollocks… Here’s The Sex Pistols. The vast at best. A year before, their previous gulf between what was now regarded as the spiky, album, A Day At The Races, had blades-drawn future and the flatulent, fairy-dust received such a critical battering that Freddie past was thrown into even sharper relief when one Mercury’s days of bringing opera to the masses, compared Johnny Rotten’s God Save The Queen with darling, now seemed decidedly numbered. Queen’s own bombastic version of the national A Day At The Races, the anthem which still closed follow-up to A Night At The their shows. Opera – their Bo RapSpeaking with me some containing 1975 years later, Brian May – the breakthrough international former PhD student hit – was considered flaccid studying Motions Of by comparison. The Interplanetary Dust, who’d moment where the group’s fashioned his favourite desire to push the musical guitar out of a fireplace, envelope crumbled into which he played with an self-indulgent parody. The old sixpenny piece for Brian May worst accusation of all: that a plectrum – insisted that Queen in the studio had begun to tread water; that the band had remained impressively unmoved by having found the magic formula for success they such accusations. He gave a knowing chuckle as now simply joined the dots and offered up the he recalled: “The most popular misconception of same again – only not different. people outside the people who ‘get it’, as you would At a time when punk rock was considered the say, is that Freddie took himself seriously. They new critical yardstick, Queen suddenly epitomised didn’t understand that although he took his work everything about the old rock aristocracy that was incredibly seriously, there was always that element now held in contempt: massive production, backof self-parody, if you like, in Freddie. He was always arching guitars and the once glorious, now oddly slightly tongue-in-cheek, there was always a little out of step image of Freddie Mercury preening in twinkle in his eye. And I think that’s what was
“The most popular misconception is that Freddie took himself seriously.”
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missed by the outside world. It never mattered to Freddie, though. It never bothered him. It was like, they either get it or they don’t.” In fact, what nobody had anticipated when News Of The World was released in the punk-dominated autumn of 1977 was exactly how much we were about to ‘get it’ from Queen – to the tune of seven million sales worldwide, making it the most successful Queen album to date. “After that we stopped worrying about punk or what the critics had to say,” Roger Taylor told me. “We stopped worrying about anything…” lthough Queen were loath to admit it, the thinking behind News Of The World had in fact been more than a little influenced by the lacklustre reception A Day At The Races had received – and not just from the critics. Designed very much as what their former producer Ray Thomas Baker decried as a record that “absolutely screamed ‘sequel’”, it had sold less than a third of what A Night At The Opera had sold in both Britain and America, and less than half what it had sold worldwide. Not a flop, but not “the way things should be going”, as Taylor delicately put it. May reluctantly conceded that it “may have been over-produced”. Any thoughts of simply aiming for a third bite of the same formulaic cheery were finally dashed when Groucho Marx refused them permission to call the album Duck Soup, which would have been the third time in a row they had ‘borrowed’ the
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