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Featuring!

EVERY SONG IN DET AIL THE BAND AND ENG INEER WHAT THE STARS S ’S VIEW THE MUSIC PROFES AY SO And so much m R’S TAKE ore!

JULY 2021 ISSUE 289

Features 26 Led Zeppelin All that glitters is gold. A 20-page spectacular celebrating Led Zeppelin’s epic fourth album in its golden anniversary year. A complete track-by-track musical breakdown, including stuff you never knew, unpublished thoughts from its late engineer, Geddy Lee on the album’s genius, Jimmy Page on his Stairway solo and so much more…

46 Billy Gibbons Art lover, musical explorer, friends in unexpected places, slipper salesman… Behind the beard and sunglasses there’s a different Billy Gibbons from the one most people think they know.

54 L7 Punk rock renegades who burst onto the Sunset Strip as grunge dawned, they burned brightly and left a trail of thrilling chaos in their wake.

58 Chris Catalyst The guitarist tells us about band hopping, mental health, and why he’s allowed to call Ginger Wildheart “a knob”.

60 Blackberry Smoke These southern rock road warriors want you to know there’s more to their music and their homeland than dog-eared clichés and ill-fitting stereotypes.

64 Helloween With hatchets buried and differences sorted, the German metallers return with and expanded line-up and one of the best albums of their career.

68 Wolfgang Van Halen Following in the footsteps of a famous parent often means forever being in their shadow. Can the son of Edward Van Halen be one of the ones who escapes it? (We think so.)

BARRIE WENTZELL

26 Led Zeppelin

“It’s more like a stream of consciousness.”

Jimmy on that solo, from that song, from that album.

JULY 2021 ISSUE 289

46

Billy Gibbons

“He has no dark side. He’s just suave as hell.

The Most Interesting Man In The World.”

Regulars 10 The Dirt

We look back at the life and work of the late Jim Steinman, the self-styled ‘Little Richard Wagner Of Rock’; Peter Green, Black Sabbath, AC/DC and Genesis books on the way; Game Of Thrones’ Esmé Bianco suing Marilyn Manson… Welcome back Deap Vally and Pop Evil… Say hello to Arielle and The Damn Truth… Say goodbye to Jim Steinman, Les McKeown, Mike Mitchell, Rusty Young…

22 The Stories Behind The Songs Dropkick Murphys A collision of Celtic punk and beyond-the-grave lyrics, I’m Shipping Up To Boston was the ultimate drinking anthem.

24 Q&A Paul Gilbert The guitar whiz on Mr. Big, experiencing near-Beatlemania in Japan, clean living and coke-head mice.

72 The Hot List

We look at some essential new rock tracks you need to hear and the artists to have on your radar. This month they include Yola, Prosperina, Kitten Pyramid, The Record Company, Cedric Burnside, Buckcherry, Wolf Alice and more…

79 Reviews

New albums from Blackberry Smoke, Paul Weller, Billy Gibbons, Helloween, Paul Gilbert, Monster Magnet, The Black Keys, Peter Frampton, Nancy Wilson… Reissues from Black Sabbath, The Who, Lou Gramm, Clutch, The Yardbirds, Cream, David Bowie, Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, Patto, Frank Zappa… DVDs, films and books on Lynyrd Skynyrd, Francis Rossi, Dave Grohl, Alice Cooper, Jim Morrison, Bob Dylan… Lockdown live reviews of Iggy Pop, Korn, Weezer, Tame Impala, Big Thief, Ruts DC…

96 Buyer’s Guide Meat Loaf He was at his best when paired with songwriter Jim Steinman (RIP), and their bombastic Wagnerian rock is almost a genre in itself. But there’s more to Meat than just Bat Out Of Hell.

99 Gig Listings

Find out who’s playing where and when (hopefully!).

106 The Soundtrack Of My Life Don Letts

ROSS HALFIN

The broadcaster, filmmaker, musician and DJ on the records, artists and gigs that are of lasting significance to him.

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WELCOME

T

he BBC’s Desert Island Discs is one of my all-time favourite radio shows, and over lockdown I’ve found myself raiding their archive. And I’m always delighted when I find the unexpected castaway who has a secret penchant for rock.

It also gets me thinking about what my own desert island choices would be (I imagine everyone does this). Impossible, right? Only eight songs? That’s just cruel. Surely we should be allowed eight albums, and even that would be a ridiculously tough ask… But if the premise was albums over songs, I know for damn sure what one of them would be, and that’s the album we’re celebrating in this month’s issue; an album that’s celebrating its halfcentury in 2021; a little record most commonly known as Led Zeppelin IV. We’ve tried to offer a different insight into the oft-told tale of Zeppelin’s mighty fourth album, with a deep-dive track-by-track, and thoughts and explanations from the band, the engineer, a music professor, rock-star fans and more.

And if this issue’s 20-page dose of Led Zep IV isn’t enough, I’m going to encourage you to listen to Classic Rock’s podcast The 20 Million Club. Hosted by Nicky Horne, it’s where we take a deep dive into albums that have sold 20 million copies or more. And, as you might imagine, Led Zep IV has already had its time in the spotlight. In fact it’s what we kicked it off with.

All episodes in season one are available now from wherever you get your podcasts.

Siân Llewellyn, Editor

COVER: BARRY PLUMMER (PHOTOS); MAGICTORCH (ILLUSTRATION)

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This month’s contributors DAVE LEWIS

Just after the release of Led Zep IV (about which he writes this issue), Dave was lucky enough to be in attendance at Zep’s Empire Pool Wembley show – the first of 15 occasions he saw them play live. The effect has been a lasting one.

Evenings With Led Zeppelin, the acclaimed book he wrote with Mike Tremaglio, is out in an expanded edition by Omnibus Press on September 9.

MILTON MERMIKIDES

Milton is a composer, guitarist, academic and unapologetic nerd. His academic and popular writing is published widely, and this month he explains the technical musical genius of Led Zep IV (p26) . He is Reader in Music at the University of Surrey, Professor of Guitar at the Royal College of Music and Deputy Director of the International Guitar Research Centre. www.miltonline.com

KEN SHARP

This month we’re pleased to welcome Ken back to CR’s pages as part of our Led Zep IV celebration (p26). Ken spoke extensively with engineer Andy Johns about the album prior to his passing. Ken is the New York Times best-selling author of Nothin’ To Lose: The Making Of Kiss (1972-1975) and is also a singer/songwriter with six albums to his name, Miniatures is his latest. More at ken-sharp.com

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Now playing: Nancy Wilson, You And Me

Monster Magnet, A Better Dystopia

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News/Lives Editor Lynyrd Skynyrd, Live At Knebworth 1976

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Cream, The Goodbye Tour – Live At The Forum 1968

Heartbreakers, LAMF: The Found ‘77 Masters

The Sheepdogs, No Simple Thing

Contributing writers Marcel Anders, Geoff Barton, Tim Batcup, Mark Beaumont, Max Bell, Essi Berelian, Simon Bradley, Rich Chamberlain, ³Ɏƺȵǝƺȇ (ƏǼɎȒȇً «ǣƬǝ (ƏɮƺȇȵȒȸɎً hȒǝȇȇɵ‫(ژ‬ƺƺً ǣǼǼ (ƺxƏǣȇً xƏǼƬȒǼȅ (Ȓȅƺً nƺƺ (ȒȸȸǣƏȇً xƏȸǸ 0ǼǼƺȇً !ǼƏɖƳǣƏ 0ǼǼǣȒɎɎً ¨ƏɖǼ Elliott, Dave Everley, Jerry Ewing, Hugh Fielder, Eleanor Goodman, Gary Graff, Michael Hann, John Harris, Nick Hasted, Barney Hoskyns, Jon Hotten, Rob Hughes, Neil Jeffries, Emma Johnston, Jo Kendall, Hannah May Kilroy, Dom Lawson, Dannii Leivers, Ken McIntyre, Lee Marlow, Gavin Martin, Alexander Milas, Paul Moody, Grant Moon, Luke Morton, Kris Needs, Bill Nelson, Paul Rees, Chris Roberts, David Quantick, Johnny Sharp, David Sinclair, Sleazegrinder, Terry ³ɎƏɖȇɎȒȇً (ƏɮǣƳ ³Ɏɖƫƫɀً 0ɮƺȸƺɎɎ Áȸɖƺً hƏƏȇ‫ژ‬ÈǝƺǼɀɿǸǣً xǣƬǸ áƏǼǼً ¨ƏƳƳɵ áƺǼǼɀً ¨ǝǣǼǣȵ áǣǼƳǣȇǕً Rƺȇȸɵ çƏɎƺɀً çȒɖɎǝ

Dave Ling

Contributing photographers Brian Aris, Ami Barwell, Adrian Boot, Dick Barnatt, Dave Brolan, Alison Clarke, Zach Cordner, Fin Costello, Henry Diltz, kƺɮǣȇ 0ɀɎȸƏƳƏً hƏȅƺɀ IȒȸɎɖȇƺً hǣǼǼ IɖȸȅƏȇȒɮɀǸɵً Rƺȸƫ Jȸƺƺȇƺً Ȓƫ Jȸɖƺȇً xǣƬǝƏƺǼ RƏǼɀƫƏȇƳً «Ȓɀɀ‫ژ‬RƏǼˡȇً xǣƬǸ RɖɎɀȒȇً áǣǼǼ XȸƺǼƏȇƳً «ȒƫƺȸɎ kȇǣǕǝɎً xƏȸǣƺ kȒȸȇƺȸً Əȸȸɵ nƺɮǣȇƺً hǣȅ xƏȸɀǝƏǼǼً hȒǝȇ xƬxɖȸɎȸǣƺً JƺȸƺƳ‫ژ‬xƏȇǸȒɯǣɎɿً (ƏɮǣƳ Montgomery, Kevin Nixon, Denis O’Regan, Barry Plummer, Ron Pownall, Neal Preston, Michael Putland, Mick Rock, Pennie Smith, Stephen Stickler, Leigh A van der Byl, Chris Walter, Mark Weiss, Barrie Wentzell, Baron Wolman, xǣƬǝƏƺǼ‫ژ‬ñƏǕƏȸǣɀً zƺǣǼ ñǼȒɿȒɯƺȸ

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Future PLC Quay House, The Ambury, Bath BA1 1UA Editorial Editor Siân Llewellyn Art Editor Darrell Mayhew Features Editor Polly Glass Production Editor Paul Henderson Reviews Editor Ian Fortnam News/Lives Editor Dave Ling Online Editor Fraser Lewry Online News Editor Scott Munro Content Director (Music) Scott Rowley Head Of Design (Music) Brad Merrett Advertising Media packs are available on request Commercial Director Clare Dove clare.dove@futurenet.com Advertising Manager Helen Hughes helen.hughes@futurenet.com Account Director Olly Papierowski olly.papierowski@futurenet.com Account Director Steven Pyatt steven.pyatt@futurenet.com

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JIM STEINMAN November 1, 1947 – April 19, 2021

A larger-than-life character, a songwriter and producer whose approach was to reach for the sky, he left behind some truly glorious music. Classic Rock remembers the inimitable talent behind Bat Out Of Hell and so much more.

CLASSICROCKMAGAZINE.COM 11

Meat Loaf and Jim Steinman: a musical marriage made in heaven.

F

“I never intended to do music [for a living].

I didn’t think I was a good enough musician.”

12 CLASSICROCKMAGAZINE.COM

musical More Than You Deserve. When Steinman got a job in the National Lampoon road show, he managed to get his new partner a role as understudy to John Belushi. Together they plotted their own masterpiece, although baffled critics and general music business indifference did their best to thwart the process. Almost every record label that Meta Loaf and Steinman approached virtually laughed in their faces, telling them Bat Out Of Hell would never come to fruition. It took four years of determination and graft before it finally got a release. That it went on take up residence in the UK Top 100 album chart for 522 weeks and continues to sell more than 200,000 copies every year brought sweet redemption.

Neither Meat Loaf nor Steinman ever managed to repeat the triumph of the original Bat Out Of Hell (produced by Todd Rundgren), although the pair worked together again on its follow-up, 1981’s Dead Ringer, and a sequel, Bat Out Of Hell II: Back Into Hell. Released in 1993, the latter’s Grammywinning first single, I’d Do Anything For Love (But I Won’t Do That) topped the charts in 28 countries.

In his Rolling Stone interview, Meat Loaf confided: “I couldn’t say this before, but Jim was going to do Bat Out of Hell III before he got sick.” He was talking about the completion of the trilogy, The Monster Is Loose, which eventually was made with producer Desmond Child and released in 2006. “He was sick for a lot longer than people knew. It was at least thirteen years ago that he had a stroke. He had open-heart surgery, triple bypass.”

Steinman threw himself into a variety of projects – the more unlikely the better. Few would have foreseen him stepping in to reactivate the career of Bonnie Tyler, the gravel-voiced Welsh

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ollowing the death of Jim Steinman, statement: “I don’t want to die, but I may die this at the age of 73, having succumbed year because of Jim. I’m always with him and he’s to kidney failure at a hospital in right here with me now. I’ve always been with Jim Connecticut, Meat Loaf has led the and Jim has always been with me.” many tributes to the GrammyConfirming the news of Steinman’s passing, winning songwriter and eccentric genius behind a message on his Facebook page said: “There will his classic 1977 album Bat Out Of Hell. “We be more to say in the coming hours and days as belonged heart and soul to each other,” an we prepare to honour this giant of a human being emotional Meat Loaf told Rolling Stone, of their and his glorious legacy. For now, do something sometimes difficult yet immensely successful that makes you feel young, happy and free. He’d relationship that spanned five decades. “We didn’t want that for you!” [simply] know each other. We were each other.”

The self-styled ‘Little Richard Wagner Of Rock’, A “devastated” Bonnie Tyler paid tribute to her Steinman was behind massively bombastic hits for “friend and musical mentor”, declaring him a “true and collaborations with Bonnie Tyler, Celine Dion, genius”. “He was also a funny, kind, supportive Air Supply, Barry Manilow, Sisters Of Mercy, Ian and deeply caring human being, and the world is Hunter, Boyzone and more. But he will forever be a better place for his life associated with Meat and his work and Loaf and Bat Out Of Hell, a worse one for his the original album now passing,” she added. having sold more than Celine Dion said it 50 million copies. was “one of the greatest Steinman once privileges” of her described his songs as career to have worked walking “the tightrope with Steinman. of being thrilling and Meat Loaf and silly”. They were Jim Steinman Steinman had certainly never boring. a tempestuous relationship – Meat once threw Of Jewish ancestry, James Richard Steinman a baby grand piano at Jim – yet beneath it all was was born in New York City in 1947. At Amherst a sense of co-dependency. Their respective College he wrote a musical version of a futuristic managers might have sued one another over rock take on Peter Pan, The Dream Engine, which ownership copyright for the name Bat Out Of laid the foundation for much of his later work, Hell, yet Meat claims the artists never did. including Bat Out Of Hell and Bonnie Tyler’s 1983 During a long conversation with Rolling Stone hit Total Eclipse Of The Heart. that was peppered with tears and laughter, Steinman and Meat Loaf first met at a New York a fraught-sounding Meat Loaf made the dramatic theatre in 1973 when the singer auditioned for his

“Thank God that Meat and I knew nothing about making albums, because otherwise it [Bat Out Of Hell] couldn’t have happened.”

Jim Steinman singer best known at the time for her hit Lost In France, but that’s what happened in the early 80s with the hits Total Eclipse Of The Heart and Holding Out For A Hero. On paper his collaboration with gothic rockers the Sisters Of Mercy seemed more surreal still, but his involvement in their production helped to make This Corrosion, Dominion and More into hits.

“This Corrosion is ridiculous,” acknowledged Sisters frontman Andrew Eldritch. “It’s supposed to be ridiculous. It’s a song about ridiculousness.

So I called Steinman and explained that we needed something that sounded like a disco party run by the Borgias. And that’s what we got.”

However, it didn’t always work. In the absence of their regular producer Robert John ‘Mutt’ Lange, Def Leppard famously brought in Steinman to help them with the Hysteria album.

Both sides soon realised that the team-up was doomed to failure. “All that Jim Steinman knew about the studio was that he didn’t like the colour of the carpet,” griped Leppard singer Joe Elliott. In turn, Steinman said he found Leppard “interesting, in a way a scientist finds a really strange sort of insect interesting”.

Like his hero Phil Spector, whose ‘wall of sound’ productions had been a huge influence, in the studio the perfectionist Steinman was in complete control. “There have been very few cases where I’ve been interested in what the artist thinks,” he once admitted. “I mean, I’m not interested in doing what Bonnie Tyler wants to do.

I don’t think she has any idea what she’s doing. She probably just wants to do the housework with the record playing.”

Spector had once called Steinman “a bad clone” of himself. Steinman didn’t care a jot, replying: “To be insulted by Phil Spector is a big honour. If he spits on me, I consider myself purified.”

Steinman threw everything into the records he made. “I would do almost anything for what I create,” he once said with a completely straight face. “I don’t know if I would kill someone, but I would consider it.”

Although his success came mostly with others performing his works, in 1981 he released his own album, Bad For Good. In its original guise as Renegade Angel, the record had been intended as a successor to Bat Out Of Hell, until various issues with Meat Loaf intervened (“He had lost his voice, he had lost his house, and he was pretty much losing his mind,” said Steinman). A somewhat frightening, batshit spoken-word song Love And Death And An American Guitar served as reminder that Steinman played by nobody’s rules except his own.

In 1989 Steinman produced and masterminded the album Original Sin, released under the name Pandora’s Box. It became a cult favourite and nothing more, although Celine Dion later triumphed with a remake of its song It’s All Coming Back To Me Now. Very little is known about Steinman’s private life. It was reported that he married and divorced, although he once claimed: “I’ve never had my heart broken. I’ve never been dumped… but probably because I don’t allow myself to be dumped.”

Some insiders claimed that he kept “vampirelike” hours, and the numerous apocryphal tales about him are fuelled by his larger-than-life attitude towards just about everything. Just as in life, whether visiting restaurants or ordering takeaways at the studio, Steinman always craved a little of all that was on offer.

“One of the funniest evenings I ever had with Jim was at a Mexican restaurant in New York,” recalls musical theatre impresario Andrew Lloyd Webber, who in 1996 worked with Steinman on the musical Whistle Down The Wind. “Because he was so generous he took all six of us there and said to the waiter: ‘We’ll have one of everything.’ When the waiter replied: ‘Are you sure you want one of everything?’ he said: ‘No you’re right, we need six of everything!’”

More recently, Steinman wrote the music and lyrics for Bat Out Of Hell: The Musical.

Back in 2000, Meat Loaf had said such a production was impossible. “It’ll never end up as a stage show,” he protested. “It can’t. I mean, it just won’t.”

“I never intended to do music [for a living],” Steinman once told Classic Rock. “I didn’t think I was a good enough musician. I was gonna do film and theatre, but I figured: ‘This is fun, let’s do this.’

I didn’t want [Bat Out Of Hell] to be just a bunch of songs.

I wanted it to feel like you were entering a cinematic or complete theatrical environment. No one could deal with it. They couldn’t figure out what it would sound like finished.”

Looking back on the huge efforts involved in getting Bat Out Of Hell off the launch pad, Steinman added: “All I can say is that I thank God that Meat and I knew nothing about making albums, because otherwise it couldn’t have happened.”

However, there were no regrets of any sort. “I’ve been called over-the-top,” he told the Washington Post. “How silly. If you don’t go over the top, you can’t see what’s on the other side.” DL

THANK YOU FOR THE MUSIC Colleagues and fans pay tribute.

“Stop. Right. There. Three words [on Paradise By The Dashboard Light] that changed my life forever. Three words that gave me a career in music. Three words penned by the most brilliant, hilarious and unique human being I have ever known. Jim, I will love you forever.”

Ellen Foley “Jim Steinman carved his own path and created a style that others could only hope to follow. I feel privileged to have known him and to have recorded one of his incredible songs [Making Love Out Of Nothing At All]. Legends are not made on Earth, they are created in Heaven!”

Graham Russell, Air Supply “Jim was a legendary songwriter for Meat Loaf and many others. Our hearts and prayers go to his family and friends.”

Scorpions “I learned a great deal from Jim, a unique talent that broke barriers in songwriting. Whilst echoing the magic of tradition he forged a new path, initially with his match made in heaven partnership with Meat Loaf, then with Bonnie and Celine. Jim Steinman’s legacy will live on!”

John Parr “Yesterday we lost a constant in our family’s life and in the world of brilliant music. Rest in musical genius and power Jim Steinman. Total love, gratitude, awe and admiration, always.”

Pearl Aday “He was a brilliant writer, with his own unique style of creating songs. I will never forget him asking me during my days with Meat Loaf: ‘Make your guitar sound like a milkshake!’

RIP, it was always a pleasure to perform your great music.”

Bruce Kulick “Another part of my youth has died, a part of my musical DNA. I adored Jim Steinman as a songwriter. I stole from his oeuvre, all the time. This is another painful reminder to seize the day and follow our hearts, because our days on this planet are limited.”

Tobias Sammet, Avantasia/Edguy

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John Hinch June 19, 1947 – April 29, 2021

Thank you and good night.

Al Schmitt April 17, 1930 – April 26, 2021

New Yorker Al Schmitt’s production credits read like a Who’s Who of rock, including Elvis Presley, Jefferson Airplane, Neil Young, Spirit, Steely Dan, Toto and Madonna. The multiple Grammy winner recorded and mixed more than 150 gold- and platinum-selling releases. Schmitt was 91 years old.

Ralph Schuckett March 2, 1948 – April 7, 2021

After working on Todd Rundgren’s album A Wizard, A True Star, between 1973 and 2018 Ralph Schuckett had four spells as keyboard player with Rundgren’s band Utopia. Carole King, who hired him for her celebrated album Tapestry, described Schuckett as “a sweet guy, a great friend and a very talented cat”. He was 73 at the time of his passing.

Rob Halford and KK Downing have paid tribute to John Hinch, who has died at the age of 73. The drummer played on Judas Priest’s debut album Rocka Rolla.

Halford praised the technique of Hinch as “strong, direct and unique”. Downing described his playing as “faultless”.

Barry Mason July, 12 1935 – April 16, 2021

Lancastrian Barry Mason wrote songs that were hits for Tom Jones (Delilah), Englebert Humperdinck (The Last Waltz), Rod Stewart, Elvis Presley and many more, often in partnership with Les Reid. Mason was awarded an MBE for services to music and won five Ivor Novello Awards. He was 85.

Lew Lewis Died April 2021

Having starting out alongside future Dr. Feelgood singer Lee Brilleaux in the Southside Jug Band, Canvey Islander Lew Lewis played harmonica with Eddie And The Hot Rods, and guested on albums by The Clash, The Stranglers and Kirsty MacColl. Away from music, having served jail time for holding up a Post Office with a fake pistol, bipolar issues were diagnosed.

His death was announced on April 17.

Paul Cunningham January 6, 1969 – April 25, 2021

The former lead singer with British rock band The Atom Seed has died of undisclosed cause at the age of 52.

Formed in 1989, the London-based group released the album titled Get In Line before breaking up in ’93.

“Paul and I shared so many good times together, my thoughts are with his much loved family,” said former Atom Seed bass player Chris Dale.

Lars Ratz 21 February, 1968 – April 18, 2021

Born Lars Ranzenberger, Ratz was the co-founding bassist, keyboard player and co-producer for German powermetallers Metalium. They formed in Hamburg in 1999, and released eight albums before splitting in 2011. He was also a member of Viva and Zed Yago. Ratz, an experienced pilot, died after a home-built aircraft he had been flying crashed. He was 53.

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Paul Oscher February 26, 1947 – April 18, 2021

Born in Brooklyn, New York, Paul Oscher (pictured) played harmonica for Muddy Waters from 1976 to 1982 and also worked with Otis Spann, Hubert Sumlin and Keb’ Mo’, among others. Oscher died at the age of 74 after being hospitalised with covid-19.

Bob Porter June 20, 1940 – April 10, 2021

A member of the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame’s nominating committee, 80-yearold American Bob Porter was a multiple Grammy-winning record producer, discographer, writer and radio presenter.

He died due to complications from cancer of the esophagus.

Les McKeown November 12, 1955 – April 20, 2021 Along with his fellow members of the Bay City Rollers, Les McKeown was among the most popular figures in the music of the 1970s. And yet when called upon to replace founding lead singer Gordon ‘Nobby’ Clark in 1973, McKeown later admitted that the Rollers had not been “high on my list of bands I’d have wanted to join”.

What a life he’d have missed. Sporting obligatory tartan trousers, the Edinburgh quintet notched a string of bubblegum-lite hits including Shang-A-Lang, Summerlove Sensation and the UK chart toppers Bye, Bye Baby and Give A Little Love. The band sold more than 120 million records worldwide.

After quitting in 1978, McKeown re-joined for a number of comebacks, although the band would never match the heights of Rollermania in the mid-70s.

When he was 20 the singer’s path took a dramatic turn for the worse after running

over and killing a 76-year-old woman. McKeown once said that guilt led to him becoming an alcoholic. Several trips to rehab followed.

In recent times he returned to the road with Les McKeown’s Bay City Rollers.

Sweet guitarist Andy Scott said: “We toured with them a few years ago and it was a blast playing the big venues again. Over the years I had got to know Les quite well.”

Midge Ure angrily rued the business decisions that saw the Rollers’ fortunes ebb away, claiming the group were “thoroughly ripped off by everything bad about the music industry”, adding: “They were the biggest in the world for a time but nothing to show for it.”

Cockney Rebel’s Steve Harley posted a backstage photo of himself alongside McKeown from 2017 with the words: “Another friend has died – so sad for Les’s family.” DL

Mike Mitchell April 16, 1944 – April 16, 2021 The guitarist with The Kingsmen, the garage rockers from Portland who souped up Richard Berry’s ballad Louie Louie, transforming it into a global smash, passed away on his 77th birthday. No cause of death was disclosed.

The Kingsmen recorded Louie Louie in 1963, and the single went on to claim the No.2 spot in the US for six weeks. However, it’s very likely that it wouldn’t have been a hit at all had it not been for Boston-based DJ Arnie Ginsberg, who played the song on his program as The Worst Record Of The Week. Listeners let Ginsberg know he was talking out of his hat, and having

reportedly sold a mere 500 copies, it leapt into the US national chart.

Louie Louie became one of the most covered songs of all time.

Some estimates say it was reworked more than 2,000 times, including by Motörhead, John Lennon, Led Zeppelin, The Clash, Deep Purple, Bruce Springsteen and Smashing Pumpkins.

The Kingsmen’s version of Louie Louie actually contains an error: Jack Ely resuming singing too soon after the solo that made Mitchell famous. “I learned to play the guitar because of Mike Mitchell,” said Joe Walsh. “I know every one of his solos, mistakes and all.” DL

Rusty Young February 23, 1946 – April 14, 2021 Norman Russell Young, better known as Rusty, was the pedal steel guitarist, keyboard player and also a vocalist and songwriter for the influential American country rock band Poco. The songs Rose Of Cimarron and Crazy Love, both written by Young, were two of the group’s biggest hits.

Born in Long Beach, California but raised in Colorado, Young had previously been the road manager for Buffalo Springfield, and played lap-steel guitar on one of their final recordings, Kind Woman. After that band broke up, in ’78 he co-founded Poco along with guitarists Jim Messina and Richie Furay, bassist Randy Meisner (who was

soon replaced by Timothy B Schmit) and drummer George Grantham. Meisner and Schmit both went on to join the Eagles. Poco’s line-up changed numerous times, with Young the only constant.

Young retired from touring in 2013, but changed his mind and continued part-time. He was 75 years old when he succumbed to a heart attack.

“From the moment I was called to play with Buffalo Springfield, all through Poco, and now my solo projects, things have just fallen into place,” he said in 2020. “I’ve worked really hard to be the best that I can be, and I think my music is the proof.” DL

New book on Peter Green due in October.

Book Bonanza!

Peter Green, Black Sabbath, AC/DC and Genesis goodies among those on the way The coming months will see the publication of a wide selection of rockrelated books, and also, inspired by the success of Bohemian Rhapsody, The Dirt and Elton John’s Rocketman, a couple of potentially fascinating biopics.

Rufus Publications, who specialise in high-end, luxury books, are set to focus on Peter Green and the Ronnie James Diofronted Black Sabbath. Produced in conjunction with the Fleetwood Mac founder, Peter Green – The Albatross Man is published in October. Three editions will be available, two offering unreleased early recordings from Fleetwood Mac, priced from £95 to £2,000.

Due later in the year (no date yet available) is Sabbath: The Dio Years, A Photographic History, with new interviews with Tony Iommi and Geezer Butler, previously unpublished photos and more.

AC/DC frontman Brian Johnson’s memoir The Lives Of Brian arrives on October 26 via Penguin Books. “I’ve gone from choirboy to rock’n’roll singer, and now I’ve gone and written a bloody book about it,” Jonno says modestly. Classic Rock contributor Paul Brannigan’s Eruption: The Eddie Van Halen Story is published on September 23 by Faber & Faber.

On July 15 from Kingmaker Publishing comes Genesis: 1975 To 2021 – The Phil Collins Years, which includes exclusive interviews with band members and important associates. It’s a follow-on from Mario Giammetti’s acclaimed first volume of the Genesis saga, looking at each album and tour, this time from the Collins era.

Carl Palmer describes ELP, a new book telling the group’s official story in their own words, as “definitive”. Created with the co-operation of the families of Greg Lake and Keith Emerson, it’s due by the end of the year through Rocket 88.

Hachette Books’ Beast: John Bonham And The Rise Of Led Zeppelin, written by CM Kushins (with a foreword by Dave Grohl) is published on September 7.

From reading to watching. Netflix are hot favourites to land a still-in-theplanning film of Kiss’s early years.

Approved by Paul Stanley and Gene Simmons, the script was written by British writer/director Ole Sanders.

Netflix have also announced a film about Joey Ramone, although not a date when it will be available. I Slept With Joey Ramone stars comedian Pete Davidson in the titular role and is based on the memoir of the same title by Mickey Leigh, aka the late singer’s brother Mitchel Lee Hyman. DL 16 CLASSICROCKMAGAZINE.COM

Game Of Thrones star Esmé Bianco is suing Marilyn Manson (real name Brian Warner) for rape, sexual battery and human trafficking. The 38-year-old British actress, known for her role as Ros in GOT, also names Warner’s former manager Tony Ciulla and his company Ciulla Management in her suit, which claims the singer “used drugs, force, and threats of force to coerce sexual acts from her on multiple occasions”.

Hawkwind are set to release a conceptbased new album, Somnia, in September via Cherry Red Records.

Former H.e.a.t. frontman Erik Grönwall and Exodus drummer Tom Hunting have both been diagnosed with cancer. Grönwall, 33, has acute lymphoblastic leukaemia, while Hunting, 56, is undergoing treatment for squamous cell carcinoma. Classic Rock wishes them both a full recovery.

Iron Maiden frontman Bruce Dickinson (pictured) is joining the Heavy Metal Truants in their annual 175-mile bicycle ride from London to the Download Festival at Castle Donington.

Now into its ninth year, the charity ride is taking place virtually.

Organisers hope that the Truants will have raised more than a million pounds in total upon completion.

Dickinson is currently co-writing a screenplay centred on the gig he and his solo band played in Sarajevo in 1994 at the height of the Bosnian War.

Pop Evil The Michigan rockers on circle pits, breakfast cereals, having a Brit drummer, and recording at the Foos HQ. Keep your hipster hubs of New York, Nashville and Los Angeles. Pop Evil founder Leigh Kakaty wouldn’t trade his home turf of Michigan, crediting the Midwest state’s dizzying list of musicians – from Kid Rock to Eminem – for a sound on his band’s sixth album, Versatile, that sweeps up rap-rock, nu metal and more.

We joined Pop Evil’s ebullient frontman and their British-born drummer Hayley Cramer to hear more.

How did the new album go down?

Leigh: My big thing this time was harnessing that demo magic. But then you had covid – we were literally doing the photo shoot as they were shutting down the city. So this album had a whole other element of crazy.

Hayley: The drums were tracked at Studio 606. For me, to be in Dave Grohl’s world, hearing my drums through that awesome Neve desk from Sound City [studio], I was petrified but so honoured.

We borrowed [Foos drummer] Taylor Hawkins’s Rototoms, too.

can flip the songs totally to the left or right. There are so many different genres infused into Michigan, and that’s an influence on how I write. When I was young, we’d go down to the lake, write on acoustics and play rock on the weekend, but maybe in the week we’d be doing the hip-hop thing. Michigan is such a test market for new products in the US – if you want cereal, you come here and you’ll get all the craziest flavours you could ever imagine. It’s the same thing with music.

How difficult was it for a Sussex-born drummer to join a Michigan band?

Hayley: I think that was more scary than being a female going into a male-dominated band. I really felt the [vibe]: “But she’s not from Michigan!”

Leigh: I was such a Michigan purist in the early days, every band member had to be from Michigan. To be in a band now, you have to play two hundred shows a year.

People come and go. Pop Evil was a Michigan boys’ club, but we all loved Hayley. Her audition was basically opening for Disturbed – and she killed it.

“When we getting started we were almost like crusaders of rock.”

What subjects did you write about for this album?

Leigh: With Let The Chaos Reign I wanted to capture the feel of a reckless live show.

I was imagining two guys in a circle pit, blood on their foreheads. All they want to do is have that moshpit hug, which is basically when the crowd comes at each other, almost attacks each other. When you’re six albums deep, the fun aspect can get lost if you’re not careful. Because it is work, it is business. With that song I wanted to remember why I started doing this in the first place.

What’s the significance of the album title, Versatile?

Leigh: We’re one of those bands where we

Your band name – are you actually saying that pop is evil?

Leigh: Yeah. When we were getting started, popular music was giving up on rock and metal. Coming from a country that prides itself on freedom of speech, somehow the rock and metal voice meant a little less, and that just pissed me off. We were almost like crusaders for rock. It was like pop was evil. You’ve gotta remember, I’m a mixed guy – my dad was from India, my mom is Canadian. I didn’t look like the other guys I grew up with. I just didn’t fit in. Rock gave me an identity. HY Versatile is out now via Entertainment One (eOne).

“If there is one thing that unites us all it’s hope and love.”

The Damn Truth

MARTIN BRISSON/PRESS

With the help of producer Bob Rock, the Zeploving Canadians have stadiums in their sights.

bass and drummer Dave Traina. Since then they’ve released two albums independently and toured heavily, including stints supporting ZZ Top and Rival Sons. But it’s Now Or Nowhere, their third album, that could provide their breakthrough. It blows up their heartfelt idealism to arena-sized Can rock music still change the world? Montreal-based four-piece proportions – not surprising when you discover that it bears the touch of The Damn Truth certainly believe so. The band – imagine a fledgling Led heavyweight producer Bob Rock (Metallica, Bon Jovi, The Cult and many Zep fronted by Janis Joplin – are, in their own words, “rock’n’roll hippies”, more). Or rather, two thirds of it does. ardent adherents to those starry-eyed late-60s ideals, of music’s power to “We drove four thousand kilometres in the van from Montreal to spread peace and good vibes.

Vancouver cos he wanted to record in Bryan Adams’s studio FOR FANS OF...

“Touring around the world for the four years up to 2020, you there,” explains Traina. “It was an incredible experience. The get to meet so many different people, and if there is one thing man knows how to get the best performance out of you in that unites us all it’s hope and love,” explains guitarist Tom such a smooth, amazing way. We did six tracks in four days and Shemer. “I believe that love can solve a lot of these problems that booked it again for March 2020 so we could complete the album.” we are having today.”

Then covid struck.

“We’re bombarded with so much negativity,” adds Lee-la “We had a month or two with our heads in our hands, Baum, who supplies those Joplin-esque powerhouse vocals. “It’s mourning the loss of being able to finish the record with Bob,” “We all love the first on social media, the news, TV, everywhere. But I think it’s really Lee-la continues. “But after that we took stock and said let’s try Led Zeppelin album,” important to remember that there is good out there.” and do it ourselves. Both Tom and Dave have studios in the city, says The Damn Truth The pair first met at a festival near the Sea Of Galilee in Israel so as soon as we were allowed back in we finished it off.” bassist PY Letellier.

“It’s got the kind a decade ago. Both were naked at the time. “It was a magical With the album finally out, all that’s left is to get back on the of sound we would night. I was playing my acoustic guitar next to a bonfire,” Lee-la road again. The band played Canada’s first ever drive-in gig last always want to chase remembers. “Then this other long-haired nudist joined me with summer, but found the vibe just wasn’t the same. “It wasn’t loud but we’ll probably his acoustic and we played for about twelve hours straight. That’s never achieve. It just enough,” the singer claims. “I thrive on real live shows.” WS sounds so raw, but where the musical romance started.” the performances Love blossomed further when the pair added PY Letellier on Now Or Nowhere is out now via Spectra Musique/Sony. are just… When you put the record on it just screams through the speakers.”

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After erroneous reports that Whitesnake have a full-blown Christmas record in the pipeline, David Coverdale recently Tweeted: “Nope, [it’s] not an album [but] I am working on a couple of festive ditties. I’m not quite sure how to record with my guys remotely, but it’s definitely worth trying.”

Riches from the rock underground

DUST

Dust, Karma Sutra, 1971.

UK pressing £150.

The members of this New York power trio are more famous for their post-Dust activities. Drummer Marc Bell went on to play in Richard Hell And The Voidoids, before hitting the world stage as Marky Ramone in 1978; vocalist/guitarist Richie Wise went on to produce the first two Kiss albums, among many others; bassist Kenny Aaronson enjoyed a career as an in-demand session player. When you hear the musicianship on display on this album it’s easy to see how they would become so acclaimed as individuals.

The UK pressing of Dust (pictured) has a sleeve design that is sought after by collectors. However, the original US design is perhaps more apt for the hardedged, bluesy psychedelic rock sound of Dust. Distinct UK influences can be heard – Hard Stuff, Deep Purple and Sabbath spring to mind – but the overall feel is definitely American, and Dust sit nicely alongside such US underground rock

Kiss frontman Paul Stanley believes that Iron Maiden belong in the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame, saying in a Tweet: “They have helped spawn an entire genre of music.

What else do you need to do?” The class of 2021 was set to be announced as this issue went to press.

Maiden frontman Bruce Dickinson has gone on record as saying the Hall Of Fame is “vulgar” and “a complete load of bollocks”.

The Red Hot Chili Peppers are the latest act to sell off their music catalogue.

Reports say that Hipgnosis Songs paid them $140 million (approx £100m).

The company recently acquired the music catalogues of artists including Neil Young, Fleetwood Mac and Chrissie Hynde.

‘Hard Stuff, Deep Purple and Sabbath spring to mind.’ greats as Highway Robbery, Truth & Janey, Sir Lord Baltimore, Bang, Cactus and Captain Beyond.

Chasin’ Ladies is a straight-up classic early metal nugget, Goin’ Easy is a nice and sleazy stoner blues acid jam, Love Me Hard is a satisfying, pounding blast so typical of the time. But it’s the 10-minute mini-trip From A Dry Camel that takes the prize for lysergic bliss. Wah-wah guitars lure you into this strange tale, which features cool vocal effects and class musicianship. Every member smokes from the mid-section onwards, most notably Aaronson whose fluid bass lines and improvisations are mind-blowing.

Dust released the highly rated followup Hard Attack in ’72 before disbanding. LD 18 CLASSICROCKMAGAZINE.COM

Steven Wilson (pictured) releases Anyone But Me, an unused song from the recording sessions for his current album The Future Bites on May 12.

It was originally intended as the album’s closing track.

Wilson is currently finishing his first book, due for publication later this year via Little Brown, and also working on two new albums for release in 2022 and ’23.

Deap Vally The duo talk about the joy of teaming up with other musicians, and the meaning behind their new EP’s title.

Following their 2020 Deap Lips collaboration with the Flaming Lips, LA-based alt.rock duo Lindsey Troy and Julie Edwards return with Deap Vally’s new four-track EP. American Cockroach, on which they collaborated with Jennie Vee of Eagles Of Death Metal and Savages bassist Ayse Hassan, reveals a gentler, more complex side to their nature than anything they’ve released in the past.

What can you tell us about the EP’s title, American Cockroach?

Lindsey: At first it was a concept song from the point of view of the cockroach. It wasn’t originally meant to be political, it was just about this cockroach character and how it’s going to outlive us all in a nuclear war. But then it accidentally took on this other meaning. There’s this line in it: ‘Left, right, centre, centre, keep it together’, and that ended up being this great metaphor for how America is so divided.

Julie: Another way to look at the song is when you feel unworthy, when you feel you’re perceived as being this horrible garbage-eating hateful creature. Which we all feel sometimes, like the whole world wants to fumigate you.

all these other people into the mix. It gave us the free pass to let go of the limitations we always put on ourselves. For us spiritually and creatively we needed to have these musical orgies.

You worked with Wayne Coyne on the Deap Lips album. Who else is on your wish list of future collaborators?

Lindsay: Jack White is at the top of the list for me. That would be really cool.

Julie: If someone reached out to us that we hadn’t even thought of, we’d probably be like: “Oh yeah, that would be really fun.”

Lindsay: I’ve always loved that unexpected spontaneous alchemy that happens. Fun surprises can happen when you work with another person.

“We wanted to try experimenting with just letting go of limitations.”

There’s a lot of musical variety crammed into a four-track EP. Was that a deliberate move?

Lindsay: Part of the reason is because of the EP’s collaborative nature. Originally we set out to make a full collaboration album, but covid had happened, everyone was isolating, so we were just like: “Let’s just start putting some stuff out.” We just wanted to have fun and let go of our bootcamp mentality, and try experimenting with just letting go of limitations. We wanted to reinvent a little bit and make it fun for ourselves, so we started inviting

The song Give Me A Sign is more delicate than anything you’ve done before. What can you tell us about it?

Lindsay: I was going through a really rough time when we wrote that song, so they are very personal lyrics. It was a very therapeutic process writing that song.

Julie: It was intended for there to be drums, but then covid hit, we couldn’t go back into the studio. But as time passed, we realised this song was awesome and we didn’t need to develop it further. It has this inherent vibe. It’s a happy covid effect.

You have a full album coming later in the year. What should we expect from that?

Julie: Everything we’re releasing this year comes from a very collaborative place.

Once again it’s going to be the patchwork blanket of vibes and feelings. It’s definitely got some more fun surprises, thematically and sonically. EJ American Cockroach is released on June 18 via Cooking Vinyl.

“It’s going to sound really weird, but I always knew that Brian May and I would be friends.”

Arielle

CAITLIN BRADY/PRESS

She was mentored by Brian May and wants her record to sound like Petty’s. Good start.

in analogue and half digitally – entirely live, with no click track or digital tuning. The result is a sunny, timeless collection of American rock to soothe the soul.

“I hope that future musicians can rely less on the technology and use it Many kids have an imaginary friend, but not many build that as a tool instead of over-polishing things,” she says. “Because it feels more character in the image of one of the world’s most famous guitarists. Fewer than ever that people want something that’s real.” still see that dream come true. And yet that’s what happened to singerIt could have all turned out very differently, had she not fought the songwriter Arielle, who spent her school days telling friends about her entertainment industry for her own identity. Returning to the US after made-up friendship with Brian May. graduating, she pitched up in LA and played with various FOR FANS OF...

Years later, having left her Florida home to study music in the musicians including CeeLo Green. Having signed a bad record UK, she met her hero at a book signing, and Queen’s resident contract, she was encouraged to go down the pop route. When professor has been a close pal and mentor ever since. A stint she voiced her desire to move on to the musical path she follows as guitarist in the London stage production of We Will Rock You now, things got ugly. A financially ruinous and emotionally followed, and now, as she prepares to release her new album, exhausting series of court cases followed, and she lost vast swathes Analog Girl In A Digital World, she has her very own two-tone of her own music. Badly burned by the experience but determined signature guitar in production with Brian May Guitars. to rebuild her life, today she puts out her records on her own label.

“I’d say in the diversity “It’s going to sound really weird, but I always knew that we’d “It’s funny, because I’ve been doing this so long as an unknown of it and the overall be friends,” she says, at her home studio, the prized instrument artist, and I’ve seen things change,” she says. “I’ve tried almost energy maybe Tommy lying alongside her. “He plays guitar and music in a way that every genre. And a lot of that has to do with the fact that I can do

by The Who,” she says of influences.

I understand more than anybody else. I get what he does. So it it. I could pull it off. But it wasn’t something I could sustain long “It’s a concept album made sense to me at a young age that we were friends.” term because it wasn’t authentic. It’s taken me another ten years and it’s telling a story Analog Girl In A Digital World is a concept album about being to come full circle to something that is actually me.” EJ all the way though.

And also the way Pete born into the wrong generation and trying to make it in the Townshend approached Analog Girl In A Digital World is out May 7 via 21st century without going crazy. It’s the product of a modern the guitar and the woman whose heart lies in the 60s and 70s. It was recorded – half songwriting. Sonically Arielle’s own label.

I compare my album to Damn The Torpedoes

by Tom Petty.”

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THE STO RIES BEH IND THE SON GS

Dropkick Murphys I’m Shipping Up To Boston A collision of Celtic punk, legless pirates and the beyond-the-grave lyrics from American folk hero Woody Guthrie, the Boston band’s 2004 US hit was the ultimate drinking anthem.

Words: Henry Yates Photo: Paul Harries

CEASE AND DESIST!

As politically engaged songwriters and Democrat supporters to a man, Dropkick Murphys were understandably bemused when at an Iowa summit in January 2015 Wisconsin’s controversial Republican governor Scott Walker took the stage to the strains of I’m Shipping Up To Boston (“Please stop using our music in any way,” tweeted the band. “We literally hate you!!!”).

“It was a pretty big publicised incident how we reacted to that,” Ken Casey recalls with a smile, “so there haven’t been many more. But if they borrow the song, they hear from us!”

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I

t was 2004, and, for perhaps the first time in his life, Ken Casey of Dropkick Murphys was at a loss for words. As far back as anyone in Boston could remember, the band’s co-founder, co-frontman, bassist and de facto leader had been the city’s best-known mover, shaker and hustler. “I always just felt like I knew everyone in this town,” Casey remembers. “Even before I was in a band, I’d be booking all-ages punk shows at The Rat, which was like our CBGBs. The Boston punk scene was just exploding.”

When they formed in 1996, Dropkick Murphys were protagonists of that same downtown crucible of punk, their rabblerousing punch granting them entry to the scene despite a sound steeped in Celtic folk.

Eight years later their blue-collar work ethic had helped them chalk up four albums and a thousand sweat-drenched shows. “We’d rehearse at seven a.m.,” recalls Casey, “and the borderline-homeless guy who took care of the rehearsal studios would scratch his head and tell us that most people get into music so they didn’t have to work those hours. But it made us feel like we had a real job.” All Dropkick Murphys were lacking was a hit.

But now, as the line-up rumbled through a promising new instrumental that fused malevolent stabs of bass with a light-footed accordion and banjo hook, Casey knew they were within touching distance – if only they could put pen to paper. “James [Lynch, guitarist] had come up with the riff and it was so powerful,” Casey recalls. “But I was just labouring to find a lyric that worked with it.”

The answer came from beyond the grave. By the turn of the millennium, trailblazing American folk singer Woody Guthrie had been dead for more than 30 years. Yet the socio-political power of his work still burned hot, from his endlessly relevant signature tune This Land Is Your Land, to the ‘Arm The Homeless’ graffiti scrawled by Rage’s Tom Morello on to his guitar (a nod to Guthrie’s acoustic, which proclaimed: ‘This Machine Kills Fascists’).

Never shy of a polemic themselves, Dropkick Murphys were heavier than Guthrie but firmly in his lineage.

“The guy spoke up,” says Casey. “He was ahead of his time. I mean, he even wrote a song, Old Man Trump, about Donald Trump’s father being a slum lord. Around the time we were writing that instrumental, we got an invite from Woody Guthrie’s daughter, Nora, who runs the Guthrie Archives. She told us: ‘If my father had been born in your era he would have been playing music like you.’ Which was such a huge honour.”

Nora Guthrie hadn’t called just to pay the band a compliment. “She told us her father had thousands of songs that were never put to music, just pieces of paper torn from notebooks. I said: ‘My God, I’d love to come down to the archives.’ I had to put on special white gloves, and I held these pieces of paper in the palms of my hands like I was holding a newborn child.

“So I’m going through these lyrics, which are deep, political, rebellious, heartfelt. All of a sudden I stumble on I’m Shipping Up To Boston, which is only five lines long.

I was just, like: ‘What the fuck is this?’ It was so out of left field. But within seconds I said: ‘My God – that’s the lyric.’ The words fell right into our instrumental. And the Guthrie estate were ecstatic, because it was giving life to a song that would otherwise have just sat in a folder somewhere.”

Written from the perspective of a peglegged sailor whose limb had been wrenched off in some terrible nautical mishap – with the title repeated four times by way of a chorus – those scant lines of text posed more questions than they answered. “Was he down on the waterfront, looking at the ships?” Casey wonders. “He probably wasn’t actually seeing a peg-legged guy – it’s not like we had pirates in Boston Harbour in 1950.

I really don’t know. But the ambiguity makes it a better song. To me, the words felt lighthearted. And we’ve always had a few songs on every record that don’t take themselves that seriously. I like to think

I’m someone who laughs sometimes, not just the guy who walks around bitching about Donald Trump twenty-four-seven.”

Perhaps the lyric didn’t catch Guthrie at his most poetic or politically engaged.

But the simplicity and repetition, Casey argues, made I’m Shipping Up To Boston even more powerful: there was officially no easier anthem for a St. Patrick’s day crowd to bellow, even after drinking a river of Guinness. “You think about AC/DC, who are one of our favourite bands. If there was a shit-load of noodling and drum fills, it’d lose all its power. And that’s where I’m Shipping Up To Boston got its power too. It was the first time in our career that we ever just left space.”

For its first run-out, in 2004, I’m Shipping Up To Boston had a low-key release on the fourth edition of the Hellcat label’s cult Give ’Em The Boot compilation (“That

“The beauty of I’m Shipping Up To Boston is that it’s only two minutes long. It leaves you wanting more.” compilation was responsible for breaking us in a lot of ways,” says Casey, “so we felt like we couldn’t say no”). But the version that bottled the anarchy – and caught the ear of film director Martin Scorsese, who used it on the soundtrack to his Oscarwinning film The Departed – was the one on the Murphys’ 2005 album The Warrior’s Code. “After that we decided to make a music video with our own bootleg version of The Departed,” explains Casey.

“The ‘police’ and ‘hooligans’ were real.

They’re all friends of ours.”

Five lines might not be much. But, 17 years later, for Casey there’s still nothing like performing I’m Shipping Up To Boston.

“People ask me if I get sick of that song.

No, I never have. The beauty of I’m Shipping Up To Boston is that it’s only two minutes long. It leaves you wanting more.”

Turn Up That Dial is out now via Pias.

Dropkick Murphys: saying a lot with just a few words.

THE FACTS RELEASE DATE November 2004 HIGHEST CHART POSITION Did not chart PERSONNEL Al Barr Vocals Ken Casey Bass, vocals Matt Kelly Drums, vocals James Lynch Guitar, vocals Marc Orrell Guitar, accordion, vocals Josh Wallace Bagpipes Tim Brennan Mandolin, tin whistle, acoustic WRITTEN BY Woody Guthrie (lyrics), Dropkick Murphys (music) PRODUCED BY David Bianco LABEL Hellcat

Paul Gilbert The guitar whiz on Mr. Big, experiencing near-Beatlemania in Japan, the beauty of melody, clean living and coke-head mice.

I

Interview: Polly Glass

nterviewing Paul Gilbert is a bit like trying to catch Tigger, midbounce. But with Gilbert it’s the guitar that he’s wired to.

Instrument in hand, his fingers are never far from the wizardry he’s honed since the 80s with Racer X, Mr. Big, G3, on 16 solo albums, from a busy teaching career and more.

“I’m very well-suited for the apocalypse!” the now 54-year-old declares cheerfully as he reflects on a stay-at-home year, in which his online guitar school has thrived. He also played and recorded all the instruments for his new album, Werewolves Of Portland, a joyous cocktail of from-the-heart melody and jaw-dropping guitar playing, and glide-off-the-tongue titles such as Argument About Pie and Professorship At The Leningrad Conservatory.

Are you a workaholic, or just a guy who’s addicted to playing?

The first metaphor that comes to my mind is a horrible one. They do experiments with mice where they give them cocaine, and the mouse keeps pressing the cocaine button. I’ve never tried cocaine, but music can be like that. If I have a process, and it keeps rewarding me with the pleasure of music, and people smiling at me when I perform, putting food on the table, I’m gonna keep pressing that button. For every success I have there’s a whole roomful of failure.

The trick is not to be stopped by that.

Anyone who thinks of you as a shredder will be surprised by the flavours on Werewolves Of Portland (The Beatles, Queen, The Who…) Well obviously by doing an instrumental record there’s this hole where a singer used to be. The way I was trained as a guitar player as a kid, you back up the singer [guitar], and he sings his thing over there. And so, especially with slide guitar, I started to learn vocal lines. It’s nice to have different voices to play with. If it’s only guitar, or only voice, it’s not as fun as the conversation between the two.

Do you sing for pleasure? Like, around the house?

Well, a lot of the melodies were written while I was washing the dishes. I can’t play guitar while washing the dishes, but I can think, and I can hum. I found if I could do it all in my head, and hold the melody in complete silence, then it was a strong melody. With the songs I’ve written recently, they’re much more hummable, and there’s a real power to that. But not everything has to be hummed.

I like stuff once in a while that goes [plays crazy-fast guitar] that creates an energy. I allow myself those once in a while as a contrast.

How do you feel about the current generation of YouTube guitarists (for example twelve-year-olds tapping at a million miles an hour)?

I think what it comes down to is physical pain that you have to go through to get callouses in a certain part of your finger. As a teacher I have to untangle this so often I can’t believe it. The thing that’s really hard to get by is [that] it’s gonna hurt for a while. I think people who never play loud, with a drummer, don’t reach that point where they don’t care about pain. Once you get over that hump and you’ve got that callous, it doesn’t hurt any more and a lot of things fall into place.

24 CLASSICROCKMAGAZINE.COM

How have you found the experience of being a clean-living guy in an industry where so many people aren’t?

If I was only in Mr. Big, and we only had tours playing the hits, I would need to start drinking a lot more, because a lot of my energy and creative juice happens cos I’m always trying new stuff. Some musicians are really full of talent and ability, and just have to play the same stuff. To be the Eagles and be: “Okay, here we go, Hotel California one more time…” Sometimes you’re crippling yourself with alcohol just to make it interesting.

Mr. Big’s worldwide hit single To Be With You in 1992 made the band massive briefly. What was that like?

It was wonderful, and it also felt completely out of my control! It felt like it had been given to me, and at the same time could be taken away at a whim. I remember the two weeks that To Be With You was a hit, our audience changed to twelve-year-old girls. And then that two weeks was over, and it was like a door slammed and it was guys with jean jackets again. We wrote the song, we played the song, but how people respond to it is in their hands. You can’t predict that.

The fame lasted longer in Japan, though, and the band played stadiums there.

The good thing was it was just there. We would do these tours where we couldn’t leave the hotel cos it was surrounded by fans, and we had to sneak through the kitchen at the train station so we wouldn’t get chased. It was really what you’d imagine, the Beatlemania thing. Then I would get home to Las Vegas and nobody cared, we could barely do a club tour. I could go to the grocery store, no problem.

Lockdown has seen a lot of at-home creativity. You like making things (pedal boards, the animated video for Argument About Pie…). Have you tried anything new?

I had so much fun playing drums. I did get a little drum set over here.

But my main hobby, if I get the time, is melodies. The last one I learnt was a K.D. Lang song. I could do that all day. As a singer I would never want to practise, because it would wear my voice out, and I would get worse every time. With guitar nothing gets worn out, especially with melody. The more you do it, the deeper you get and the more beautiful it becomes.

Your father was a potter. What did you learn about being an artist from him?

My first fantasy about being paid for making something came because one day the gallery owner came – the gallery would pick out pots they wanted and my dad would sell them. Some of these hippo piggy banks that I’d made were sitting on the shelf, and they said: “We’d like a couple of them.” I think I made eight dollars. But sometimes the meaning is that someone likes what you did enough to give you something. I think any human being wants to be seen, and wants someone to look at what you did and say: “Oh, I like that.”

Werewolves Of Portland is out on June 4 via Mascot/The Players Club.

JASON QUIGLEY/PRESS

Paul Gilbert: happiness is a warm guitar.

“For every su there’s a who ccess I have of failure.” le roomful

While there are shining jewels throughout Led Zeppelin’s catalogue, one of their albums shines from start to finish, as close to rock’n’roll perfection as it’s possible to get. In its 50th year, we take an in-depth look at the power, the glory, the beauty and the majesty that is Led Zeppelin IV. Words: Dave Lewis, Milton Mermikides, Ken Sharp, Grant Moon, Jon Hotten, Dave Ling, Siân Llewellyn, Polly Glass, Philip Wilding, Henry Yates

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ey-hey mama, said the way you move/Gonna make you sweat, gonna make you groove…’ By 1971 we had come to expect explosive opening gambits from Zeppelin albums; Good Times Bad Times, Whole Lotta Love and Immigrant Song had been no slouches. But as a statement of intent, Black Dog was something else: a song that seemed to change the temperature in the room, with Robert Plant’s unadorned shriek announcing that what we were holding in our hands – this strange, archaic-looking vinyl set, with its cover images of peeling wallpaper and an old man gathering twigs – was the only record we needed in our lives from now on. Then came Jimmy Page’s deathless, tempodefying riff… and it was off to the races.

With their first three albums, Led Zeppelin had already covered more ground than most bands manage in a career.

There had been the debut’s go-faster and borderline-litigious blues standards. The hard-rock riff encyclopedia of II. The folkrock tumble of III. But it was on IV – or whatever else you wanted to call it – for which the band mostly eschewed the industry studios of London for Hampshire’s Headley Grange, and bent the quirks of that ghostly pile to their own will, that they finally had the head space and omnipotence to become Led Zeppelin in excelsis.

Of course, the music on IV was rooted in the most ancient of musical forms, from The Battle Of Evermore’s trilling, mistshrouded folk to the Bonzo-battered reimagining of Memphis Minnie’s When The Levee Breaks. But with the four members writing, playing and producing out of their skins – and the sessions flavoured by everything from stray mutts to brushes with the supernatural – IV felt like a work that could not have been created by any other band. Zeppelin were now a genre unto themselves, operating with a confidence that ensured even the album’s softer moments were underpinned by swagger.

Fifty years and more than 37 million sales down the line, it’s fair to say that Led Zeppelin IV started the rolling-boulder momentum that made Zeppelin the defining rock band of the early 70s. Yet it’s the musical legacy that endures. You could mount a credible pub argument for II or Physical Graffiti as the pinnacle of the Zep catalogue, but both of those high points fumble the ball at some point, or have tracks you wouldn’t miss if they weren’t there.

IV is, quite simply The One. Then and now, it comes as close to front-to-back perfection as any record in rock’n’roll: a golden run of eight glorious tracks, as hooky as a greatest hits, but with a depth that means you can still – as we have in the pages that follow – squeeze untold juice from, even a half-century later. HY

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Led Zeppelin IV climbed to the No.1 spot on the UK chart on December 4 ,1971, where it stayed for two weeks before being dislodged by Electric Warrior by T.Rex. IV would go on to spend 61 consecutive weeks on the chart.

In America it remained on the chart longer than any other Zeppelin album, although it was kept off the top spot by Carole King’s mega-selling now-classic Tapestry.

Since its release in 1971 Led Zeppelin IV has racked up worldwide sales of nearly 40 million. It’s one of the highest-certified albums in the Recording Industry Association Of America, having attained platinum status 23 times over.

In the UK, an error at a pressing plant resulted in a few pressings of Led Zeppelin IV appearing on the Asylum Records label. This occurred in 1972 when distribution of the Atlantic label was switched to the Kinney stable under the WEA imprint (Warner, Elektra, Atlantic).

A unique and very rare gold-and-black vinyl multi-coloured pressing of the album surfaced in Canada in the mid-70s.

In November 1978. IV was officially released on lilac vinyl in the UK by Atlantic in a limited pressing. Those copies now change hands for up to £100.

The completed and mixed fourth Led Zeppelin album was cut at Trident Studios in London, with more lacquers being made at The Beatles’ Apple Studios in the midsummer of 1971.

Reviewing IV for Rolling Stone, future Patti Smith guitarist Lenny Kaye ended his review with the curt summary that it was “not bad for a bunch of Limey lemon squeezers’’.

Over the coming pages, music academic Milton Mermikides reveals what’s really happening, musically, on Led Zeppelin IV. Milton: Musical evolution, particularly in the rock and popular music genres, tends to happen not by destroying all previous conventions, nor by simply repeating and ‘perfecting’ existing norms.

Rather, there is a balance between the familiar and the new, between the expected and the surprising: an accessible invention.

This ‘Goldilocks zone’ between the boringly conventional and the radically experimental has been dubbed, amusingly, by musicologist Brad Osborn the ‘Spears-Stockhausen continuum’, with Britney Spears and modernist composer Karlheinz Stockhausen representing each end of the spectrum. Revolutionary albums, bands and artists often exhibit just the right blend of familiar influences and original ideas or re-assembling of diverse influences. So it is with Led Zeppelin, who managed to manipulate, develop and subvert familiar rock conventions with a range of unlikely influences of folk, funk, structural and – in particular – rhythmic and metric concepts.

Over the coming pages I analyse the seminal Led Zeppelin IV not in terms of rock journalism, but in terms of how to really understand what is happening musically in each track. Where and what these unconventional and novel twists are amid the expected style, which make this album so influential and enduring half a century after it was made.

BARRIE WENTZELL

CLASSICROCKMAGAZINE.COM 27

Written by: John Paul Jones, Jimmy Page, Robert Plant Run time: 4 minutes 55 seconds Recorded at: Headley Grange, Hampshire, 1971 In a nutshell: Led Zep IV’s colossal, deceptively offbeat opening salvo, with one of Jimmy Page’s most widely celebrated and imitated riffs.

Allegedly inspired by an old labrador at Headley Grange, but basically it’s a song about fucking.

Noted cover versions by: Debbie Harry (1994), Keith Emerson (2008)

‘Ah’s - 39 ‘Oh’s - 10 ‘Yeah’s - 9

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Andy Johns: “Black Dog is a very powerful track. I’m still very fond of that one. It’s proto-typical Zeppelin.

They were really terrific with dynamics. As opposed to a beginning, middle and an end, they’d take you all over the place. I was very proud of the guitar sound.

It was something no one had ever done and I don’t think it’s been done since, actually.

“I came up with the triple tracking idea for the electric guitars on Black Dog. I’d been trying to get a guitar sound that they’d gotten with Buffalo Springfield on the Buffalo Springfield Again album.

“I met Bill Halverson, who did those records about a month before I worked with Zeppelin on the fourth album. I asked him: ‘How did you do that?’ And he explained it to me. You just run the guitar direct and

use a couple of compressors, and you use them as amplifiers so they distort each other. So I suggested to Jimmy that we try that on Black Dog. It’s very difficult to achieve, but after much ditzing about I got it to work and it sounded great. And we double tracked it.

Then I said: ‘Hell, why don’t we triple track this, it sounds so good.’ So we had one more guitar up the middle as well.

“When I was mixing it, normally you’d have all the guitars in the same plane on the faders as the bass and the other instruments. But the apparent level on these things was so hot they were two thirds of the way down on the faders but still loud. Which was great because it means they’re not taking up more space and it leaves room for everything else. It worked rather well.”

BARRIE WENTZELL

John Paul Jones (on the black Labrador at Headley Grange that inspired the title): “There was an old black dog around the Grange that went off to do what dogs did and came back and slept. It was quite a powerful image at the time, so we called one track Black Dog.” Jimmy Page: “He was an old dog. You know when they get the white whiskers round the nose? [When he vanished one night] we all thought he’d been out on the tiles, [because] when he got back he was just sleeping all day. And we thought: ‘Oh, black dog’ – cos we just called him black dog – ‘he’s been out on the razzle.’”

Billy Duffy

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ne day, around 1974/75, I went into a record shop as a snotty schoolboy going: ‘I really like Houses Of The Holy. What else is good

by Led Zeppelin?’ I was advised by a rather sarky shop assistant to go back through their catalogue. I did, and that’s how I happened upon Led Zeppelin IV, or The Symbols Album (oof, the mysticism – so exciting!) All my schoolmates’ older brothers were trying to turn us on to music like Pink Floyd, Black Sabbath, Blue Öyster Cult. We were into Thin Lizzy and Bowie and Alice Cooper, cos we were young teenagers, but Led Zeppelin IV represented that sort of ‘gateway album’ for me.

“Primarily as a guitar player, I just wanted to figure out how in the hell you could play Black Dog. I didn’t really care what it was about, but I wanted to know how Jimmy Page played it.

A kid who lived on my council estate in Manchester used to work in a guitar shop in the centre of town, and he could play Black Dog, and I always hated him for it – I’d just about got all twelve bars of the blues down, maybe. I can play it now, but it took me longer than I hoped.

“Rock And Roll was the one that would get played at every school disco because it’s short, sharp and snappy. I do remember seeing Heart doing Stairway To Heaven very well [at Led Zeppelin’s 2012 Kennedy Center Honors tribute concert, see page 36], with the three remaining members watching, and it was very moving. There was a genuine emotional response, which was nice. At the end of the day it’s a fantastic song, but it’s been worn – the minute you get Wayne’s World, the minute it enters the realm of post-modern irony, it’s difficult to come back. You forget how great it was.

“There was a mystique about the album. Possibly part of what I found attractive about music was that you could use your imagination – ‘Why is he in a cape?’ ‘What does the lantern mean?’ All that.

“I can’t honestly say it was an influence on me – it intimidated me more than influenced me. Just before punk I was into glam rock, Lizzy, Bowie. I could get my head around that stuff and try to painfully work it out on the guitar. But Led Zeppelin IV was on another level. It’s one of the pillars, one of the albums that built the fucking skyscraper that is rock.” GM

John Paul Jones has cited the Muddy Waters track Tom Cat, on his Electric Mud album, as an influence on the riff of Black Dog. ‘’It’s a long rambling riff, and I really liked the idea of writing something like that – a riff that would be a linear journey.’’

Key: A Harmonic language: Mainly blues-based I7 IV7 V7 Tempo: ó81bpm (perceived as 162bpm) Novel features: A significant number of irregular bars in blues-rock context

A

deeply important mechanism in musical expression is rhythmic prediction. When we hear a sequence of sounds, our brains automatically start looking for patterns. We (usually completely unconsciously) rapidly make ‘best guesses’ about how events might proceed, and adapt these ‘predictive maps’ accordingly. A simple example is if we hear two identical pulses a second apart, then we will expect a third a second later. (Figure 1.)

Figure 1: a model of rhythmic prediction.

If it comes, then it confirms (and strengthens) our assumptions. If it doesn’t, we experience some dissonance, surprise, delight or confusion, and then we adapt our models based on this new information and come up with a ‘better explanation’ for what we’ve heard. In this case perhaps that the rhythm is based on a ‘one-second grid’, but some of the pulses are ‘missing’ – essentially a framework with gaps, as illustrated in Figure 2.

Figure 2: an illustration of a predictive grid, where a series of sounding events are perceived in terms of their placement (or gaps within) a regular grid.

To complicate matters, these predictions are happening on multiple ‘time levels’. We predict in terms of the next beat, grouping of beats, bar or higher sectional levels, and these predictions are variously met or thwarted. Which explains how nuanced, complex and varied our responses to musical rhythm are. Figure 3 illustrates this ‘multi-level’ predictive map. The lowest layers may be beats or subdivisions of the beat, leading up to the bar and higher-level groupings of bars.

Figure 3: an illustration of a multi-layered predictive grid.

That brings us to Black Dog. The guitar textures, blues harmonies, vocal tone and drum patterns of this track set us up to expect familiar predictable ‘binary’ beat patterns, four beats in a bar in four bar sections, and the first four bars meet this expectation. The vocal rhythm includes four similar phrases, each starting rhythmically identically, which strongly set up a 4/4 expectation.

However, after the vocal introduction, where we expect a strong fifth bar we get… nothing. This is followed by Page’s three-note guitar upbeat line and then the band entering confidently on (what would have been) beat three. However, it shortly becomes clear that the band are entering on a strong downbeat, and our predictive map has to be reset to accommodate this new information. The following figure illustrates this remapping.

Figure 4: an illustration of the predictive resetting in Black Dog.

In accepting the American Music Award for Led Zeppelin, in January 1995 Page & Plant performed a unique arrangement of Black Dog live from their rehearsals for their then forthcoming world tour.

Robert Plant used a short sample of Black Dog on Tall Cool One, a track on his 1988 solo album Now And Zen.

WILL IRELAND

Black Dog and Rock And Roll were released as singles in the US. The former peaked at No.15 on the Billboard chart, the latter at No.47.

Another notable section occurs from 0:37, where Page and Jones’s three-note motif shifts in placement against Bonham’s steady 4/4 pulse. These sorts of rhythmic disruptions have many terms in musicology (‘partial-bar links’, ‘polymeter’, ‘phasing’ etc), but essentially they create internal dissonances which are processed as surprising, jarring or delicious, depending on your tastes. Black Dog is riddled with such irregularities. They never challenge prediction on the ‘beat level’ – the beats are all similar lengths and appear as predicted – however barlines are often shifted from their expected placement, creating a sense of deception and rhythmic ‘rug-pulling’.

These devices transform what would be a fairly straight-ahead blues-rock tune into an edgy and progressive track, on the boundary of familiarity and disarming.

CLASSICROCKMAGAZINE.COM 29

Written by: Jimmy Page, Robert Plant, John Paul Jones and John Bonham Run time: 3 minutes 40 seconds Recorded at: Headley Grange, Hampshire, 1971 In a nutshell: The party tune. The product of a spontaneous jam session, according to Page, this turbo-charged Chuck Berry romp is the Zeppelin track most guitarists will learn at some point – with varying degrees of success. Easy on the ear and the most ‘commercial’ thing on Led Zep IV, it’s the track you’re most likely to dance to.

Noted cover versions by: Stevie Nicks (2007), Great White (1987), Susan Tedeschi (2005), Van Halen (2004).

BARRIE WENTZELL

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Myles Kennedy

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t was the riffs. It was the singing. It was all of that… but there was something mysterious and dark, and that’s what really drew me in [to Led Zeppelin].

“I was definitely a Page man. The first Zeppelin song I learnt on guitar was Rock And Roll. And I remember it well, because there was a guitar magazine in the grocery store with a transcription. I took it home and it was so empowering. There was this one key lick at the end of the solo – learning that was a big thing. But it’s a challenging song, because that opening drum riff kinda throws you off. I can’t tell you how many bands I’ve played in that had a hard time with that! But that’s what makes it so cool, it’s unpredictable.

“I never had the opportunity to see Zeppelin live. I wish I’d seen the reunion. The only thing I did see was when Robert Plant and Jimmy Page reunited in the nineties. But working with them [in 2008] felt surreal. Jimmy played the Les Paul, and just being in the room with that guitar would have been enough for me. But standing next to him as he’s playing these iconic riffs and the hairs on the back of my neck are standing up… it was like living in some alternative universe” HY

Led Zeppelin IV hit No.1 in the album chart in only three countries at time of release – the UK, Netherlands and Canada. In the US it remained on the chart longer than any other Zeppelin album, although it failed to knock Carole King’s mega-selling Tapestry off the top spot.

Rock And Roll was created in a matter of minutes out of a jam session with Rolling Stones mentor Ian Stewart on piano. John Bonham played the intro of Little Richard’s Keep A Knockin’, and Page added a riff.

Fifteen minutes later they had the nucleus of the track.

In 1991 an all-star line-up under the name the Full Metal Rackets released a version of Rock And Roll for the charity Rock Aid Armenia. It featured The Who’s Roger Daltrey, Steve Harris and Nicko McBrain from Iron Maiden, FM’s Andy Barnett and tennis stars John McEnroe and Pat Cash.

Plant’s mention of ‘the book of love’ in the second verse of Rock And Roll is a reference to doo-wop group The Monotones’ 1958 US hit of the same name.

Andy Johns: “Rock And Roll happened really quickly. One minute there was no music, and then all of sudden they were doing that song. That song was difficult to record because Bonzo was leaning on his hi-hat so hard. I remember there was trouble mixing the guitar on the out section. Jimmy kept calling me up and going: “You’ve gotta mix the end again.” And I ended up mixing the end of that, the final one he accepted, in a different studio, Olympic. A different room altogether from where we mixed it. I thought, well, this idea is not gonna work, it’s a different building. But I edited it together and Jimmy couldn’t hear it was an edit at all so then he was happy.”

Key: A Harmonic language: Blues I7 IV7 V7 Tempo: ó170bpm Novel features: Metric fake-out; (Unintended) Syncopation; Tresillo and Double Tresillo grouping dissonance; Metric and rhythmic diminution.

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ed Zep IV’s second track shares the key, harmonic language and many of the stylistic features of Black Dog, but again subverts them with some sophisticated rhythmic and metric devices.

These don’t include the irregular bars found in Black Dog (although there is the illusion of one), but they still create some challenges to the listener despite the familiar context.

The first is the most infamous (and for many it’s quite bewildering), John Bonham’s solo drum intro. The playing is neither overly complex nor abstract, but it has tripped up countless listeners, publishers and even professional musicians in the last 50 years.

Here is the issue: we hear from the outset a rapid and syncopated drum groove, but it is steady and accessible with a clear pulse and meter. However, when we get to the end of the fourth bar, and where we would expect a big pay off on the start of the fifth bar, we get what sounds like an extra beat and a half (or three eighth-notes) before the guitars and bass enter confidently. Is this section actually four and three-eighths bars long? Listeners tolerate (or shrug off) this surplus rhythm by conceptualising it, as many publishers do, as four bars of 4/4 and one bar of 3/8.

Fig 1: A common mishearing – and (ludicrous) transcription – of the intro to Rock And Roll

Fig 2: Bonham’s internalised conception of the Rock And Roll intro

This sort of dissonance that occurs at the beginning of a track is termed ‘initiating dissonance’, or more colourfully ‘metric fake-out’, where our presumptions about the prevailing meter are thwarted. These are quite common, since we are yet to build a predictive grid in which to understand our rhythms, and musicians even deviously construct such traps.

However, in this case there is no intended sabotage. When the drums start we naturally assume it to be the first beat in the bar (and this interpretation is supported by the strong first hit).

It is, however, a three subdivision ‘upbeat’ preceding the first bar. In this interpretation everything falls into place (see Figure 2), like an optical illusion flipping.

If you’ve not heard it this way before, then it can take some tries. But one way to lock in this hearing is to match it to Chuck Berry’s guitar intro to Johnny B. Goode, which maps to the rhythm very closely – and may well be the inspiration to Bonham’s into (given the song title). This mishearing is a by-product of starting with solo drums, and Bonham’s musical choice of using an upbeat and syncopation, not a ‘muso’ deception.

A

nother interesting device in Rock And Roll occurs on the structural level. The entire track here is essentially a standard blues form. After the drum intro we hear a 12-bar blues in A, which is used for instrumental breaks throughout the track. What happens elsewhere in the verse-chorus sections is exactly the same form except it is stretched to double its length. If a chord lasts two bars previously, it now lasts four bars, and so on, in a process known as ‘rhythmic augmentation’, which is an inventive way of creating structural variation from limited material.

In spite of these devices the track is strictly 4/4 throughout, but one other spice is added within this backdrop: ‘grouping dissonance’ occurs when two or more musical layers disagree in how rhythmic structures are grouped. There are countless ways this can be done, but perhaps the most common in rock (and in fact all global music based on dance forms) is known as the tresillo, which is when eight rhythmic units are subdivided into groups of 3 + 3 + 2 (= 8). This momentarily implies a grouping of three before surrendering to the binary landmark. A spicier version (used, incidentally, in Led Zeppelin’s Kashmir) is known as the double tresillo. This is where the groups of three hold out even longer before relinquishing to the next ‘binary landmark’ of 16 (3 + 3 + 3 + 3 + 2 + 2) creating a greater rhythmic itch.

Fig 3: tresillo and double tresillo patterns.

The chorus break of Rock And Roll savours these devices, using a tresillo (with each hit starting with the word ‘been’) immediately followed by a double tresillo (with hits starting with ‘lone(ly)’). They each last two bars, which means that the 16-unit double tresillo has to run through its sequence twice as fast as the eight-unit tresillo. This rhythmic ‘crunching’ is known as ‘rhythmic diminution’, a mirror – and microcosm – of what occurs with the 12- and 24-bar blues forms.

The tresillo-(accelerated) double tresillo rhythmic framework in the chorus break of Rock And Roll.

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Written by: Jimmy Page and Robert Plant Run time: 5 minutes 51 seconds Recorded at: Headley Grange, Hampshire, 1971 In a nutshell: A big folk-fest liberally dusted with Lord Of The Rings references. Mandolin lines and acoustic guitars sit alongside lyrics about dragons and ringwraiths and the like, while Fairport Convention singer Sandy Denny joins in on guest vocals.

Noted cover versions by: The Lovemongers (1992), Jaz Coleman & The London Philharmonic Orchestra (1997), Deborah Bonham (2001).

Led Zep with Sandy Denny, who sings on The Battle Of Evermore.

Horses (Battle Of Evermore) Dragons (Battle Of Evermore) Songbird (Stairway) Owls (Four Sticks)

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Andy Johns: “I remember Battle of Evermore was sort of a sittingaround-the-fireplace thing. I still have a fond spot in my heart for that song. It’s so minimalistic and yet it had such a gorgeous sound to it. I’m also very proud of the way the fade happens at the beginning. That was my idea. Sandy Denny came in and sang on that later. That was done at Island. She was just a treat.”

John Paul Jones plays a mandolin on The Battle Of Evermore and also on Going To California. He noted that he had taught himself to play the instrument by using a copy of Teach Yourself Bluegrass Mandolin.

Key: Am (mixed mode) Novel features: Modal mixture, minimalist texture.

Tempo: ó71bpm

T

his track introduces a wholly different harmonic language to the album (one, as we will see, that it shares with Stairway To Heaven). It also presents a hypnotic and minimalist texture of an interlocking mandolin and acoustic guitar as the entire accompaniment, an unusual restraint for 70s rock.

Here the tonality of the track is centered on an A-minor chord. However, what is unusual is that the chords and scale material are not constrained to the typical notes of the A-minor scale. Rather, the notes of A-minor (A, C and E) act as a stable pivot, around which the other note names (B, D, F and G) can vary. While the B and G are used as passing tones the F and D are ‘mobile’, occasionally changing to F# and D# respectively.

In doing so, some unusual harmonies and three different minor modes are built on the same root; most commonly in this piece it’s A Dorian (A B C D E F# G ), then A Aeolian (A B C D E F G), and fleeting moments of the beguiling A ‘Aeolian #4’ (A B C D# E F G). The pathways to create these modes are shown below (for completeness, we’ve also included ‘Dorian #4’ which is possible in this system, but not selected by Page).

The Battle Of Evermore was performed live on the band’s 1977 US tour, with John Paul Jones taking care of Sanny Denny’s vocal parts.

Other vocalists who have filled Sandy Denny’s shoes in providing vocals for The Battle Of Evermore include Najma Akhtar in the Page & Plant Unledded TV filming in August 1994, and Alison Krauss on the Raising Sand tour with Plant in 2008.

The lyrics for The Battle Of Evermore were said to have been inspired by a book Robert Plant read about the Scottish Independence Wars.

Modal pathways in The Battle Of Evermore This use of ‘modal mixture’ and type of scale construction can be found in a range of global music cultures (including Carnatic and Eastern European) as well as the compositional styles of Ravel, Bartok, Satie and Zappa, but are refreshing to hear in this context.

BARRY PLUMMER

On 9 August 2008 Robert Plant performed The Battle Of Evermore with Fairport Convention at the annual Cropredy Festival. Sandy Denny’s parts on this occasion were sung by Kristina Donahue.

On the inner sleeve of the album, Sandy Denny is represented by an additional symbol of three connected pyramids. Hers are the only female vocals on any Led Zeppelin record.

Robert Plant: “If it suffered from naivety and tweeness – I was only twenty-three – it makes up for it in the cohesion of the voices and the playing.

“It’s really more of a playlet than a song. After I wrote the lyrics, I realised I needed another completely different voice as well to give the song full impact. So while I sang the events in the song, Sandy answered back as if she was the pulse of the people on the battlements.

Denny was playing the town crier urging people to throw down their weapons.”

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Written by: Jimmy Page and Robert Plant Run time: 7 minutes 58 seconds Recorded at: Headley Grange, Hampshire; Sunset Sound, LA; Island, London In a nutshell: The big one. The one even non-fans of Zeppelin know, in name if nothing else. An emotional roller-coaster of a track, and a devastating tour de force of light and shade, folk textures and hard rock. Since its release, Stairway has been immortalised by countless imitations, an infamous moment in Wayne’s World, and top spots in more ‘Greatest Songs Ever’ polls than most of us have had hot dinners. There’s also that guitar solo.

Noted cover versions by: Dolly Parton (2002), Frank Zappa (1991), Mastodon (2019), Rodrigo Y Gabriela (2006).

BARRIE WENTZELL

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Jimmy Page: “I would invariably do guitar solos at the end, once the finished vocals and any overdubs were already on.

Under the circumstances here, there’s a bass, an electric, 12-strings, recorders, a whole manner of things. I always put the solo on at the end because you’ve really living the track by then, and being the producer you’ve already supervised all the overdubs that have already gone on.

“I basically got my Telecaster out to do that solo. Even though I’d been playing Les Pauls, I wanted to get that bite of the Telecaster on it. It was the same Telecaster that I’d played on the first album, the one Jeff Beck had given me that I’d used in The Yardbirds. A bit of a magical guitar, really.

“The solo was done very quickly. I just said: ‘Roll it’, took a deep breath – that’s what I usually do – and then go. I had a couple of cracks at it, because you didn’t have as many options as you would have now. I worked out how I was going to actually come into it, the first two or three notes, but after that I didn’t work it out, I just played it.

“It’s ad-libbed just as much as it would have been in any of the live shows. After the recorded version was laid down on record the solo would remain in a similar vein live, but not exactly the same. I was constantly changing it, mutating it, like we did with all the songs. That doesn’t mean I ever surpassed the one on the record. It is what it is and you can tell that it’s just flying. It’s not a laboured solo, it’s not something that’s worked out, written down and read, it’s more like a stream of consciousness.”

Key: A-mimor (mixed mode) Novel Features: Chromatic bass line, Modal Mixture, syncopation, long scale form, irregular sections Tempo: 70-104bpm

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immy Page claimed in a BBC interview that Stairway To Heaven was written to take the listener on a “journey” that grew organically “layer upon layer” – it would “start with a fragile exposed guitar” and then “keep opening up” until it “accelerated on every level”.

Indeed, in contrast to prevailing rock production, the tempo changes markedly (although smoothly) throughout the course of the piece (within the range of 70-104bpm). In terms of arrangement there is also a sense of restraint, pacing of material and large-scale structure.

In typical rock and pop arrangements, we are presented with all its constituent elements (e.g. verse/chorus/bridge with any additional material based on these), often within a couple of minutes; we know what will make up the bulk of the track. In Stairway, however, the drums don’t even enter until 4:18 (a longer duration than the entirety of most rock songs, and past the halfway mark of this track).

The guitar solo and ‘wind on down the road’ section introduces significant and dramatic new musical material to the track, a good four fifths into its duration. This sort of device – when a new, energetic section is introduced at the end of a composition – has been termed a ‘thematically independent terminal climax’ (The Beatles’ Hey Jude is a classic example) and is a sophisticated twist of conventional rock/pop song form.

Other formal devices of note are that amid all the predictable binary length sections (8/16 bars), in the ‘makes me wonder’ interludes at 3:54 and 4:41, an extra bar is added, creating a sense of breadth and a softening of predictability. The introduction to the guitar solo offers another rhythmic challenge, which – similar to the introduction to Rock And Roll – although in 4/4 has been often misheard and mistranscribed. The guitar “fanfare” (as Page has called it) entry at 5:34 features three chords. Because the third is hit so hard it is tempting to hear it as the start of the bar. However, if that is done the listener (and transcriber) gets into metric trouble down the line and has to ‘reset’ to make sense of the start of the guitar solo. This is another example of ‘unintended’ mishearing as a result of syncopation. The guitar entry in fact starts on the down beat, and the third chord is a strongly articulated off beat (the definition of syncopation). Even knowing this, it can take some effort to hear it as intended, and demonstrates the level of syncopation in the band’s arrangement and musical instincts.

There are two harmonic dialects at play here:

Led Zeppelin’s first live performance of Stairway To Heaven was on March 5, 1971 at the Ulster Hall Belfast on the opening night of their spring UK tour.

That night Page performed it on a newly acquired Gibson EDS 1275 double-neck guitar.

Stairway was first heard on the radio on April 4, 1971.

It was broadcast during their live appearance on John Peel’s In Concert show on Radio 1. The track would go on to rack up some 10 million plays on radios around the world over the next 50 years.

Having not performed the song since the 1988 Atlantic Records reunion, in November 1994 Page & Plant performed a rare truncated version of Stairway To Heaven on a Japanese TV show. They would next perform it at Led Zep’s O2 reunion show on December 10, 2007.

The sheet music for Stairway To Heaven has sold more than a million copies, making it the biggestselling sheet music in rock history.

The typeface that the lyrics of Stairway To Heaven are printed in on the inner sleeve was designed by Barrington Colby, who also drew the hermit.

The 1992 album The Money Or The Gun: Stairways To Heaven is a collection of 22 obscure artists covering the song in a variety of styles, including Beatles, B52s and Doors-like arrangements. This idea originated from the Andrew Denton Australian TV show.

Stairway To Heaven has been much covered over the years. The many versions include those by Dolly Parton, Elkie Brooks, Frank Zappa, Mary J Blige and Far Corporation, the latter having enjoyed a UK top 20 hit with the song in 1985.

1) The solo guitar introduction (which Page calls a “poor man’s boureée by Bach”) is an example of a ‘harmonised chromatically descending bass line’. This may be placed in the category of a ‘lament bass’ – a device that has been employed for over 300 years in opera, concert, jazz and rock/pop. Incidentally, Led Zeppelin use the same device in Babe I’m Gonna Leave You. Here, Page builds chords on top of a bass line that descends fret by fret from A to the implied dominant note E. This indeed gives a Baroque flavour to the track (which Page calls ‘Medieval’) – aided by John Paul Jones’s suggestion and performance of coupling it with recorders.

2) Elsewhere the track delivers an organic growth with the use of ‘modal mixture’ – similarly to that employed in The Battle Of Evermore. Some subtle changes of harmonic colour are created by the use of chords from both A Aeolian (A B C D E F G) and the more bright mode of A Dorian (A B C D E F# G). In fact all the chords in this entire piece (aside from the second chord of the introduction) belong to either A Aeolian or A Dorian, or both. By using the common chords to both modes, the piece is able to subtly ‘reach out’ into either Aeolian or Dorian to create different harmonic flavours without jarring or fussy modulations. The concept is illustrated below.

A Aeolian

F

Scale

ABCDEFG

A Dorian

F#

F

Am D A5 C G FÂ7 Dsus4 D/C Chords An illustration of Stairway To Heaven’s modal language – the intersection of A Aeolian and A Dorian in terms of scale notes and chords

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Geddy Lee On the impact of Led Zeppelin IV and the greatest guitar solo ever.

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John Paul Jones, Robert Plant and Jimmy Page at the 35th Annual Kennedy Center Honors Gala in Washington, DC, December 2, 2012.

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n December 2, 2012 when Led Zeppelin received the Kennedy Center Honors from President Barack Obama, the special gala concert included an emotional performance of Stairway To Heaven by Heart’s Ann and Nancy Wilson with Jason Bonham on drums, which had Robert Plant choking back tears.

Nancy Wilson: “Oh my god, no pressure, right?! [laughs] Jimmy, Robert, John Paul, a few dignitaries, the President, the First Lady. Good Lordy! It was one of those moments where your professionalism has to be there. You have to have the most focus of your life. Before we went out there, I had to get my fingers really warmed up. It was winter, and it was cold and drafty backstage. You can’t play Stairway to Heaven with cold fingers in front of Jimmy Page!

“When we walked out, Ann and I gave each other a really long look and took a deep breath. I had to start all by my little

old self. I thought: ‘Okay, I’ve played this song all my life and I know how it goes.’

Of course, my knees were shaking. But once Ann started singing, I thought: ‘We’re in!’ [laughs].

“We didn’t see the broadcast until a few weeks later and couldn’t see what was going on in the balcony. I think a lot of the emotion between the guys was not just about the song itself, but also us having Jason Bonham on the drums. He was the little kid who grew up around Led Zeppelin’s practice rooms. And he played with Heart for quite a while. Then the reveal of the smaller choir, the larger choir, then the orchestra. It was really well put together. If anybody deserved a tribute like that, it’s Led Zeppelin.

“At the dinner afterward, each member came up to us. Plant was like: ‘Oh my god, I’ve grown to hate that song so much because everybody murders it so badly.

But you guys did great!’ Then Page told me: ‘You played that so well.’ And I just kind of swooned. What a night.”

No pressure: Nancy Wilson playing Stairway… at the Kennedy Center Honors Gala.

GETTY GETTY x2

had the pleasure of seeing them on the Zeppelin IV tour at Maple Leaf Gardens. If I’m not mistaken, they opened with Black Dog, and I remember being completely blown away by its heavyocity. It’s a great riff song, but to have the confidence to play that fucking riff and just let it draw out, and then Robert Plant steps up and does his lyric thing back and forth. I mean, nobody did that. Nobody had the courage to do that.

“That wasn’t the first time I saw them, that was August 18, 1969. They were doing two shows. We were at the first show.

I went with John Rutsey and Alex [Lifeson]. It was general admission. We lined up for hours. We got in and we sat in the second row. And I swear they didn’t walk out on stage – they floated out. They literally brought the house down, because by the end of the night there was plaster falling from the ceiling.

“I remember when the first album dropped and we waited at our local Sam The Record Man store in Willowdale, grabbed the record, ran to my house, put it on and sat on my bed freaking out over Communication Breakdown. They were a huge, huge influence on us. We wanted to be them instantly. But their stuff was hard to play. We tried a number of Zeppelin songs when we played in the bars, but we felt we couldn’t pull them off. We did have Livin’ Lovin’ Maid in our set for a while though.

“On one hand you’ve got Stairway To Heaven – that and [Pink Floyd’s] Comfortably Numb vie for the greatest guitar solo ever recorded. Then you’ve got what was probably the biggest hit on the record, Rock And Roll, and that might be my least favourite Zeppelin song. It’s too simple for me, too commercial. I just never dug it. Then a song like Battle Of Evermore, magical. And the drum sound on When the Levee Breaks, the sound drummers tried to copy for generations – and they’re still trying to copy it.

“The phrase ‘heavy metal’ didn’t suit Zeppelin. It didn’t suit them because they were so much more than a heavy metal band. Yeah, they had a sound that constantly surprised. They used influences and they took chances that other heavy metal bands just would not conceive of, maybe sparked by Robert Plant’s lyrics. He had that Tolkienesque majesty about his lyrics, and people don’t like that about his writing, but I do. I love the imagery that he uses. And it is the combination of the way Jimmy’s acoustic guitar is used and the presence of that blues background. It gives their music much more depth than your average heavy metal band.

“You just go down the list: Going To California, beautiful song, amazing. Misty Mountain Hop, I love that song. You just say the titles aloud and you can hear the songs. If I had to pick one song… it’s got to be Stairway, obviously. Though it’s hard to choose between that, When The Levee Breaks and Black Dog. “I remember when Page & Plant were touring Walking Into Clarksdale and they came to Toronto. Someone kept calling our office saying they were Robert Plant and they needed to speak to me. No one believed it, but turns out it was him. And we were on hiatus after Selena [Neil’s Peart’s daughter] had passed away and we were not in a good place. I called Robert back, and he wanted us to come to the show, and I was pretty down in the dumps at that point. And he said no, come to the show, we’ll talk. He understood what was going on with the band.

I remember him saying: ‘You’ve got to re-join life, and sooner is better than later. So get your ass down here.’ So I called Alex up and said we’re going to see Page & Plant. And they were totally awesome. They were so nice. There’s nothing better than meeting someone you admire for so many years and so many reasons and finding out they’re true gents.” PW

Andy Johns: “We recorded Stairway To Heaven at Island [studios] and I remember the tracking quite well. In those days it was unusual in as much as we tracked the song without a bass; it was drums, Jimmy playing an acoustic and John Paul was playing an upright Hohner piano. I put a lot of bottom end on that so there’d be some bottom end to work with. It was a beautiful track and I could see it had dynamics. I thought: ‘Boy, this is gonna be fun.’ Then John Paul put the bass on. Then we put on the electric rhythm. When we went to do the electric twelve-string the song really started to come alive. Jimmy would use a 12-string quite often through his Vox AC30 amp, which has a very electric, distorted kind of sound. I said to Jimmy, “Why don’t we record this direct?”

So that’s why the 12-string has that bell like quality. It wasn’t difficult to get a good guitar sound out of Jimmy. These days when you’re doing guitar overdubs I can spend the first week or two searching around to find the three or four basic sounds one needs. But Jimmy would just show up, plug in, I’d stick a mic on it and it always sounded pretty good.

“I remember Jimmy had a little bit of trouble with the solo on Stairway to Heaven.

He hadn’t completely figured it out.

Nowadays you spend a whole day sometimes doing one thing. Back then, of course, we never did that. They were a very quick band. We never spent a very long time recording anything. I remember sitting in the control room with Jimmy, he’s standing there next to me and he’d done a few passes and it wasn’t going anywhere. I could see he was getting a bit paranoid, and so I was getting paranoid. I turned around and said: ‘You’re making me paranoid.’ And he said: ‘No, you’re making me paranoid!’ Then: bang!

On the next take he ripped it out. Of course, it’s a really wonderful solo. Pagey was just unbelievable.”

Despite pressure from Atlantic Records, Stairway To Heaven was never released as a single, although in 1972 it was pressed as a promo single in the US for radio stations.

BARRIE WENTZELL

In 2016 a Los Angeles jury ruled in favour of Page and Plant in a claim that in writing Stairway To Heaven they had plagiarised an instrumental called Taurus by American band Spirit.

At the time of Led Zep’s O2 reunion show in December 2007, download sales of Stairway helped take the song to No.37 in the UK chart.

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Written by: Jimmy Page, Robert Plant and John Paul Jones Run time: 4 minutes 39 seconds Recorded at: Headley Grange, Hampshire, 1971 In a nutshell: The tasty, hooky opener of side two, inspired by the ‘Legalise Pot’ rally in Hyde Park in 1968, at which students and the police clashed over marijuana possession (hey, it was the 60s). Built on a single hook that burrows into your head and refuses to leave, it’s possibly the song on Led Zep IV that you almost forget, then put on and promptly remember how good it is.

Noted cover versions by: Glenn Hughes (2006), Jimmy Page & The Black Crowes (2000)

Having recorded more than enough songs for a single album, at one point the band considered releasing a double album, and Page even toyed with the idea of issuing the album as four separate EPs. Three songs recorded at the fourth album sessions – Night Flight, Boogie With Stu and Down By The Seaside did not make the final cut and were held over.

They were eventually released on the 1975 Physical Graffiti double album.

Black Dog, Rock And Roll, Going To California, Stairway To Heaven and Misty Mountain Hop were all regularly performed live some months before the album’s November 1971 release.

Misty Mountain Hop was covered by 4 Non Blondes on the 1995 official Led Zeppelin tribute album Encomium. The album also included a version of Four Sticks by the Rollins Band.

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BARRIE WENTZELL

Andy Johns: “There was such variety on Led Zeppelin IV. People tended to do that a little more back then. Albums would have a lot of variety on them. Even good artists today think, ‘this is what our fans want, we’re good at that’. So they make three or four albums in a row that are almost interchangeable. Back then, the artists that I was working with like Led Zeppelin and the Stones – their albums were very eclectic in a way – there’d be a really nice variety. It’s like writing a set list. The running order of an album was really quite important; you could really affect the way the album felt by the running order.”

Key: A (mixed mode) Novel features: Homorhythmic texture, chromatic parallelism, polymetric implication in melody, ‘embellished’ mixolydian Tempo: 132bpm

A

lthough this track is in the classic rock guitar-friendly key of A and demonstrates a general blues harmonic language, it distinguishes itself from the rest of the tracks on the album in some fundamental approaches:

1) It employs an example of homorhythmic melodic texture. Most rock and pop arrangements exhibit what can be termed ‘melody-dominated texture’, where a melody is foregrounded and ‘floats’ above an accompaniment that provides rhythmic and harmonic context.

In the main melody here, however, the accompaniment and melody are more unified, and the guitars and keyboards join the voices in a co-ordinated rhythm. This ‘block chord’ approach stands out to the listener even if they can’t identify its mechanism.

2) Furthermore, this homorhythm has an implied ‘grouping dissonance’ similar to the tresillos of Rock And Roll. Here the fabric of the melody is made up of nothing more than three one-beat notes. These are repeated against the 4/4 meter. However, since these three beats don’t line up against the four in the bar, they slip behind and ‘phase’, creating the feeling that there are two meters happening at once (a ‘polymetric implication’). You can see below how the top notes of the melody land on different beats (2, 1 ,4, 3). This means the same three-note motif holds different rhythmic meanings, drawing a hypnotic expression from the simplest idea.

Polymetric implication in the melody of Misty Mountain Hop 3) While melodies are commonly harmonised diatonically (i.e. with chords derived from the key), here block chords from the keyboards and guitar harmonise this melody in what’s called ‘parallelism’. Parallel chords remain the same regardless of their position (you can think of a fixed chord shape on guitar being moved up and down the fretboard, which is exactly what happens here). In doing so they very often ‘break’ the key, introducing chromatic deviations.

In this case the prevailing A Mixolydian of the track (A B C# D E F# G) is embellished with a C natural and D# and G#, creating a swirl of modal colours to the track’s main melody.

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BARRIE WENTZELL

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The fourth album’s title is comprised of four symbols. The symbols for John Paul Jones and John Bonham were selected from Rudolph Koch’s The Book Of Signs. Jones’s is a single intersecting circle said to symbolise a person who possesses both confidence and competence, as it’s difficult to draw accurately.

John Bonham’s symbol of three interlocking rings is said to represent the triad of mother, father and child. (It was also – somewhat appropriately, given the late drummer’s penchant for alcoholic beverages – the logo for Ballantine beer.)

Robert Plant’s symbol was his own design, although it can also be traced to a book titled The Sacred Symbols Of Mu by Colonel James Churchward. The feather in a circle

representing the feather of Ma’at – the Egyptian goddess of justice and fairness – and is the emblem of a writer.

•

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Jimmy also designed his own symbol. Often referred to as ‘Zoso’, there have been various theories put forward surrounding its origin.

Some point to it being used as early as 1557 in representing Saturn. It has also been noted that it’s made up of astrological symbols for Saturn, Jupiter and perhaps Mars or Mercury.

The four symbols were first introduced to the media via a series of teaser press adverts placed in the music papers in the weeks leading up to the release of Led Zeppelin’s fourth album – each depicting a particular symbol alongside a sleeve of a previous Zep album.

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When it was first released, the album appeared in the music press under various titles including The New Led Zeppelin Album, Led Zeppelin IV, Four Symbols and Runes. Some music papers did make the effort to reproduce the actual symbols themselves in their chart run-downs.

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The symbols have also lingered large within the presentation of the three surviving members: Page and Plant using their linked symbols as the logo for their 1995/6 tour, Jones incorporating his into the artwork of his 1999 solo album Zooma, and Plant used the feather-in-a-circle design on the back cover of his 2010 Band Of Joy album. Jimmy Page used the enduring Zoso image as the embossed cover of his deluxe book Jimmy Page

By Jimmy Page.

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Written by: Jimmy Page and Robert Plant Run time: 4 minutes 42 seconds Recorded at: Island Studios, London, 1971 In a nutshell: Chances are if there’s a track you forget about on Led Zep IV it’s Four Sticks, but that’s no poor reflection on it’s heady, quizzical charms, simply that it’s on an album with Stairway, Black Dog and… well, all the others. It was named thus because John Bonham actually played it with two drum sticks in each hand. That in itself tells you a lot.

Noted cover versions by: Soulfly (2010), Robert Plant And The Strange Sensation (2006)

Number of ’baby’s in…

Black Dog - 7 Rock And Roll - 3 Bat The tle Of Evermore - 0 Stairway To Heaven - 0 Misty Mountain Hop - 5 Four Sticks - 18 Going To California - 0 When The Levee Breaks - 1

BARRIE WENTZELL

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Key: E (mixed mode) Novel features: non-isochronic 5/8 and 6/8 meter, ‘Mixodorian’ mode Tempo: dotted crotchet ó73bpm, crotchet ó110bpm

A

s we’ve seen – despite listener (and transcriber) mis-hearing – the vast majority of this album (and Led Zeppelin’s output) is in straight-up 4/4 time. It is, however, made more dissonant with significant use of syncopation, grouping dissonance and irregular section length. Black Dog includes irregular length bars, and these result in a shifting and ‘resetting’ of bar lines. However, the beat itself – the underlying heartbeat of the music – is always regular. It has an isochronic (‘equal time’) beat.

Four Sticks, conversely, is a clear example of non-isochronic beats – where the listener and performers experience a pattern of changing beat lengths in order to absorb the rhythm. Here, all the meters can be perceived in terms of strings of two, three or six semi-quaver rhythmic units, (which we will call ‘long’ and ‘short’ pulses respectively). The construction of meters through the addition of small rhythmic units is known as ‘additive meter’ and is a staple of North African, Eastern European, Mediterranean and other traditional music forms. It has found its way into the Western pop, rock and ‘classical’ forms through, for example, Dave Brubeck’s Turkish influenced Unsquare Dance and Take Five, compositions of Bartok, Stravinsky and Zappa, The Beatles’ Here Comes The Sun, the Mission Impossible theme, and the music of Radiohead and, frankly, anything under the prog/post-prog umbrella.

In Four Sticks there are two metric groups (A and B) presented; an ‘asymmetric’ 5/8 bar made up of two long and two short beats (3 + 3 + 2 + 2 = 10 semi-quavers), and a symmetrical 6/8 bar which can be thought of as two groups of three short beats ([2 + 2 + 2] + [2 + 2 + 2]), or even just two groups of six. Illustrated below. These dissonant asymmetric – and more constant symmetrical – patterns are interchanged and collectively make up the entirety of the shifting but perfectly accessible metric background.

Andy Johns: “There’s a unique drum pattern on Four Sticks. It’s called Four Sticks because Bonzo was using four sticks when he played on it. It had a flammy sound on it.

“That song was very difficult to mix. I must admit I might have recorded that one inappropriately because I compressed the drums before that got to tape. Of course, once you’ve done that you can’t undo it. It made it hard to mix. I didn’t record it right. I must have mixed that song four or five times until I got the version that’s on the record and it still doesn’t sound quite right. I wouldn’t mind another go at it. I might be able to do it a little better with some of the gizmos we’ve got these days.”

An illustration of the two metric feels in Four Sticks Another interesting aspect of this track is in its use of modality. The root of the key is E, and the central mode is largely E Dorian (E, F#, G, A, B, C#, D). However, the G is very often teased up to a G#, creating a more joyful E Mixolydian. This mixed-mode blending of Dorian and Mixolydian is a common feature of blues-rock harmonic language (and sometimes called ‘Mixodorian’), and here even expands to include a D#. The idea of a ‘cluster’ of modes that share the same root note is known as ‘modal interchange’ or ‘parallel modes’, a device also used in the next track.

The recording of Four Sticks took place the day after John Bonham had attended a gig by drummer Ginger Baker at London’s Lyceum. Suitably inspired, Bonham came in to the studio the next day determined to emulate his ex-Cream hero.

TOP: BARRIE WENTZELL; BOTTOM: GETTY

Led Zep’s only documented live performance of Four Sticks was at a gig on May 3, 1971 at the KB Hallen in Copenhagen on their European tour. It would go on to become a much-played number on the Page & Plant Unledded tour in 1995.

In October 1972, Page and Plant recorded a version of Four Sticks with the Bombay Orchestra at EMI Studios in Bombay, India. It surfaced under the title Four Hands on the extended version of Coda in 2015.

John Paul Jones played a Minimoog synthesiser on Four Sticks.

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Written by: Jimmy Page and Robert Plant Run time: 3 minutes 32 seconds Recorded at: Headley Grange, Hampshire, 1971 In a nutshell: The ballad of Led Zep IV, Going To California strikes a stirring, pastoral penultimate note before the big finale.

Some might scoff at the doe-eyed lyrics and youthful sentiment at work (to be fair, Plant was only 22 when he wrote them), but the spine-tingling aura of the track as a whole is hard to resist.

Noted cover versions by: Zakk Wylde (1997), Amy Lee (2016)

BARRIE WENTZELL

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Andy Johns: “Going To California mentions an earthquake.

There had been a severe earthquake in LA the week before we showed up to mix it. I remember that [manager] Peter Grant was very nervous about that. He was really frightened of earthquakes [laughs], which was a bit strange because he was a big wrestler type guy. The day that we went to mix Going To California, Jimmy said: ‘We can’t mix that, there’ll be another earthquake. Let’s save that for later.’ I was like: ‘Oh, come on, man!’ I didn’t think Led Zeppelin was that big of a deal to cause an earthquake. But we mixed it anyway – and there was a fucking tremor right in the middle of the damn mix [laughs].”

Key: D/Dm Novel Features: Ionian-Dorian modal parallel modal sections Tempo: ó78bpm

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his track adopts the stripped-down, hypnotic vocal and interwoven guitar texture of The Battle Of Evermore as well as the parallel mode concept of Four Sticks. There are two notable musical ideas here, which combine to make this otherwise extremely simple song beguiling and effective.

Firstly, the two guitars have distinct rhythmic personalities, with one marking the strong beats in the bar and the other exhibiting multiple syncopations, often ‘pushing’ (anticipating the next bar line or chord change). This never breaks the 4/4 backdrop, but creates a mesmeric rhythmic tapestry supporting the vocals.

The chords are interesting also. In Stairway and Evermore, modal mixture was used between modes that shared the same central chord (A Dorian and A Aeolian both share the root chord of A-minor). Here, however, the chords are drawn from the more contrasted parallel modes of D Ionian and D Dorian. When the shift happens from this major to minor mode – and enhanced by the reverb added to the vocal – it contains a haunting shift, as if the harmonic ground under our feet shifts dangerously.

The two modes share chords but not the same tonic chord, which is what makes the track simultaneously beautiful and menacing.

Ionian

D A

Dorian

G

Dm G7

An illustration of the overlapping Ionian-Dorian modal language of Going To California

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BARRIE WENTZELL

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The actual photo used for the cover was said by Page to have been discovered by Plant when the pair of them visited an antique shop in Reading. Describing it, Page said: “The old man on the cover carrying wood is in harmony with nature.

He takes from nature. It’s a natural cycle.”

The high-rise blocks of flats pictured on the back cover of the album were situated at Eve Hill in Dudley. They were demolished in 1999.

Zep’s customary iron control did not prevent a bizarre version of the sleeve surfacing on a Russian pressing in the 1990s that replaced the stick carrying old man with a contented Russian worker smoking a pipe.

The gatefold sleeve recreates The Hermit character in the Tarot card. A symbol of self-reliance and wisdom, it was drawn by a friend of Page, Barrington Colby. Page later based his fantasy sequence in their film The Song Remains The Same on the same image.

Plant’s love of Joni Mitchell surfaces in the final verse of Going To California with an oblique reference to the song I Had A King from her 1968 album Song To A Seagull. During the live version of Going To California on Zep’s How The West Was Won album, he mentions her name . Plant once stated “If you are in love with Joni, you’ve got to write about it now and then.’’

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Written by: Jimmy Page, Robert Plant, John Paul Jones, John Bonham, Memphis Minnie. Run time: 7 minutes 8 seconds Recorded at: Headley Grange, Hampshire, 1971 In a nutshell: The enormous closing statement, and an incendiary reinterpretation from a band with their share of covers up their sleeve.

Famed for its cavernous drums and hypnotic hooks, it breathed power and fiery dynamics into a 1920s artefact. Talk about ending on a high.

Noted cover versions by: Kristen Hersh (1994), A Perfect Circle (2004), Jeff Buckley (various), W.A.S.P (1998)

Jimmy Page: “You’ve got backwards harmonica, backwards echo, phasing, and there’s also flanging, and at the end you get this super-dense sound, in layers, that’s all built around the drum track. And you’ve got Robert, constant in the middle, and everything starts to spiral around him. It’s all done with panning… each twelve bars has something new about it, though at first it might not be apparent.

There’s a lot of different effects on there that at the time had never been used before: phased vocals, a backwards echoed harmonica solo…”

On the appeal of recording at Headley Grange, where they could make music at any time, day or night, whenever the inspiration came.

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BARRIE WENTZELL

Jimmy Page: “That’s the whole point. It’s a working environment. If it didn’t work, we’d go into a studio.

But in fact it was great. While touring, we would mutate songs. From the beginning we were doing it, but now it was really evident from one concert to the next.

“We used the acoustics of the house. We were playing in this drawing room to begin with, and then John Bonham had another drum kit set up in the hall, with this really high ceiling. When he started playing I said: ‘Right, we’ll have to do something in here now.’

The drum sound in that hall was just huge. You’ve heard it – on When The Levee Breaks. So we were moving from drums in the hall to drums back in another area, and really using the acoustics of the building.”

Phil Collins

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ots of Led Zeppelin songs show what an amazing drummer John Bonham was, but this is the one. That beat is just momentous. No one could hit as hard as he could. Genesis were always on the road somewhere and Zeppelin were always one the road somewhere else, so our paths never crossed. But I was totally in awe of him in the seventies. He was one of the drummers that really made you raise your game, even though we were very different.”

Key: F (Blues mixed mode) Novel Features: Major/minor interchange, Parallelism, Blues microtonality Tempo: ó71bpm

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his is a revisiting of Memphis Minnie’s and Kansas Joe McCoy’s 1929 classic and oftrecorded country blues song. Here Page’s electric slide guitar, Plant’s blues harp and Bonham’s immense drum sound (enhanced by the use of semiquaver delay) transport the tune from the intimate voice and finger-picked guitar texture of the original to a full-on 70s blues-rock context.

There is, however, a preservation of fundamental early blues concepts. Memphis Minnie, who co-wrote and performed guitar on the original track, was a highly accomplished, hugely influential and woefully under-acknowledged blues guitarist. Page, perhaps inspired by Memphis Minnie’s use of open G (or ‘Spanish’) tuning (from low to high DGDGBE), opts for the even more unorthodox F tuning (FACFCF), with judicious use of slide. A second guitar uses standard tuning and also employs slide, complementing the harmonica and reinforcing the blues aesthetic.

While the chosen instruments have stylistic connotations they also influence the musical mechanics. In the case of the slide guitar it facilitates two musical mechanisms: 1) parallelism – the open-string tuning is essentially made mobile by the slide and can be transposed to any pitch with little effort.

When The Levee Breaks is based on a 1928 song by Memphis Minnie and was originally recorded by Minnie with Kansas Joe McCoy in 1929.

The mix of When The Levee Breaks is the only remnant officially released from the aborted Sunset Sound Studios mixing session. The Headley Grange mix surfaced on the companion disc of the 2014 reissue.

John Bonham’s legendary drum beat on When The Levee Breaks has been much sampled: it can be heard on the Beastie Boys Rhymin’ & Stealin’, Cold Cut’s Beats + Pieces, Dr Dre’s Lyrical Gangbang, MC Lute’s Survival Of The Fittest, Eminem’s Kim, Ice T’s Midnight, Massive Attack’s Man Next Door and Beyonce’s Don’t Hurt Yourself.

It wasn’t just the Headley stairwell and hallway that gave that massive, famous echoey drum sound, it was also thanks to two Beyerdynamic M160 microphones with limiters and a Binson Echorec echo device that Jimmy Page had bought.

An early version of When The Levee Breaks titled If It Keeps On Raining was cut at Island Studios in November 1970. It can be found on the extended version of Coda released in 2015.

2) microtonality – the notes in between frets are readily available.

At the heart of much blues harmony and melody is a bittersweet mixture of major and minor implication. It’s a common misconception that all blues is ‘just minor blues scales’; most players use a sophisticated and paced mix of major and minor thirds, major and minor sevenths as well as other ‘blue notes’.

One way to examine this in the context of Levee is by looking at some of the chords used. These are all parallel ‘slides’ of the open-string F major chords. Three of these chords (F, Bb and C) belong to F major and three (Ab, Db, C) belong to F-minor. A bittersweet balance of hope and sadness, all from one moveable chord.

Figure 1: Some transpositions of F major implying either F major or F minor.

F major and F minor (and blues scales based around these) are also used but what is fundamental (and extraordinarily beautiful) about blues expression is that the notes between the major and minor scale degrees are used to great expressive effect. Sometimes they’re used as passing tones, but also as targets, which embed the major-minor ambiguity deeply. These most readily appear between the major and minor third – sometimes called the ‘neutral third’ or the ‘blues curl’, and occasionally between the major and minor seventh (the ‘neutral seventh’). You can hear these implied in Page’s guitars and Plant’s vocal inflection and blues harmonica playing, demonstrating a genuine rather than pastiched connection to the core of the blues style, despite the forward-thinking invention elsewhere on the album.

If you have an original UK pressing of the album that misspells Memphis Minnie’s credit on When The Levee Breaks as ‘Mempnis Minnie’ it could be worth up to £500.

At Led Zeppelin’s induction into The Hall Of Fame on January 12, 1995, Page, Plant and Jones reunited to perform a short set that included When The Levee Breaks with Neil Young guesting on guitar.

Memphis Minnie (born Lizzie Douglas) had been making her living playing the blues – one of very few women to do so in the 20s – busking on Memphis’s Beale Street, playing in bars and juke joints, when a talent scout from Columbia Records saw her and her partner Kansas Joe McCoy play. In June 1929 they were sent to New York to record. When The Levee Breaks – which tells the tale of the Great Mississippi River Flood, one of the worst natural disasters in US history – was nailed in their first ever studio session with McCoy supplying the vocals to Minnie’s stinging lead guitar. Her classic Bumble Bee was recorded at the same session.

Figure 2: Two fundamental blues microtones occur between the major and minor third, and the major and minor seventh scale degrees

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The Tao Of Art lover, musical explorer, friends in unexpected places, slipper salesman… Behind the beard and sunglasses there’s a very different Billy Gibbons from the one most people think they know.

Words: Dave Everley Portrait: Ross Halfin

S

ome time back in the early 70s, when ZZ Top were just starting out, Billy Gibbons met blues great BB King.

Gibbons was a 20-something guitar hotshot from Texas who’d got a papal blessing from Jimi Hendrix himself a few years earlier. He had every right to be cocky, but he was enough of a class act even then to shut up and listen when BB King spoke.

At some point during their conversation, BB picked up Billy’s guitar and strummed it. He looked quizzical, then handed it back to Billy.

“Why you working so hard?” asked BB. “Don’t work so hard.”

BB was talking about the thick, heavy guitar strings Gibbons used to get ZZ Top’s thick, heavy guitar sound, but he might as well have been talking about life. “Don’t work so hard.”

Taking the veteran’s advice, Gibbons ditched his thick strings for slinkier, lighter ones right away and never looked back.

King’s credo has stuck with him down all these years, in life as well as in music. Few people can make not working so hard look so damn easy as The Reverend Billy F Gibbons.

“I would like to believe that,” says Gibbons.

“As the old saying goes, we’re fortunate in that we get to do what we like getting to do, so why mess with it?”

I can’t see him from the waist down, but there’s every chance he’s wearing pyjama bottoms.

“The only difference between Billy on stage and off stage is that off stage he’s always in pyjamas,” says Matt Sorum, former drummer with Guns N’ Roses and latterly one of Gibbons’s chief collaborators outside of ZZ Top. “If you watch the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame when he played with Jeff Beck, he went on stage in pyjamas with a leather jacket on top.”

Pyjamas or not, Gibbons is a solid-gold character, albeit less the cartoon figure the public knows from videos and shows, more curious cultural lightning rod. Few other rock’n’roll veterans of his vintage are as comfortable

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hey say you can judge a person by the company they keep. Which makes Gibbons the most interesting man in the world. In fact that’s exactly what his friend Al Jourgensen, ringleader of industrial-metal hellraisers Ministry, calls him: The Most Interesting Man In The World.

It’s a reference to the guy from the Don Equis beer ads: the one with the deep tan and the great beard, who ended up on a thousand ‘I don’t often…’ memes. “That is Billy Gibbons,” says Jourgensen.

“He has no dark side. He’s just suave as hell. The Most Interesting Man In The World.”

Other people have other takes. Matt Sorum, who co-wrote the song Vagabond Man on Hardware, describes him as an old-school entertainer. “He’s a vaudevillian character in a way, except he’s like that all the time.”

Dave Gahan, the singer with Depeche Mode, and a man with whom Gibbons forged an unlikely friendship decades ago, speaks no less highly of him. “He’s a very polite, very kind, very genuine southern gent,” Gahan tells Classic Rock. “I think he just enjoys being around other musicians and seeing how their world works.”

Vaudevillian, Southern gent, The Most Interesting Man In The World. All of them are accurate. Today you can add ‘hot sauce pitchman’ to the list. “I got plenty here,” he says, holding up a bottle of his own Whisker Bomb pepper sauce.

“This is the original. If you want to step it up I’ve got the Have Mercy one,” he adds.

But we’re not here to talk about condiments.

We’re here to talk about his new album, Hardware, and maybe a little about who Billy Gibbons really is.

The former is easiest. Hardware (named in tribute to Gibbons’s late friend and engineer Joe Hardy)

“We’re fortunate in that we get to do what we like getting to do, so why mess with it?”

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t’s 11am Las Vegas time when Gibbons calls to talk about his new solo album, Hardware. Even via Zoom, his innate Billy Gibbons-ness fills the room: foot-long gingery beard, pink-rimmed glasses, bobbled beanie hat (acquired when he swapped it for a Stetson with a Cameroonian tribal chief years ago, if myth is to be believed).

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Billy Gibbons discussing surrealist art and 80s industrial music as they are jawing about the blues and sun-baked boogie rock.

Yet for all that, he’s proof that while you can take the boy out of Texas, you can’t take Texas out of the boy even after all this time. His stories are as rambling as a Lone Star trail and shaggier than the beard on his chin. He’s got a catchphrase: ‘Long story longer’ – a promise he delivers on every time he says it. Attempting to keep him on track is like gluing water to a balloon: fun trying but ultimately impossible. The only thing you can do is sit back and listen while Gibbons talks. In the words of BB King: don’t work so hard.

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BILLY F GIBBONS is a tremendous record, one that beats with a blues-rock heart but comes with twitches and twists that are pure Gibbons. To make it, he and Sorum holed up in a remote studio out in the California desert, several hours’ drive from LA and 20 miles from the nearest town. The day they got there they were greeted by a pair of rattlesnakes on the porch. In the afternoon they’d sit and watch the eagles fly overhead.

“You read about these places, you see travelogue photos, but when you’re there the energy is imbibed,” says Gibbons. “It’s something you feel.”

Gibbons would regularly make the 20-mile drive to the nearest town to grab breakfast at a Mexican restaurant he’d found. The place was run by a young woman. One morning he walked in to find the place on fire. “Don’t worry,” said the owner, as she tried to douse the flames, “I’m not burning your breakfast.” The blaze was eventually put out and no one was hurt. Gibbons walked away from it with a new song: the hot-to-the-touch She’s On Fire.

“And the breakfast was just great as well,” he says.

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here’s a song on Hardware called Spanish Fly. The title refers to a hotrod – inevitable, given Gibbons’s love of fast and loud cars. “One of my buddies down the street has got a 1946 Ford two-door sedan, which he named Spanish Fly,” he says admiringly. “It’s quite dazzling, this piece of machinery. He wouldn’t sell it. He wouldn’t even give me a ride in it.” But there’s another meaning as well. Spanish Fly is an old, old herbal love potion that comes in many different forms and guises. “Of course, growing up in Texas and making the pilgrimage to the Mexican border, you gotta come back with Spanish Fly,” says Gibbons. “It was this aphrodisiac, supposedly.”

And did it work?

“That’s a good question.” He leans forward conspiratorially.

“I’ve always been afraid to ask.”

There’s something else about Spanish Fly, a sparse electro-blues number. The song opens with a whumping bass sound that sounds like it’s coming through the walls of a hip-hop club next door.

Thing is, this isn’t Billy Gibbons straining for cross-cultural credibility. Back in the 1990s, he mixed with members of Houston’s vibrant hiphop and R&B scene. Names roll off his tongue: the Geto Boys, Mannie Fresh, Juvenile, Destiny’s Child, the latter fronted by a teenage superstar-inwaiting named Beyoncé Knowles. They’d all hang out together at a studio down the road from ZZ Top’s HQ while ZZ fixed their place up.

“We got along quite famously,” says Gibbons.

“I wanted to know what these guys were doing and they wanted to know what I was doing. It became quite the exchange, and the rate was one to one.”

At one point the locations were reversed, and his new friends decamped to ZZ Top’s studio

while the place they were using was refurbished.

Gibbons was on the road at the time, and he remembers getting a worried phone call from his secretary, Denise.

“I think we might have a problem,” Denise told him.

“What’s that?” asked Billy.

“Well,” said Denise, “I’m concerned there might be a fire. There’s smoke ascending through the ceiling.”

Gibbons laughs his throatiest laugh at the thought of the Fire Marshall being called out because a bunch of rappers and their entourage were blazing their way through a ton of plutonium-grade weed in his studio. “I told Denise: ‘Do not worry, it’ll be fine.’”

help 1983’s Eliminator album sell by the truckload.

He admits that the British band flicked a switch in his brain. “The sound was just so bombastically beautiful. It was heavy as lead. There was no drummer – how could this possibly be? But it was h-e-a-v-y – emphasis on each letter of that word.”

Gibbons has got to know Depeche Mode pretty well over the years. In 2013 they asked him to remix Soothe My Soul, a track on their album Delta Machine. Gahan called Gibbons and told him they needed “a little Texas mud”.

“For me, the best moment was getting his mix of the song back,” says Gahan. “Just sitting there with a big smile on my face: ‘Oh, so that’s how he hears us. Depeche Mode-meets-ZZ Top. No one would’ve thought that could have happened.”

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he signs that Billy Gibbons liked to mix with different crowds were there a long time ago. Dave Gahan recalls him turning up unexpectedly at a Depeche Mode show in

n recent months, King Crimson guitarist Robert Fripp and his wife Toyah Wilcox kept an increasingly stir-crazy public entertained with home-made videos of them doing exuberantly OTT covers of famous rock songs, from Ace Of Spades to White Wedding. Early on, they gave that Sunday Lockdown Lunch treatment to ZZ Top’s Gimme All Your Lovin’. And yes, since you ask, Gibbons has seen it. “I was lured into that little surprise,” he says. “It was so exhilarating. I was running in the street. I was the town crier, shouting the message: ‘Forget the ZZ version, I got the new one!’”

Fripp’s name sets Gibbons off down another unexpected conversational avenue. He’s aware of King Crimson, of course, but it’s some of their guitarist’s later work that really rustled his whiskers.

“When Fripp and Brian Eno got together and started making some eerie and ethereal sounds, that’s Tres hombres: Gibbons, what really got me interested,” he Ministry’s Al Jourgensen and n. says. “They were treading in water Nielse Rick Trick’s Cheap that no one had even dipped their toes in, much less dived into.

And then Eno continued on and made this brilliant work called Music For Films, which I still listen to today.”

On one hand, the idea of Al Jourgensen Billy Gibbons being a fan of ground-breaking ambient Houston in the mid-80s. “He was the last person music should be a surprise, but on the other it we expected to show up,” says Gahan. “He’d come kind of isn’t. Nor is his admiration for punk’s backstage beforehand, but then he’d hang out for original class of ’77. At some point during his the whole show. He was just into the music.”

European sojourn in the late 70s, he visited the A grizzled Texas boogie man and a bunch of UK to check out what was happening. “The punk Limey electro-pop pioneers might seem like they scene was taking over, and I hit a couple of famous have little in common, but Gahan thinks there are punk destinations,” he says vaguely. Nobody really similarities under the surface. “I think Billy saw recognised him; ZZ Top weren’t a household that we had that rock’n’roll swagger that some name in the UK at that point, and anyway, he was other people didn’t see,” he says. “And he heard growing out his beard. “I had thrown the razors the blues in our music – Martin [Gore, Depeche aside, which was certainly not the trend at the Mode keyboard player/songwriter] is a bit of time. I was oddball, I was embraced. And I came a gunslinger when it comes to playing the guitar. back home with a full dose of something new.”

He can play those riffs with the best of ’em. He ddballs attract oddballs, as Gibbons’s was very interested in the electronic stuff, and the friendship with Ministry’s Al Jourgensen combination of that and the electronics.” proves. The pair first met in the car park That much rings true. Gibbons’s discovery of of a Houston club named Numbers in 1990.

Depeche Mode coincided with ZZ Top embracing Jourgensen was in town with his other band, the kind of state-of-the-art technology that would

“He has no dark side. He’s just suave as hell.

The Most Interesting Man In The World.”

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“He was the last person we expected to show up.

He’d come backstage beforehand, but then he’d hang out for the whole show.”

ROSS HALFIN

Depeche Mode’s Dave Gahan

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BILLY F GIBBONS night and got shit-faced. Billy had brought a bigass bag of hatch chiles from New Mexico, so we were drinking ridiculously expensive wine and having this chilli-eating competition. That’s the one time I’ve seen him not so suave, cos he got down on all fours and puked all over.”

The image of Billy F Gibbons, epitome of cool, crawling drunkenly on his hands and knees, is one few people get to see. But Jourgensen wants to make one thing clear: “He never puked on his beard. That beard is like Teflon. It won’t accept spaghetti sauce and it won’t accept puke.”

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Gibbons with Matt Sorum, one of his chief collaborators outside of ZZ Top, in 2009.

industrial-metal provocateurs Revolting Cocks. At some point in the afternoon the owner of the club told him that Billy Gibbons wanted to meet him.

Al had cut his teeth on 70s rock, and bought ZZ’s Tres Hombres album when he was a kid. And now Billy Gibbons wanted to meet him?

“He pulled up in a 1934 Mercury, wearing a white suit,” says Jourgensen. “Me and Mikey [Scaccia, RevCo guitarist] got in and we were just flabbergasted: ‘It’s Billy fucking Gibbons, in a white suit, with the beard, in the middle of the day.’”

Gibbons told them he was a fan. “I love what you’re doing,” he said to the pair.

“I want to take you out to dinner.” They drove to an Italian restaurant and all piled inside, one man in a white suit and a couple of grubby punks in torn T-shirts and combat boots.

As they ate spaghetti – Jourgensen and Scaccia splattering themselves with tomato sauce, Gibbons not getting a speck of anything on his white suit or his beard – Al’s curiosity got the better of him.

“I finally asked him: ‘Why are we here?’ And he goes: ‘Well, I figure I owe you a dinner, because my career kind of hit a rough patch there, but now we’re selling records hand over fist,’” says Jourgensen. “‘The reason is because we switched over to programmed drums, and all the drum

samples we got were from Ministry and Revolting Cocks songs.’ We just freaked out, it was such a rock-god moment. With all the egos and lawyers in the music business, it was pretty ballsy of him to say: ‘Yeah, I just ripped off all your shit, I’m gonna buy you dinner.’ That was good enough for me.”

ne of the greatest compliments Billy Gibbons says he ever got, up there with Jimi Hendrix’s proclamation that he was “America’s best young guitar player”, was when late Rolling Stones producer Jim Dickinson told him he was “the Dali of the Delta”. “He said: ‘You’ve brought the surrealism,’” says Gibbons. “‘You’ve kept the essence, but you’ve avoided wearing a funny hat with a Hawaiian shirt and a big fat microphone.’”

Where the hat and the Hawaiian shirt and the big fat microphone come into it isn’t clear, but otherwise Dickinson was on the money. With Gibbons a strain of weirdness has always bubbled just beneath the surface. Listen to the gleefully unsettling answer-phone headfuck of Heaven, Hell Or Houston from ZZ’s El Loco, or Hardware’s closing track Desert High, a semi-spoken-word piece that finds Gibbons sounding like Tom Waits gone wandering out in the sun for too long. Hell, listen to the unhinged ‘Haw-haw-haw’s and oddball choogling of ZZ’s 70s signature track La Grange, still the greatest and strangest rock’n’roll song to ever be written about a Texas bordello.

But Gibbons appreciated the Dali comparison for a deeper reason. He’s a huge art freak, and has been since he was a psychedelic beatnik kid. At one point during ZZ Top’s three-year break between 1976’s Tejas and 1979’s Deguello, he spent several months hanging out in Paris with a bunch of avant-garde artist buddies he knew from back in Houston. “Going to the hangouts, drinking wine, getting into the esoteric side of things,” as he puts it. “The phrase ‘avant garde’ today has very little energy, the shock value has evaporated. But at that time there was a lot of energy, and we were following it.”

Gibbons has amassed an impressive art collection down the years. “Billy loves art,” says Matt Sorum. “He has one of the biggest collections of African artefacts I’ve ever seen. He’ll go: ‘Come on, we’re going to Paris, I have some African stuff I have to pick up’, and we’ll travel to this big warehouse. You would be mind-boggled.”

Right now, Gibbons has a thing about NFTs – the latest fad to sweep the digital world. Sorum has a handle on that kind of thing, and Gibbons will email him to ask questions.

“He’ll send me multiple articles: ‘What is this?’

‘How does this work?’ He’s very well read, very curious. He’s a deep guy.”

“The only difference between Billy on stage and off stage is that off stage he’s always in pyjamas.”

Fast forward a decade or so. Gibbons made a stop off Sonic Ranch studio near El Paso, where Jourgensen was recording a new Revolting Cocks album. On the spur of the moment, Al invited Billy to play guitar on a couple of tracks (the two songs, Prune Tang and Pole Grinder, eventually appeared on RevCo’s 2006 album Cocked And Loaded). When they’d done, everybody decided to let their hair down.

“The wine cellar there has bottles that are worth literally fifty thousand, a hundred thousand dollars,” says Jourgensen. “We broke those out that

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est Coast Junkie, one of the singles from Hardware, opens with the Reverend Billy F Gibbons laying the preacherman shtick on thick. ‘People say to me: have mercy, have mercy,’ he intones, living up to his nickname. continued on p53 But how did he end up

GETTY

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Matt Sorum

BILLY F GIBBONS becoming a Reverend? It’s probably best if he explains.

“That goes back to when I was about eighteen. We were fascinated by these high-powered radio stations along the Mexican border – XERF just across the river from Del Rio, Texas, XEG down in Reynosa. You could buy shows in fifteen-minute segments after six o’clock in the evening. You had someone selling piano lessons, you had someone selling a hundred baby chicks for two Gimme all your lovin’: dollars, then the preachers would Gib bons and wife Gilligan come on…

Stillwater in 2009.

“Long story longer, someone coerced me into doing it. They said: ‘Hey, you oughtta go down there and buy fifteen minutes’ worth of airtime, see if you could get somebody to send you money.

“Now, we had a friend working on the docks in Houston, and he took some delivery of some Chinese slippers. But they were all left feet, and they didn’t know what to do with them. So we bought them for a dime on a dollar and called them Thought-Provoking Soul Slippers.

“I became the Reverend Willie G, selling these slippers over the airwaves. [Adopts Southern preacher voice] ‘I will send you ThoughtProvoking Soul Slippers with your love offering of five, ten, a thousand dollars or more! We will stamp your favourite psalm in the sole, and with every step you take, thousands of prayers will go out to Jesus!’ That was our pitch. And it caught on.

Until the mail delivered a big bag full of cash, and my folks wanted to know where it came from.”

His parents put a stop to it and the money dried up. But at least the nickname stayed.

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have my own small Billy Gibbons story. It’s not quite as funny as seeing him drunkenly puking on the floor after a chilli-eating contest, but it does say a little bit about him.

It was about 10.30 on a Saturday night a couple of years ago, and I was catching a train back to London from the coast. Somewhere around Tunbridge Wells, a man with a long beard, bobbled beanie hat and American accent gets on the train and sits on the next seat along. The only reason I didn’t ask at the time if he was Billy Gibbons was: a) I was shitfaced, and b) it really couldn’t have been anybody else. I tell him about it now.

“Was I with a gorgeous young lady called Gilligan?”

You were with a gorgeous young lady, but I don’t know her name.

“Well that was us! That was Miss Gilligan,” he says, referring to his wife of 16 years.

It turns out Gibbons is a big fan of public transport generally, and British public transport specifically. When he was in London to pick up the Living Legend award at the 2012 Classic Rock Roll Of Honour, he caught the number 27 bus from his hotel to the venue.

Once, when ZZ played at Wembley Arena, he even hopped on the Tube to get to his own gig.

“They’d organised a couple of stretch limos,” he remembers. “I said: ‘Oh, you gotta be kidding, it’ll take hours. We’re sitting there [on the Tube], and I’ve got a guy across from me and he’s holding

Going Underground: “Got a gig to get to. Tube train due in five minutes…”

a ZZ Top ticket. We’re staring at each other across the carriage. He’s looking at me, and he’s looking down at the ticket, then he’s looking at me. And he finally goes: ‘This is so wrong.’”

W

hen Gibbons will next get the chance to hop on a bus to one of his own gigs isn’t clear for obvious reasons. He says he got a dose of covid early on, not long after

One unexpected side effect of being unable to tour for the past year is that Gibbons has had a chance to put aside some music for a new ZZ Top album, which will be the first since 2012’s La Futura. “The solo expressions are adding a sliver of interest to the golden goose,” he says, which is his way of saying some of the songs that didn’t make it on to Hardware could end up on the next ZZ album. “The last laugh has yet to be heard,” he says of the latter. “We’re laying the foundation. I get to tiptoe out of Hardware and back into ZZ, which is under way now.”

When that album materialises remains to be seen (he’s saying maybe later this year, more likely next). Same with getting back on the tour bus. “They haven’t figured out how to shorten a mile,” he says, “but we’re ready to go make some loud noise.”

All that is in the future. Between his music, his hot sauce, his art collection, his strange and fantastic friendships and the rest, the Reverend Billy F Gibbons has plenty to get on with. Working hard on not working so hard has never looked so easy.

MAIN: ROSS HALFIN; INSET: GETTY

“The last laugh has yet to be heard.

I get to tiptoe out of Hardware and back into ZZ, which is under way now.”

Billy Gibbons playing the Peter Green Tribute Concert in London in March last year. He’d flown to Spain, but couldn’t taste the food at any of the expensive restaurants he was eating in. He finally got tested just as they finished recording Hardware.

“We had a visitor, an out of town physician, who asked me if I wanted to take a test. Which I did. He said: ‘You may want to consider donating some of your blood, cos your antibodies are off the chart,’” he says proudly.

Billy F Gibbons’ Hardware is released on June 4 via Concord Records.

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Punk rock renegades who burst onto the Sunset Strip as grunge dawned, L7 burned brightly and left a trail of thrilling chaos in their wake.

Words: Emma Johnston Portrait: Charles Peterson

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ost grunge-era bands have been credited with particularly its lead single Pretend We’re Dead – a rock club classic to a role in the demise of hair metal. But few this day – hit the mainstream pop charts. played their part with such panache, razor“We were just, like, sluggin’ it out in the underground in LA for sharp humour, wild hedonism and headlinemany years,” says Sparks. “By the time it hit, it was just like: ‘About grabbing performances as L7. And they did it fucking time.’ We had peers that were getting signed and stuff too. all by infiltrating the very heart of the Sunset Strip.

So it felt like we were sort of pranksters from the underground.

Formed in Los Angeles by vocalist/guitarists Donita Sparks and The underdog band.”

Suzi Gardner in 1985, the band were unlike anything the city had They certainly used their wicked sense of fun to get serious seen before. A bunch of punk rock women playing metal, and points across. Their reaction to sexual harassment from coming from a musical standpoint that was more Motörhead than a promoter at one of their shows was to all pee in his hat. While Poison, they quickly became known for their wild, raw live shows, working in the same studio complex as Mötley Crüe, Tommy Lee uncompromising attitude and deeply sarcastic sense of fun. Archly invited them in to hang out, and they were met with the sight of disheveled, they looked like they’d been sleeping in their clothes for a room plastered with centrefolds. When they returned the a week, while any make-up they used invitation, they made sure their own base was turned into an art statement: lipstick was covered from wall to wall with male was smeared on to preposterous, Leigh pornography. “There were just penises Bowery-style amounts, eyes were ringed everywhere,” Sparks says with a laugh. with a racoon mask of red. Unexpectedly, For UK audiences, the most in-yourthe old guard – Guns N’ Roses, Faster face moment that got L7 the country’s Pussycat – lapped it up. attention was an appearance on Channel “There were bands that dug us and were 4’s The Word, a post-pub live TV show with waiting for chicks to come out there and a noisy mix of ramshackle interviews, hit them over the head with a frying pan, gross-out stunts and live music. On the Donita Sparks you know?” says Sparks, her voice friendly, day of their recording, the agenda no-nonsense and dripping with wit. “I think one of grunge’s included a bare-bum competition, and a secret recording of guest greatest legacies is the temporary slaying of misogyny in rock.”

Oliver Reed, drunk in his dressing room. As they soundtracked the A new box set, Wargasm: The Slash Years 1992-1997, captures the show’s finale with Pretend We’re Dead, an agitated Sparks dropped band’s spectacular rise and messy fall. her trousers and gave the nation a full-frontal eyeful.

The band had already released a couple of albums on super“That was a really long day,” she remembers. “The other artists indie Sub Pop before signing to Slash. The label appealed to their on the show were cool, but I thought it was a bit mean-spirited art-punk sensibilities, having been home to The Germs and X, plus that they had a hidden camera in Oliver Reed’s dressing room. their headquarters were opposite the band’s favourite MexicanI don’t know, parts of the show seemed slightly mean spirited and American restaurant. With the might of Slash’s parent company I wanted to, um, fuck shit up.”

London Records behind them, they looked on bemused as their Rebellion has always been in Sparks’s nature. Born into a liberal first album for their new label, 1992 album Bricks Are Heavy, and household in a very conservative, middle-class, “horrible suburb

“One of grunge’s greatest legacies is the temporary slaying of misogyny in rock.”

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CLASSICROCKMAGAZINE.COM 55

of Chicago”, she was taught from a young age to question authority and stand up against injustice.

“I’m the youngest of four,” she says. “My oldest sister listened to Roxy Music and would come home dressed really wild, and the whole block would look at her. Every sister after that was always into the next wild look and getting bitchstares from the neighbourhood.”

For Sparks, it was punk rock that stole her heart and made her choose to be an outsider. She loved the Ramones and the Sex Pistols, The B52s and Ian Dury & The Blockheads, but most of all Poly Styrene and X-Ray Spex. With no real punk scene in Chicago at the time, as soon as she finished high school she packed her things and moved to California, where she landed a job at listings paper LA Weekly and did performance art in her spare time.

Suzi Gardner, a poet, had been in the role before her. The two were introduced by mutual friends.

“Suzi was always either getting fired or quitting jobs, and I was always taking her place,” Sparks remembers. “We were both in other bands that we didn’t like very much. On a drunken weekend she played me some stuff she was working on,

head), and by the summer the band were back in the UK to play at the Reading Festival for what should have been a triumphant celebration of having made it. It wasn’t to be though. The weather turned against them, as did their on-stage sound. The audience, soaked through, freezing cold and impatient with the technical hold-up, made their dissatisfaction known by pelting the band with mud. Sparks responded with one of the most inventively aggressive moments in the festival’s history, by pulling out her bloody tampon and throwing it into the crowd.

“Reading was bittersweet because it was a show we were really looking forward to, and it was kind of like a coming out thing Donita on that incident with the tampon where you’ve made it,” she says. “It’s kind of like a debutante ball or something. It was a rainy, cold day and we got pelted with mud the drummer, and that’s what we were missing for all whole time. It had thrown out our tuning, and we those years without her.” just had shit sound on stage. It was just not fun, y 1992, L7’s star was in the ascent. Pretend and it was like a slow-motion gig. Also, we thought We’re Dead was on heavy rotation on radio that it would catapult us further, but it was actually and MTV (the making of the video was, in like the beginning of the levelling off of our career. true L7 fashion, a messy affair that ended in a trip So I went performance art, with a little bit of to the hospital for Gardner after a crane fell on her humour. And a little bit of politics, I suppose.” and I was like: ‘Yes, this is what I wanna do!’ So we joined forces.”

Countless line-up changes followed, but it all came together when they found LA native Jennifer Finch to play bass and drummer Dee Plakas.

“Jennifer brought a career drive,” says Sparks.

She was really a hustler, calling people and making shit happen. And Dee is a very incredible, solid

“I went performance art, with a little bit of humour. And a little bit of politics, I suppose.”

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L7

L7 in January 2020 in LA: (l-r) Jennifer Finch, Suzi Gardner, Dee Plakas, Donita Sparks.

ETTY

Chaos from order: an L7 gig in the early 90s.

The follow-up to Bricks Are Heavy, Hungry For Stink, arrived in 1994. It was an altogether darker, heavier album. By this point the grunge landscape had changed. Their friend Kurt Cobain had died, pop-punk was on the rise thanks to Green Day, and the musical appetite of the public was starting to change. For L7, life on the road was a blur of drugs and booze, as captured in the recent, typically frank documentary Pretend We’re Dead.

“Hungry For Stink is darker. I think I was in a bit of a mood at that point,” says Sparks. “I was just in a dark place. That is reflected in songs like Baggage and My Sanity. It’s not a super-joyous album. We’ve always been a band that’s had shit going down even when things are on the upswing.

We were dealing with being impoverished and also paying our rent and having jobs. We weren’t like college kids, we had bills to pay and we had drugs to do, and there was a lot going on.”

Things unravelled further the following year, when their roadie and friend Umbar died on their tour bus; album sales had plateaued; and when they went to the studio to make 1997’s The Beauty Process: Triple Platinum, the rug was pulled out from under them further when Jennifer Finch quit via a letter in the middle of the recording. In the film,

leaving the band. Suzi left the band and I did not she cites health and money issues, as well as want to replace Suzi and go on without her. And grieving her father and Umbar, but a lack of it’s not like we were burning up the charts or communication between the four band members selling a lot of tickets to our shows either, it was left a sour taste. And now there was a rush to find a long, brutal decline and a not-good ending. So it a new bassist who could match Finch’s renowned left a really bitter taste in mine and Dee’s mouth on-stage energy. for quite a long time. Everybody felt shitty.”

“It’s weird, because we never knew,” says Sparks.

It was a sad and unusually quiet end for a band “We knew that she had another band that was that had burned so brightly, and there was pulling her away, and I think she maybe wanted to a danger of them fading into obscurity. But it was be a frontperson. But then in the documentary she work on the documentary that got the four of attributes a lot of it to the passing of her father and them talking again after years of silence, and in some other personal things that were going on 2015 they reunited for a new album, Scatter The with her. So I think it was probably a bit of both.

Rats, and shows that were every bit as wild and The timing was not great. And it wasn’t electrifying as the ones that typified their early a discussion with us, it was just a piece of paper. It days. Now they’re planning more live shows for wasn’t nasty or anything, it wished us well, but it after the pandemic, as well was a little odd. But I didn’t as collaborations with other take it personally.” bands, having rediscovered Gail Greenwood from the joy of performance.

Lunachicks stepped in, but “It’s not like we’re rolling the writing was on the wall in the dough,” says Sparks. for their time with Slash, “A lot of bands reunited and they were dropped and made a lot of money. from the label. Sparks, Not us, of course, because Gardner and Plakas went on that’s the L7 way. We are to release one more album, doing it because we enjoy it.

Slap-Happy, as a trio Donita Sparks Hopefully we’ll enjoy it for through their own label, but a long time.” that too was fraught with The return of L7 – feminist icons, punk-rock difficulties. The documentary reveals that the warriors and grunge-era heroes – is a reminder distributor folded and offered to sell the CDs back of how powerful rock’n’roll can be when it’s to the band, but as they were unable to afford the placed in the hands of the truly fearless. With shipping most of them went into landfill. In communication back on the table, and no pressure a panic over her financial situation (“I thought I’d to do anything more than go out and have fun on fucked up my life,” she says in the film), Gardner stage, these true underdogs, pranksters from the quit the band with a phone call. Sparks, having underground, live to fight another day. lost her creative partner, called an end to L7.

“We realise now that we’re all different “It was difficult because of the way it went personality types – introverts, extroverts,” says down, but once again if we had all talked and came Sparks. “I think we’re all a little bit older, a little bit to that conclusion it would have been good,” she wiser, and that’s the way it should be.” says. “But it was more contentious than that. That contention hung over all of us for years. In what Wargasm: The Slash Years 1992-1997 is out way was it contentious? That’s a private matter now via Cherry Red. for now. Listen, everybody has their reasons for

“We’ve always been a band that’s had shit going down, even when things are on the upswing.”

CLASSICROCKMAGAZINE.COM 57

From the Sisters Of Mercy to Ugly Kid Joe – via a superb new solo album – Chris Catalyst’s résumé is nothing if not long. The guitarist tells us about band hopping, mental health, and why he’s the only person who can call Ginger Wildheart “a knob”.

Words: Henry Yates

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alking to Chris Catalyst in pubs in his Leeds stamping ground, drawn in by his offbeat wit, clocking his piercings and enjoying his pops at rock’s sacred cows (“We’ve already got one Morrissey, and that’s frankly too many”), at first you’d peg him as a talkative fellow fan. But slowly, by degrees, you’d realise this unassuming 41-yearold is actually the secret weapon of the transatlantic rock scene.

The Sisters Of Mercy. Ginger Wildheart. Ugly Kid Joe. Terrorvision. Catalyst has played with them all, and plenty more as well; it’s even rumoured that he’s one of the Nameless Ghouls in Swedish metallers Ghost. “I’ve been lucky enough to work with some brilliant humans,” he reflects. “And some total arseholes. People often say: ‘Fucking hell, your arse never touches the floor.’ But last night I got stoned and ate an Easter egg while watching World’s Wildest Police Videos.”

This human dynamo hasn’t wasted lockdown. Today, Catalyst is plugging – and posting out copies of – his second self-released solo album, Kaleidoscopes, on which Britrock guitars collide with punky pace and nicely spikey lyrics on some impeccable songs. “I’m done underplaying this record,” he says, beaming. “It’s got some great fucking tunes.”

hooks in attitude. “The Stranglers were a big thing,” he says, “and Steve Jones is still one of the greatest guitar sounds. There were so many guys back then who could play me under the table. But then they had kids, put the guitar in the loft. And I just refused to fuck off.”

Having moved to Leeds in 1998 for a better bite at the music industry, Catalyst was working at a radio station when Sisters Of Mercy leader Andrew Eldritch hired him as a guitarist with the band when they played live. Today Catalyst is grateful, with caveats. “I’ll always have respect for Andrew,” he says. “He just has a different pace of doing things, which I found frustrating, because

see through chancers and kiss-arses. If you’re born above Leicester, you’re born with an enormous bullshit detector.”

And a thirst. “All the bands I’ve been in do like a drink,” Catalyst adds. “I’ve done gigs with the Sisters where Andrew has drunk a bottle and a half of vodka before we’ve gone on stage, and not dropped a note.”

As fellow Yorkshiremen, playing keyboards for Terrorvision computes. But aren’t Ugly Kid Joe just too American? Catalyst just chuckles at the disparity.

“I was guitar tech-ing for them, and when I heard that Sonny Mayo couldn’t do a tour I said I’ll do it. Like you say, they’re Californian, sunkissed surf-punk dudes, and then there’s this Yorkshire chancer, this spotty herbert on stage left.

It almost made me more Yorkshire, like: ‘Ey oop, I’m going to get a whippet and a flat cap.’”

Catalyst concedes that he might now be a bigger name had he played the game. “People have said: ‘You should have moved to London when you had better cheekbones and more hair.’ But I was never into kissing arse. Did my bands miss out on industry interest? Yes. Would we have ended up in some kind of drug-addicted or Londonaddled mind-state, having to be on that roulette wheel? Probably.”

Besides, planting his flag in Leeds has allowed him to retain his artistic voice, whether in Eureka Machines, the closest thing he has to a regular band, or on latest album Kaleidoscopes.

“Divide And Rule is dead Beatles-y, like Norwegian Wood,” he says. “That’s about the Tories and the right wing – how their aim is to keep people battling against each other. King Of Everything is about people’s opinions on the internet, feeding that disinformation. Y’know, one person reads that someone’s not having the vaccine cos they’ve been told it’s got a 5G chip in it. Bouncer’s Dream is about that eighties episode of Neighbours – it’s the most psychedelic television you’ll ever see. I’m Not Okay is talking about mental health. I’ve had my battles. I was diagnosed with OCD three years ago.

I’ve had issues with anxiety. Things that a lot of people face. Where I come from, that’s shoved under the table. It goes against my cultural prerogative to talk about it. And that can’t be a good thing. But what I’ve worked out is that I wouldn’t change how my mind works.

The crux is that I am pretty happy.”

Catalyst deems Kaleidoscopes to be “a trip through my record collection”. The more you listen to these songs, the more his own voice comes to the fore, perhaps announcing that this eternal chameleon has finally found a skin he’s comfortable in.

“People spend such a long time trying to find out who they are,” he offers. “You go through phases where you’re like: ‘Well, am I Thom Yorke?

Maybe I’m Kurt Cobain. What about Bob Marley?

I smoke a bit of weed.’ What you suss out, in the end, is that there’s loads of fucking Freddie Mercury, Kanye West and PJ Harvey wannabes, but there’s only one you. And it turned out that who I am was enough for… not a lot of people, but enough to keep my career sustainable. That’s a liberating feeling.”

“I’ve been lucky enough to work with some brilliant humans.

And some total arseholes.”

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t’s been a long road to get where he is today.

Born Chris May and raised in the drabscape of 80s Hull, as a fledgling musician he prized songcraft, devouring the Stones, Beatles, Dubliners and Bob Marley from his parents’ collection, before punk taught him to steep his

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I like to be busy. That’s his prerogative, but it was tiresome at times. It was like he didn’t really want to do it, and that made it hard to enjoy at times.

There was a point where I couldn’t do a tour.

Instead of moving it, Andrew saw fit to get someone else in, which was a shame. But there’s no bridges burnt.”

Fronted by a similarly hyperactive band hopper, he says Ginger Wildheart’s solo band was a better fit. “Lots of people fall out with Ginger,” he says.

“I never have. So many people kiss his arse, and I don’t. I think, as a fellow working-class Northerner, he reacts well to that. I’ll tell him if he’s being a knob. And he’ll tell me. People like Ginger

Kaleidoscopes is out now. Visit www. chriscatalyst.com/ for more information.

NEIL CHAPMAN/PRESS

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The American South’s reputation has taken a bit of a beating of late. Southern rock road warriors Blackberry Smoke want you to know there’s more to their music and their homeland than dog-eared clichés and ill-fitting stereotypes.

Words: Polly Glass 60 CLASSICROCKMAGAZINE.COM

to their motherland, and, in the title track, an exasperated look at the Deep South stereotypes embedded in American culture. Straight-shooting matter with a wry edge. If you like Blackberry Smoke, You Hear Georgia won’t change that.

But there’s more to this band of rock-steady longhairs, and to their home turf. Their story is riddled with sharp edges, little darknesses and intrigue. From a foundation of blue-collar grit, Bible Belt hoodoo and fast-living early days, their sound has been shaped by the nuances of the American south, with a little help from the British Invasion and 80s MTV. It’s the story of how a livewire guitarist from Alabama and two metalhead brothers (drums and bass) founded the 21st century’s answer to Lynyrd Skynyrd.

“If we felt the need to change anything about what we do, we would. But we come from the ‘If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’ generation.”

Charlie Starr

JO LOPEZ/PRESS

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ne loud Sunday night in the 90s, at a rock bar called the Nine Lives Saloon in Atlanta, Charlie Starr was born.

Not literally, of course.

But as the young singer/guitarist christened Charles Gray thrashed out AC/DC, Rolling Stones and Motörhead classics, his bandmate inadvertently gave him the name that the rest of the world would come to know him by.

“He and I had a cover band that played there every Sunday, and he started calling me that on stage,” Starr recalls. “And this was over a period of a few years, so people started calling me that all the time. I never really thought about it as a ‘stage name’ per se, or a persona. It’s

nothing like that, it’s just a nickname that stuck.”

Nickname or otherwise, it pairs well with the affable frontman’s southern timbre, Keith Richards threads and beautiful vintage guitars (all of which are on display on our Zoom call) – the sort of romantic rock-star ideals upon which rock’n’roll was built, with songs to match.

It worked for the Stones, and it works for Blackberry Smoke.

“We’re firm believers in not overthinking much,” drummer Brit Turner, all shaggy beard, glasses and trucker cap in the Atlanta sun, reasons on a separate Zoom call from his van. “I think people can tamper with the music so much that it doesn’t sound real.”

They make good on that ethos on their seventh album, You Hear Georgia, part celebration of the dulcet nostalgia they do so well, part love letter

ut first let’s rewind just a year. Like the rest of us, Blackberry Smoke hunkered down with their families when covid hit.

Keyboard player Brandon Still had a baby. When it was safe to do so the band played socially distanced gigs and drive-in shows. Starr wrote songs – a lot of songs.

“I have hundreds of ideas on my phone and on scraps of paper,” he says. “I wrote a lot of songs during lockdown for Blackberry Smoke, and also co-wrote a lot of songs with friends. People would sit around bored and say: ‘Let’s write some songs.’

Who knows where they’ll wind up. But it was a really productive period.”

Recorded in Nashville with Dave Cobb (Rival Sons, Jason Isbell, Chris Stapleton) producing, You Hear Georgia comes with an ensemble-y feel, with additional musicians (longtime touring guitarist Benji Shanks and percussionist Preston Holcomb), A-list guests (Rickey Medlocke and Warren Haynes are among Starr’s co-writers on the record) and backing singers the Black Bettys creating flavours of the Tedeschi Trucks Band and Little Feat. From the first notes, there’s a sense that you’re in good hands.

“It was always my dream to have a three-guitar band like Lynyrd Skynyrd, you know?” Starr says.

“Over the years Shanks would come and play with us, and it was always so great. This time we were just like, let’s invite everybody, let’s have a party.”

Over the years, Blackberry Smoke’s warm, inviting brew of countrified rock and select spices (swampy slide, Delta hues, metallic edges…) has matured and sweetened, but ultimately not changed a great deal, and You Hear Georgia is no exception. It’s an approach afforded by independence (they put out music through Earache Records in the UK but essentially retain total control over their operation), and a fan base, affectionately known as ‘the brothers and sisters’ (a nod to the Allman Brothers album?), who continue to buy their records and fill the generously-sized theatres they play.

“Each time gets a little more comfortable,” Turner reasons. “But this, I felt like working with Dave Cobb was magical. He gets what we do. I feel like he just let it happen.”

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‘Comfortable’. That’s a word you’ll hear a lot from Blackberry Smoke. You’ll also hear it being used about them by fans and critics, respectively as a redeeming quality and a dull one. Listening to their records and watching their shows – the rock-steady harmonies, the effortless live chemistry, the Skynyrd-style rugs on stage – ‘comfortable’ invariably comes to mind. Is it necessarily a bad thing?

“I guess if we felt the need to change anything about what we do, we would,” Starr says simply, “but I think we come from the ‘If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’ generation.”

He pauses and laughs, then adds: “And I don’t know if we’ve ever been given any good advice!

We’ve had to learn the hard way in so many instances, and come out the other side with our little notebook full of: ‘Next time don’t trust the guy that bribes government officials’ and ‘Don’t wait three years to…’ you know. The list goes on and on and on.”

Gonna need a bigger bus… You’re never alone when you’re on the road with Blackberry Smoke.

T

“It was always my dream to have a three-guitar band like Lynyrd Skynyrd.”

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Charlie Starr and handling snakes and all that. It’s very inspiring when you look at it, because it’s all kind of scary.

“That’s another thing about the South, there’s a lot of boogeyman stories,” he continues. “There were all these spooky stories about devil worshippers, and how rock’n’roll bands were causing it. That’s the deeply rooted religious thing, and how people can make it so complicated. It’s such a huge part of the culture.”

Meanwhile in the city of Smyrna, Georgia, near an airbase where their father was a flying instructor (the family had previously lived in the Philippines, among other places, as part of Turner Snr’s military service), the Turner brothers soaked up everything MTV threw at them – “Def Leppard, Judas Priest, Ratt, all that business” – and jammed it out in their basement.

“My dad had some friends from the service, and their kids were a little bit older, so they turned us on to Aerosmith and Judas Priest,” Brit says, “and it went from that to Led Zeppelin. But

we went hard into Iron Maiden, then Slayer, Metallica and all that.”

It was AC/DC that set him on the path to being a drummer. “AC/DC was my love because it sounded like: ‘Okay, I understand this, and I think I can play it,” he recalls. “You could never play it like Phil Rudd, but you can play along.”

Inspired, Turner and his bass-playing brother Richard would wind up in Atlanta, playing in local metal band Nihilist. Gigs were full-on, even violent affairs. They opened for Iron Maiden and Metallica, as well as a stream of hardcore groups like Agnostic Front and Circle Jerks. Bad Brains frontman H.R. sat in with them one night.

“That kind of music is more like a sport than the music we play now,” he observes. “It was fun, so we definitely enjoyed it. But it’s a violent kind of music, it’s different. After ten years of slogging it out around this area I really just got tired of it.”

Still, in the late 80s/early 90s there was plenty for young musos in America to dig into. Southernfried rock faces like The Black Crowes, Raging Slab and the Georgia Satellites were enjoying a purple patch, along with heavy misfits like Faith No More and Junkyard; mavericks who filled the space between hair-metal and grunge with underrated aplomb. For Starr, who moved to Atlanta straight after high school, it was an exciting time.

JO LOPEZ/PRESS

oday Atlanta is part of the Blackberry Smoke brand. In a city where rock, metal, hip-hop and more rub shoulders, the band have become part of the furniture. The Black Crowes are their neighbours, as are Mastodon and their families (“We run into each other at Target with the children,” Turner tells us).

But it all began outside the city. Starr grew up in Lanett, a tiny cotton-mill town near the AlabamaGeorgia border, where he split his time between a bluegrass-playing father (who worked in a body and paint shop by day) and a mother who loved The Beatles, the Rolling Stones and Bob Dylan.

Typical of that part of the South, there was little to do. High-school football was a big deal. There was no music scene, except for the bars where as a teenager Starr would play covers sets on Fridays and Saturdays, playing music “to put people on the dance floor and sell beer”.

Before that, aged 11, he had discovered Aerosmith’s Rocks album in the cassette player of an abandoned truck in a mud hole. He cycled home, tape in hand, played it and never looked back. “I think it was Back In The Saddle that I heard first. The guitar sounds were just massive, and it just tickled my ear.

I was like: ‘I like that, I don’t know what they’re doing, but I like that.’”

Religion was a constant presence. Starr was raised a Baptist. He grew up watching his devout father sell horses to the local preacher (“I only ever saw the preacher in a suit with his hair really coiffed, but he came over that day with his truck and horse trailer, and he had his sleeves rolled up, and on his forearm was a tattoo of a dagger, and it said: ‘Born loser’.”). Around the time of the PMRC (Parents Music Resource Center, an American committee who wanted to limit the access of children to music deemed to have violent, drugrelated or sexual themes) hearings, his mother set fire to rock records in their yard. The sort of darkness, contradiction and superstition that seems to get under the skin of anyone from that part of the world, in one way or another.

“I spoke with Alice Cooper twice about this,” Starr muses, “and he pointed it out it was on our Whippoorwill album, Six Ways To Sunday, the imagery in those lyrics about speaking in tongues

BLACKBERRY SMOKE

ANDY SAPP/PRESS

“Which guitar to play today… Decisions, decisions…”

“Is ‘scarecrow’ one word, or two?”

“How does that lick go?”

“Sorry, synths aren’t allowed in the studio.”

Blackberry Smoke recording new album You Hear Georgia.

“This was in 1993, and the Black Crowes had exploded. I don’t know if they were responsible for the excitement in the rock scene of Atlanta, but they probably had something to do with it. There were so many bands, and I met so many musicians who are still my friends, and it really excited me.

I could barely sleep at night.”

Starr worked in a body shop like his dad by day, playing honky tonks and bars and partying hard by night. “We were in our twenties, so we just went nuts. Some people go to college, I joined bands [laughs]. We drank and did drugs and had a blast.” And he remembers that quietly fertile, dynamic rock era with fondness.

“Even before Nirvana put out the Nevermind record, those bands were already pushing out some of the more bubblegum, hairspray stuff,” he enthuses. “It was like, they look like they haven’t showered in a few days, they’re not just trying to pick up chicks, they’re greasy and real. I was never one for some of the radio-ready, lipstick music.

Although I do love the New York Dolls, and Hanoi Rocks.”

Somehow it all led to Buffalo Nickel, the band that Starr and the Turner brothers played in, which, when that fell apart, led to Blackberry Smoke in 2001. But there was/is something about that founding trio that can be felt today in the

group’s almost telepathic musical chemistry; the unmistakable warmth; the tight-but-loose ease at heart of everything they do.

A few months ago Starr and the two Turners played together again, as the backing band for a friend making a record down in Macon, Georgia. “It was kind of like the old days,” Starr recalls, doe-eyed. “It was magical, it made me tear up a bit. There’s something that happens with Brit, Richard and myself. Only the three of us sound like that.”

I

t all serves to paint a more layered picture of Blackberry Smoke’s world than some may deduce from stereotypes of the American south; simplistic, often damning preconceptions that Starr is all too familiar with, and channels on You Hear Georgia’s title track.

“Hollywood’s always been really good at portraying that,” he sighs. “As I got older and travelled outside of the southern United States…

Some of the ways that Southerners can be portrayed in movies – as these wretched, toothless, racist hillbillies – I would meet or see people like that in other places. There’s ugly everywhere, and if people focus on ugly ideas it sort of becomes a stereotype.”

Is it easy for you to separate the South you

know, that’s in your music, from the more divided side that has been in the spotlight for the past few years?

“I look at it two different ways, and it really is the good and the bad. I try to surround myself with the good. What the South is to me is completely different to what it is to somebody from California, who’s looking over and thinking: ‘Well, down there it’s all hate and negativity.’ It’s not all good, obviously, I’ve experienced bad things too, but the good outweighs the bad for me. A lot of people just can’t move past horrible, horrible things. And I’m not saying that it’s easy…” Starr pauses, thinking. “I don’t know, that’s a deep subject.”

In a sense his lack of outspoken politics – except those that may hide behind his calm, kind eyes – says a lot about Blackberry Smoke, a band who’ve created a safe space of sorts, where differences and nuance are accepted, even expected, without fuss. Where the appeal of the music is simple, and deep if you care to listen for it.

“The music is, in its way, sacred to me, it’s not just a commodity,” Starr says. “It’s rock’n’roll. It’s meant to make you feel good, it’s not to be feared.”

You Hear Georgia is out on May 28 via Earache/3 Legged Records.

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With hatchets buried and differences sorted, a new-look seven-piece Helloween return with one of the best albums of their career. But will the love last?

Words: Dave Ling

FRANZ SCHEPERS/PRESS

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one who never left, Michael Weikath. Weikath (or Weike, as he is mostly known) is an interesting guy with a quirky sense of humour.

In conversation he uses the word ‘the’ in relation to his bandmates, as in “The Deris” and “The Sasha”. Hansen, by contrast, is more quietly spoken, although his words ring with forceful determination.

“Kai was a proponent of doing this, and the idea was discussed a lot before it happened,” Weikath says. “Hellish Rock [a 2007 tour on which Gamma Ray were ‘special guests’ to Helloween] helped to make it possible.”

F

Michael Kiske, Michael Weikath, Markus Grosskopf and Kai Hansen with Helloween on a German TV show in 1988.

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INSET: GETTY

ithin the world of power metal, the return of Kai Hansen and Michael Kiske to Helloween was as surprising as Alan Lancaster and John Coghlan kissing and making up with Status Quo’s Frantic Four. Or Iron Maiden readmitting Bruce Dickinson and Adrian Smith. Or even Zeppelin’s internet-busting comeback at the O2 Arena. As unexpected news goes, it was that big.

Helloween were formed in Hamburg in 1984 by guitarist/vocalist Kai Hansen, guitarist Michael Weikath, bassist Markus Grosskopf and drummer Ingo Schwichtenberg, although it wasn’t until lead singer Michael Kiske joined for their Keeper Of The Seven Keys albums – Part One in 1987, a follow-up 12 months later – that the big time really beckoned.

Then, in 1989, a war of words erupted when Hansen quit to form power-metallers Gamma Ray. Despite the subsequent firing of Kiske and hiring of his replacement Andi Deris – and Schwichtenberg’s exit due to drugs and mental health issues – Helloween and Gamma Ray each carved out comfortable, if unbalanced, careers.

Five years ago it was announced that Hansen and Kiske were returning as part of the seven-man Pumpkins United line-up, which also included Weikath, Grosskopf, Deris, current guitarist Sasha Gerstner, a member since 2002, and drummer of 16 years standing Dani Loeble. Following a triumphant world tour, Pumpkins United decided to make an album together. Now, that album is finally getting a release.

“It was a long ride to make this happen,” Kai Hansen begins. “Whenever Gamma Ray played with Helloween we drank some beers, and I felt it would be sad if we never did something before we got too old. What we had was too good to ignore.”

With the release of Helloween, Classic Rock is getting the lowdown from the returning Hansen and the

urther back still, Weikath and Hansen had forged a verbal cease-fire during a lengthy discussion at the bar at a UFO concert in Hamburg. Today Weikath observes that it wasn’t helping anyone, and that “false narratives” were sometimes created by comments from reporters. Time, it appears, has proved to be a healer.

“I always paid attention to what Helloween did, and there was a healthy competition between the two bands,” Hansen admits. “Before I left, Weike and I had some issues. He was happy that I went because I was in his way, but time buried those feelings. We are very different as people, but I always respected Weike as an artist. The guy is a genius, he writes great stuff. After a while I really missed the squaring up to each other and what it created.”

The return of the equally strong-willed Kiske represented another huge question mark. Never much of a metalhead in the first place, after being sacked from Helloween he had dabbled in various sub-strands of rock. In 2000 he was snapped up for work with operatic metal supergroup Avantasia.

Ultimately, it was this that began to steer him back towards Helloween.

“He had become a bit of a hermit and got away from doing live music, metal especially,” Hansen says. “But then Tobi [Sammet] got him out on an Avantasia tour. I was there too, and we talked a lot about the past and a possible future. It led to me jumping in on [Kiske’s band] Unisonic [in 2011].”

“Michael has become a very different guy,” Weikath considers. “He’s developed a sense of clemency. Back then, the same as me, he was a hard head who would never let anything go. We have come to realise that neither will do the other harm, and there’s a sense of trust.”

Still, the perils of ‘lead singer disease’ are all too well known, and with Kiske, Deris and Hansen competing for the microphone, Helloween have a potential triple-case scenario.

“None of that stuff is going on, and I’m surprised,” Weikath admits. “It helps that we have an effective management team that knows all of the characters.

If necessary we turn to them. I wish we had had that before.”

There aren’t just multiple singers in Helloween.

Being a seven-man band with three guitar heroes must present problems? There’s an English phrase: ‘Too many cooks spoil the broth.’

“We have a few songwriters, all with different styles.

How do you pull everything together without sounding like a f**king samba band?”

Kai Hansen CLASSICROCKMAGAZINE.COM 65

HELLOWEEN

“We have the same idiom in German”, Weikath remarks. “Sure, there are times when it becomes too much, but things work fine. Leatherwolf have three guitarists, so do Iron Maiden.”

“Many bands have one lead animal and the rest just follow. With Helloween we have a bunch of alphas, and that can cause problems, but luckily we are older and wiser now,” Hansen notes.

When Classic Rock asks how the band share out the guitar solos these days, the response is a classic Weike-ism. “Hansen and I do the puppet theater,” Weikath replies with a straight face, “and Sasha has no problem playing like a rhythm guitarist underneath the whole thing.”

But what about the egos?

“It’s much less of a problem. Everyone has grown up,” he believes. “We will never be mature, but for somebody to throw a tantrum now would be considered bad behaviour. There were none of those old situations.”

Hansen explains that any baggage from the bad old days was jettisoned before the ‘go’ button got pushed: “Issues from the past were talked about between the older members, some controversial things that had to be addressed.”

However, for Hansen the excitement and joy of being back in Helloween were tinged with sadness. “I agreed to carry on with Helloween with a tear in my eye,” he says. “I was sad to leave Gamma Ray, but I had to close my personal circle.”

They felt heaven-sent. When everybody submitted what they had, it was clear we were going to have an amazing album.”

Weike admits to feeling tension while working in the studio (with producer Charlie Bauerfeind and mixer Dennis Ward), but adds that it was a positive sort of tension. “There were a lot of silly jokes and breaking up with laughter, often at very serious moments.”

In a lovely symbolic reference, Loeble recorded his drum parts playing Ingo Schwichtenberg’s original kit. “That was pretty intense, because we wanted Ingo to be sitting there,” Hansen says. “But during the tour, everybody had reached the conclusion that this was a new configuration of Helloween.”

The band dug out vintage equipment including an old Marshall stack last used on Walls Of Jericho, their full-length debut from 1985, and a Vox AC30 amplifier featured on 1998’s Better Than Raw. “We used old-school equipment but very modern technology to get the best of both Back with a bang: (l-r) Michael Kiske, worlds,” Hansen says proudly.

Michael Weikath, Kai Hansen, Andi Deris, Dani Löble, Markus Helloween has lots of hidden detail. Each Grosskopf, Sascha Gerstner. repeated listen revealing something new…

“That was the intention,” Weikath says might kill one another, but it became evident we with a smile. “We tried hard for those magic could get along.” moments. It felt like providence, as though there The show’s success left them with a question: was some sort of divine guidance.” would they make an album with the Pumpkins Amazingly, the album’s 12-minute finale, Skyfall, line-up, or go back to the way things were before? was pretty much an after-thought. The band The ensuing world tour, which included believed the record was a done deal until Hansen a spectacular show at London’s Brixton Academy, told them about his alien-themed epic, which was so well-received that Helloween knew the doffs its hat to David Bowie. stakes had been raised. They say the pressure acted “When I wrote Skyfall I wasn’t thinking of him at as an incentive. Maybe even a challenge. Work all, but when I took the demo to the producer he began on a new album, with Hansen and Kiske said: ‘I like the Major Tom thing’,” says Hansen. “It’s re-inducted into the fold. great to be compared to somebody so fantastic.”

“As Mr Super-Critical, I annoy myself and The chasm between the personalities of others, and there’s no doubt that tension existed,” Weikath and Hansen is highlighted by their Hansen says. “We have a few songwriters here, all individual responses to hearing the completed, with slightly different styles. How do you pull almost 65-minute-long album for the first time. everything together without sounding like “It was relief, really,” says Weikath. “But also a fucking samba band?” pride. A lot of pride.”

“I’ll be honest, at first I couldn’t listen to it,” admits Hansen. “I didn’t like the sound or the mix. But gradually I found some distance. And now I’m happy that it doesn’t have that stereotypical modern production; we didn’t want to sound like everybody else.”

Both men also have different views on Michael Weikath whether the album might prompt some non-Helloween fans to now get on board.

Instead, Helloween interwove a flavour of each “Maybe,” Weikath replies optimistically. “This is stage of the group’s career into the finished one of the strongest albums we’ve ever done. We product. “Yeah, but it was done intuitively,” are guilty of being a classic heavy metal band, but Weikath claims. “We agonised over whether or it is freakin’ mature.” not to include a ballad [it was eventually saved for “I cannot say. It could go either way,” Hansen the next album], and the final running order was shrugs. “We might attract some new people, but actually put together by Markus Staiger, the boss maybe it will scare away those that like the Keeper of our record company, who really got involved.” albums and nothing else.”

The songwriting credits are fairly evenly split, Nevertheless, from this point onwards with Weikath, Hansen, Andi Deris, Sasha Gerstner Pumpkins Reunited is Helloween. and Markus Grosskopf all getting involved. It was “We are going on forever, together,” Weikath a fruitful process. predicts. “It’s the most suitable thing to do.”

“The Deris and me had an avalanche of ideas,” Helloween is released on June 18 via Weikath says, smiling. “We would discuss Nuclear Blast. replacing a part of a song and ‘bam!’, another idea!

“We are guilty of being a classic heavy metal band, but it is freakin’ mature.”

H

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© 2017 FÁBIO AUGUSTO/PRESS

elloween’s current incarnation (and new album) can be traced back to the first Pumpkins United gig, which took place in Monterrey, Mexico in 2017.

“We had rehearsed a lot but… man, we were shitting our pants,” Hansen says with a chuckle.

“The first show of any tour is always shaky. But I won’t forget the sense of acceptance and happiness that came back from that South American audience. We went into things with no idea of what would happen or whether we

Following in the footsteps of a famous parent often means forever being in their shadow.

Can Wolfgang Van Halen, son of Edward, be one of the ones who escapes it?

Words: Dave Ling Portraits: Travis Shinn

I

t’s a familiar tale. A 12-year-old kid decides to learn to play guitar, asks his dad if he can have one, and is overjoyed when dad says he can.

What makes one particular example of this familiar story less ordinary, and considerably sexier, is when the kid’s name is Wolfgang Van Halen, and the dad in question is Edward Van Halen, the guy who took the perceived limitations of guitar playing as we knew it and tore them up, and completely revolutionised the way the instrument could be played.

The guitar that dad gave the gobsmacked teenaged Wolfgang, at Christmas several months later, was the back-up version of a custom-striped ‘5150’ guitar that he had used in the promo clip for Van Halen’s Panama.

Inside the guitar case was also a festive card featuring a Playboy bunny model.

“Play, boy!” Wolfgang says today, chuckling at the memory. “He was really proud of that joke.”

With his soon-to-bereleased debut album Mammoth WVH (more on that to come), Wolfgang Van Halen is introducing himself to the world. Before our phone conversation we learn that a US publicist and ‘Uncle Pat’ from the Van Halen camp will be listening in, although it’s soon clear that Wolf, answering questions with cordial authority, doesn’t need any metaphorical hand-holding.

Two years before he was given the 5150 guitar, Wolfgang began his musical journey playing drums, which he started when he was ten. His dad had brought him a small kit. It’s been reported that the youngster sometimes sat in to watch Van Halen rehearse and on occasion sat behind the bigger set-up of his uncle, Alex Van Halen, who also gave him advice.

“In fact the encouragement came from my father, not my uncle – not that I have anything against Alex,”

Wolfgang clarifies. “No, it was my father that showed me the way. He taught me a straight-up AC/DC, Highway To Hell-style beat, and I took it from there. To this day I consider myself a drummer before anything else. It’s where I feel most comfortable.”

Asked how many different instruments he plays, he goes through a mental checklist: “I guess… drums, guitar, bass and I dabble on keys. I’ve also worked a lot on my singing, if you consider that an instrument.”

Did he take any formal tuition?

“Not at all. It often began with my dad showing me something, and from there I would take it and develop my own style. My dad wasn’t the best teacher,” he continues, laughing. “I would ask him to play something, but he would just proceed to be Eddie Van Halen. He would look at me and say: ‘Do that.’

To which I would laugh and reply sarcastically: ‘Sure thing, no problem.’”

All the same, Wolf’s musicianship, including his guitar technique, came on in leaps and bounds. At a sixthgrade talent show, he got up in front of the school to perform 316, the almost 90-second instrumental guitar piece written for him by his dad that featured on Van Halen’s album For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge (Wolf was born on March 16, 1991 – 3/16 – just weeks before the record’s completion).

During Van Halen’s 2004 tour, which was fronted by Sammy Hagar, 13-year-old Wolf started to make guest appearances with the band. “Now and again I would pop up during my father’s solo spot and play 316 with him,” he recalls. “It was nerve racking, but a fun thing to be a part of.”

With his confidence blooming, it wasn’t long before the emerging prodigy could play Eruption, EVH’s celebrated finger-tapping tour de force from Van Halen’s classic self-titled debut.

“I’m a hard rocker at heart but I’m not really interested in labels.”

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CLASSICROCKMAGAZINE.COM 69

Wolf (left) on bass with Mark Tremonti and his band Tremonti, London, October 2012.

An eye on the prize, but drummer, guitarist, bassist, songwriter, singer Wolf Van Halen isn’t putting all his eggs in one basket.

“How old was I for that? Um… I guess I was fifteen,” he replies casually. “I had started at twelve, and by then I was a pretty confident guitar player.”

While he was still in the womb of his mother, the actress Valerie Bertinelli, Wolf’s father had serenaded him by playing his guitar up against her pregnant belly. Given that he was named by his parents after the classical genius Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, there was little likelihood that their one and only offspring would pursue a career in anything but music.

“Not really,” he agrees. “But there was never really an active thought of: ‘I’m going to do this…’ It just gradually snowballed. The process was natural.”

Perhaps surprisingly, given how accustomed we have become to seeing sons and daughters of rock stars putting bands together, Wolf did not learn his chops by hooking up with a succession of fledgling Los Angeles rock acts.

“No, there wasn’t too much of that,” he says.

“I preferred to play with friends in middle school and high school. We’d get together after class and jam, but it was never taken too seriously.

Everything was just for fun.”

a lightbulb moment. Somebody sent for David Lee Roth, and an impromptu version of On Fire, the closing track from the band’s debut album, was all it took to confirm that things sounded good. Very good, in fact.

The following year Wolf toured as Van Halen’s bassist, and in 2012 he appeared on what became their final album, A Different Kind Of Truth. It goes without saying that the job brought some gigantic pluses to his young life, but did he have mixed feelings about taking the place of fan favourite Michael Anthony?

Mark Tremonti, who was without a bass player for a European tour with his solo band Tremonti.

Eventually Wolf became a permanent replacement for Brian Marshall, and played on their albums Dust and Cauterize. British fans got their first sight of Wolf playing live in late 2012, during a short run of Tremonti gigs that included one at The Forum in London.

“That was a blast, and I was so happy to be supporting friends and playing music,” he recalls.

“It showed me that I’m happy to do what I do and that the size of the room really doesn’t matter. If there’s people to listen and enjoy the show, that’s what it’s about.”

His reputation was further enhanced by an invitation to appear on a solo album from Clint Lowery, the guitarist with the Atlanta band Sevendust. Wolf played all of the drums on 2020’s God Bless The Renegades, and also a sizeable amount of the bass. “I had admired Clint as a songwriter for so long, it was a complete honour to help him out,” he explains.

When asked whether he receives lots of similar invitations, Wolf replies: “Not as many as…” and then reconsiders his words. Seemingly he was going to say: “Not as many as you might think”, but modesty prevails. “No, not really,” he finally replies, adding: “If anybody wants me to play drums, I’d love to. Just hit me up. There’s nothing I like more than relaxing, playing drums and not having to worry about anything else.”

Wolf’s world was torn apart October 6, 2020, the day his beloved father lost his battle with cancer. While the rock world mourned one of its greatest innovators, his son’s record label released Distance, a choking farewell to the man who had shaped his life.

An emotional YouTube promo, featuring clips of Wolf growing from a child to a man, with his father looking on, is now approaching five million views. The bond between the pair is truly something to behold. No wonder Edward wept upon hearing the track before his death.

“I wasn’t planning on Distance being the first song of mine that people heard,” Wolf explains, but getting it out as a tribute to dad felt like the right thing to do. Also for the money to go to his favourite charity.”

Amazingly, Wolf had considered omitting Distance from his debut album.

“I feel like a veteran in dealing with unwarranted criticism.”

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hings came to a head in the summer of 2006. Now 15 years old, Wolf had also become a proficient bass player, and as he sat around jamming with his dad and Uncle Alex at Van Halen’s base, 5150 Studios, there was

“That really wasn’t on my mind,” Wolf insists.

“I was just there to support my father in any way I could. He was newly sober, and because of that was dealing with some performance anxiety, so I was very happy to be there for him. The backlash wasn’t anything I thought too much about.”

All the same, it must have provided a sharp lesson in dealing with fans and the media?

“Oh, for sure,” he says, chuckling ruefully.

“I now feel like a veteran in dealing with unwarranted criticism.”

In the autumn of 2012, with Van Halen off the road, Wolf agreed to help out Alter Bridge guitarist

WOLFGANG VAN HALEN

Wolfgang and dad Eddie Van Halen performing A Different Kind Of Truth with Van Halen at Madison Square Garden, New York City, February 2012.

“That was pretty crazy I suppose,” he admits.

“But the response persuaded me to add it as a bonus track because it’s only available digitally right now. It feels like a good thing to [include it].”

U

nderstandably, Wolfgang is thrilled at the prospect of releasing his long-awaited album (out June 11). Instead of using his given name, it’s coming out under the handle Mammoth WVH – both the record and the band.

“I want us to be viewed as a band rather than a solo project,” he says. “Growing up I always liked the name of Mammoth and I vowed to use it later in life. For those that don’t know it’s what Van Halen were called before becoming Van Halen. My dad was Mammoth’s singer, so that also makes me feel like a kindred spirit.”

Although Wolf wrote, played and sang every note on the album, Mammoth WVH is also a group, comprising guitarists Frank Sidoris (from Slash’s Conspirators) and Jon Jourdan (Texan progressive hard rockers To Whom It May) bassist Ronnie Ficarro (Falling In Reverse) and drummer Garrett Whitlock (Tremonti).

So why do everything alone in the studio?

“Because I could!” he says with a chuckle.

“I really wanted to see whether I could pull it off.”

The album has been a long time coming. Wolf began writing with the intention of doing something on his own in 2013.

“We started recording in 2015 but then I went on the road again with Van Halen and wrote

a bunch more tunes,” he explains. “When I got back I wrote more. Like I said, it took me a while to become comfortable as a lead vocalist. By the summer of 2018 the album was done.”

It was produced by Michael ‘Elvis’ Baskette (Alter Bridge, Tremonti, Slash), who Wolf met via Tremonti. Wolf considers Baskette his equivalent of Van Halen’s Ted Templeman.

“I don’t want to work with anyone else. Elvis is my guy,” Wolf states emphatically. “He helped me to find my confidence as a singer. Working with

question of whether Wolf sees himself as a hard rocker, a metalhead or, as Distance could possibly propose, a soon-to-be popular entertainer.

“I’m a hard rocker at heart but I’m not really interested in labels,” Wolf responds, sounding uncomfortable with the question. “I’m just happy to be making music that I enjoy, and if anyone else feels the same that’s a bonus.”

At 30, Wolf has his life and career ahead of him.

There are so many possibilities; remaining a bandleader, or joining a big group. Would he describe himself as ambitious?

“Maybe,” he replies cautiously. “But I see myself going headfirst with this. I’m having a wonderful time, and it’s exciting to be behind something that’s one hundred per cent mine.

I want to know how far I can take it.”

For the time being, Wolfgang Van Halen has much to feel proud of. He’s made a cracking debut album, earned a lot of respect for defending his father against the Grammys (for their too-fleeting tribute to him this year’s awards), and more than proved himself as a musician and songwriter in his own right. He seems like a decent, well-grounded guy too.

“Thank you. That’s good to hear,” he says.

“And I’m always here to protect my dad’s legacy.”

Make no mistake, we will hear much more from Wolfgang Van Halen.

GETTY

“It’s exciting to be behind something that’s one hundred percent mine. I want to know how far I can take it.” him is an absolute pleasure; Elvis is my partner in all of this.”

Naturally, dad Edward heard the record at every stage right up to its completion.

“Oh yeah. And I’m happy that he loved it,” Wolf says, smiling. “That pride of his is what kept me going in making it.”

Although the tender, heartstring-tugging Distance might suggest otherwise, Mammoth WVH is a guitar-intensive record that fits comfortably into the category of modern rock. It begs the

Mammoth WVH is released on June 11 via EX1 Records and is reviewed on p86.

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e write this with sunshine streaming through the window, and this month’s Hot List – painstakingly whittled down, as it always is, from a massive longlist – singing through our speakers. Who knows how the world will look by the time you read this – for one thing we’re in Britain, so sod’s law it’ll be raining by then. But regardless, we’re confident that these new tracks will give you plenty to get your teeth into.

As ever we cast our net wide and reaped a zingy, eclectic catch of fresh sounds. There are familiar and unfamiliar names here, and it’s all first-class stuff. Catchy, feelgood rock’n’soul from Yola. Neil Fallon’s latest side hustle. AC/DC-infused tuneage from Buckcherry. The new single from RL Burnside’s grandson. They’re all here, folks, and more besides. The high seas of rock’n’roll never fail to please.

We hope you enjoy this month’s selection, and if you want more tips (and to vote for your favourite) visit loudersound.com every Monday for Classic Rock’s Tracks Of The Week.

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Yola Diamond Studded Shoes An irresistible soul tune wrapped up in buttery, sun-kissed Americana, complete with countrified, Allmans-style slide guitar and a fun, stylish video, Diamond Studded Shoes is an utterly lovable gateway into Yola’s world for newcomers, and sure-fire catnip for existing fans. On-the-money stuff from the Bristol-born former Phantom Limb singer. We played this when it first came out and it just made us feel good. We hope it does the same for you. Bewilderingly, Yola’s upcoming album Stand For Myself is being released on eight-track cartridge (ask your grandparents).

Find out more at iamyola.com

The Picturebooks feat. Neil Fallon Corrina Corrina

THE PICTUREBOOKS: CLAUS GRABKE/PRESS

Corrina Corrina’s origins are shrouded in mystery. The song was first recorded back in the 1920s, and since then it’s been covered by a range of artists including Eric Clapton, Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, Steppenwolf, Rod Stewart, Bill Haley and Phish.

This latest version is the result of a collision between German motorcycle freaks The Picturebooks and Clutch frontman Neil Fallon, with Brant Bjork bassist Dave Dinsmore hitching a ride. It thumps, it rips, it snarls, it stops, it starts, and it’s as tasty as a blues burrito slathered in rock’n’roll relish.

Find out more at thepicturebooks.com

Kitten Pyramid 7 Day Duvet

Mercutio Where The Pain Lives

“This album is atonement for my propensity to waffle”, Kitten mastermind Scott Milligan says of the record from which this delightfully weird piece of proggy pop is taken. “Creatively I like to get to the point sharpish because I have the attention span of a goldfish.”

Accordingly, 7 Day Duvet wastes no time in hooking you into its whimsical world of off-kilter, Beatles-via-Beck sweetness, in which nonsense is the lingua franca and ‘all kids who come last… glue their hands to physicists’.

Find out more at kittenpyramid.co.uk

The opening salvo from British band Mercutio’s upcoming album Where The Pain Lives is a buzzing alt.rock jackhammer, with one foot in the Royal Blood school of heavy and the other in Muse’s box of far-out tricks. Joined by singer Ross William Wild in 2019 (a musical theatre guy who sang with Spandau Ballet for a stint in 2017), they’ve grown into a power trio with bite and intensity. Catch them on tour supporting Inglorious (all being well) in September/October.

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The Record Company Ball And Chain Big Mama Thornton’s 1968 single was famously covered by Janis Joplin, and now LA-based rock’n’roll mavericks The Record Company have come in and screwed with it – in a really cool way. Sort of like Massive Attack and The Black Keys kicking back with a spliff and a stack of early blues LPs, it’s built around a trippy loop of the titular lyric, originally the result of an accident in bassist Alex Stiff’s home studio. The Record Company’s version is a commanding interpretation that genuinely feels like their own. Serendipity right there for you, folks.

Find out more at therecordcompany.net

Wolf Alice Smile

From chorus shrieks to stomping boots, our next entry is something a little more menacing and ominous, but deliciously so, from progressive grungy Brits Prosperina. Hailed as “an anthem for the disenfranchised Left”, Boot packs mighty guitar chops and seething lyrics. A heavy, commanding fusion, it makes us think of Soundgarden caught in a dystopian kaleidoscope with Tool and Idles,while the animated video kinda brings to mind the latter’s Kill Them With Kindness.

Find out more at facebook.com/ProsperinaBand

By turns dark, heavy and dreamy, Smile, the new single from British alt. rockers Wolf Alice invokes a gauzy whirlwind of 90s oddball rock, channelling the likes of Smashing Pumpkins and Garbage to compelling effect. Lead singer Ellie Rowsell explains: “This is one of the songs we wrote thinking that we would play it live. I miss that feeling of singing on stage. It’s like screaming into a pillow or something – you can get away with being more nasty.”

Find out more at wolfalice.co.uk

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THE RECORD COMPANY: JUSTIN BORUCKI; WOLF ALICE: JORDAN HEMINGWAY/PRESS

Prosperina Boot

Who Is...

Cedric Burnside Meet the American bluesman following in grandpa’s footsteps.

Describe your sound in a sentence.

It’s very unorthodox. A lot of people say it don’t make any sense…

They’re probably right. It’s different from anything you’ve ever heard.

When did you first realise you wanted to be a musician?

Music has been a part of my family as long as I can remember.

As a child I used to sit and watch my family play music on raggedy amps and beat-up drums. I was fascinated, and wanted to do it so bad! My gut just said: “You’re gonna do that.” I knew I wanted to do that for the rest of my life.

What were the first records and/or bands you really fell in love with?

My Big Daddy (RL Burnside) used to do house parties every other weekend. At five or six years old I was one of several grandkids that used to sit there listening to the music and watching. That’s honestly the first music I remember.

Has that big surname of yours put much pressure on you?

I want to make my mark while I’m on this earth. That’s what I’m trying to do. But as I do that, I want to not forget where I come from and where I learned it from, which is RL Burnside. I give thanks to Big Daddy every day.

Let’s talk influences. Who are your go-to guitar heroes?

My Big Daddy! Junior Kimbrough.

Muddy Waters. Luther Dickinson.

Cedric Burnside Step In Cedric Burnside is the grandson of the great American blues singer-songwriter RL Burnside, and Step In, recorded at the legendary Royal Studios in Memphis, is proof that the blues runs thick in his blood. A modern-day take on traditional Mississippi Hill Country blues, it’s a vivid tale of adversity, anguish and atonement, powered by the kind of hard-drivin’ boogie that made the family name.

Find out more at cedricburnside.net

Who would you say has the best voices in rock’n’roll?

Muddy had a great voice too. We just cut our new record at Royal Studios in Memphis, so I can’t leave out the great Al Green.

What are the defining moments in your musical life so far?

Getting a Grammy nomination was pretty incredible. Getting a second one made me feel like people really appreciated what I do. That’s a nice feeling.

CEDRIC BURNSIDE: ABRAHAM ROWE/PRESS

When gigs can finally take place again, what can people expect from a Cedric Burnside show?

They are definitely going to get authentic Hill Country blues with great energy. I’ve recently recorded a new album, so they’ll hear some new music. Either way, I just hope they’re ready to dance.

What can you do besides music?

I’ve been getting into falconry and working in my garden. I can make a pretty damn good cornbread with purple hull peas, too.

Cedric’s new album I Be Trying is out on June 25 via Single Lock.

Kip Moore Good Life Based on this snappy, feelgood first taste of his upcoming fifth album, you’d be forgiven for wondering if Kip Moore has been taking tips from The Cadillac Three and Brothers Osborne. And that’s no bad thing. Swapping the brooding Springsteen-esque sensibilities of last year’s Wild with a swampy, soulful groove and countrified bounce, Good Life is the sort of music that demands cold beer, warm weather and good friends – the sort of stuff we’ll all relish when social distancing restrictions are lifted altogether.

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This Or That?

Buckcherry frontman Josh Todd takes on the most intimidating quiz known to man.

Beatles or Stones?

The Stones, for sure. They’re just edgier, a little more sex.

AC/DC or Zeppelin?

AC/DC, easy. For me they’re the best hard rock band that ever lived.

Hendrix or Page?

Page. There’s a longer history there.

Page had those greasy rock riffs.

Sixties or seventies music?

I like disco a lot, so seventies.

Gibson or Fender?

That’s tough. I would say Gibson, because my favourite is an SG. Cigarettes or alcohol?

Alcohol. Cigarettes are a waste of time. You don’t get high. They don’t do anything to you except kill you.

Fine wine or cold beer?

Cold beer.

Bourbon or tequila?

When I was drinking, it was just whatever could get you drunk. So tequila, probably.

Piercings or tattoos?

Tattoos. Not too tricky. You can tell.

Love or money?

The older you get, it’s money, right?

You can buy love with that.

Buckcherry So Hott

Tour bus or plane?

Tour bus.

Josh Todd and co. return with brand new album Hellbound in June. So Hott is the first taste, and it’s an absolute banger (even if the accompanying video looks a little dated, to say the least). Built up from a proper classic rock party riff, and mixed with the kind of salacious edge that made Crazy Bitch and Lit Up such anthems, it gets an awful lot very right. Like AC/DC with college boy energy.

Find out more at buckcherry.com

Cardio or weights?

Cardio. It’s great for singers.

Denim or leather?

Denim.

Book or movie?

Book. Always better than the movie. Right now I’m reading a book about the OJ Simpson trial, written by the two detectives on the case.

Prog or punk?

Punk.

Quinn Sullivan All Around The World

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Early bird or night owl?

Early bird. I’m up at five-thirty a.m.

Cats or dogs?

Dogs.

Lover or fighter?

I got a bit of both, but I’m gonna side with lover.

Vinyl or streaming?

Spotify is fine. I’m not a big vinyl guy. I can’t really tell the difference.

Motorbikes or sports cars?

Motorbikes. I mean, my favourite sport is MotoGP. HY

Hellbound is out on June 25 via Earache.

BUCKCHERRY: CHRISTOPHER DEVARGAS/PRESS; QUINN SULLIVAN: JUSTIN BORUCKI/PRESS

Quinn Sullivan has always sounded old for his age – and we mean that in the best possible way. Now at the ripe old age of 21 (having begun touring when he was only 11), he’s mixing real soul with a keen ear for a good pop melody like an artist of twice his years, as proven on this dulcet, hopeful number. If the prospect of blues-trained guitar prodigies makes you sigh wearily (summoning visions of pubescent YouTubers with oodles of technique and no personality), then this guy should feel like a breath of fresh air.

Find out more at quinnsullivanmusic.com

Horror or comedy?

Comedy. I don’t like to get scared.

But my daughter can really handle a horror flick. We’ll go to a horror movie together and I’ll be hunched up in my seat, and she’ll be fine.

p

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David Bowie

Another day, another Bowie reissue.

But is this latest a good one?

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Ingredients:

A Classic Excellent Very Good Good Above Average Average Below Par A Disappointment Pants Pish

80 Albums p90 Reissues p94 DVDs & Books p96 Buyer’s Guide p

16 PAGES Edited By Ian Fortnam

100% ROCK ian.fortnam@futurenet.com

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S M U B AL

Lou Barlow

Blackberry Smoke You Hear Georgia 3 LEGGED Atlanta rockers blend rhinestones and rock’n’soul with reliable skill.

T

here was always a danger for a band like Blackberry Smoke that they would end up too country for rock fans and too rock for the country massive. But after six studio albums, including two No.1s on the US country chart, they seem to have perfected a winning balancing act between their two chief influences.

Readers of Classic Rock are always going to prefer it when the bottom end has some heft, though, and Live It Down, the opening track on You Hear Georgia, is one of the finest rockers Blackberry Smoke have recorded to date. A lean, funky central riff and a muscular rhythm section drive behind it set us off nicely, before Stonesy gospel backing vocals boost an anthemic, party-tonight, sleep-tomorrow chorus, laced with tumbling piano and interspersed with gnarly vintage organ breaks and sleazy guitar squalls.

Another up-tempo highlight is All Over The Road. Given the title, it’s no surprise that it’s a classic high-octane stomper designed to soundtrack an ill-advised, full-throttle journey across state lines. It’s hardly reinventing 18 wheels, of course, but as it picks up a boogie-fuelled head of steam it’ll fire you up in the same way that any Quo, Creedence or Skynyrd rocker would.

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Elsewhere, though, the pace is more laid back. The country tradition of pithy lyrics and proud, slightly prickly southern sentiments is all over the title track, on which Charlie Starr takes aim at those who can’t see past the preconceptions and prejudices that still abound about America below the Mason-Dixon line. Arguably more likeable is their take on the classic country self-pity-fest, Lonesome For A Living.

The Starr-penned number sees Nashville star Jamey Johnson take the mic for a song that seems to wryly acknowledge the commercial hay made from tear-jerkers while still making for a sweetly pedal steelsoaked lament.

The folky guitar ballad Old Enough To Know, co-written with Travis Meadows, is another down-home gem, offering choice cautionary lines such as ‘Don’t trust a grown man with a nickname’ and ‘Nothing worth a damn happens after two a.m.’ Allman Brothers guitarist Warren Haynes’s guest spot on the sludgey rocker Rise Again is less distinctive, and a couple of other unremarkable tracks leave this album just short of being a stunner, but for the most part Blackberry Smoke have done Georgia proud once again.

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Reason To Live JOYFUL NOISE He’s never had a problem with writing songs, has our Lou. There are 17 tracks on the new album from the Sebadoh frontman and Dinosaur Jr bassist; 17 gorgeous, countryflecked acoustic tracks filled with beautiful yearning couplets and shaken refrains, introspective but simultaneously forward-looking. Although Barlow has a reputation for being eternally depressed and/ or heartbroken – in many respects he’s the archetypal US indie icon of the 90s – Reason To Live is full of a warmth and pleasure in life that suits his growing maturity as songwriter and raconteur well. His life might have settled, but his songs still have a questing spirit.

Lead-off single Love Intervene gives a fair indication of content – layered, poignant and damn catchy, full of humane intelligence and empathy. In that respect he recalls Throwing Muses’ persuasive off-kilter way round a riff as much as he does more classic touch-points such as R.E.M. and his own previous work. Either way, it makes for enthralling listening.

QQQQQQQQQQ Everett True

Joe Bonamassa Now Serving: Royal Tea Live From The Ryman PROVOGUE

Two teas, please.

Some people have accused Joe Bonamassa of releasing too many albums.

More likely he’s just satisfying his fan base and saving them the bother of searching out dodgy bootlegs. Like this one, maybe.

Frustrated that he was unable to tour last year’s Royal Tea album, he set up a gig at Nashville’s legendary Ryman Auditorium, installed a load of cardboard cut-outs where the audience should be, and proceeded to rip through the album, mostly in sequence, starting with the epic When One Door Opens but missing out the final Savannah for some reason.

A hardened road hog, Bonamassa has no problem spicing up the tracks live for the cardboard audience, confirming that Royal Tea is one of his better albums in recent years. For the encore he revives Rory

Gallagher’s Cradle Rock and Jethro Tull’s A New Day Yesterday, tacking on a slab of Yes’s Starship Trooper for good measure. And the cardboard cut-outs respond enthusiastically after every song – until the last.

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Fear Factory Aggression Continuum NUCLEAR BLAST

Dino’s cyber-brutes mark the end of an era.

Completed against the odds, due in part to the sudden departure of frontman Burton C Bell, Fear Factory’s tenth studio album can hardly avoid being a pivotal moment in their story.

Bell recorded his vocals before leaving, which ensures that Aggression Continuum sounds as it should, like the next last word in extreme metal futurism, with guitarist and driving force Dino Cazares serving up countless new variations on his still unique robot-riff formula.

The tunes are huge, too: Disruptor and Monolith are instant classics and will plainly bring houses down on future tours, irrespective of who is gripping the mic at the time.

Elsewhere, Fuel Injected Suicide Machine and Manufactured Hope embrace a more cinematic vibe, with echoes of the Californians’ Demanufacture peak.

This is a fine closing statement from Bell and also the sound of a band with shitloads of rocket fuel left in the gleaming titanium tank.

Confusing times, killer record.

QQQQQQQQQQ Dom Lawson

Kansas Point Of Know Return, Live & Beyond INSIDE OUT Wayward sons, still carrying on.

At the coal face for more than half a century, without ever quite becoming giants, Kansas deserve reconsideration, and this double live album shows why.

Still with original drummer Phil Ehart and Rich Williams, lead guitarist since 1973, their covid-19-halted 2019-20 tour was a showcase for Point Of Know Return, their best and best-selling album, plus assorted catalogue picks from 1974’s Lonely Wind to the 2016 pair Refugee and the elegiac

Summer. The band are musically impeccable, of course, and they’re on inspired and spirited form. Vocalist Ronnie Platt is Steve Walsh-esque without being a clone, David Ragsdale’s violin adds depth, and Williams still sizzles. Carry On Wayward Son retains its magnificence, but Closet Chronicles and the epic Miracles Out Of Nowhere run it close, while Hopelessly Human climaxes with tubular bells, and Dust In The Wind, their only US Top 10 hit really ought to be a standard by now.

Excellent.

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Djabe & Steve Hackett The Journey Continues ESOTERIC ANTENNA

Hackett joins the Hungary games.

When his hectic touring, recording and autobiographywriting schedule allows, former Genesis guitarist Hackett has, for more than a decade, enjoyed guesting with Hungarian jazz-rock outfit Djabe. This live set is taken mainly from an August 2019 show in Nyiregyhaza, where they played their collaborative album Life Is A Journey (think Weather Report-meets-Brand X) plus a few Genesis jollies.

Reducing the latter’s Firth Of

Fifth to four minutes is rather stingy, even if Hackett has released five million live versions in recent years, while Los Endos is buzzed up with much in-themoment improvisation. The bulk of the two-CD & DVD release is Djabe (rough translation ‘freedom’) doing their thing, with a pretty handy Brit joining in. Their thing happens to be fluid, adept and highly enjoyable.

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bends, and Waiting For God an alluring restraint. Godhead (there are gods aplenty in Manson’s imagery) questions gender stereotypes, while Anonymous XXX is Roxy Music’s Angel Eyes fed through a shredder by Curve.

These days it’s not news that the world has gone nuts, but Garbage present their bulletin with controlled rage.

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Garbage

Justin Sullivan

No Gods No Masters

Surrounded EARMUSIC New Model Army mainman goes solo during lockdown.

Would Justin Sullivan have written this album had there not been a pandemic? Probably, although he really didn’t seem to be in any hurry to follow up his first solo record, 2003’s Navigating

By The Stars. Nevertheless, despite the 18 years between them, the feel and approach is very familiar and utterly captivating. Aided strategically by various muso mates, it’s mostly just guitar and voice, and a seemingly endless supply of stories to be told, most of them dark, stark and haunting, Sullivan’s command of atmosphere and emotion a peerless master class in songwriting. Whether he’s highlighting the achievements of

extraordinary men (the chilling Amundsen) or soul gazing (Clean Horizon and Stone And Heather), the attention to lyrical detail is second to none, the execution immaculately intimate.

Elemental, enthralling, essential, Surrounded is fire and ice in equal measure.

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First album in five years sticks it to The Man. Garbage are here to reveal that capitalism, racism and sexism are wrong. And if they go about this bold mission with a production that sounds overly compressed and lacking in actual human fire, it’s the message that counts, right? Even if Shirley Manson’s continual repetition of the F-word on The Men Who Run The World evokes a crusty teenager trying too hard to shock daddy.

Once the album stops yelling and stamping for attention, the strong suits of this outfit come through, and dark, sinister atmospheres trademarked by Depeche Mode and The Banshees are allowed to thrive.

Wolves has surprising hairpin

Live At Knebworth 1990 Wish you’d been there?

Fans will already have this, as The Later Years box set includes the show on Blu-ray. Now it’s available for the first time as a standalone, as a double-vinyl album and on CD and digital platforms, and with new cover art and a David Gilmour-assisted remix.

June 1990’s Silver Clef Award Winners show at Knebworth helped fund the BRITS School movement, and therefore might be viewed with slightly smudged rose-tinted specs. Having argued the headline toss with Paul McCartney, Pink Floyd got their way and performed a truncated set full of classics like Shine On You Crazy Diamond Pts 1-5 and Money. The highlights are/were the poignant Wish You Were Here and Comfortably Numb, any time Candy Dulfer straps on her sax,

ROUND-UP: MELODIC ROCK

Crowne: a powerful and committed introductory statement.

Kings In The North FRONTIERS What do you get when a member apiece from H.e.a.t, Europe, Art Nation and The Poodles is thrown into a musical blender, along with a dash of seasoning provided by Dynazty? The answer is a Scandinavian melodic rock supergroup of almost unparalleled class.

With H.e.a.t (suppliers of keyboard player, rhythm guitarist and producer Jonah Tee) and Art Nation (whose Alexander Strandell is the project’s frontman and composer of a sizeable chunk of the songs) infusing their own firebrand AOR with pop, Crowne were never going to be a by-numbers proposition. And so it proves. Europe bassist John Levén and Poodles drummer Christian Lundqvist provide a thumping

rhythm section, scorching lead solos come from Dynazty’s Love Magnusson.

Kings In The North is as powerful and committed an introductory statement as one could reasonably have wished for. It also includes some super-memorable songs. For milder tastes the VU meter occasionally creeps into the red, though Crowne’s propensity for hummability always trumps any sense of recklessness.

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Goodnight Riverdale Park Cajun blues artist puts down the deposit on a house.

It’s difficult to believe that an artist could release a string of EPs and now a full-blown album while being of no fixed address. Yet that’s the claim made in this album’s promotional blurb.

Whether or not Suitcase Sam is grabbing the coattails of Seasick Steve, his music sounds plenty authentic enough. The Canadian sings his country rock-meets-swampy, jazzy southern outlaw blues tales in an enticing drawl, backed by fiddles, upright bass, pedal steel and, at their most raucous, on the ragtimeflavoured instrumental Maple Leaf Stomp, a resonator guitar.

Goodnight Riverdale Park is a lazy Sunday-afternoon listen that deserves to be heard.

Now, where to send that royalty cheque?

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By Dave Ling Valentine

Vince DiCola

Demos From The Attic

Only Time Will Tell

20TH CENTURY MUSIC

ESCAPE MUSIC

Valentine released one of the all-time great AOR albums, yet were ultimately engulfed by the Seattle tidal wave.

Recorded before a band name change to Open Skyz, the 14 self-produced song outlines on Demos From The Attic offer a tantalising reminder of the band’s quality, although by their nature the audio quality is less than optimum.

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Vince DiCola’s music has appeared in Rocky IV, Staying Alive and more. Here he teams up with Stan Bush, Jason Scheff (ex-Chicago), former Kansas/Streets man Steve Walsh and erstwhile Toto frontman Bobby Kimball for a well-tailored collection of tunes that doff their cap to the aforementioned three bands and other noted luminaries.

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Midnite City

Kent Hilli

Itch You Can’t Scratch

The Rumble FRONTIERS The frontman from Perfect Plan hits the solo trail for the first time. Very astutely, Hill picked the increasingly ubiquitous Michael Palace, who co-wrote four of its selections and played the instruments, as a conspirator for The Rumble. The leading man from Örnsköldsvik, Sweden, has an utterly exemplary voice, and the pair concoct an uplifting Scandi-AOR banquet.

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ROULETTE MEDIA

Crowne

Suitcase Sam CURVE MUSIC

Pink Floyd WARNER MUSIC

STUNVOLUME/INFECTIOUS

and Clare Torry wailing on The Great Gig In The Sky. For Floydian mystery, best go back to Ummagumma and Meddle, or read Nick Mason’s memoir Inside Out. QQQQQQQQQQ Max Bell

For those in the mood for a lockdown exit party, look no further this third album from these fun-loving Brits.

With music from Leppard-meets Poison knees-up to cowbell jive, former Tigertailz singer Rob Wylde and co. will empty the fridge, make a move on your sister and vomit all over the cat before passing out behind the sofa.

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ALBUMS

Helloween

Billy F Gibbons Hardware CONCORD ZZ Top leader’s dirty third album. He’s getting the hang of this solo lark.

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A Highway. He does all this against a backdrop of guitars that recall early Black Keys as much as Deguello-era Top. Just as ZZ Top could surprise with a change of musical and emotional pace, such as with Rough Boy, so can solo Gibbons. The contemplative Vagabond Heart finds him shedding the cartoon image, looking back and facing his faults.

‘I’ve been a liar and a thief, a gambler and a cheat’, he confesses, but he’s still unable to let go of his restless lifestyle: ‘I’m movin’ on and I don’t know why/This could be my revelation.’ We’re a long way from Legs.

Elsewhere, though, it’s business as usual, and business is good. There are more drug references than you might expect from a man in his eighth decade, his women seem to want him for his money, and he’s still driving (more accurately, ‘rollin’’) his Camino.

Gibbons sounds like he’s having a ball, finally making the desert-rock album he’s hinted at since ZZ Top’s First Album’s Goin’ Down To Mexico. While he’s not straying too far from the mothership, nothing here is phoned-in. As befits the craftsman he’s always been, he’s taken the time and trouble to fashion a bunch of songs worthy of standing alongside anything in his catalogue. Hats off.

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The Damn Truth Now Or Nowhere SPECTRA MUSIQUE/SONY MUSIC

Legendary pop-metal producer Bob Rock lends extra muscle to Montreal quartet.

A big noise in their native Quebec, Canadian quartet The Damn Truth unashamedly idolise that hazy lost era when heavy metal, hard rock and blues were all part of the same long-haired hippie love-in, as evidenced by the impassioned Janis Joplin-style vocals of their powerhouse frontwoman Lee-la Baum. Most of the band’s third album was produced in Vancouver by fellow Canadian and studio legend Bob Rock, renowned for his long associations with Metallica, Mötley Crüe, The Cult and The Offspring. Covid19 restrictions ultimately limited Rock to finishing only six of this album’s nine tracks, but his flair for alchemising fairly generic raw material into dynamic pop-metal gold is clear on the chiming, soaring, lighters-aloft power ballad

Mojothunder Hymns From The Electric Church SELF-RELEASED

Southern rockers turn on the charm on this stellar debut.

Two years in the making and well worth the wait, this rather spectacular debut album from Kentucky southern rockers Mojothunder will immediately bring to mind Money Maker-era Black Crowes and the swinging, good-time hard rock of the Georgia Satellites. It might also remind you of the bluesy stomp of latter-day AC/DC in places.

These are all good things. The band are also graced with the honey-dripping vocals of frontman Sean Sullivan, who sounds like he was born to rattle arenas with this stuff.

Lead-off single Soul is a slowburning, slide-guitar wailing ballad, epic in both scale and intent. But it’s the full-on rockers that really make this album, fleetfooted roof shakers like Jack’s Axe and the infectious Rising Sun. The jewel of the album, however, is Fill Me Up, a ridiculously catchy, Americana-tinged fist puncher that practically radiates positive energy and the promise of endless summer nights.

A truly remarkable introduction. More, please.

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Gary Numan Intruder BMG Comeback kid addresses apocalypse.

Numan’s eighteenth album envisions an Earth so hacked off at humans’ apathy regarding climate change that it casts them as a virus and decides to get rid. It’s almost as if the revitalised synth-rock demi-god, whose 2017 release Savage was his first top three album in 40 years, is a prophet or something.

BLAIN CLAUSEN/PRESS

rankly, the age of 66 is rather late in the day for a multimillion-selling rock star to launch a solo career, but that’s what ZZ Top’s Billy Gibbons did in 2015 with the Latin-tinged Perfectamundo.

Three years later, the aptly titled The Big Bad Blues was half covers. With ZZ Top on recording hiatus since 2012’s La Futura, perhaps Gibbons is simply bored, because here comes album number three. And he’s shifted the ground again.

Recorded in the Californian desert with former Guns N’ Roses/Velvet Revolver drummer Matt Sorum, one-time Slick Lilly leader Austin Hanks and, on the whip-smart Stackin’ Bones, Larkin Poe, Hardware is a riff-strewn feast of scuzz.

Gibbons is back to songwriting too, having a hand in everything bar Bob Dylan collaborator Augie Meyers’s Hey Baby, Que Paso, which he transforms into a cousin of Dire Straits’s Walk Of Life. The desert looms large, and not just in some of the Queens Of The Stone Age-style guitar, or Desert High, where you can almost feel the sand in your throat: it’s everywhere, just under the surface.

Hardware is, in the best sense, dirty.

Gibbons is at his gravel-voiced growliest, whether declaring ‘She’s all mine’ on She’s On Fire or, in more rueful but typically witty fashion, ruminating how ‘you’d think I was a highway the way she hit the road’ on I Was

Helloween NUCLEAR BLAST German metallers’ best album in decades.

It’s taken them more than 30 years, but at last Helloween have come up with an album that you can truly say is the one they should have done after 1988’s Keeper Of The Seven Keys: Part II. This is devastating power metal, built around towering riffs and blazing melodies. It’s what Helloween did so magnificently in the 80s, before losing their way. Now, with an ensemble line-up that includes returning vocalist Michael Kiske and guitarist Kai Hansen, the band are back on the right road.

You can feel their swelling excitement as Out For The Glory bursts its seams. And things march on from there. Best Time is an ebullient fist pumper, Mass Pollution has the wackiness that was always part of their armoury, and the mammoth Skyfall is a symphony encapsulating all of the band’s finest attributes.

It’s taken them ages, but Helloween have delivered another classic.

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Everything Fades and the ballsy, driving, multi-tracked guitar stampede This Is Who We Are Now. Although it’s unlikely to win prizes for originality, Now Or Nowhere is a solid exercise in analogue rock’n’soul classicism that persuasively vaults the 50-year generation gap between 1971 and 2021.

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This ominous set of industrial ire and theatrical brooding sees him in his element, prioritising atmosphere over tunes, both coldly alien and vulnerably human. If he was once sci-fi, he’s now documentary.

Deliberate murkiness and deadened drum sounds veil for a while its passion. Yet Numan has always – at least either side of his wilderness years – fermented more emotion than his caricature. Intruder, with the title track as creepy as Peter Gabriel’s homonymous song, is most gripping when it paces itself, shifting between spells of repressed angst and heavy NINflavoured assaults. We’re all doomed, but Numan’s confidence is restored.

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The Amorphous Androgynous & Peter Hammill We Persuade Ourselves We Are Immortal

Using more than 100 musicians, including a 25-piece string orchestra, 50-strong Chesterfield Philharmonic choir, singer Kendra Frost, sax player Brian Hopper, veteran session guitarist Ray Fenwick and Paul Weller on guitar and piano, the main melody is subjected to variations and interludes, the frequent wordless female wailing screaming Pink Floyd’s The Great Gig In The Sky. Hoary breakbeats underpin Psych Recap’s jagged electronic barrage and sax-draped Immortality Break, a Vangelis soundtrack sensibility imbues the closing Symphony On A Theme of Mortality. Biblically dense, Hammill’s core track is so compelling, its aftershock may have benefited from more song structures (and vocals), instead of grandiose Floyd and Tangerine Dream-like mood noodling. Still worth a float.

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FSOLDIGITAL.COM

The Datsuns

Hammill leads Floyd-like progtronic epic British electronica duo Future Sound Of London, trading as psychedelic alter ego Amorphous Androgynous, strive for prog epic heights on this 40 minute, six-part expansion of Hammill’s opening Van der Graaf Generator-evoking ballad addressing mortality and immortality.

Eye To Eye HELLSQUAD Long dormant Kiwi blues rockers reawaken with a wider 70s perspective ’Finding this new universe was easy,’ sings Dolf de Borst on In Record Time which, musically speaking, is tough to believe. It’s been seven years since New

Zealand’s The Datsuns – frontrunners of the 00s Antipodean blues rock revival that also gave us Jet, and Kiwi kissing cousins of The White Stripes and The Hives back in 2004 – released their sixth album Deep Sleep, and this seventh doesn’t exactly rocket straight off the launchpad into uncharted quadrants.

Even when debating the technological erosion of humanity, blues-heavy AC/DC garage rock remains the day’s order, albeit with krautpsych touches (Brain To Brain), a synthetic Muse metal feel (Suspicion, Sweet Talk) or seemingly played 20rpms or so too fast on a turntable on fire (Dehumanise). It wasn’t broke, they didn’t fix it, but more engrossing are the moments when they embrace prog, mating Deep Purple with Can for the compulsive In Record Time (complete with authentic 70s poltergeist solos) or, on Moongazer, imagining what Pink Floyd’s Money might have sounded like if David Bowie had replaced Syd. QQQQQQQQQQ Mark Beaumont

Ayron Jones Child Of The State BIG MACHINE/JOHN VARVATOS

A wild ride and thoughtprovoking commentary from Seattle’s new guitar hero Having spent years releasing his

music independently under the radar, Ayron Jones’s label debut has the confidence of a performer who has spent decades owning arena stages – which is perhaps unsurprising given the fact that Guns N’Roses’ Duff McKagan and Pearl Jam’s Mike McCready are among his admirers.

From the full-fat riffage and punk-blues vocal of swaggering opener Boys From The Puget Sound to the grunge blast of Killing Season, to the good oldfashioned raunch of Supercharged, this album feels like a showcase of every aspect of his character. At times it can make it a little unfocused – the apologetic My Love Remains is a blowsy slab of classic rock balladry that lands just the wrong side of Bon Jovi-sickly – but, stuffed with Zeppelinworshiping riffs, attitude and soul, it’s mainly a grand showcase of an ambitious and natural talent. It’s thoughtprovoking too, with no room for misinterpretation on the weighty Mercy.

Ending with a scream from him and an empathetic howl from his guitar, it’s a powerful portrait of life as a black man in modern-day America: ‘Got me on my knees, too much smoke, can’t breathe.’

Ayron Jones could well be the new guitar hero for our times.

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ROUND-UP: BLUES

Kings For Sale GRANDIFLORA

Mississippi-born Afton Wolfe has laid his hat from New Orleans to Nashville since the late 90s, becoming a local hero wherever he’s alighted. Now, the Southerner’s belated solo career announces a talent that his bands have

never quite bottled. While last year’s debut EP Petronius’ Last Meal was too bleak to pack ’em in, this full-length release might travel further.

Opener Paper Piano is a jazzy tumble that makes no apology for its heart-halffull optimism, while Dirty Girl ’s stomp-‘n’slide visit to New Orleans is testament to a skilled cultural magpie who has kept his antennae up on his travels across America. Elsewhere, those moments of

You And Me CARRY ON MUSIC A mélange of ethereal acoustic ballads, eclectic covers and thoughtful tributes.

After a lifetime as sister Ann Wilson’s righthand woman, guitarist Nancy Wilson ventures yet further outside the boundaries of Heart.

The wispy You And Me and I’ll Find You project romantic idyll for a love that transcends any borders. We Meet Again is pensive, while on The Inbetween synth melds with a laid-back message of compromise.

Of the covers, Springsteen’s The Rising layers acoustic guitar over foundational distortion, while Simon And Garfunkel’s The Boxer and Cranberries hit Dreams blend seamlessly with Wilson’s serene originals.

A grungy offshoot features Pearl Jam’s Daughter, and Party At The Angel Ballroom welcomes Duff McKagan and Foos’ Taylor Hawkins for the rumbling postlockdown battle cry ‘Party like hell’. The Dragon pays gritty tribute to Layne Staley, and 4 Edward is a thoughtful, bluesy nod to the late Eddie Van Halen.

With its contrasts in mood, this solo studio debut (aside from ’09’s Baby Guitars’ kids songs) bleeds authenticity and does Wilson credit as an independent artist.

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By Henry Yates

Afton Wolfe: the most grizzled debut you’ll hear all year, and one of the best

Afton Wolfe

Nancy Wilson

hope and sweetness are offset by hurt and stomach acid: try the broken twilight country of Carpenter (‘I have no excuse for my behaviour, I wouldn’t make you much of a saviour’), the angle-grinder almost-grunge of Cemetery Blues, or O’ Magnolia, where a sea of harmonies raises the careworn jetsam of Wolfe’s vocal. It’s the most grizzled debut you’ll hear all year, and one of the best.

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Seafoam Green

Scott McKeon

Martin’s Garden MELLOWTONE This Irish duo have pricked up ears in high places, with Rich Robinson producing 2017’s Topanga Mansion and Tedeschi Trucks drummer Tyler Greenwell making sonic sense of this lashing of Muscle Shoals soul and Dublin folk. For Something To Say and Mine All Mine are songs to warm your bones, while House On The Hill’s catchy funk-blues hook is yours for life.

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New Morning IDAHO On his third solo album, respected sideman McKeon revels in not having to rein in his guitar solos.

Recorded live with a cast of session notables, New Morning is both technically adept and rich in atmosphere, with hypnotic garage-jazz opener Fight No More worthy of Santana, and Third Eye Witness a woozy dreamscape interrupted by a solo like an angry wasp.

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Quinn Sullivan

Amigo The Devil

Wide Awake MASCOT/PROVOGUE Four albums by the age of 21 should have left Quinn Sullivan burnt out, but on Wide Awake the bandleader sounds like a man in motion.

While the thumbprint of early mentor Buddy Guy has faded – and Sullivan flays his guitar less all round – this is no bad thing, with the funky She’s So Irresistible nodding at Prince and Keep Up revealing a steady hand with a torch song.

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Born Against LIARS CLUB Trading as Amigo The Devil, Danny Kiranos’s 2018 debut Everything Is Fine was a starkly beautiful tapestry on which genres were seemingly picked from a tombola and emotions torn from the depths. The past year’s isolation hasn’t sugared his modus operandi, and he remains angular and brilliant, whether on the haunted-house funk of Murder At The Bingo Hall or the jarring Quiet As A Rat. QQQQQQQQQQ CLASSICROCKMAGAZINE.COM 83

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Danny Elfman

Paul Weller Fat Pop (Volume 1) POLYDOR Modfather-turned-stylistic polymath surveys his broad new sonic lands.

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t’s testament to the invention and variety of his recent work that you fire up a new Paul Weller record in 2021 with absolutely no idea what you’ll be faced with. Of late there have been outings into motorik psychedelia (on 2012’s Sonik Kicks), sprawling textural soundscapes (2015’s Saturns Pattern), stripped-back folk rock (2018’s True Meanings) and musique concrete montages (2020’s In Another Room EP). Following the thread of amalgamation records from 2008’s experimental breakthrough 22 Dreams through 2017’s A Kind Revolution to last year’s On Sunset – which combined his latest avant-garde leanings with his core soul, folk, mod and funk roots – his fifteenth solo album, Fat Pop (Volume 1), further explores the territories he’s claimed as his own.

‘I’m on the cosmic fringes, I’ve never been or felt so at home,’ Weller declares on opener Cosmic Fringes, a catchy concoction of krautrock synth-pop and Scary Monsters industrial art rock, and there he remains for the first third of Fat Pop, elaborating on the album’s title with the cocky enthusiasm of a laptop prodigy. The marvellous, uplifting True finds him lacing Ziggy’s more soulful glam with avant-garde horn riffs while he swaps jubilant harmonies and hand claps with Mysterines singer Lia Metcalfe, while the title track is more phat pop, venturing into Gorillaz’ psychedelic future funk enclosure

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declaring himself not just a rock of familial reliability ‘when the world is so dark’, but the new downbeat disco king ‘who brings the beat when the place is jumping?’

From there his roots begin to show through. Glad Times is golden-era lounge soul refracted through a dream; Shades Of Blue a mod-pop jig given a psych gospel overlay; Iggy Pop tribute Moving Canvas the sort of spaced-out Californian funk that conjures flashbacks to the 70s’ most widecollared acid flicks. But where once Weller might have merely wallowed on such gilded retro splinters, now everything has relevance. If the meaty, vaguely Pentecostal retro blaxploitation of Testify feels nice but unnecessary, its orchestrated sisterpiece The Pleasure resets the balance with subtle references to George Floyd and BLM. The sweeping 60s orchestrations of Still Glides The Stream make heroes of the streetsweepers and key workers keeping Britain on its feet in a crisis. There are hints of personal relevance too. The bliss-folk In Better Times is a message of support to a youth in distress, and the Tame Impalagone-glam Failed explores his self-doubt and inadequacy after a row with the missus.

Invention meets familiarity, fragility meets warmth, sensitivity meets strut.

Weller’s never felt so at home.

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Big Mess ANTI/EPITAPH Fêted soundtrack composer returns to his avant-punk roots.

Best known nowadays as an Oscarnominated score composer for film and TV, especially his multiple collaborations with director Tim Burton, Danny Elfman returns to his surrealist avant-rock roots on his first solo album in 37 years. The former Oingo Boingo frontman and unlikely new-wave pop star conceived Big Mess during covid lockdown with help from LA musician friends including drummer Josh Freese and guitarist Robin Fink, whose long list of shared credits include Devo, Guns N’ Roses and Nine Inch Nails.

Mixing industrial metal textures with orchestral strings, sharp pop hooks and sinister mood shifts, in places this sprawling double album feels like a vaudevillian glam-punk opera, mixing gnarly guitar blast with Sparks-style electrocabaret archness on gloriously profane confessionals like Kick Me, Sorry and Happy. Promoted with a series of strikingly arty horror-punk videos, Big Mess is dense and discordant and wilfully ugly at times, but also a richly original and impressively ambitious musical response to a nightmarish pandemic.

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The Black Keys Delta Kream NONSUCH Ohio’s finest doff the cap to the great Mississippi hill country bluesmen.

Giving credit where it’s due is not something the music industry has always been the best at, particularly when it comes to blues artists, who seem to have been ripped off more than most over the years. With Delta Kream, though, The Black Keys pay tribute to the Mississippi hill country bluesmen who inspired them most.

Loping and swaggering, relaxed yet thrillingly live, with a loose, heady groove that crowns Dan Auerbach and Patrick Carney both grand scholars and natural conduits of the genre, this love letter to Junior Kimbrough and RL Burnside – with a little John Lee Hooker and Mississippi Fred

McDowell thrown in for good measure – is like being bathed in hazy sunshine, and just as good for the soul. Guitarist Kenny Brown of Burnside’s band and bassist Eric Deaton, who played with Kimbrough, join the duo, and in their expert hands songs like Poor Boy A Long Way From Home jump like crickets.

The Black Keys found fame on the back of this music, and this joyous tribute is the perfect way to send a whole new generation scurrying back to discover the source of it all.

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Dennis DeYoung 26 East Vol 2 FRONTIERS Styx legend’s final album.

As a young man he wrote and sang the hit songs that made Styx one of America’s biggest rock bands – those magical power ballads, and Mr. Roboto, the kookiest of all 80s rock anthems. Now, aged 74, Dennis DeYoung is taking his final bow as a recording artist.

26 East Vol 2 is both a swansong and a companion piece to 2020’s Vol 1. Again it features songs written and performed by DeYoung with another Chicago-born AOR icon, Jim Peterik, formerly of Survivor. There is also a surprise guest appearance from Rage Against The Machine guitarist Tom Morello.

And throughout, DeYoung is inspired, giving everything he’s got this one last time. Hello Goodbye is a joyous Beatles homage, Made For Each Other his last great ballad, The Isle Of Misanthrope a glorious pomprock epic. And to finish, his Grand Finale, with lyrics referencing past Styx classics.

With 26 East Vol 2 the old master goes out on a high.

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Peter Frampton Band Frampton Forgets The Words UME …but remembers to bring his guitar.

Ordinarily, 10 instrumental versions of some pretty well-known songs might seem like oldschool indulgence. But Peter Frampton’s richly toned interpretations hold the day. No

rush here, it’s all on the stately side, whether he’s covering Sly Stone (If You Want Me To Stay), George Harrison (Isn’t It A Pity) or his childhood chum David Bowie (Loving The Alien).

There’s no doubt that Frampton is a master of his craft, and his tastes are refined enough to sit Radiohead next to Roxy Music, and Alison Krauss beside Marvin Gaye. There’s plenty of wit about the project: the cover features a vintage typewriter and a blank sheet of paper, but his fingers do the talking elsewhere. The best moments are possibly the more obscure ones: a delicious I Don’t Know Why (a Stevie Wonder B-side in 1968) and Michel Colombier’s Dreamland. Herd immunity for troubling times.

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Dogs D’Amour Straight Up 2021 KING OUTLAW/CARGO

Digital reshuffle breathes life into old Dogs.

While many bands re-enact their classic albums live, few re-record them. After Dogs D’Amour mainstay Tyla had revisited their 90s landmark Straight with his current line-up of Stoneshomaging swashbucklers, the file-transfer system at mastering automatically placed its 12

tracks in alphabetical order, unintentionally providing a fresh new perspective, which he decided to keep.

Coming after 1989’s chartinvading A Graveyard Of Empty Bottles, Straight marked the Dogs’ gutter-glam peak, mixing rollicking anthems such as No Gypsy Blood and Lie In The Land with wasted bar-stool ballads like Heroine and Kiss My Heart Goodbye, Tyla’s poetic lyricism remaining relevant by eschewing the era’s inherent misogyny with Bukowski-inspired romanticism.

Now, beginning with the selfexplanatory Back On The Juice and closing with the reflective You Can’t Burn The Devil, Tyla’s charred, heartfelt vocals show that there’s life in the old Dog yet, along with a cool ghost in the machine.

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AFI Bodies RISE Plundering the best bits of the 80s with post-hardcore’s biggest goths.

After a certain amount of time and success it’s easy to retread a tried-andtested blueprint until it begins to fade away to nothing, More satisfying for all involved is a constant evolution and sense of growth. That’s something AFI have mastered over their

11-album career, blossoming from their daft punk early days to become the eloquent, genrespanning goths of today.

Bodies, burnished to a high sheen by guitarist and producer Jade Puget, is an elegant set of sweeping rock anthems, not a rough edge to be found, and yet there’s soul amid the aural perfection. That can mainly be credited to frontman Davey Havok, who has the voice of an 80s Blitz Club New Romantic – there are even shades of Alison Moyet here and there – and the shadowy heart of an American hardcore veteran. Dramatic emo on Begging For Trouble rubs shoulders with Depeche Mode synths on the moody Back From The Flesh, while Death Of The Party is pure Killing An Arab-era Cure, and because it’s all done with such conviction it all makes perfect sense. In AFI’s hands, looking backwards is another leap forward.

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Rise Against. Not the boneheaded, gun-toting, flagwaving, “USA!”-chanting kind we saw storming the Capitol, of course; they’re very much from the opposite side of the political spectrum to those people. It’s in the way that Nowhere Generation, and particularly its title track, is an uncompromising call to arms to their country’s youth to rise up and reclaim the American dream from the ring-fenced, middle-class, middle-aged greed and privilege that keeps so many people in dead-end jobs, to move things on, and to save the environment while they’re at it. The sloganeering surfs in on a wave of ultracatchy punk melodies, dragging the listener along in its wake.

Hopefully millennial rock audiences are listening and inspired to rise up and sort out the mess their parents’ generation have left them with.

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Rise Against

Blue Weekend DIRTY HIT Era-defining sounds from the London visionaries’ third album-of-the-year contender.

‘Great guitar hopes’ does a reductive disservice to the brilliance of Wolf Alice. They’ve bagged two No.2 albums and the 2018 Mercury Prize (for 2017’s

Nowhere Generation SPINEFARM

Tim McIlrath and his punk revolutionaries call out to America’s youth.

There’s an odd kind of patriotism at play in the ninth album from Chicago punk firebrands

Wolf Alice

ROUND-UP: SLEAZE

S.u.g.a.r.: rock’n’roll that’s fast, cheap and outta control.

Visions Of A Life) by being the evolutionary leap into an era where alt.rock, psychedelia, dream pop, grunge, punk and intergalactic next-gen shoegaze intermingle on a binary-defying sonic spectrum.

Shedding the darker, sludgier side of Visions, their third and arguably finest album ventures further still, folding Kate Bush’s operatic mistiness, minimalist art-pop, gruesome go-go and the odd R&B intonation into an already flavoursome stew.

Befitting an album about escapism (The Beach dreams wistfully of an exotic postlockdown bender; lustrous, Lana-like semi-rap Delicious Things is an ode to the Hollywood high life), defiant self-belief (‘I am what I am and I’m good at it,’ singer Ellie Rowsell asserts on cosmic rave rocker Smile) and the turbulent tides of love, an oceanic crescendo is never far away. But its more vulnerable moments breathe, sometimes heavily: Feeling Myself lures shoegaze into the bedroom for an orgasmic tribute to self-love, while Safe From Heartbreak (If You Never Fall In Love) could be Stevie Nicks dishing out hardbitten romantic advice after a dozen regretful tequilas.

Not just euphoric but also important music, and another near-faultless Wolf Alice wonder.

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By Sleazegrinder S.U.G.A.R.

Governess

Heavy Leg

S.U.G.A.R. ALIEN SNATCH Berlin brats S.u.g.a.r. apparently could not care less about grumpy ol’ Bob Mould’s similarly monickered outfit, Their sound reflects that snatch’n’grab-as-you-please attitude, too, dipping freely into Stones, MC5, Ramones, Cramps… whatever greasy teenage slime they can get their hands on. It’s all there in this selftitled album, a flailing, reckless assault of dirty denim and well-battered riffs that congeal into a collection of perfect punk-rock nuggets.

In classic garage-scum fashion they get in and out quick; the whole album is over and done with in a snappy 20 minutes. And it’s an eventful and frequently thrilling ride, from the speedy bludgeon of opener I Don’t Want To Be Your Friend to the 60s-inspired Detroit rock city rave-up I Feel Alright. Speaking of Motor City, Let It Go even lets loose with some Stooge-y sax skronking outta nowhere.

If you dig your rock’n’ roll fast, cheap and outta control, then this is where it’s at.

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Never Coming Home Turbonegro’s late-80s, Apocalypse Dudes-era death-punk continues to snake its tendrils around the globe and Buffalo NY’s Governess might be the greatest adherents yet. Tough, funny, catchy and sleazy, this is a fantastic debut. You’d have to be a real dummy to sleep on this. Half a year from now they’ll probably be millionaires. Or dead.

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Get Up SELF-RELEASED Second album from these up-’n’-coming Scottish sleazedealers who are clearly enthralled with the swagger of Bon-era AC/DC. Bangers like Bullet Train On A Speed Pill and Kick It On Down The Road breathe crunchy new life into crusty old blooze riffs, and the hooks are diamond-hard. I don’t see any reason why these dudes should be toiling in obscurity for five more minutes.

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The Bad News

Crime Line

Take It Out SELF-RELEASED French-fried garage rock from Rennes that pinballs breathlessly from psychedelic floor shakers to snarly punk without missing a beat. Fans of swirly organ will eat up full-force ravers like Rock City Baby, while pogo enthusiasts will love snotnosed house-wreckers like I Wanna Get High. Something for everyone, really.

Unless you’re lame.

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Locked and Loaded

SELF-RELEASED

SELF-RELEASED

Wall-punching, drughoovering, throatslashing punk rock’n’roll from Virginia that will singe the hair right off your greasy moustache.

Their casual nihilism (Rip Til You RIP, Drop Dead, Born To Be Buried) is both hilarious and perfect for their relentless sonic assault. If you’re unmoved by this all-balls EP, please check your pulse.

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Monster Magnet

Mammoth WVH Mammoth WVH EX1 RECORDS Van Halen The Younger strides out as a one-man band on his first album.

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Michael ‘Elvis’ Baskette (Slash, Alter Bridge), who has done a fine job in giving the album a consistency and clarity amid the intensity.

The spectre of dad Eddie is a recurring theme on the album, right down to the title, which is the name of the band Eddie and Alex started out with before the family name took over, and it’s bookended with tributes to Eddie. He’d have chuckled at the vigorous tapping on opener Mr Ed. And while the closing Distance, released as the first single late last year, is a more heartfelt song, its direct approach prevents it from becoming mawkish.

The album’s overall pace is relentless and peppered with false stops and starts.

Among the stand-out tracks are the poppy but forceful Think It Over with its shades of Jimmy Eat World, the arena-rocking anthem Don’t Back Down with its glamtinged chorus, and the chunky riffs of You’re To Blame that lead to a spectacular guitar solo – all high bending notes and slick runs.

Interestingly, Wolfgang Van Halen has a band in the wings, waiting for gigs to get the green light. If they can add a group dynamic to this album they’ll mop up the pent-up energy that’s hanging in the air.

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Lee Aaron Radio On! METALVILLE The Metal Queen has a lot of fun.

There are some albums that radiate a huge smile; you can tell everyone involved is having a blast. And that’s the overriding feeling Radio On! generates. Lee Aaron and her band throw themselves wholeheartedly into every track.

It begins with the flamboyantly guitar-driven, mid-paced Vampin’, before Soul Breaker sashays down the Pat Benatar route, as lyrically it has a woman in emotional command. You’d feel sure Mama Don’t Remember must be a cover of a 70s Suzi Quatro classic, but its swagger is all original. The title track highlights the exuberance of turning up the radio and carousing down the highway.

Devil’s Gold has a slow-burning sensuality. Had Me At Hello uncorks the sleaze, which slithers over a slightly funky rhythm.

Aaron herself is in splendid voice, and her musical relationship with guitarist Sean Kelly is what really drives the album along. Kelly knows when to hit the virtuoso button, and when to hold back, which helps

Crowded House Dreamers Are Waiting EMI Melbourne’s most melodic misplace the muse.

Lock up your espadrillewearing admirers of well-crafted, polite, soft rock; Crowded House (now consisting of Neil Finn and his two sons plus Mitchell Froom and founding bassist Nick Seymour) return with their first album in more than a decade.

Neil’s forays with Fleetwood Mac haven’t re-energized his afflatus; this is tame gruel, devoid of spark. Even the most ardent House fan would probably admit that the indistinguishable songs lack personality, and flop into a sexless wash of anodyne torpor and pretty but humdrum chords.

It picks up in the final quarter, as if even the band got restless.

Real Life Woman threatens to stir, and Love Isn’t Hard At All could be early New Order with a splash of falsetto, if you squinted. Yet overall this unlucky seventh, begun before lockdown but finished remotely, finds their former highs trapped behind glass, blurred and beclouded like the past year has been for all of us.

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Arielle Analog Girl In A Digital World NOONCHORUS She can’t remember the 60s, but she’s right there.

After the sound of her computer dialling up and logging on, Arielle cuts straight to the chase, yearning for a world before the internet in a song that’s wrapped around the Who’s Baba O’Riley.

An American Anglophile with a strong, clear guitar style and a voice to match, Arielle transports herself back to the 60s on her latest album and revels in the sound separation that the stereo breakthrough enabled, best demonstrated on the vibrant, Chuck Berry-styled You’re Still A Man. It also suits her careful chord picking on Peace Of Mind, where her voice rises and falls with the mood of the song, and This Is Our

TRAVIS SHINN/PRESS

he son of Eddie Van Halen, Wolfgang began his apprenticeship in the family firm early, tinkering around on uncle Alex’s drum kit during soundchecks when he was nine, before dad bought him his own kit. Five years later he’d taken up guitar and was making occasional appearances on stage with the band, duetting with dad on the instrumental 316 that was written to commemorate his birthday. He was just 15 when he joined Van Halen full-time as their bassist, following the acrimonious firing of Mike Anthony along with frontman Sammy Hagar.

That explains why Wolfgang had no qualms about playing all the instruments on this, his first solo album, as well as doing the vocals. He’s more than competent at whichever instrument he happens to have in his hands at the time.

You might wish for the thrill of hearing musicians sparking off each other in the studio, but Wolfgang renders such a concept irrelevant amid the modern-day hi-tech recording studio. And hearing him go a little crazy on drum and bass during Feel provides its own thrill. His vocals might lack memorable character, but right now the forceful energy he throws into his songs is enough. The only objective presence in the studio was producer

A Better Dystopia NAPALM It’s a covers album, but you probably won’t notice.

Monster Magnet mainman Dave Wyndorf spent the pandemic doing the same as most of us did – pining for the good ol’ days. Naturally, he did it louder and flashier than the rest of us, and the results are the band’s first covers album.

One of rock’n’roll’s greatest cultural anthropologists, Wyndorf chose to avoid easy targets and instead dug deep into his dusty crates for protometal nuggets like Poobah’s Mr. Destroyer and Dust’s Learning To Die to revamp. It’s a testament to his unrelenting vision that they both sound essentially like Monster Magnet songs. In fact the whole album does, really.

Which is remarkable, given that Hawkwind and The Scientists – both of whom are covered here in majestic fashion – sound nothing alike on any other day.

Ignore the fact that most of these songs are 50 years old and you’ve got the best new Monster Magnet album since 2001’s God Says No. QQQQQQQQQQ Sleazegrinder

to make this a consistently buoyant melodic rock album.

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Intervention where her voice gradually gives the song an urgency and then drives it over the line. The rollicking, folksy I’d Rather Be In England catches our national idiosyncrasies, along with a novelty clip of the national anthem.

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Nephila Nephila THE SIGN Swedish psychedelic supergroup convince with a steelier vision.

Having formed as a spin-off from Woodstockfixated retrorockers Children Of The Sün, Nephila still seem spiritually rooted somewhere in an adjacent era. But the sound on this record is flintier, bluesier and proggier, as if their time machine has whisked them forward two or three years. An avowed influence from Jefferson Airplane is audible on the lysergic vision of Mushroom Creatures, and there are echoes of Wishbone Ash on the pulsing chunky twin guitars on Who Are You and Ciavata. The vocals of Stina Olsson, who fronts this band of otherwise medievalmasked musicians (bonus point for effort in the wardrobe department), are bluesy and soulful throughout, and the harder instrumental approach underpinning it seems to suit both parties.

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Texas Hi BMG Glaswegian survivors’ tenth album.

Not ones to be rushed, these days Texas take their time between albums. While 2017’s Jump On Board kept the flag flying, Hi is a renewed statement of intent.

The bluesy days of Southside are long gone, but Sharleen Spiteri can still conjure the ghost of Sister Rosetta Tharpe as easily as she can Diana Ross. More pertinently, they’re making unashamedly adult pop, not least in Dark Fire, the brief but twangsome collaboration with Richard Hawley, the barbed Just Want to Be Liked and the massive ballad Unbelievable. Clare Grogan (an Altered Images bandmate of bassist Johnny McElhone) is a spirited guest singer on Look

What You’ve Done, and Wu-Tang Clan add tongue-twisting ferocity to the title track. Take Texas lightly at your peril.

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Red Fang Arrows RELAPSE Less-than-serious stoners return after half a decade.

Finished in December 2019 but only now getting released, Arrows is Red Fang’s rather belated follow-up to 2016’s Only Ghosts. However, despite the wait it all seems to be business as usual as the band go about doing pretty much whatever the hell they want without feeling like they have to satisfy anyone but themselves.

Beginning the record with the creepy two-minute bass dirge Take It Back is not an obvious move, but it suits Red Fang just fine before they blast into the super-crunchy Unreal Estate.

From the brutal doom of Days Collide to the more upbeat and hooky title track – this album’s Prehistoric Dog – this is loose and dirty stuff, with the vocals almost buried under a welter of barely controlled distortion and fuzzy riffage.

Red Fang might not take themselves too seriously, but thankfully Arrows rocks pleasingly hard indeed.

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Go Ahead And Die Go Ahead And Die NUCLEAR BLAST

Unique father-son death metal combo stick it to the pricks.

While some of us dreamed of forming a death metal group with our fathers, during 2020’s lockdown Igor Amadeus Cavalera made that a reality, recording an album with his dad, Soulfly’s Max Cavalera. They holed up in the Arizona desert and recorded 11 songs of chundering, classic death metal, no quarter given to dad, none asked by the old man either.

Splitting vocals and guitar playing, they match each other riff for riff, growl for growl.

El Cuco is a breakneck broadside of toxic black tar, while Prophets Prey sounds like the last seconds of a black box recording. Apparently the lyrics lambast crooked cops, religious nuts and environmental wreckers but, given that crisp diction is not death metal’s forte, you’ll have to take their word for it. Suffice to say Worth

Less Than Piss is ideal catharsis for whatever’s getting your goat.

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BEST OF THE REST Other new releases out this month.

Heavy Feather

Alan Vega

Mountain Of Sugar THE SIGN Swedes take the 70s into the 21st century.

For their second album, Swedish four-piece Heavy Feather have refined the approach they had on Débris & Rubble. It’s still immersed in the good stuff of 70s hard rock – from Humble Pie to Vinegar Joe and Trapeze – but now they’ve discovered individuality.

If you’re looking for an obvious modern comparison, then Blues Pills are the closest. Lisa Lystam has enormous vocal thrust, while Matte Gustafsson’s guitar style is dynamic and rich in tone.

The songs are joyous, from the high-stepping 30 Days to the smoky haze of Too Many Times.

Let It Shine is an inspiring ballad, while Rubble & Débris is raw, rough, nasty. Best of the lot is Lovely Lovely Lovely, a mix of rock and soul that Glenn Hughes would be proud of.

Mountain Of Sugar has the 70s writ large in firmly modern terms.

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Mutator SACRED BONES The late Suicide frontman’s second posthumous set is no mere cutting-room-floor sweep, but a hitherto unreleased album from the ever-edgy electro pioneer’s prolific nineties peak. Dark, bleak, challenging, unique. 7/10

Lovebites Glory Glory To The World JPU The third EP from the preposterously technically adept Japanese metal quintet delivers all that’s expected: migraine-inducing visuals, dog-whistle guitars, dead-eyed deadpan vocals and possibly something about vampires… Babywho? 6/10

Procol Harum Missing Persons (Alive Forever) EP CHERRY RED Whether or not two songs equate to an EP, Missing Persons’ Keith Reid-worded, Gary Brooker-voiced, lockdown-completed title track sits grandly enough in the band’s classily dramatic canon. Its War Is Not Healthy ‘flip side’ not so much. 6/10

Empyre The Other Side Having appeared unplugged before Alter Bridge, Shinedown et al, it’s no surprise to find the much-touted Brit rockers marking covid time with an acoustic album. An impressive show of accomplished class, but in an ideal world the stuff of stunning B-sides. 7/10

Gojira Fortitude ROADRUNNER Ingenious French tech-metallers return with an album brimming with progression, power and commitment. Amazonia is an environmentally aware triumph laced with indigenous instrumentation and titanic dynamics. Positively huge. 8/10

Gruff Rhys Seeking New Gods ROUGH TRADE

Wytch Exordium RIPPLE MUSIC Something wicked this way comes… from across the North Sea. Emerging from the relatively isolated environs of Skellefteå in northern Sweden, Wytch’s debut album is both comforting in its familiarity and reassuring in its ability to kick arse.

Stopping just short of fully embracing the aesthetics of doom metal, Wytch’s mastery of heavy rock is to be admired by turning the volume knob all the way to the right. Opener Black Hole sets a terrific pace as Niklas Viklund and Mattias Marklund’s pulverising guitars coalesce and drive on Johanna Lundberg’s soaring and melodic vocals. The snaking and twisting riffs of Warrior and Blood follow in a similar vein, but the band’s sense of dynamics is brought to the fore with the beautifully menacing The Saviour that rises and falls.

Reeking of patchouli and spilt beer, Exordium is classic rock in excelsis.

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Seven albums into a creditable solo career, the ex-Super Furry Animals frontman and overlooked genius of a mid-90s Taffnaissance (sadly overshadowed by Britpop hype) returns in style, with broad volcanic concepts and huge pop-tastic tunes.7/10

Hippie Death Cult Circle Of Days HEAVY PSYCH SOUNDS Coming across like a generously cowbelled Black Sabbath, Portland’s four-piece HDC blend warm, flowing riffery with engaging ingenuity on this convincing second set of brilliantly realised vintage metal classicism. 8/10

Various Head Rush FRUITS DE MER Triple LP (with bonus CD) set of 22 contemporary artists celebrating the influence of the Neu!/Can/Kraftwerk axis on their intrinsically motorik muse. Subtle hints of post-Moroder EDM reflect time’s passage, but kosmische purists will find much to love. 8/10

Dust Mice Earth III

BANDCAMP

Post-punk space-rock from the Pacific Northwest. Analog synths, mesmeric guitars and squalling sax recall Warrior-era Hawks and Inner City Unit. Patchy and unpolished with occasional flashes of brilliance. 7/10

Rob Zombie The Lunar Injection Kool-Aid Eclipse Conspiracy NUCLEAR BLAST

Familiar, formulaic ‘90s Wednesday 13 on a 70s Alice-Cooper budget’ gore-soaked, post-Manson, electro-literate spook-metal thrills. But in a good way. It’s fab unedifying stuff, but shouldn’t he be playing golf by now? 6/10

Peter Hammill In Translation Ten unlikely covers (from Jerome Kern to Gustav Mahler), recorded to ease the stately Van der Graaf Generator institution through lockdown, receive characteristically dramatic readings. It’s not exactly Rikki’s nadir, but neither is it exactly rock. 6/10

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Clutch

Black Sabbath Sabotage: Super Deluxe Edition BMG Anger and frustration resulted in their sixth album being their heaviest.

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The tragedy of Sabotage is that it isn’t fondly remembered by the band themselves. As bassist Geezer Butler once told me: “The songs are great, but it’s hard to listen to them again because we had such a horrible time doing it.” How cruel.

Disc 1, the original album remastered

by Andy Pearce and Matt Wortham (who did the Super Deluxe versions of Paranoid and Vol 4 following work on Deep Purple and Free classics) now plays better than ever. There are no out-takes, and the reproduction picture-sleeve single is of little merit, so the bonus carrot is the 100-minute, two-disc live album recorded on the Stateside Sabotage tour (probably at Asbury Park Convention Hall, New Jersey, on August 5, 1975). The band, thundered along by Bill Ward on drums and occasionally utilising Jezz Woodruffe on keyboards, are magnificent. True, the vocals are strained in places and there are almost 23 minutes of jamming/soloing in the set, but this is the classic Ozzy line-up playing 10 of the biggest hitters from Sabbath’s first five albums plus Hole In The Sky, Symptom Of The Universe and Megalomania from the freshly minted Sabotage. Today, 1975 sounds like Sabbath at their peak.

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Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young Déjà Vu: 50th Anniversary Deluxe Edition RHINO The only CSNY album that matters, now packed with tons of extras.

How do you supersize a supergroup?

The answer, for an initially reluctant Crosby, Stills & Nash, was to bring in Neil Young, as suggested by their Atlantic boss, Ahmet Ertegun. The resultant Déjà Vu, released in March 1970, was full of inspired songs and sold in its millions, justifying the line-up tweak on both critical and commercial levels.

Half a century on, the highlights have lost none of their lustre, be it Young’s expansive Helpless, David Crosby’s scat-

Various Chicago/The Blues/Today!

CRAFT

Exquisite vinyl upgrade for crucial collection In late 1965, producer/ historian Samuel Charters got nine of the foremost Chicago blues exponents to record short studio sets for the Vanguard Records samplers that became a seminal trilogy. Like Harry Smith’s 1952 Anthology Of American Folk Music for the folk boom, the albums introduced many to electric blues, including future rock gods and 1968’s British blues boom.

The full band style dominated by electric guitars and harmonica is captured perfectly

by Junior Wells’s Chicago Blues Band, whose Help Me (A Tribute To Sonny Boy Williamson) and It Hurts Me Too provided welltrodden set staples (the former for Ten Years After), while Vietcong Blues reflects the era’s more global storm clouds. Otis Rush’s brass-garnished I Can’t Quit You, Baby unleashes a master class in soul-tearing drama, Homesick James slides up Robert Johnson’s Dust My

SAM EMERSON/PRESS

abotage is the sound of indignant fury. From the opening battle cry of “Attack!” to the dying embers in a drunken piano coda: a band of brothers fighting back. As guitarist Tony Iommi drily observed: “The aggression definitely came out in the music when we played together. There is some really heavy stuff on that record.”

In part that aggression was a reaction to the relatively subtle Sabbath Bloody Sabbath made two years earlier. Mostly, though, it was driven by the band’s bitter legal battle with management, which had reached the point where lawyers entered the studio to serve writs, sabotaging sessions by forcing the band into court the next day.

If you wind up a band like Sabbath, things will get heavy. Witness the riotous opening pair Hole In The Sky and Symptom Of The Universe, separated by the brief flamenco interlude Don’t Start (Too Late). Or the album’s twin epics The Writ and Megalomania – which at one point has Ozzy growling “Suck me!” like Satan himself. Even the lesser tracks – the ballsy boogie Thrill Of It All; Ozzy’s hit single attempt Am I Going Insane (Radio); and the choral Supertzar (that served as the band’s intro theme ever after) – top most tracks on subsequent albums.

Songs Of Much Gravity 1993-2001 HNE/CHERRY RED Clutch weren’t born fully formed, but they weren’t far off, as this fourdisc compilation of their early years shows. The Maryland band’s debut album, 1993’s Transnational Speedway League, bristles with a gnarled punkrock malevolence that was absent later on, but otherwise everything else was pretty much in place, from the coiled grooves of Binge And Purge to frontman Neil Fallon’s vividly skewed lyrical imagery on A Shogun Named Marcus.

Their self-titled second album, released two years later, dialled back the belligerence even further in favour of the lumberjack psychedelia of Texan Book Of The Dead and Escape From The Prison Planet, Fallon bellowing like a grizzly with its knackers caught in a bear trap.

By the time of 2001’s Pure Rock Fury, they’d fully mutated into a backwoods ZZ Top, right down to the tips of their increasingly luxuriant beards.

Songs Of Much Gravity isn’t the complete story – 1998’s titanic The Elephant Riders and the following year’s less sparkling Jam Room are missing, although an EP of B-sides and rarities goes some way to plugging the gaps. But as a history lesson on one of modern America’s greatest cult bands, this collection does the trick.

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jazz title track, or the leaping harmonies of Stephen Stills’s masterly Carry On. The selling point of this four-disc set, though, is the addition of 38 extra tracks (demos, out-takes and such), many of which are being released for the first time.

What’s abundantly clear is that each of the band members, to varying degrees, was squirrelling away material for their respective solo projects. Young’s exquisite Birds (here a duet with Graham Nash) would take full flight on After The Goldrush; Crosby’s two attempts at Laughing lack the eerie monastic ambience that defined its appearance on 1971’s If I Could Only Remember My Name; Nash offers a delicate prototype of Sleep Song, a year before Songs For Beginners.

It’s Stills who seems the most engaged with the sessions at hand. So Begins The Task and She Can’t Handle It reach deep into his formative years as a folkie, while Know You Got To Run, the first song written for the album, only to miss the final cut, proves that he was among the most gifted blues-rockers of a golden generation.

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Broom, and Jimmy Cotton and his harmonica hop aboard rock‘n’roll’s birth boogie Rocket 88; just six of 42 magic tracks that also include JB Hutto, Otis Spann, Johnny Young, Big Walter Horton and Johnny Shines.

None of these guys are here now, but the mighty footprint they left still reverberates, repackaged and remastered on heavyweight wax into a magnificent historical artefact.

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Frank Zappa/ The Mothers Of Invention Hi-res reissues QOBUZ 24-bit reissues exclusive to streaming site.

These releases trace Frank Zappa’s progress from 1960s rock’s greatest iconoclast to supreme irrelevance, with emphasis on ‘supreme’.

Absolutely Free (1967, 9/10), the second album by the Mothers Of Invention, is a masterpiece, a furious meld of facetious satire and mean-itman tightly elaborate playing, a reproach to the banal

consumerism of the un-swinging American 60s, which inspired future experimental rock movements such as Krautrock.

Burnt Weeny Sandwich (1970, 7/10) is a formidable exercise in jazz-rock soloing, featuring the electric violin of Jean Luc Ponty. Bongo Fury (1976, 6/10) is an awkward reunion in the prickly friendship between Zappa and Captain Beefheart, two martinets who don’t quite gel, each doing their own thing, one blues-raw, the other a little overcooked.

By the late 70s/early 80s, as on Chicago ’78 (6/10) and Zappa In New York (1978, 6/10), the maestro was wilfully oblivious to new wave’s imperative to brevity or sense of cultural identity, offering long, twiddly solos and sleazy stories of dames on the road. At least

by Halloween 81 (6/10) he has pared down to soul basics.

However, as 1981’s Orchestral Favourites (7/10) demonstrates, no rock star had a greater understanding of the range and dynamics of 20th-century classical music than Zappa.

Perhaps all he lacked was a sense of frowning gravitas.

Finally, Mothers 1970 (7/10) is a trove of 70 previously

unreleased tracks discovered by the Zappa family after his death, with highlights including the seriously wah-wah flecked Red Tubular Lighter and Envelopes, mapping out new progressive possibilities for contemporary music.

David Stubbs

Various 80s Rock Down XPLODED TV From lockdown to Rock Down.

Jacket sleeves rolled up?

Check. Highwaisted jeans?

Check. Floppy fringe in place? Check. You are now ready to strut your 80s stuff in the company of Status Quo’s Francis Rossi, who has selected three CDs’ worth of rock anthems from the decade for this release, and is seemingly quite happy to have his own In The Army Now followed by Mike Oldfield’s Moonlight Shadow.

Obviously the big anthem makers – Bon Jovi, John Cougar Mellencamp, U2 – are all here to help you keep that cheesy grin in place, and there’s even a smattering of cool with Iron Maiden, Def Leppard and Robert Plant included for you to give it that serious face. Just try

not to look perplexed when Far Corporation’s Stairway To Heaven comes on.

You might also wonder what Rossi has against the New Romantics, who have been ruthlessly expunged from this collection. Maybe he doesn’t need this pressure, Ron. QQQQQQQQQQ Hugh Fielder

Cream The Goodbye Tour – Live At The Forum UCM/POLYDOR

Full 1968 show, now on double blue vinyl.

Cream might have released just six sides of studio vinyl and two live sides during a supernova career that lasted from the summer of ’66 to their final show in November ’68, but they really did change the game, their influence immediate, hard-hitting, wideranging and enduring.

Lifted from last year’s full version of Goodbye Tour Live 1968 and pressed on a pair of blue vinyl platters, The Goodbye Tour – Live At The Forum is the same show that Politician, I’m So Glad and Sitting On Top Of The

World on the original ’69 Goodbye album were taken from.

Those three are included here, the latter two among the band’s best live recordings, shimmering with a combination of virtuosity, invention and power.

Playing live, one thing you could never accuse Cream of is consistency. Here, Sunshine Of Your Love burns bright but wobbles, the expansive Spoonful lacks some of the tension and dynamics of the Wheels Of Fire version from the previous year, while the energetic Crossroads is bettered only by the incendiary version on that same album.

You could, however, accuse them of being a bit sloppy occasionally, such as here when Eric Clapton fluffs the intro of Sunshine (not exactly tricky), and Jack Bruce sings the first couple of words of White Room in the wrong key. Tiny, insignificant fluffs in the grand scheme of things, but perhaps reflecting that, as Ginger Baker later said of these farewell series of shows: “We knew it was all over. We knew we were just finishing it off, getting it over with.” But even a little off-colour or jaded, Cream could still be magnificent.

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The Who The Who Sell Out UMC/POLYDOR Five-CD Super Deluxe edition of ’67 album, plus unreleased tracks, demos and other goodies.

© THE WHO

T

he Pop Art structure of The Who Sell Out was born out of necessity. Pete Townshend didn’t think he had enough songs for a full album, so it was filled out with mock jingles for acne treatment, Charles Atlas’s “dynamic tension” course, and baked beans. As a successful and much-consumed pop band, The Who in late 1967 were nicely positioned between commercial commodity and ambitious purveyors of a more expansive, spiritualist psychedelic vision of Armenia City In The Sky and the horizon-scraping (albeit moodily vindictive) I Can See For Miles, of which multiple versions feature across this collection.

After this would come their full-blown ascent into the dubious conceit of rock opera, as hinted at by the segmented storytelling of Rael (Tommy was less than two years away).

The additional CDs here include both stereo and mono recordings of the original album, alternative takes, and very rough run-throughs that eerily take you back more than 50 years, with the sounds of producers (Chris Lambert and Terence Stamp) gently egging on the band

resounding ghostlike in your own headphones. Much of this is completism for completism’s sake, but there are pearls amid the sweepings.

They run through The Stones’ The Last Time with imitative swagger (did Daltrey have Jagger envy?), while Townshend’s own demos for Relax and the basic reverb of Jaguar have a certain, lo-fi charm, the songwriter and, here, singer offering heartfelt, un-amplified, un-tasselled versions of his own compositions. Melancholia is especially effective in its late-60s ennui (‘The kids have picked most of the flowers’).

Other bonuses include mono mixes of the original version of Magic Bus, with its ingenious stick rhythms and acoustic, skittering, bluesy shuffle. Perhaps this was The Who’s finest period, caught between pop and a harder place, still light and mobile in feel, wide-eyed, bristling with cheek and charm, weightless rather than weighty.

This collection is itself generously weighed

down with memorabilia, including posters, flyers, and a crack-back bumper sticker for ‘Wonderful Radio London’, beneficiaries of one of the album’s jingles. There’s also an 80-page booklet including liner notes by Townshend.

A veritable capsule in pop/rock time.

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REISSUES

Patto

David Bowie The Width Of A Circle PARLOPHONE The Bowie production line continues, here with a mix of the familiar and the not so.

O

nce, the release of a David Bowie album was a major event; now it’s beginning to feel like a chore, as limited editions, deluxe boxed sets, alternative versions and endless, endless live albums roll off the conveyor belt.

Mixed feelings therefore attend the release of The Width Of A Circle, which is apparently a “companion album” to Metrobolist, a record which itself was an ever-so-slightly different version of The Man Who Sold The World. Here for our marketing pleasure are two CDs, or variants thereof, this time comprising a variety of songs recorded in or around 1970, the year of the original US release of The Man Who Sold The World (1971 in the UK). Some are previously released, several are different versions of the same song, and quite a few are previously unreleased, although it’s difficult to tell which, as a quick scan of the CD collection suggests some crossover with the already available.

The good news, though, is that after all the fuss and noise, The Width Of A Circle turns out to be a useful and decent addition to the David Bowie catalogue. Yes, there are the usual pointless ‘2020 mixes’, suggesting that producer Tony Visconti is kept busy around the clock, mixing and mixing

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again. There are the now-usual semirarities, released from the big boxed sets rarities (the Mercury Holy Holy, All The Madmen as a single edit). There’s also a slight sense of incoherence, as Bowie ranges from arts lab ringmaster (the full live concert hosted by John Peel) to melancholy mime (the BBC film soundtrack with its Pierrots and Harlequins and Columbines) to full-on rocker (a session for Andy Ferris, backed

by Hype). In 1971, pre-Hunky Dory, Bowie was still trying on everything in the dressing-up box. Which is what makes this collection worth having, as the music ranges from cheery pop (London Bye Ta Ta) to songs about clowns (Twopenny Pierrot, set to the tune of London Bye Ta Ta) and finally apocalyptic eyed rock (a crunchy Waiting For The Man, The Supermen, and other songs that are nothing like London Bye Ta Ta). Like a caterpillar dissolving and re-forming in a transparent pupa, David Bowie is becoming something new before our ears. When he finally emerges, he’ll be months away from Ziggy and the world will be different for ever. But for now, as The Width Of A Circle displays brilliantly, he’s not so much planning his next move as constantly shape-shifting.

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Give It All Away: The Albums 1970-1973 ESOTERIC Four-CD set of stirring progjazz otherness from neglected UK quartet.

Never pop, not quite prog and too abstract for blues rock, Patto were tough to classify. At the band’s centre was guitarist Ollie Halsall, an astonishing virtuoso whose playing was more aligned to free-form jazz than to anything else, skating in and out of grooves with an intuitive grasp of harmonics. He and lead singer Mike Patto wrote the bulk of their repertoire, full of frisky time signatures and wilful detours, a vision expertly fleshed out with bassist Clive Griffiths and drummer John Halsey (later The Rutles’ Barry Wom).

Their first two albums – 1970’s Patto and 1971’s Hold Your Fire – include the real gold. Government Man might’ve been a hit in a more accommodating universe, the extraordinary Money Bag spins out into an epic avant-rock odyssey, Tell Me Where You’ve Been brings the heavy funk, the jazz-rooted Air-Raid Shelter travels way off the beaten path.

Critics loved them, but sales stayed low. Management and label Vertigo dropped them prior to 1972’s loose, larkish Roll ‘Em, Smoke ‘Em, Put Another Line Out. Halsall himself bailed out during sessions for 1973’s Monkey’s Bum, and the album remained unreleased until 2017.

This collection is nevertheless a fine document of both a vastly overlooked band and Britain’s greatest unsung guitar hero.

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Napalm Death Vinyl Reissues CENTURY MEDIA Birmingham’s chief brutes revive some old victories.

Everyone’s favourite grindcore overlords have been enjoying a rich streak of top form for the best part of two decades.

If you want proof, then these two welcome vinyl reissues will do fine.

Time Waits For No Slave (2009, 8/10) was a vicious assault from start to finish. But eclectic influences and lust for experimentation that reached a peak with last year’s Throes Of Joy In The Jaws Of Defeatism

were already audibly in effect on the mid-paced churn of the title track and the post-punk brutality of Procrastination On The Empty Vessel.

Utilitarian (2012, 9/10) was even more devastating. With a startling cameo from avantgarde king John Zorn on the explosive Everyday Pox and, surprisingly, razor-sharp melodic vocal hooks from frontman Barney Greenway on the sinewy thump of The Wolf I Feed. Any fears that Napalm Death were mellowing out in their old age were allayed by, well, just about everything, but the short, sharp onslaught of Nom de Guerre and the unhinged, crusty blast of Opposites Repellent were more intense than anything the band had done before.

Back on shiny plastic, these ferocious, fearlessly creative records sound more thrillingly ferocious than ever. No one else comes close.

Dom Lawson

The Yardbirds The Yardbirds (DEMON) Haphazard album shows why The Yardbirds were such a terrific singles band.

Arguably best known as a finishing school for three of Britrock’s most celebrated guitarists – Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck and Jimmy Page – The Yardbirds are a band whose recorded output is rarely held in the same regard as contemporaries such as the Stones and The Beatles, both of whom made significant strides of their own in 1966.

Listening to The Yardbirds’ sole UK LP (aka Roger The Engineer) it’s easy to see why.

With one foot in their blues past and the other in the psychedelic present, this is an erratic album that’s held together by Beck’s frequently dazzling displays.

Over, Under, Sideways, Down is where both threads are bound together, while What Do You Want finds Beck letting rip in fine style. Alas, Hot House Of Omagarashid’s throwaway psych and the lightweight Turn Into Earth are too slight to convince.

Presented in both mono and stereo formats, with a seveninch single of Happenings Ten Years Time Ago, an additional disc of 1966 studio recordings plus a 24-page booklet with contributions from Wayne Kramer and Thurston Moore, The Yardbirds remains a curate’s egg that at once highlights

stunning musical talent alongside some pretty pedestrian songwriting.

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Nolan & Wakeman Tales By Gaslight BURNING SHED Revisiting music based on classic literature.

In 1999, Clive Nolan and Oliver Wakeman created a rock opera inspired by Lewis Carroll’s nonsense poem Jabberwocky.

Three years later the pair did a similarly impressive job on Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s novel The Hound Of The Baskervilles.

Unfortunately, a third work, based on Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein classic had to be abandoned due to lack of money.

Since then, the first two of those albums have become almost impossible to buy. So Nolan and Wakeman came up with the idea of this box set. To make it more enticing, they’ve added a third CD, titled Dark Fables, which is comprised of previously unreleased pieces, including 30 minutes of music composed for the abandoned Frankenstein album.

Newly recorded, this half-hour suite whets the appetite for what might have been had the project gone ahead. And revisiting Jabberwocky and The Hound Of The Baskervilles proves to be highly enjoyable. The duo caught beautifully the essence of both literary master works.

Extensive notes from the protagonists give you insights into the way these were developed, and the new artwork from Peter Pracownik adds another atmospheric dimension.

Tales By Gaslight is a box set worthy of the quality inside.

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Blitzkrieg Theatre Of The Damned MIGHTY MUSIC

Shiny new reissue from NWOBHM staple.

Blitzkrieg’s early-80s run as NWOBHM pioneers and Metallica influencers is well-established and well-documented. Less well-known is their second life, sparked in the mid-90s by laststanding original member vocalist Brian Ross and a rotating cast of characters

who have kept the flame burning more or less ever since.

Produced by heavy metal hero Biff Byford, Theatre Of The Damned was originally released in 2007. This version brings a crystal-clear remaster job and has been given the deluxe limited-edition gatefold vinyl treatment. While lacking some of the punk rock intensity of their salad days, the record still sounds remarkably like classic Blitzkrieg, which means it’s chock-full of tasty trad-metal riffs and Ross’s commanding vocals. It all works best when the band are in full-on headbanger mode (Night Stalker, The Phantom). And while there are a few duds that wander too far into melodic rock territory, no fan of the original band would walk away from this album disappointed.

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Toyah The Blue Meaning (Deluxe) CHERRY RED

Over-played post-punk from national treasure Mrs Fripp.

Aside from her esteemed thespianism (Quadrophenia scene-stealing, co-starring opposite Olivier, voicing Teletubbies) and unlikely Lockdown Sunday Lunch ubiquity – sexing up the classics alongside her implausibly good-humoured hubby Robert Fripp – Toyah Willcox has enjoyed a weirdly contradictory musical career.

Parallels to Adam Ant are unavoidable: both caught a break in Derek Jarman’s 1977 punk fantasy Jubilee and enjoyed cult notoriety before ascending to hardcore-fanembarrassing stardom. If Adam was pop’s Prince Charming, Toyah was its Marmalade Atkins. But prior to hitting upon their foolproof formulae to ram-raid weenyboppers’ piggy banks, both made albums that set their peak credibility in stone: Adam’s Dirk Wears White Sox, Toyah’s The Blue Meaning.

Opening highlight Ieya is eight minutes-plus of fantastically grand, keyboard-laced, glaminformed, pacy post-punk with gobbledegook lyrics massively over-acted by an apparently unhinged Toyah hamming it up to high heaven.

If Adam’s USP was sex, Toyah’s was the occult. Well, sort of. ‘I am the beast,’ she

confides piercingly, before giving it plenty on the ‘Zion, Zuberon, Necronomicon!’ front, and it’s only marvellous; triumphant nonsense – unfettered by the soon-come widow’s weeds of goth – that still sounds great.

Elsewhere, Toyah huffs helium and straight-faces her way through songs with titles like Ghosts, Mummies and Insects (that mostly sound like Japan at 78 rpm), and this being deluxe there are 27 (live, demo, instrumental) extra tracks and a DVD for fans to digest.

As unashamedly ludicrous as any lockdown lunch and just as much fun.

QQQQQQQQQQ Ian Fortnam

Lou Gramm Questions & Answers: The Atlantic Anthology 1987-1989 HNE Foreigner singer’s solo albums, plus some very 80s remixes.

Rock singers don’t come any better than Lou Gramm, the curly-haired dude from Rochester, New York, whose partnership with English guitarist Mick Jones defined Foreigner as one of the all-time great AOR bands in the late 70s and early 80s. On the band’s classic hits, from punchy hard rock anthems to epic ballads, Gramm’s voice had a perfect blend of grit and soul.

When, after years at the top, things got a little tense between him and Jones, the singer found a new outlet, releasing two fine solo albums while remaining in Foreigner.

For both albums, 1987’s Ready Or Not and 1989’s Long Hard Look, Gramm’s chief collaborator was Bruce Turgon, a former member of his early70s band Black Sheep. And if these albums sounded more than a little like Foreigner, such was the power of that unmistakable voice.

Ready Or Not, the better of the two, yielded the US top-five hit Midnight Blue, Gramm’s peak as a solo artist. Long Hard Look, with ex-Dio/Whitesnake star Vivian Campbell on guitar, features a great version of the Small Faces’ Tin Soldier. But the third disc in this package, all extended remixes, proves that some things were better left in the 80s.

QQQQQQQQQQ Paul Elliott

BEST OF THE REST Other new releases out this month.

Can Live In Stuttgart 1975 MUTE First in a series of hit-free snapshots capturing the ever-influential German improvisers in full flow. Each of its five segments finds nascent chaos metamorphosing into funk-fuelled crescendo as if by inspired osmosis. 7/10

Various Beyond The Pale Horizon: Progressive Pop Sounds Of 1972 GRAPEFRUIT The most striking conclusion taken from these three hit-packed CDs (Quo, Heep, Mott, Yes, Free… Curtiss Maldoon?) is how much the definition of what constitutes ‘pop’ has changed since 1972. Not to mention ‘progressive’. 7/10

Jonathan Richman Having A Party With… CRAFT A welcome Record Store Day reappearance on Bermuda seafoam (i.e. pale blue-ish) vinyl for former Modern Lover Richman’s quirky third from ‘91. With preppy/savant wit ahoy it’s about as nerdishly charming as flat plastic gets. 7/10

Yardbirds Live In France REPERTOIRE Neat single-disc encapsulation of The Yardbirds’ ‘65-68 metamorphosis from Beck/Dreja-driven quintet to Page-dominated proto-Zep quartet across four explosive performances. Rough, raw, maximum R&B, invariably limited by singer Keith Relf. 7/10

Spiritualized Electric Mainline Pure Phase FAT POSSUM With two separate analogue mixes combined in a unique inexact fusion, Pure Phase finds Jason Pierce channelling Steve Reich, spiritual psych-rock and gospel in a mesmerising celestial head-fuck of mammoth proportions. Tune in, bliss out. 8/10

John Martyn The Church With One Bell CRAFT An RSD repress of Martyn’s uniquely idiosyncratic ‘98 blues covers album, recorded with veteran Chicago producer Norman Dayron, that offered fresh takes on new (Portishead’s Glory Box), old (Elmore James’s The Sky Is Crying) and timeless (Strange Fruit). 7/10

Ronnie Lane Anymore For Anymore UMC Plonk’s pastorally vibed ‘74 debut solo album still boasts an easy breezy charm that’s as far away from the raucously Rod-ed Faces (that he abandoned the previous year) as he could get. Weirdly archaic, yet strangely prescient. 7/10

David Bowie Kit Kat Club New York 99 ISO/PARLOPHONE The final instalment of Bowie’s Brilliant Live Adventures series is the 12-track soundtrack to an intimate webcast club show featuring pianist Mike Garson (their Life On Mars? duet shines brightest) and on guitar Helmet’s Page Hamilton. 8/10

Various Riding The Rock Machine GRAPEFRUIT What’s not to love here? Kicking off with Rainbow’s Long Live Rock ‘N’ Roll and Heep’s Easy Livin’, this is a bulky 59-track, three-disc set of songs to soundtrack ‘appy days indeed. Classics, rarities; rock’s golden era boxed. 8/10

Steve Miller Band Live! Breaking Ground: August 3rd 1977

SAILOR/CAPITOL/UME

SMB were as big as SMB ever were in ‘77. In the US, at least. No matter what intuition might tell you, neither Take The Money And Run nor Fly Like An Eagle charted in the UK, but in Maryland they went down a storm. As did The Joker. 6/10

Various Caught Beneath The Landslide

EDSEL

Curated by ex-NME snapper Kevin Cummins, this 71-track, four-CD audio companion to his While We Were Getting High Britpop photomemoir is as definitive a snapshot of Cool Britannia as has yet been compiled. A 90s Nuggets. 8/10

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F F U T S BOOKS &

Alice Cooper In The 1970s

DVDs

Lynyrd Skynyrd Live At Knebworth ’76 EAGLE ROCK Unnecessary history-rewriting tweak renders the extraordinary ordinary.

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a little bloke with a big voice in a huge hat – but it wasn’t until Free Bird that the magic happened. While there were a hardcore upfront (who’d probably caught Skynyrd on Whistle Test) who were in the know, most weren’t, so the set’s final song kicked off to little more than polite applause. Thirteen minutes later, Skynyrd were stars.

It’s a staggering performance. I’ve watched it countless times down the years on pub video jukeboxes and YouTube, and it never gets old. In the original cut there’s a brilliant shot of a supine punter blearily rousing himself and peering stagewards as he realises something amazing is about to happen. But that has been cut from this release, along with other similar shots, because it doesn’t support the hysterical applause clumsily helicoptered in from a Fillmore show (when Skynyrd played with Peter Frampton) and dubbed across the entire set. It virtually drowns out Free Bird’s piano intro, offers an unreliable, misleading account of a genuinely historic event, and ultimately slaps an ugly moustache on Skynyrd’s Mona Lisa.

Live At Knebworth ’76 should have been a nine out of 10, but…

QQQQQQQQQQ Ian Fortnam

What Drives Us Dir: Dave Grohl AMAZON PRIME Tales from bands in transit.

Although not necessarily in Transits.

If you’ve ever stuck your head into the toxic fug of a touring band’s van, you’d be hard-pressed to find any romance in between the crisp packets and fungal underwear. Unless you’re Dave Grohl, that is.

Having previously made a road-trip docu-series and album around the magic of the independent studio, here he focuses on the strains, intimacies, pitfalls and support structures of van touring, in interviews with the likes of Ringo, The Edge, Steven Tyler, Flea and St Vincent’s Annie Clark, alongside many early American punk bands. Despite too long spent on origin stories before the Ginsters wrapper really comes off and the scent of intestinally traumatised bassist kicks in (Clark recalls journeys in a “fart van” during the inevitable segment on flatulence; Ringo

Bob Dylan: No Direction Home Robert Shelton PALAZZO More Dylan than most will ever need.

Robert Shelton must have sometimes rued the evening he reviewed Bob Dylan for the New York Times 60 years ago this September. Possibly the most influential review in rock history, it helped nudge Dylan towards mass acceptance, but it set in motion the chain of events which would dominate Shelton’s life. Having secured Dylan’s shoulder-shrugging agreement to write the definitive biography in 1965, it would take over two decades to appear. When it finally emerged in 1986 after eight years of editing and squabbling with publishers, Shelton famously declared it “abridged over trouble waters”.

To celebrate Dylan’s 70th birthday in 2011, the exhaustive but exhausting 240,000-word complete version appeared. Ten years on comes this beautifully illustrated edition, edited by Liz Thomson, to whom the original was co-dedicated. She strips down Shelton’s stentorian prose, shedding album reviews, interview transcripts and an overwrought appeal for Dylan to be acknowledged as a poet (superfluous after his Nobel Prize for Literature in 2016, 20 years after Shelton’s death).

It’s slimmed down, but not dumbed down.

Unlike other Dylan biographers, Shelton was there and, aside from Dylan, he interviewed a jaw-dropping roll-call of friends, rivals and acquaintances.

Shelton was the one invited by

GETTY

f ever there was a live performance that had no need of restrospective revisionism, it was Lynyrd Skynyrd’s show-stealing support slot (third on the bill beneath 10cc) to the Rolling Stones at the tail end of the summer of ’76. I was there, and it was one of the greatest sets I’ve ever witnessed. The way that it went down was cinematic, you couldn’t have written it better (Cameron Crowe’s Roadies devoted an entire episode to Knebworth’s climactic Free Bird alone), and the way it went down was not like this.

So how do you change history? Suck the intrinsic magic out of a unique moment in time? In this case you simply change the audience track. Obviously that doesn’t sound like much, but in the case of Live At Knebworth it’s pivotal. For it was how Skynyrd (on the up, but to most of the 200,000 Stones fans in attendance, an unknown quantity) went from zeros to heroes over the course of a single song, in the eyes of a blasé audience who initially only saw them as yet another superfluous obstacle between themselves and the Stones, that made the show so special.

Sure, the rest of the set was fine – 53 minutes that took us from Workin’ For MCA to Sweet Home Alabama: excellent southern boogie, numerous guitars and

Chris Sutton SONICBOND PUBLISHING Chronological overview of the King Of Shock-Rock’s golden period.

You won’t find any heart-warming stories about Vincent Furnier’s childhood in Phoenix, Arizona, here. Instead, having established his credentials as a long-term fan in the preamble, Chris Sutton plunges straight into the action, charting the band’s progress from 1969 onwards, offering detailed analysis of every Alice Cooper album and single from the period.

While insightful interviews with major players including the band’s Michael Bruce, Dennis Dunaway and Neal Smith add weight, it’s the (mostly) gory details that fascinate. Who knew that I’m Eighteen was eight minutes long before producer Bob Ezrin trimmed it of the “excess bullshit”? Or that the band’s triumphant 1972 Hollywood Bowl show ended with a helicopter showering the audience with 5,000 pairs of paper panties?

A riveting read for sick things of all ages.

QQQQQQQQQQ Paul Moody

reveals The Beatles’ rule of owning your emissions), insights into the bonding familial closeness of the experience abound, not least in intimate footage from the Foo Fighters’ back-to-basics first tour.

Elsewhere Ian MacKaye’s potted history of the US touring circuit is invaluable, and DH Peligro of the Dead Kennedys’ harrowing and deeply moving tales of racism and drug addiction on the road deserve a documentary to themselves.

By the end, Grohl almost makes you dream of breaking down 12 miles out of Doncaster in a rustbucket held together with gaffa tape and bass strings.

QQQQQQQQQQ Mark Beaumont

Dylan’s parents, Abe and Beatty, into the family home (“Here’s a picture of Bobby as a Boy Scout”), but it’s no hagiography.

Alongside his intimate reportage, Shelton paints a picture of a genius who shed people as easily as he did personas. He whizzes through the 70s with unseemly haste and finishes with 1978’s Earls Court dates, but there isn’t a better, more detailed, more believable account of Dylan’s blossoming.

QQQQQQQQQQ John Aizlewood

Permanent Damage – Memoirs Of An Outrageous Girl Mercy Fontenot with Lyndsey Parker RARE BIRD The late GTO’S deathbed confessions.

The late Mercy Fontenot tells the story of her life in the GTOs and her subsequent second act as a face on the US punk scene as if we’ve ended up stoned back at her place one night. Maybe that’s what ghost writer Lyndsey Parker did, and her account sometimes pinballs from place and time based on her subject’s digressions. At one point Fontenot is talking about meeting Brian Jones and Jimi Hendrix at the Monterey Pop festival in 1967, then on the same page, as if it happened the next day, she talks about sampling the same heroin that killed Janis Joplin, in 1970.

But that kind of suits the unashamedly anarchic life she led. Her stories of hanging with Gram Parsons and Mick ’n’ Keef are reliably colourful, but there’s also a dark side to her story – she tells tales of rape, ODs, arrests and car wrecks as if they were everyday events. She passed away in July last year, but judging by this book she didn’t half live.

QQQQQQQQQQ Johnny Sharp

Francis Rossi AAA AWAY WITH MEDIA Quo veteran’s coffee-table tome ventures behind the scenes.

“Why would I want to look at pictures of myself?” Francis Rossi asks in his sparse thoughts in this limited-edition, individually signed glossy art book of blackand-white photos that capture

him in the studio, at home and on stage. He might not, but others might well do. The thoughts accompanying the photos are also surprisingly revealing, particularly because Rossi has always been a bit of an eccentric on the quiet. Asked by one young fan what his favourite part of a Quo show was, he explained that it was “The end”, because that’s when he can look back on it with most enjoyment.

Due to the timing, there’s a bit of an elephant absent from the room in these photos – the audiences, since it was produced during lockdown. And while casual Quo fans will probably have little inclination to look at glossy photos of sound desks, guitars and a septuagenarian rocker in repose, for the band’s many loyalists it will make for a tidy souvenir.

QQQQQQQQQQ Johnny Sharp

Babble On An’ Ting: Alex Paterson’s Incredible Journey Beyond The Ultraworld With The Orb Kris Needs with Alex Paterson OMNIBUS Exhaustive, highly entertaining account of ambient-rave pioneer.

Alex Paterson was a relative latecomer to fame, 10 years after many of his contemporaries.

He spent the 1980s as a roadie, cook and ‘fifth member’ for Killing Joke, worked at EG Records, and in his spare time monitored the growth of hiphop, ‘mastermixes’ and eventually rave. Initially working with The KLF’s Jimmy Cauty, before they fell out, he inaugurated The Orb in the late 80s, helping to usher in a new era of chill, before going on to work with, among others, Primal Scream and Robert Fripp.

Author Kris Needs is a man of vastly Catholic taste, as well as an old friend of Paterson’s.

Interviewing him extensively, he delves into his traumatic childhood (deprived of parental love), his 70s punk and soul epiphanies, and a DJ aesthetic that embraces everything from prog rock to reggae.

An indispensable guide to an artist whose work has traversed topographic oceans of acid funk.

QQQQQQQQQQ David Stubbs

(1..19 75 10 69+66'4 "07%.'#4$.#56 10.+0' 5*12 $#0& +0(15 #0& /14'

999 07%.'#4$.#56 &' 999 (#%'$11- %1/ 07%.'#4$.#564'%14&5

S ’ R E Y BUGUIDE

Meat Loaf: big man, big songs, big presence.

Meat Loaf

Essential Classics

He was at his best when paired with songwriter Jim Steinman, and their bombastic Wagnerian rock is almost a genre in itself.

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Meat didn’t try. The ensuing decades found him delving into everything from acting (let us never forget his star turn as a bigtittied revolutionary in Fight Club, or the ever-suffering bus driver in Spice World), to short-fused reality TV star (the Trumpstarring The Apprentice) and best-selling author. He also continued making music, sometimes with Steinman back in the fold, including a surprise early-90s comeback with the ear-worming, lyrically confusing pop-goth power ballad I’d Do Anything For Love (But I Won’t Do That).

It’s really been a hell of a ride so far. Meat has had many highs and lows in his sixdecade career, but he will certainly be most remembered as the gutter-operatic, sopping-wet, wheezing, horny manmountain who carved his own bombastic scarf-rock niche into the culture and made rock’n’roll even bigger and weirder in the process. Here we take a look at the wild world of Meat Loaf albums. And while we may wince here and there, let’s also give the guy who sang Bat Out Of Hell his due.

Ken McIntyre

Shortly before going to press with this issue we learned the awful news of Jim Steinman’s passing.

We pay tribute from page 10.

Bat Out Of Hell (CLEVELAND INTERNATIONAL/EPIC, 1977)

The combination of whacked-out songwriter Jim Steinman’s horny pocket symphonies and Meat Loaf’s leather-lunged operatic howl was unstoppable and untoppable. The hits will continue to resonate for the next thousand years. Your children’s children’s children will know all the words to Paradise By The Dashboard Light and Two Out Of Three Ain’t Bad. A perfect melange of 1950s teenage death ballads, Broadway pomp and head-caving hard rock, Bat was created in a long-gone world where rock’n’roll gods stomped the earth and no one stomped heavier than Meat Loaf. The term ‘classic rock’ was practically invented for this record.

Bat Out Of Hell II: Back Into Hell (PURE MUSIC, 1993)

If the success of the first Bat seemed unlikely in ’77, what hope (in hell) would Bat II have during the height of alt.rock?

The last thing anybody wanted in 1993 was to hear some bullshit album from creaky old dinosaurs like Meat and Steinman. And yet the constantly feuding duo pulled it together and created their second-greatest album, a collection of truly breathtaking rock’n’roll grandeur, including the most beautifully absurd and almost grotesquely over-inflated power ballad perhaps of all time, I’d Do Anything For Love (But I Won’t Do That). The rest of the album is just as nuts. What a comeback!

GETTY

ith the possible exception of Tiny Tim, Marvin Lee Aday, the man who became Meat Loaf, is probably the most unlikely rock star ever to grace the world’s stages. An overweight, stringy-haired eccentric with a flair for the theatrical, and with a leatherlunged bellow that could topple bricks, he spent the first few years of his musical career scraping the bottom of the charts as part of underrated soul-rock duo Stoney And Meatloaf. He then made a minor but memorable inroad into pop culture history with his turn as motorcycle maniac Eddie in both the 1974 Broadway production and the subsequent ’75 film of The Rocky Horror Picture Show.

Then two years later he suddenly and shockingly went supernova. Meat Loaf is 50 per cent responsible for 1977’s Bat Out Of Hell, one of the biggest-selling rock albums of all time – to date it has stacked up sales in excess of 50 million copies – and truly one of the greatest.

Meat and his half-mad, black-gloved songwriting partner Jim Steinman were an unlikely but unforgettable act. Bat Out Of Hell was the pinnacle of bizarre but majestic 70s rock’n’roll excess, and will probably never be matched. Which doesn’t mean

Superior Reputation cementing

Essential Playlist Paradise By The Dashboard Light Bat Out of Hell

I’d Lie For You (And That’s The Truth) Dead Ringer (EPIC, 1981)

In 1980, Meat was nursing his tour-ruined vocal cords and starring in low-budget comedy Roadie. His music partner Jim Steinman recorded Bad For Good, the follow-up to Bat Out Of Hell, without him. But while working on that album, he wrote this one. When Meat’s voice kicked back in, he bashed out this fine return to form. More low-key and less concept-y than Bat, it nonetheless satisfies the itch for epic, Wagnerian rock’n’roll and is anchored by three strong singles: Read ‘Em And Weep, I’m Gonna Love Her For The Both Of Us and the title track, a duet with Cher. One of Meat’s pickedover treasures.

Bat Out Of Hell III

Stoney & Meatloaf

Bad Attitude

(VIRGIN, 2006)

(RARE EARTH, 1971)

The title is sorta disingenuous.

Steinman and Meat were in a legal battle over ownership of the BOOH phrase, so Steinman relinquished production to the slightly less bombastic Desmond Child. And we do mean slightly, as this is still an incredibly overthe-top album. Most of the songs were written by Steinman, but not as a continuation of the BOOH theme (whatever that is).

Still, it’s a solid collection of overwrought Meat-jams, with another monster power ballad (It’s All Coming Back To Me Now) and a zingy metallic opener, The Monster Is Loose, written by Nikki Sixx and John 5.

Proof that pre-Steinman Meat was just as theatrical and pleasantly overblown as post, this minor gem was concocted while Meat and Shaun ‘Stoney’ Murphy were both cast members in hippie musical Hair. Signed to Motown’s short-lived rock subsidiary Rare Earth Records, S&M is very much in line with Motown’s vision, a frothy stew of brass and thunder, full bluesy R&B and sexed-up gospel-rock.

The highlight is opener (I’d Love To Be) As Heavy As Jesus, which has to be the most Meat Loaf-y phrase of all time. Many skip over pre-fame Meat, but this is wellworth a listen.

Much like Alice Cooper, Meat has always been one to follow the prevailing trends in rock music when concocting his latest album. Created during the relentless glam-metal wave of the mid-80s, this is Meat’s hardest-rocking record, a veritable orgy of shredding and whooping. Buoyed by the storming single Modern Girls (which went nowhere, but everybody was pretty busy with Billy Idol and Van Halen at the time), Bad Attitude featured guitars by Bruce Kulick (Kiss) and a duet with Roger Daltrey on the title track. This was Meat’s attempt to keep up with the kids.

And for the most part he did.

(ARISTA 1984)

Avoid

Good Worth exploring

Welcome To The Neighborhood

Two Out Of Three Ain’t Bad Bat Out Of Hell

Dead Ringer For Love Dead Ringer

I’d Do Anything For Love Bat Out Of Hell II

Rock N Roll Dreams Come Through Bat Out Of Hell II

Modern Girl Bad Attitude

Runnin’ For The Red Light Welcome To The Neighborhood

Razor’s Edge Midnight At The Lost And Found

What You See Is What You Get Stoney & Meat Loaf

Hang Cool Teddybear

Midnight At The Lost And Found

Welcome To The Neighbourhood

Blind Before I Stop

(MERCURY 2010)

(EPIC 1983)

(VIRGIN 1995)

(ARISTA 1986)

Meat really went all-in on this one. No Steinman, but instead of hiring murky background songwriters he hired high-impact types like Justin Hawkins, Jon Bon Jovi, Desmond Child and Foxy Shazam’s Eric Nally, and peppered the album with cameos from Brian May, Steve Vai and Jack Black, among others. The result is a flash-fire of fevered visions colliding in an audacious, wonderfully ridiculous collection of bombastic theatre-rock that really needs to be heard to be believed. While it does get mired in cheese here and there, this might be Meat’s most ambitious – and most over-the-top album.

And that’s saying something.

Created during a rift between Meat and Steinman, Midnight features a crack studio band that included Rick Derringer and Skynyrd guitarist Gary Rossington. Fun fact: two of the songs Steinman originally slated for the album and sold to other performers became massive hits: both Air Supply’s Making Love (Out of Nothing At All) and Bonnie Tyler’s Total Eclipse Of The Heart would have been on Midnight had the fellas not been feuding. Still, even without those coulda-beens, Midnight retains the ‘classic’ Meat Loaf sound, and even though he (and most people, really) hate it, it has its deep-cut 70s FM radio charms.

Two years after the massive success of Bat II, Meat offered up this relationship-gone-awry concept record. And while it failed to produce any real hits of note, it went platinum anyway.

Seven-minute single I’d Lie For You (And That’s The Truth) is primo to-the-limits Meat Loaf, but the album is fairly bristling with pleasantly hooky hard rock from beginning to end, and the songwriting credits are stuffed with legends including Steinman, Sammy Hagar and Steven Van Zandt. It was not the heartstopping follow-up anyone hoped for after Bat Out Of Hell II, but it’s still a solid collection of crunchy AOR.

Although there are some truly deplorable albums near the tail end of Meat’s career, when his voice was thoroughly shot and his choice of collaborators went all goofy (let us not forget that he did a song with Lil’ John and the Sugar Ray guy in 2011), this album is still worse. Desperate to find some niche to survive the 80s, an on-the-ropes Meat teamed up with Milli Vanilli producer Frank Farian and created a pastel-coloured collection of synth blasts and funky bass pops. There are a couple of minor highlights – the muscular Masculine and the raucous Rock N’ Roll Hero – but for the most part this one’s junk.

The Future Ain’t What It Used To Be Bat Out Of Hell III

Bat Out Of Hell Bat Out Of Hell

Los Angeloser Hang Cool Teddy Bear

Life Is A Lemon And I Want My Money Back Bat Out Of Hell II

Blind As A Bat Bat Out Of Hell III

Peel Out Dead Ringer

CLASSICROCKMAGAZINE.COM 97

Tour Dates BRYAN ADAMS

Bristol Cardiff Scarborough Widnes Telford Cornwall Powderham Canterbury Cornbury Leeds London

City Centre Castle Open Air Theatre Halton Stadium QEII Arena Eden Project Castle Spitfire Ground Music Festival Harewood House Royal Albert Hall

Jun 26 Jun 27 Jul 1 Jul 2 Jul 3 Jul 5 Jul 6 Jul 8 Jul 9 Jul 10 May 9, 10

ALL THEM WITCHES

Brighton Nottingham Glasgow Leeds London

Chalk Bodega St Luke’s Church Brudenell Social Club Camden Electric Ballroom

AMARANTHE

Manchester London

The Ritz Kentish Town Forum

Sep 27 Sep 28 Sep 29 Sep 30 Oct 1 Jan 18 Jan 19

Recommended

IAN ANDERSON: JETHRO TULL’S THE PROG YEARS Bath Reading Aylesbury Leicester Brighton London Poole Perth Glasgow Hanley Blackburn

ARENA

London Sheffield Bilston Kinross Southampton Liverpool

Forum Hexagon Waterside De Montfort Hall Dome Shepherd’s Bush Empire Lighthouse Concert Hall Pavilion Theatre Victoria Hall King George’s Hall

Camden Powerhaus Corporation Robin 2 Backstage At The Green Hotel 1865 Academy

BAD TOUCH, PISTON

Norwich Newcastle Glasgow Dundee Manchester Nottingham Wolverhampton Leeds Buckley Newport Cardiff Exeter Southampton London Gravesend

BAUHAUS

London

Nov 17 Nov 19 Nov 20 Nov 21 Nov 22 Nov 23 Nov 24 Nov 26 Nov 27 Nov 28 Nov 19 Nov 30 Dec 1 Dec 2 Dec 3

Alexandra Palace

Oct 30

Diamond Rock Club Cobblestones The Junction Dick Whittington Waterloo Music Bar Eleven Waterfront Corporation Railway Camden Underworld Ivory Blacks Trillians Yardbirds Club Club Academy KK’s Steel Mill

BEAST IN BLACK

London

Oct 1 Oct 2 Oct 3 Oct 4 Oct 5 Oct 6

Waterfront Studio The Cluny King Tut’s Wah Wah Hut Beat Generator Bread Shed Bodega KK’s Steel Mill Key Club Tivoli The Patriot Clwb Ifor Bach The Cavern Joiners Arms Islington Academy 2 Red Lion

BLAZE BAYLEY

Ballymena Bridgwater Plymouth Gloucester Blackpool Stoke-on-Trent Norwich Sheffield Winchester London Glasgow Newcastle Grimsby Manchester Wolverhampton

Sep 17 Sep 18 Sep 20 Sep 21 Sep 22 Sep 24 Sep 25 Sep 27 Sep 28 Sep 29 Sep 30

Islington Assembly Hall

Sep 4 Sep 10 Sep 11 Sep 12 Sep 18 Sep 19 Sep 24 Sep 25 Oct 15 Oct 16 Nov 24 Nov 25 Nov 26 Nov 27 Dec 11 Dec 1

BEHEMOTH, ARCH ENEMY, CARCASS,

JOHN MCMURTRIE

UNTO OTHERS

Dublin Glasgow Manchester Birmingham London

Olympia Theatre Academy Academy Academy Brixton Academy

Sep 28 Sep 30 Oct 1 Oct 2 Oct 3

THE BLACK CROWES

London Manchester

Brixton Academy Apollo

RECO MME …

NDS

BRUCE DICKINSON

Oct 23, 24 Oct 26

BLACK FOXXES

Exeter St Albans Cardiff York Edinburgh Hull Liverpool Sheffield Cambridge Leicester Brighton Tunbridge Wells London

Cavern Sep 22 The Horn Sep 23 Clwb Ifor Bach Sep 24 Fulford Arms Sep 25 Mash House Sep 27 Adelphi Sep 29 Loft Sep 30 Academy 2 Oct 1 Portland Arms Oct 2 Academy 2 Oct 4 Hope & Ruin Oct 5 Forum Oct 6 Tufnell Park Boston Music Room Oct 7

BLACK STONE CHERRY, KRIS BARRAS BAND

Bristol Birmingham Lincoln Nottingham Leeds Manchester Glasgow Edinburgh Newcastle Liverpool Folkestone Cardiff Exeter Southampton Cambridge

Academy Academy Engine Shed Rock City Academy Apollo Barrowland Usher Hall Academy Academy Leas Cliff Hall St David’s Hall Great Hall Guildhall Corn Exchange

Sep 9 Sep 10 Sep 11 Sep 13 Sep 14 Sep 16 Sep 17 Sep 18 Sep 20 Sep 21 Sep 23 Sep 24 Sep 25 Sep 27 Sep 28

BLACKWATER CONSPIRACY,

THESE WICKED RIVERS

Liverpool Edinburgh Glasgow Carlisle Newcastle Stoke-on-Trent Leeds Oxford Blackpool Newport Sheffield Leicester Birmingham Gravesend Swansea London Belfast Dublin

Arts Club Bannerman’s Bar Hard Rock Café Brickyard Trillians Eleven Warehouse Academy 2 Waterloo Music Bar The Patriot Corporation The Musician Academy 3 Red Lion Patti Pavilion Islington Academy 2 Empire Whelans

BLONDIE, GARBAGE

Liverpool Birmingham Manchester Hull Nottingham Brighton Cardiff London Glasgow Leeds

M&S Bank Arena Utilita Arena AO Arena Bonus Arena Motorpoint Arena Centre Motorpoint Arena O2 Arena The Hydro First Direct Arena

Sep 8 Sep 9 Sep 10 Sep 11 Sep 12 Sep 14 Sep 15 Sep 16 Sep 17 Sep 18 Sep 19 Sep 21 Sep 23 Sep 24 Sep 25 Sep 26 Oct 22 Oct 24 Nov 6 Nov 8 Nov 9 Nov 11 Nov 12 Nov 14 Nov 16 Nov 18 Nov 20 Nov 21

BLUES CARAVAN

JEREMIAH JOHNSON, WHITNEY SHAY, RYAN PERRY

Southampton Chislehurst Nottingham Grimsby Doncaster Hartlepool Edinburgh Bilston London

1965 Beaverwood Club Bodega Yardbirds Club The Leopard United FC Bannerman’s Bar Robin 2 Oxford Street 100 Club

Sep 13 Sep 14 Sep 15 Sep 16 Sep 17 Sep 18 Sep 19 Sep 20 Sep 21

DANNY BOWES & LUKE MORLEY: AN EVENING OF CONVERSATION & MUSIC

Whitley Bay Scarborough Airdrie Greenock Shrewsbury Birmingham Loughborough Stourbridge Ilfracombe Frome Ipswich Bury St Edmunds Exeter Porthcawl

Playhouse Spa Theatre Town Hall Beacon Arts Centre Theatre Severn Town Hall Town Hall Town Hall Landmark Memorial Hall Corn Exchange The Apex Corn Exchange Grand Pavilion

Nov 1 Nov 2 Nov 3 Nov 4 Nov 6 Nov 7 Nov 8 Nov 9 Nov 11 Nov 12 Nov 14 Nov 15 Nov 17 Nov 18

Leaving the music behind, the Maiden frontman gets chilled and chatty instead. And don’t scream: “Number Of The Beast!” okay?

See below for dates. Currently August 1 to 10.

Llanelli Lytham St Annes Ilkley Crawley Bedford Isle of Wight Leicester Grinstead

Ffwrnes Lowther Pavilion King’s Hall The Hawth Corn Exchange Shanklin Theatre Y Theatre Chequer Mead East

BRING ME THE HORIZON

Glasgow Cardiff Sheffield Birmingham London

The Hydro Motorpoint Arena FlyDSA Arena Utilita Arena O2 Arena

BROKEN WITT REBELS

Leicester Liverpool Leeds Cambridge Nottingham London Guildford Southampton Brighton Tunbridge Wells Norwich Cardiff Buckley Wolverhampton Edinburgh Aberdeen Glasgow

Academy 2 Jimmy’s Lending Room Portland Arms Bodega Oxford Street 100 Club Boileroom Joiners Arms Green Door Store Forum Waterfront Clwb Ifor Bach Tivoli KK’s Steel Mill Mash House Tunnels Garage

PHIL CAMPBELL & THE BASTARD SONS

Buckley Manchester Aberdeen Glasgow Carlisle Bradford Belfast Dublin Nottingham Bristol Bournemouth Swansea

CARAVAN

Basingstoke London Gloucester Brighton Chester Leeds Bury Bilston Bury St Edmunds Newcastle Glasgow Bristol Exeter Dover

Sep 21 Sep 22 Sep 24 Sep 25 Sep 26 Nov 25 Nov 26 Nov 27 Dec 10 Dec 11 Dec 16 Dec 17 Dec 18 Jan 6 Jan 7 Jan 8 Jan 13 Jan 14 Jan 15 Jan 2Jan 21 Jan 22

Tivoli Academy 3 Unit 51 Garage Brickyard Nightrain Limelight 2 Grand Social Rescue Rooms Thekla Old Fire Station Patti Pavilion

Nov 4 Nov 6 Nov 8 Nov 9 Nov 10 Nov 13 Nov 14 Nov 15 Nov 17 Nov 18 Nov 19 Nov 20

Haymarket Highbury Union Chapel Guild Hall Old Market Live Rooms Brudenell Social Club The Met Robin 2 Apex The Cluny Oran Mor The Fleece Phoenix Arts Centre Booking Hall

Oct 6 Oct 7 Oct 8 Oct 9 Oct 14 Oct 15 Oct 16 Oct 17 Oct 21 Oct 22 Oct 23 Oct 27 Oct 28 Oct 29

DEEP PURPLE, BLUE ÖYSTER CULT

Manchester Leeds Glasgow

Nov 19 Nov 20 Nov 22 Nov 23 Nov 25 Nov 26 Nov 28 Nov 29

Arena First Direct Arena The Hydro

Oct 2 Oct 3 Oct 5

London Birmingham

O2 Arena Arena

Oct 7 Oct 8

BRUCE DICKINSON (SPOKEN WORD)

Brighton Salford Bradford Nottingham Birmingham London

Theatre Royal The Lowry St George’s Hall Theatre Royal The Alexandra Shepherd’s Bush Empire

REBECCA DOWNES

London

Oxford Street 100 Club

Aug 1 Aug 4 Aug 5 Aug 8 Aug 9 Aug 10 Oct 19

THE DUST CODA

London Manchester Glasgow Nottingham Newcastle Bristol Birmingham

Tufnell Park Boston Music RoomDec 4 Deaf Institute Dec 5 King Tut’s Wah Wah Hut Dec 6 Billy Bootleggers Dec 7 Head Of Steam Dec 8 The Exchange Dec 10 Dead Wax Dec 11

EINSTÜRZENDE NEUBAUTEN

London

ESOTERICA

Birmingham Manchester London London Bournemouth

Kentish Town Forum

Sep 9

Actress & Bishop Deaf Institute Camden Black Heart Camden Underworld The Anvil

Sep 1 Sep 2 Sep 3 Sep 9 Sep 10

EVERGREY, WITHERFALL, DUST IN MIND

London Nottingham Bristol Manchester Newcastle Glasgow Dublin Birmingham

Gt Portland Street 229 Club Rescue Rooms The Fleece Academy 3 St Dom’s Social Club Cathouse Voodoo Lounge Asylum 2

FAITH NO MORE

Manchester Glasgow Birmingham London

Apollo Academy Academy Brixton Academy

BRIAN FALLON AND THE HOWLING WEATHER

Norwich Leeds Glasgow Nottingham Bristol Manchester Birmingham London

Waterfront Academy SWG3 Rock City Academy Academy Institute Shepherd’s Bush Empire

THE FLAMING LIPS

Leeds Liverpool Aylesbury Bexhill-on-Sea London Galway

FOCUS

Southampton

Oct 9 Oct 10 Oct 11 Oct 12 Oct 13 Oct 14 Oct 15 Oct 16

Jun 7, 8 Jun 9 Jun 11 Jun 12, 13

Dec 3 Dec 4 Dec 5 Dec 6 Dec 8 Dec 9 Dec 10 Dec 11

Stylus Invisible Wind Factory Waterside Theatre De La Warr Pavilion Kentish Town Forum Big Top

May 25 May 26 May 30 Jun 1 Jun 2 Jun 22

1865

Aug 18 CLASSICROCKMAGAZINE.COM 99

RECO MME London Norwich Nottingham New Brighton Kinross York Carlisle Exeter Whitby

Chelsea Under The Bridge Aug 19 Epic Studios Nov 3 Rescue Rooms Nov 4 Floral Pavilion Nov 5 Green Hotel Nov 6 Crescent Community Centre Nov 11 Old Fire Station Nov 12 Corn Exchange Nov 15 Pavilion April 1

GIRLSCHOOL, ALKATRAZZ FEATURING

DOOGIE WHITE

Stoke-on-Trent Blackpool Swansea Grimsby Edinburgh Bradford Newcastle London Wolverhampton Dublin Belfast

Eleven Waterloo Music Bar Hangar 18 Yardbirds Club Bannerman’s Bar Night Train Trillians Camden Underworld KK’s Steel Mill Voodoo Lounge Limelight

Nov 18 Nov 19 Nov 20 Nov 21 Nov 25 Nov 26 Nov 28 Dec 1 Dec 2 Dec 3 Dec 4

GRAND SLAM, STARSEED

Bilston Bradford Grimsby Edinburgh Glasgow Newcastle Milton Keynes Stoke-on-Trent Swansea London

GUN

Bath Buckley Swansea Wolverhampton Bury St Edmonds Manchester London Glasgow Aberdeen Southampton Newcastle Stoke-on-Trent Bradford Wavendon Brighton

Robin 2 Night Train Yardbirds Club Bannerman’s Bar Cathouse Trillians Craufurd Arms Eleven Hangar 18 Tufnell Park Dome

Oct 7 Oct 8 Oct 14 Oct 15 Oct 16 Oct 17 Oct 20 Oct 21 Oct 22 Oct 23

Komedia Tivoli Hanger 18 KK’s Steel Mill The Apex Night People Islington Assembly Rooms Barrowland Ballroom Lemon Tree Engine Rooms The Cluny Eleven Night Train The Stables Mid-Sussex Music Hall

Dec 1 Dec 2 Dec 3 Dec 4 Dec 7 Dec 8 Dec 9 Dec 11 Dec 12 Dec 14 Dec 15 Dec 16 Dec 17 Dec 18 Dec 19

STEVE HACKETT

Leicester Liverpool Hanley Birmingham Cambridge Cardiff Basingstoke London Manchester Edinburgh Glasgow Dundee Scunthorpe Bradford Nottingham Croydon Guildford Brighton Poole Bexhill-on-Sea Southampton Plymouth Carlisle Stockton Newcastle Aylesbury Oxford Peterborough Harrogate

De Montfort Hall Philharmonic Victoria Hall Symphony Hall Corn Exchange St David’s Hall The Anvil Palladium Apollo Playhouse Royal Concert Hall Caird Hall Baths Hall St George’s Hall Royal Concert Hall Fairfield Halls G Live Dome Lighthouse De La Warr Pavilion Mayflower Theatre Pavilions Sands Centre The Globe City Hall Waterside New Theatre Cresset Theatre Royal Hall

Sep 10 Sep 11 Sep 12 Sep 14 Sep 15 Sep 17 Sep 18 Sep 20, 21, 22 Sep 24 Sep 25 Sep 27 Sep 28 Sep 30 Oct 1 Oct 2 Oct 4 Oct 5 Oct 7 Oct 8 Oct 9 Oct 11 Oct 12 Oct 14 Oct 15 Oct 16 Oct 18 Oct 19 Oct 21 Oct 22

LUKE HAINES & PETER BUCK

London

Oxford Street 100 Club

Sep 12, 13

STEVE HARLEY & COCKNEY REBEL

Leamington Spa

BETH HART

Cambridge York Bath London

The Assembly

Corn Exchange Barbican Forum Palladium

HAWKWIND

London

Palladium

ROBYN HITCHCOCK

Bexhill-on-Sea

De La Warr Pavilion

Rock City Guildhall Phoenix Arts Centre

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Oct 29 Oct 31 Nov 3 Nov 5, 6 Oct 28 Sep 16 Sep 10 Sep 15 Sep 16

The Junction Engine Rooms Chalk Thekla Islington Assembly Hall Craufurd Arms Sin City Asylum Waterfront Phase One Sugarmill Tivoli Academy 3 Riverside Cathouse Night Train Picturedrome

ROBERT JON & THE WRECK

Cardiff Sittingbourne Chester Leeds Newcastle Manchester Nottingham London Edinburgh Aberdeen Hartlepool

KANSAS

London

Globe Bourne Music Club Live Rooms Brudenell Social Club The Cluny Night & Day Café Bodega Oxford Street 100 Club Voodoo Rooms Drummonds Durham Steel Works Club

Palladium

KINGDOM OF MADNESS FEATURING TONY MARTIN

Newcastle Kinross Glasgow Stoke-on-Trent Leicester Sheffield Buckley Swindon Bradford Colchester Havant Wavendon

KING KING

Leeds Bristol Exeter Bexhill Bilston Cambridge Sheffield Edinburgh York Newcastle Glasgow Manchester Sheffield Cardiff Birmingham Bury St Edmunds London

The Cluny Green Hotel Hard Rock Café Eleven Y Theatre Corporation Tivoli Level III Nightrain Arts Centre Spring Arts Centre The Stables

Stylus Academy Phoenix Arts Centre De La Warr Pavilion Robin 2 Junction Academy Queens Hall Grand Opera House Boiler Shop Academy Academy Leadmill Y Plas Town Hall Apex Arts Centre Camden Electric Ballroom

Sep 17 Sep 19 Sep 20 Sep 21 Sep 22 Sep 24 Sep 25 Sep 26 Sep 27 Sep 30 Oct 1 Oct 2 Oct 3 Oct 5 Oct 6 Oct 7 Oct 8 Sep 16 Sep 17 Sep 18 Sep 19 Sep 20 Sep 21 Sep 22 Sep 23 Sep 24 Sep 25 Sep 26

One of the best British prog bands of their era bring beautifully crafted songs to warm up cold November nights.

See below for dates. Currently November 14 to 27.

Nov 3 Nov 4 Nov 5 Nov 11 Nov 12 Nov 13 Nov 19 Nov 26 Dec 4 Dec 10 Dec 11 Dec 12 Oct 15 Oct 16 Oct 17 Oct 19 Oct 20 Oct 22 Oct 23 Oct 24 Feb 10 Feb 11 Feb 12 Feb 17 Feb 19 Feb 10 Feb 22 Feb 23 Feb 24

CORKY LAING PLAYS MOUNTAIN HRH Blues Festival Bannerman’s Bar Green Hotel Brudenell Social Club Oxford Street 100 Club

MARILLION

Nov 4

Recommended Great Yarmouth Edinburgh Kinross Leeds London

Nov 11 Nov 13 Nov 14 Nov 15 Nov 16

JOHN LEES’ BARCLAY JAMES HARVEST

Manchester London Leeds

LAMB OF GOD, KREATOR, POWER TRIP Academy Academy Academy Academy Brixton Academy

LARKIN POE

Southampton Bristol London Glasgow Dublin Manchester Brighton Oxford Birmingham

Engine Rooms SWX Shepherd’s Bush Empire SWG3 Galvanizers Vicar Street The Ritz Chalk Academy Institute

THE LAST INTERNATIONALE

Manchester Bristol Leeds Glasgow Birmingham London

Night People The Exchange Brudenell Social Club Stereo Hare & Hounds Oxford Street 100 Club

Dec 14 Dec 15 Dec 16 Dec 17 Dec 19

Nov 19 Nov 20 Nov 21 Nov 23 Nov 24 Nov 26 Nov 27 Nov 28 Nov 30 Oct 23 Oct 24 Oct 25 Oct 26 Oct 27 Oct 28

RNCM Islington Assembly Hall City Varieties

Nov 20 May 10 May 12

LINDISFARNE

Snape Fareham Bury St Edmunds Shrewsbury All Cannings Wavendon London Bradford Stanhope Lowdham Shoreham-by-Sea Bilston Porthcawl Skegness Kinross Carlisle Morecambe Newcastle Buckley

MAGNUM

Nottingham Sheffield Norwich London Southampton Cardiff Manchester Holmfirth Birmingham Cambridge Glasgow Dublin Belfast

Maltings Aug 7 Wickham Festival Aug 8 Apex Aug 27 Folk Festival Aug 29 Rock Against Cancer Sep 5 The Stables Sep 10 Kensington Nells Jazz & Blues Sep 17 Cathedral Sep 18 Northern Kin Festival Sep 19 Warthogs Sep 24 Ropetackle Arts Sep 25 Robin 2 Sep 26 Grand Pavilion Oct 16 Butlins Folk Festival Nov 28 Green Hotel Dec 3, 4 Old Fire Station Dec 5 The Platform Dec 10 City Hall Dec 18 Tivoli Dec 3 Rock City Leadmill Waterfront Islington Assembly Hall Engine Rooms Tramshed Academy 2 Picturedrome Symphony Hall Junction Garage Voodoo Lounge Limelight 1

MANIC STREET PREACHERS

Cardiff Bristol Manchester Glasgow Birmingham London

NDS

MARILLION

Hull Edinburgh Cardiff Manchester Cambridge Birmingham Liverpool Bath London

Motorpoint Arena

City Hall Usher Hall St David’s Hall Bridgewater Hall Corn Exchange Symphony Hall Philharmonic Hall Forum Hammersmith Apollo

MASON HILL, HOLLOWSTAR

Aberdeen Glasgow Galashiels Dublin Belfast Cambridge Sheffield Bristol Brighton Southend-on-Sea Cardiff Southampton Bradford

Tunnels Garage Macarts Grand Social Voodoo Lounge Junction 2 Corporation The Fleece Patterns Leos The Globe Joiners Nightrain

Sep 16 Sep 17 Sep 19 Sep 20 Sep 21 Sep 22 Sep 24 Sep 25 Sep 27 Sep 29 Sep 30 Oct 2 Oct 3 Jul 16, 17 Nov 14 Nov 15 Nov 17 Nov 18 Nov 20 Nov 21 Nov 23 Nov 24 Nov 26, 27 Sep 2 Sep 3 Sep 4 Sep 9 Sep 10 Sep 14 Sep 15 Sep 16 Sep 17 Sep 18 Sep 20 Sep 21 Sep 22

Blackpool London Manchester Wolverhampton Leeds Nottingham Norwich Newcastle Liverpool Dover Oxford

Waterloo Music Bar Camden Underworld Rebellion KK’s Steel Mill Key Club Rescue Rooms Waterfront Studio Cluny 2 Arts Club Booking Hall Academy 2

MASSIVE WAGONS

London Sheffield Nottingham Southampton Exeter Birmingham Manchester Southend-on-Sea Cardiff Newcastle Liverpool Glasgow

Islington Academy Rockin’ The Bowl Rescue Rooms Engine Rooms Cavern Club Academy 2 Club Academy Chinnerys The Globe Riverside Hangar 34 Garage

CHANTEL McGREGOR

Newcastle Cleethorpes Ruislip Nuneaton Doncaster London Sheffield Morcambe Hull Edinburgh Kinross Aberdeen Glasgow Bristol Looe Tavistock Derby Grimsby Bilston

The Cluny Rocks The Tropic Queens Hall The Leopard Oxford Street 100 Club Greystones The Platform Adelphi Bannerman’s Bar Green Hotel Café Drummond Hard Rock Café Thunderbolt Blues Festival The Wharf Flowerpot Yardbirds Club Robin 2

Sep 23 Sep 24 Sep 25 Sep 26 Oct 3 Oct 4 Oct 5 Oct 6 Oct 7 Oct 8 Oct 9 Sep 11 Sep 12 Sep 13 Sep 15 Sep 17 Sep 18 Sep 19 Sep 21 Sep 22 Sep 23 Sep 25 Sep 26 Jun 21 Jul 4 Aug 13 Aug 20 Aug 21 Aug 27 Oct 15 Oct 22 Nov 13 Nov 24 Nov 25 Nov 26 Nov 27 Dec 3 Dec 4 Dec 5 Dec 9 Dec 16 Feb 7

MARCO MENDOZA, ALEXA DE STRANGE

Newcastle Edinburgh Blackpool Leicester Bilston London London Scarborough

MOGWAI

Glasgow

Trillians Bannerman’s Bar Waterloo Music Bar The Musician Robin 2 Raynes Park Cavern Camden Underworld Vibe Bar

Jun 24 Jun 26 Jun 27 Jun 29 Jun 30 Jul 1 Jul 2 Jul 3

Royal Concert Hall

Nov 7

MOLLY HATCHET

Leeds Cardiff Wolverhampton Southampton London

Warehouse The Globe KK’s Steel Mill Engine Rooms Oxford Street 100 Club

Nov 28 Nov 29 Nov 30 Dec 1 Dec 2

ALANIS MORISSETTE, GARBAGE, LIZ PHAIR

London

O2 Arena

Oct 21

DUNCAN EVERSON

INGLORIOUS, MERCUTIO

Nottingham Gloucester Exeter

Dec 11

Plymouth Southampton Brighton Bristol London Milton Keynes Swansea Birmingham Norwich Liverpool Stoke-on-Trent Buckley Manchester Newcastle Glasgow Bradford Holmfirth

…

RECO MME Manchester Dublin

Arena 3 Arena

NEW MODEL ARMY

Nottingham London

Rock City Chalk Farm Roundhouse

Oct 22 Oct 25 Nov 26, 27 Dec 4, 5

NHS THANKYOU CONCERT THE WILDHEARTS, BIG COUNTRY, THE BREW, MORE

Cleethorpes

Meridian Park

Jul 31

Arlington Arts Centre Red Lion Raynes Park Cavern The Patriot Brickmakers Craufurd Arms Waterloo Music Bar Cornwall Rocks Festival The Station Nightrain The Cluny

NIGHTWISH, AMORPHIS, TURMION

THE PSYCHEDELIC FURS,

Dublin Birmingham London

Bristol Nottingham Glasgow Manchester Liverpool London Cambridge

KÄTILÖT

3 Arena Resorts World Arena Wembley Arena

Nov 17 Nov 18 Dec 13

THE NIMMO BROTHERS

Clitheroe The Grand NewburyArlington Arts Centre Wavendon The Stables

Jul 13 Jul 14 Jul 15

THE OFFSPRING, THE HIVES

Cardiff Birmingham London Glasgow Manchester Leeds

Motorpoint Arena Resorts World Arena Wembley Arena The Hydro AO Arena First Direct Arena

Nov 23 Nov 24 Nov 26 Nov 27 Nov 29 Nov 30

MIKE OLDFIELD’S TUBULAR BELLS IN CONCERT

London

South Bank Centre

Aug 7-15

ORANGE GOBLIN, SPIRIT ADRIFT, KING CREATURE

Buckley Belfast Dublin Glasgow Manchester Birmingham Cardiff London

Tivoli Limelight 2 Grand Social King Tut’s Wah Wah Hut Gorilla Asylum Globe Camden Underworld

Dec 9 Dec 10 Dec 11 Dec 13 Dec 14 Dec 15 Dec 16 Dec 17, 18

ORANGE GOBLIN, SPIRIT ADRIFT, KING CREATURE

Buckley Belfast Dublin Glasgow Manchester Birmingham Cardiff London

Tivoli Limelight 2 Grand Social King Tut’s Wah Wah Hut Gorilla Asylum Globe Camden Underworld

Dec 9 Dec 10 Dec 11 Dec 13 Dec 14 Dec 15 Dec 16 Dec 17, 18

OZRIC TENTACLES, SILAS & SASKI

Glasgow Newcastle Stockton-on-Tees Todmorden York Birmingham Southampton Guildford Tunbridge Wells Ramsgate Cambridge Brighton Cardiff Bristol Exeter London Manchester Carlisle

Mono Cluny 2 Georgian Theatre Golden Lion Fulford Arms Hare & Hounds 1865 Boileroom Forum Music Hall Portland Arms Green Door Store Globe The Exchange Phoenix Arts Centre Islington The Lexington Deaf Institute Brickyard

OZZY OSBOURNE, JUDAS PRIEST

Nottingham Dublin Birmingham London Manchester Newcastle Glasgow

Motorpoint Arena 3 Arena Resorts World Arena O2 Arena AO Arena Utilita Arena The Hydro

THE PINEAPPLE THIEF WITH GAVIN HARRISON

Dublin Glasgow Manchester Bristol London

Button Factory St Luke’s Church The Ritz SWX Shepherd’s Bush Empire

PITCHSHIFTER

Wolverhampton Manchester Bristol London Nottingham

KK’s Steel Mill Academy 3 SWX Highbury Garage Rock City

POWERWOLF

WILL IRELAND

Newbury Gravesend London Crumlin Norwich Milton Keynes Blackpool Looe Cannock Bradford Newcastle

London

Chalk Farm Roundhouse

PRAYING MANTIS, VAMBO

Southampton

The Brook

Dec 1 Dec 2 Dec 3 Dec 4 Dec 5 Dec 6 Dec 8 Dec 9 Dec 10 Dec 11 Dec 12 Dec 14 Dec 15 Dec 16 Dec 18 Dec 19 Jan 16 Jan 17 Feb 27 Mar 1 Mar 4 Mar 7 Mar 9 Mar 12 Mar 14

Oct 5 Oct 6 Oct 7 Oct 8 Oct 30 Nov 29 Nov 30 Dec 1 Dec 2, 3 Dec 4 Oct 8 Oct 6

PAULINE MURRAY

Academy Rock City SWG Academy 2 Academy Royal Albert Hall Junction

QUIREBOYS, MASSIVE

Glasgow Aberdeen Leeds Gateshead Stoke-on-Trent Manchester Gloucester Brighton Birmingham Oxford Southend-on-Sea Bristol Nottingham

Garage Lemon Tree Brudenell Social Club The Sage Sugarmill Academy Guildhall Concorde 2 Institute Bullingdon Chinnerys Thekla Rescue Rooms

FÉLIX RABIN

Southampton Great Yarmouth Stamford Newcastle Bilston Grimsby Liverpool Keighley Lincoln Kinross Edinburgh

1865 HRH Blues Festival Mama Liz’s Cluny 2 Robin 2 Yardbirds Club Phase 1 Studio 5 Blues, Rhythm & Rock Festival Green Hotel Bannerman’s Bar

Oct 7 Oct 8 Oct 9 Oct 10 Oct 12 Oct 13 Oct 14 Oct 15 Oct 16 Oct 17 Oct 18

Southampton Cardiff Nottingham Manchester Liverpool Glasgow Birmingham Leeds London

Engine Rooms Tramshed Rock City Academy 2 Grand Central Hall Garage The Mill Warehouse Camden Electric Ballroom

REDD KROSS

Brighton London Bristol Leeds Manchester Newcastle

The Albert Islington The Lexington The Exchange Brudenell Social Club Deaf Institute The Cluny

Oct 14 Oct 15 Nov 18 Nov 19 Nov 20 Nov 26 Nov 27 Jan 21 Jan 22 Jun 11 Jun 12 Jun 17 Jun 18 Nov 11 Nov 12 Nov 14 Nov 15 Nov 16 Nov 17 Nov 18 Nov 19 Nov 20 Nov 21 Nov 22

Feb 28 Mar 1 Mar 3 Mar 4 Mar 5 Mar 6 Mar 8 Mar 9 Mar 10 Mar 31 Apr 1, 2 Apr 3 Apr 5 Apr 7 Apr 8

ROMEO’S DAUGHTER, SWEET CRISIS

Nuneaton Bilston Blackpool Stoke-on-Trent Milton Keynes Carlisle Newcastle Edinburgh Glasgow London

Queens Hall Robin 2 Waterloo Music Bar Eleven Craufurd Arms Brickyard Trillians Bannerman’s Bar Hard Rock Café Highbury Garage

ROSE TATTOO

London Birmingham Glasgow

Islington Assembly Hall Institute 2 SWG3

Mar 5 Mar 10 Mar 11 Mar 12 Mar 18 Mar 19 Mar 24 Mar 25 Mar 26 Apr 2 Jul 19 Jul 20 Jul 21

MICHAEL SCHENKER GROUP, DORO

Leeds Newcastle Wolverhampton London

Academy City Hall KK’s Steel Mill Shepherd’s Bush Empire

Oct 28 Oct 29 Oct 30 Oct 31

SEPULTURA, SACRED REICH, CROWBAR

Wolverhampton Dublin Manchester Glasgow London

KK’s Steelmill Academy The Ritz Garage Brixton Electric

JOANNE SHAW TAYLOR

Glasgow Edinburgh Newcastle Kendal Manchester

St Luke’s Liquid Rooms Riverside Brewery Arts Centre Academy 3

NDS

GIRLSCHOOL

Sep 27 Sep 28 Sep 29 Oct 1 Oct 2 Oct 3 Oct 5

RECKLESS LOVE, DAN REED NETWORK,

MASON HILL

…

Nov 23 Nov 24 Nov 25 Nov 26 Nov 27 Nov 2 Nov 3 Nov 5 Nov 6 Nov 7

They’ve been kicking hard-rock ass for more than 40 years, and there’s no reason to think it won’t be the same this tour.

See opposite page for dates. Currently November 18 to December 4.

Liverpool Leeds Oxford London Bristol Nottingham Swansea Birmingham

Arts Club Warehouse Academy King’s Cross Lafayette The Fleece Glee Club Sin City The Mill

KENNY WAYNE SHEPHERD

Bexhill-on-Sea Salisbury Gateshead Edinburgh Warrington

De La Warr Pavilion City Hall Tyne Theatre Queens Hall Parr Hall

Nov 9 Nov 10 Nov 12 Nov 14 Nov 16 Nov 17 Nov 19 Nov 18 Oct 15 Oct 17 Oct 19 Oct 20 Oct 21

SISTERS OF MERCY

London

Chalk Farm Roundhouse Sep 10, 11, 12

SKINDRED, ROYAL REPUBLIC

Cambridge Oxford Northampton Leeds Birmingham London Cardiff Bristol Nottingham Glasgow Southampton Sheffield Newcastle Bexhill-on-Sea Manchester Norwich

Junction Academy Roadmender Academy Institute Chalk Farm Roundhouse Tramshed Academy Rock City SWG3 Guildhall Corporation University De La Warr Pavilion Academy UEA

SKUNK ANANSIE

London Nottingham Manchester Brighton Cardiff Bristol Cambridge Folkestone Guildford Leicester Lincoln Norwich Birmingham Sheffield Newcastle Glasgow Leeds

Brixton Academy Rock City Victoria Warehouse Dome University Academy Corn Exchange Leas Cliff Hall G Live Academy Engine Shed UEA Academy 1 Academy City Hall Academy Academy

JOHN SLOMAN

London

Raynes Park Cavern

Sep 23 Sep 24 Sep 25 Sep 30 Oct 1 Oct 2 Oct 7 Oct 8 Oct 9 Oct 10 Oct 15 Oct 22 Oct 23 Oct 29 Oct 30 Oct 31 Mar 25 Apr 7 Apr 8 Apr 9 Apr 11 Apr 12 Apr 14 Apr 15 Apr 16 Apr 18 Apr 19 Apr 21 Apr 22 Apr 23 Apr 25 Apr 26 Apr 27 Jun 17

SNAKE OIL AND HARMONY,

NATE BERGMAN

Aberdare Sheffield Milton Keynes Manchester London Stoke-on-Trent Bradford Nottingham Bilston

Jacs Corporation Craufurd Arms Night People Putney Half Moon Eleven Nightrain Billy Bootleggers Robin 2

Nov 26 Nov 27 Nov 28 Sat 29 Nov 30 Dec 2 Dec 3 Dec 4 Dec 5

Chester Glasgow Newcastle Blackpool Ballymena

Live Rooms Cottiers Theatre The Cluny Waterloo Music Bar Diamond Rock Bar

AL STEWART

Bournemouth Cambridge Manchester Bristol Bexhill-on-Sea Guildford Bath Birmingham London

Pavilion Theatre Corn Exchange RNCM St George’s De Law Warr Pavilion G Live Forum Town Hall Belgravia Cadogan Hall

Dec 7 Dec 8 Dec 9 Dec 10 Dec 11 Oct 15 Oct 16 Oct 17 Oct 19 Oct 20 Oct 25 Oct 26 Oct 28 Oct 29, 30

STRAY, KEN PUSTELNIK’S GROUNDHOGS

Newcastle Bilston Newport

The Cluny Robin 2 The Patriot

Nov 24 Nov 25 Nov 26

Recommended SUPERSUCKERS London York Glasgow Blackpool Newcastle

SWEET

Brighton Southampton Frome London Birmingham Shrewsbury Bexhill-on-Sea Norwich Newcastle Glasgow Edinburgh Holmfirth Cardiff Manchester Nottingham Bury St Edmunds

Oxford Street 100 Club Crescent Community Centre Broadcast Waterloo Music Bar The Cluny

Mar 20 Mar 21 Mar 22 Mar 24 Mar 25

Chalk 1865 Cheese & Grain Islington Assembly Hall Town Hall Buttermarket De La Warr Pavilion Waterfront Boiler Shop Garage Queen’s Hall Picturedrome University Academy Rock City Apex

Nov 25 Nov 26 Nov 27 Nov 28 Dec 2 Dec 3 Dec 4 Dec 5 Dec 8 Dec 9 Dec 10 Dec 11 Dec 17 Dec 18 Dec 19 Dec 20

SWEET CRISIS

London Hereford Castle Chelmsford Cambridge Sittingbourne Leicester

Camden Rocks Festival Lakefest Festival Hot Box Junction 2 Bourne Music Club The Charlotte

GEOFF TATE

Bilston Grimsby Bournemouth Swansea Nuneaton London Stoke-on-Trent Blackpool

Robin 2 Yardbirds Club Madding Crowd Patti Pavilion Queens Hall Camden Underworld Eleven Waterloo Music Bar

Aug 13 Aug 14 Aug 19 Aug 21 Aug 26 Sep 15 Aug 12 Aug 13 Aug 14 Aug 15 Aug 16 Aug 17 Aug 18 Aug 19

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V Glasgow Inverness Edinburgh Newcastle

Aug 21 Aug 23 Aug 28 Aug 29

Nottingham Bristol London Wolverhampton

Picturedrome KK’s Steelmill The Foundry

Sep 11 Sep 17 Nov 5

Junction Waterfront Rock City Concorde 2 Camden Electric Ballroom Wedgewood Rooms Tramshed Phoenix Arts Centre SWX KK’s Steel Mill The Ritz Warehouse Riverside Garage Olympia Limelight

Oct 19 Oct 20 Oct 22 Oct 23 Oct 24 Oct 26 Oct 27 Oct 29 Oct 30 Oct 31 Nov 2 Nov 3 Nov 4 Nov 5 Feb 4 Feb 5

Cardiff Bristol Exeter Frome Manchester London Norwich Brighton Bournemouth Wolverhampton Gloucester Newcastle Leeds Galashiels Stirling Aberdeen Sheffield Southampton Birmingham South Shields Inverness

Cathouse Mad Hatters Bannermans Bar Trillians

TERRORVISION

Holmfirth Wolverhampton Sheffield

THERAPY?

Cambridge Norwich Nottingham Brighton London Portsmouth Cardiff Exeter Bristol Wolverhampton Manchester Leeds Newcastle Glasgow Dublin Belfast

RICHARD THOMPSON

York Glasgow Perth Gateshead Birmingham Manchester Cardiff London Dublin

Barbican Royal Concert Hall Concert Hall The Sage Symphony Hall Opera House St David’s Hall Palladium Vicar Street

GEORGE THOROGOOD & THE DESTROYERS

Nottingham London Liverpool Birmingham York Glasgow Manchester

RECO MME

Royal Concert Hall Shepherds Bush Empire Philharmonic Hall Symphony Hall Barbican SEC Armadillo Bridgewater Hall

Oct 25 Oct 26 Oct 27 Oct 28 Oct 30 Oct 31 Nov 1 Nov 2 Nov 3

Jul 23 Jul 25 Jul 26 Jul 28 Jul 30 Jul 31 Aug 1

THUNDERMOTHER, BETH BLADE & THE BEAUTIFUL DISASTERS

Edinburgh Carlisle Bradford Blackpool Newcastle London Wolverhampton Buckley Newport Plymouth

Bannerman’s Bar Brickyard Nightrain Waterloo Music Bar Trillians Camden Underworld KK’s Steel Mill Tivoli Patriot Junction

ROBIN TROWER

Southampton London Holmfirth

The Brook Islington Assembly Hall Picturedrome

MARTIN TURNER EX-WISHBONE ASH

Twickenham Worcester Havant Whitby Hull Chislehurst Sutton Lowther Derby Dartmouth Cardiff Glasgow Kinross Newcastle Selby Maidenhead Swindon

VEGA

London Belfast Stoke-on-Trent Blackpool Aberdare Newcastle Bradford Buckley Inverness Bilston

Eel Pie Club Huntingdon Hall Spring Arts & Heritage Pavilion Hessle Town Hall Beaverwood Club Boom Boom Club Pavilion Flowerpot Flavel Arts Centre The Globe The Ferry Green Hotel The Cluny Town Hall Norden Farm Centre Level III

Nov 3 Nov 4 Nov 5

Sep 2 Sep 5 Oct 2 Oct 8 Oct 9 Nov 4 Nov 5 Nov 10 Nov 11 Dec 4 Dec 5 Dec 8 Dec 9 Dec 10 Dec 11 Dec 16 Dec 17

Camden Underworld Voodoo Lounge Eleven Waterloo Music Bar Jac’s Riverside Nightrain Tivoli Monsterfest Robin 2

Y&T

Southampton Norwich Nottingham London Cardiff Wolverhampton Glasgow Newcastle Holmfirth Wolverhampton

102 CLASSICROCKMAGAZINE.COM

Live Rooms Waterloo Music Bar The Ferry Queen’s Hall Centre The ARC Brudenell Arts Centre The Met Picturedrome Princess Theatre Apex Arts Centre Arlington Arts Roses Theatre The Stables Ropetackle Arts Centre The Brook Tivoli The Beehive Cheese & Grain Islington Academy Robin 2 Y Theatre

Oct 17 Oct 19 Oct 21 Oct 22 Oct 23 Oct 26 Oct 28 Oct 29 Oct 30 Nov 2 Nov 3 Nov 5 Nov 6 Nov 7 Nov 9 Nov 10 Nov 11 Nov 12 Nov 13 Nov 14 Nov 18 Nov 19 Nov 20

The Brook Waterfront Rock City Islington Assembly Hall Tramshed KK’s Steel Mill Garage Academy Picturedrome KK’s Steel Mill

Oct 26 Oct 27 Oct 29 Oct 30 Oct 31 Oct 30 Nov 4 Nov 5 Nov 6 Nov 7

YOU ME AT SIX

Manchester Bristol Newcastle London

THE WILDHEARTS

Sep 3 Sep 4 Sep 5 Sep 6 Sep 8 Sep 9 Sep 10 Sep 11 Sep 12 Sep 15 Sep 16 Sep 17 Sep 18 Sep 20 Sep 21 Sep 22 Sep 24 Sep 25 Nov 5 Nov 11 Nov 12

WISHBONE ASH

Chester Blackpool Glasgow Edinburgh Lochgelly Stockton-on-Tees Leeds Bury Holmfirth Hunstanton Bury St Edmunds Pontardawe Newbury Tewkesbury Wavendon Shoreham-by-Sea Southampton Wimborne Honiton Frome London Bilston Leicester

Academy Academy University Kentish Town Forum

Sep 2 Sep 6 Sep 9 Sep 10

Fronted by one of the best British songwriters of his generation, a night with them is always a night to remember.

See left for dates. Currently September 3 to November 12.

CALL OF THE WILD FESTIVAL

READING/LEEDS FESTIVAL

Lincoln

Reading Leeds

PHIL CAMPBELL & THE BASTARD SONS, MASSIVE WAGONS, WARRIOR SOUL, MORE

Lincolnshire Showground Sep 18-20

CHELSEA BLUES, RHYTHM & ROCK FESTIVAL

CHRIS FARLOWE, CLIMAX BLUES BAND, MORE

London

Chelsea Under The Bridge

July 10

CLEETHORPES ROCKS

STRAY, CHANTEL MCGREGOR, SKAM, MORE

Cleethorpes

Beachcomber

Jul 3, 4

CORNWALL ROCKS Looe

Tencreek Holiday Park

Aug 12-14

DOWNLOAD FESTIVAL (2022)

KISS, IRON MAIDEN, BIFFY CLYRO, MORE Donington Park

Jun 10-12

EXPERIENCE 1970

JOHN LODGE, PENTANGLE, ARTHUR BROWN, MORE

Freshwater (IoW) East Afton Farm

Sep 3-5

GRAVITY FESTIVAL

THE TREATMENT, PRAYING MANTIS, HELL’S ADDICTION, MORE

Festivals A NEW DAY FESTIVAL

Great Yarmouth

FM, THE WILDHEARTS, CATS IN SPACE, MORE

Pentrich

Coney Grey Showground

ROMEO’S DAUGHTER, DEMON, MORE

Glasgow

Garage

Don Valley Bowl

Spa

SONIC ROCK SOLSTICE

ATOMIC ROOSTER, NIK TURNER, HEAVY METAL KIDS, MORE

Bromsgrove

Stoke Prior Space Port

MYKE GRAY FEAT KIM JENNETT, PISTON, HANDS OFF GRETEL, MORE

Prestwich

Longfield Suite

Oct 15-17

Southport

The Atkinson

Ebbw Vale

ARCTANGENT FESTIVAL

London Leeds

Aug 19-21

BILSTON BLUES RHYTHM & ROCK FESTIVAL

THE ANIMALS, THE CINELLI BROTHERS, SOUTHBOUND MORE

Bilston

Robin 2

Aug 29

BLOODSTOCK FESTIVAL

JUDAS PRIEST, KREATOR, DEVIN TOWNSHEND, MORE Catton Park

Aug 11-15

KEN PUSTELNIK’S GROUNDHOGS, STEPHEN DALE PETIT, XANDER & THE PEACE PIRATES, MORE Penstowe Manor

Nov 4-7

Sep 11, 12 Sep 11, 12

HARD ROCK HELL PROG

DAVE BROCK, COLOSSEUM, THRESHOLD, ATOMIC ROOSTER, MORE Shepherd’s Bush Empire Academy

Sep 4, 5 Sep 4, 5

HARD ROCK HELL SLEAZE MICHAEL MONROE, QUIREBOYS, L.A. GUNS, MORE

SheffieldAcadedemy

BUDE BLUES, RHYTHM & ROCK FESTIVAL Bude

Vauxhall Holiday Park

FIELDS OF THE NEPHILIM, MY DYING BRIDE, MORE

London Sheffield

FÉLIX RABIN, THE CINELLI BROTHERS, ZOE SCHWARZ, MORE Alive

Nov 20

DIRTY LOOPS, HAKEN, INTERVALS, MORE

Guildford

Guildford Park

Jul 30, 31

Jul 23-25

Recommended STONEDEAD FESTIVAL

BLACK STAR RIDERS, H.E.A.T, GUN, TERRORVISION, MORE

Newark

Showground

Aug 28

STORMIN’ THE CASTLE FESTIVAL Witton Castle

Sep 3-5

WEYFEST

MASON HILL, XANDER & THE PEACE PIRATES, ELLES BAILEY, MORE

Farnham

RADAR FESTIVAL Nov 5-7

Hafod-y-Dafal Farm

BIG COUNTRY, INGLORIOUS, MORE

Aug 28, 29

Oct 10

EUROPE, ANTHRAX, THERAPY?, H.E.A.T, MORE

Country Durham

LINCOLN BLUES FESTIVAL Lincoln

Jul 2-4

SARI SCHORR, DANA GILLISPIE, KYLA BROX, MORE

HARD ROCK HELL GOTH & INDUSTRIAL

Fernhill Farm

Jul 1-5

SOS FESTIVAL

JOHN LEES’ BARCLAY JAMES HARVEST, THE CRAZY WORLD OF ARTHUR BROWN, MORE OPETH, CULT OF LUNA, SWANS, MORE

Mar 27

SOUTHPORT BLUES, RHYTHM & ROCK FESTIVAL

HARD ROCK HELL

Kentish Tow Forum Academy

Sep 10-12

SCARBOROUGH PUNK FESTIVAL

STEELHOUSE FESTIVAL

Mount Ephraim Gardens Aug 20-22

Aug 21

ROCKIN’ THE BOWL

SKID ROW, WILDHEARTS, NAZARETH, WOLFSBANE, MORE

Faversham

Jul 29-31

ROCKDOWN FESTIVAL

Scarborough

Cropredy Village

The Station

Aug 27-29 Aug 27-29

THE WILDHEARTS, DISCHARGE, VARUKERS, MORE

STEVE HACKETT, CLANNAD, TREVOR HORN, MORE

Leicestershire

Richfield Avenue Braham Park

ROCK AND BLUES CUSTOM SHOW

Sheffield

Oct 15-17

CROPREDY FESTIVAL Oxfordshire

QUEENS OF THE STONE AGE, LIAM GALLAGHER, MORE

DORO, MASSIVE WAGONS, CATS IN SPACE, MORE

THE WILDHEARTS, PRAYING MANTIS, TYGERS OF PAN TANG, MORE

Cannock

Derbyshire Nov 6 Nov 7 Nov 9 Nov 10 Nov 11 Nov 13

Tramshed SWX Phoenix Arts Centre Cheese & Grain Academy 2 Camden Electric Ballroom Waterfront Chalk Madding Crowd KK’s Steel Mill Guildhall Boiler House Stylus Mac Arts Tolbooth Lemon Tree Foundry Engine Rooms MMH Radio Birthday Bash Hedworth Hall Monsterfest

…

Rural Life Living Museum Aug 20-22

WHITBY BLUES RHYTHM AND ROCK FESTIVAL DANA GILLESPIE, KAYLA BROX, CINELLI BROTHERS, MORE

Whitby

Pavilion

Oct 9

KEVIN NIXON

Opium Limelight 2 Academy 3 Cathouse Riverside Wardrobe

Oct 9 Oct 16 Oct 28 Oct 29 Oct 30 Nov 1 Nov 5 Nov 12 Nov 13 Dec 17

Nov 14 Nov 15 Nov 17 Nov 18

THE WILDHEARTS

Bristol

WAYWARD SONS

Dublin Belfast Manchester Glasgow Newcastle Leeds

Sep 22 Sep 23 Sep 24 Sep 25 Sep 27 Sep 28 Sep 30 Oct 1 Oct 2 Oct 3

Rescue Rooms Thekla Islington Academy KK’s Steel Mill

NDS

‘ The orche strations tend to mu te the closin g run of cata logue song s.’

Weezer

REVIEWS

LA Walt Disney Concert Hall Emphasis on the songs illuminates the band in a different light.

“Time to rock some bot,” says a subdued Rivers Cuomo, who has clearly embraced ‘lockdown hair’, leading Weezer on to the stage for a full run through their orchestral pandemic album OK Human accompanied by the LA Philharmonic and the Youth Orchestra Of Los Angeles.

Once settled at his grand piano, though, the very first tune finds him admitting: “All my favourite songs are slow and sad”. And the album’s subtler, more sensitive approach arguably suits him better than their covid-parked stadiummetal record Van Weezer, arriving hot on its heels in one of rock history’s most gymnastic stylistic swivels.

Pushing to the fore a songcraft often hidden behind the goofy fun of collegiate grunge noise, the show refines Weezer wonderfully. The regal Mirror Image, Americana showstopper Bird With A Broken Wing and the ragtime ELO La Brea Tar Pits weave crisp hooks into ornate strings, making up for the loss of Rock Weezer’s mildly unhinged quality with pure melodic elegance. It’s also an opportunity for Cuomo to rekindle his Pinkerton vulnerability, becoming absorbed with music during lockdown on Playing My Piano, following agoraphobic intellectuals to art-house cinemas on Aloo Gobi and, as the album title’s Radiohead wordplay suggests, outlining the inhumanities of a world in which we judge ourselves by likes (Numbers). The orchestrations tend to mute the closing run of catalogue songs (including Buddy Holly, Island In The Sun, Falling For You), although Say It Ain’t So never sounded so poignant. But as a live-album experience it exposes the maestro behind the mania.

BRENDAN WALTER/PRESS

Mark Beaumont

Weezer: plenty of on-stage guests pulling the strings.

Tame Impala

Korn

Lee Rocker & Complexions

Western Australia Wave House

Monumental livestream

Gather Round

Kevin Parker and co. present a new view of their debut album.

Never mind the songs, feel the spectacle.

Stray Cats bass man soundtracks rocka-ballet dance collaboration.

As home-working environments go, an anniversary live performance of Tame Impala’s Innerspeaker in full, at the residential coastal studio where it was recorded (now owned by mainman Kevin Parker), with sumptuous sunset views of the Indian Ocean as a backdrop, it takes some beating.

If there were any neighbours, they might be startled by the noise emitting from the open back door as Parker, barefoot on a rug, strikes up the swirling Strat mantra of It Is Not Meant To Be. Surrounded by vintage valve amps and synths, with the horizon behind him, Parker’s dreamy croon takes on an extra wistful quality. But before long the quartet bring the noise as Desire Be Desire Go is laced with fat distortion, before Parker lets rip with a satisfyingly fuzz-caked solo.

But although Lucidity is filmed with a kaleidoscope effect for that extra tinge of trippiness, something’s missing. It sounds great, looks great… it’s just not a live gig. Unfair to expect it to be. But Parker doesn’t acknowledge having an audience at any point, and throughout the band rarely seem to break sweat.

A sidebar of ecstatic, emoji-filled messages from around the world on the stream’s chat panel can’t replace the feeling of feeding off an audience, and despite fans texting “MOOOORE!” there’s no encore.

In cyberspace, no one can hear you scream.

With the normal album and touring cycle disrupted, Korn have decided to ignore the up-close and intimate livestream option favoured by many bands over the past year, and instead go big – very big indeed. Easily living up to its Monumental title, the showcase event for 2019’s The Nothing is huge and lavish in scale, helped in no small part by the extensive use of cutting-edge aerial technology and drones to give an epic sense of spectacle from the stage set for the Stranger Things: Drive-Into Experience.

It’s akin to a stark, futuristic-looking film set, the distant strobing lights of the silhouetted cityscape signaling alienation and insidious emotional breakdown. At times Jonathan Davis and co. appear as small, black-clad nu-metal action figures against an overwhelming blitzkrieg backdrop of lasers and pulsing enormo-screen visuals, all the while expertly exploiting their extensive back catalogue and throwing in a handful of songs from The Nothing, in a little over an hour. Cold, You’ll Never Find Me and Can You Hear Me from The Nothing are interspersed with a wide selection of oldies like Freak On A Leash and Falling Away From Me, and a there’s a particularly intense Ball Tongue as we head toward the climax of Narcissistic Cannibal and Here To Stay. Altogether it’s a bit of a bomb-heavy tour de force. Dark, emotionally brutal and quite immense, even on a laptop screen, Korn deliver the unsavoury goods, no trouble at all.

With Gather Round, a collaboration with ballet company Complexions, rockabilly veteran Lee Rocker dips his patent leather winkle-picker into the contemporary dance world. Sharing a title and music with Rocker’s latest solo album, the full production is set to premiere next year. This online taster version features three duet performances set to vintage jukebox foot stompers including Gather Round itself and When Nothing’s Going Right. Widescreen acoustic anthem The Last Offline Lovers, meanwhile, strikes a more romantic, Springsteen-ish note.

Two dancers give athletic, technically demanding performances featuring an impressive amount of toe-perching pointe work, which is unusual in contemporary ballet. That said, Dwight Rhoden’s choreography feels firmly rooted in musical theatre convention, owing more to West Side Story than to the fertile avant-rock/ballet crossover lineage of The Fall, David Byrne, Radiohead and others.

It might have been more interesting to hear Rocker attempt an instrumental theatre score rather than recycle existing material with no clear narrative function. But maybe next year’s finished production will feature more original music and stronger emotional connections. But this free online preview is a fun, high-energy spectacle and a pleasingly left-field mix of two antique art forms.

Johnny Sharp

Essi Berelian

Stephen Dalton CLASSICROCKMAGAZINE.COM 103

Iggy Pop Sydney Opera House White-knuckle birthday show from implausibly untamed former Stooge.

Not exactly a livestream as such, but a retrospective chance to see ‘the world’s forgotten boy’ (on the occasion of his 74th birthday) playing the 2019 Australian show that marked his 72nd birthday. Squint ever so slightly and Iggy at 72 probably looks an awful lot like Iggy at 74: lithe but loosely packed, gym-toned frame; vein-mapped bare chest; flailing Jennifer Aniston hair; wildly unbalanced gait (one leg is an inch and a half shorter than the other as a result of his scoliosis), so the suspension of disbelief isn’t that much of a stretch.

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Iggy’s performance is engaging, compelling, electrifying. It’s never been anything else. He reaches for The Stooges’ Gimme Danger early on, and in many ways danger has always been Iggy’s stock in trade; his shows have always been typified by peril.

Back in the day, you never knew what was going to happen: broken glass, peanut butter, selfmutilation, stage-diving (way before it was a recognised ‘thing’ and the audience knew how to play their part). You were never entirely certain you

weren’t going to become part of the action. Iggy was an unhinged nihilistic lunatic, sure, but he was also a self-proclaimed ‘dear old klutz’ who’d regularly collapse on to unsuspecting punters as a result of sheer unintentional clumsiness.

Now, of course, Iggy presents a different kind of peril. He’s no longer considered to be a danger to anyone other than himself. Where he once appeared indestructible, at 72 he appears extremely destructible indeed. Every time he hurls himself across the stage like an unravelling rag doll, or lolls

‘Iggy’s per formance is engaging, c ompelling, electrifyin g.’

REVIEWS Big Thief Columbus, Ohio Athenaeum (livestream) Brooklyn grunge-folk quartet revisit their pre-pandemic peak.

“I feel like we’re in a barn,” grinning Big Thief singer Adrienne Lenker says in this enjoyably raw livestream show, “but a barn on another planet.” Little did they know back in November 2019 that the band’s Ohio tour finale would be their last public performance for more than a year.

Shot close-up on stage using hand-held cameras, the Brooklyn-based grunge-folk quartet are captured at the end of a transformational year, basking in breakthrough success following two hugely acclaimed, Grammy-nominated albums.

Their modest stage production – the band huddled around amps adorned with folksy animal posters – reveal an emphatically indie outfit still adjusting to playing barn-sized venues. But the fissile chemistry between them, especially when Lenker trades crunchy guitar licks and charged glances with ex-husband Buck Meek, is electrifying.

Lenker herself radiates a rivetting intensity, her handsome androgyne prize-fighter looks backed by a quavering, piercing, richly emotional voice that draws on a deep well of vintage Americana, from tremulous acoustic confessionals like Pretty Things to the finger-picking avant-bluegrass jig Cattails and the sultry Nashville twang of Mary, a country-jazz tearjerker featuring the quietest drum solo ever.

Even if they sound a little wonky and ramshackle at times, Big Thief build to a mighty crescendo with their encore rendition of Masterpiece, bringing various crew and support band members on stage for a riff-blasting, roofraising, balls-out moshpit monster.

Aptly enough, a real barnstormer.

Stephen Dalton

Ruts DC London New Cross Inn Hit-making second-gen punks unplugged.

Lust for life: Iggy delivers a well-balanced, dream set-list.

backwards into the audience’s waiting arms, you fear he might actually break into a thousand pieces.

And it’s a tough watch.

Musically speaking, it’s a dream set-list, with Bowie alumnus guitarist Kevin Armstrong leading a strong sextet (including an entirely unlikely twopiece brass section) through a perfectly balanced combination of Stooges stormers (TV Eye, No Fun), Berlin-era favourites (Lust For Life, Nightclubbing), the hit (Real Wild Child) and a cracking memorial assault on The Jean Genie. Iggy’s trademark

subterranean caw remains present and correct, if frayed at the edges (but we can forgive him that).

And finally, as the Eighth Wonder Of The World triumphantly celebrates surviving another working day, the entire audience breaks into a heartfelt chorus of Happy Birthday To You, and there’s that beaming Alfred E Neuman grin incongruously coupled with exactly the same goodbye wave that you’d expect of any departing septuagenarian. Just like your grandad. If he’d invented punk.

Ian Fortnam

“I hope that’s helped to ease the pain, d’you know what I mean?” Segs Jennings says at the end of this show styled as an ElectrAcoustiC Live Stream. And in an hour and a bit more the largely acoustic trio storm through a collection of songs old and older, including Ruts DC numbers like the manifesto-ish This Music Must Destroy and the Malcolm Owen tribute Mirror Smashed, and material familiar to the masses, namely the clutch of singles recorded with Owen as The Ruts: In A Rut, West One (Shine On Me) and Staring At The Rude Boys, among others.

What makes this show remarkable, apart from its sudden appearance at the end of lockdown hell, is that even though it is performed by three stocky men who are sitting down, and even though original Ruts singer Malcolm Owen is long gone (tragically lost to a wasteful, smack-related demise way back in 1980), Ruts DC perform with powerful intensity to such an extent that a song like Babylon’s Burning sounds just as urgent and desperate as it did in 1979. Which is quite a remarkable feat.

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THE SONG THAT MAKES ME CRY

The Flaming Lips’ Do You Realize??. Listen to the words: ‘Do you realise that everyone you know some day will die? ’ It’s a hymn to humanity, life and death, uplifting and devastating at the same time.

MY ‘IN THE MOOD FOR LOVE’ SONG

A new kid on the block, Jacob Collier. When I heard He Won’t Hold You, featuring Rapsody, it stopped me in my goddamn tracks. Amazing kid who does everything himself. Finding new music makes my life worth living.

“When Mick’s on stage with his guitar it’s a really beautiful thing to watch.”

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If I wanted to make everyone laugh, The Jam, Going Underground. But if I want to make ’em weep it would be Father John Misty’s Ballad Of A Dying Man. I’ve been a fan of him since Fleet Foxes. This hits the nail on the goddamn head.

There And Black Again is available now via Omnibus Books.

MICK JONES: GEORGE BODNAR ARCHIVE/ICONICPIX

THE SONG I WANT PLAYED AT MY FUNERAL