ISSUE 293
10 Charlie Watts: A Tribute
OCTOBER 2021 ISSUE 293
16 The Dirt
Welcome back Herman Rarebell and Barenaked Ladies… Say hello to Amyl And The Sniffers and Troy Redfern… Say goodbye to Nanci Griffith, Don Everly, Walter Yetnikoff…
24 The Stories Behind The Songs Jane’s Addiction 26 Q&A Samantha Fish 28 Six Things You Need To Know About… Blacktop Mojo
30 Cover story: Iron Maiden. 40 The Classic Rock Interview: Ginger Wildheart 48 Guitar’s Greatest Live Moments 58 Don Broco 60 Mr. Big 64 Tremonti 71 Reviews
New albums from Iron Maiden, Roger Taylor, Yes, Tremonti, Lindsey Buckingham, Ministry, Howlin Rain, Joanne Shaw Taylor, Pond, The Killers, Andrew W.K… Reissues from Black Sabbath, Mötley Crüe, Genesis, Uriah Heep, Ozzy Osbourne, Marillion, Thunder, Small Faces, Spirit, Garbage… DVDs, films and books on Eddie Van Halen, The Who, Dave Grohl, David Bowie, Barry Adamson… Live reviews of Judas Priest, The Wildhearts, Kreator, Devin Townsend, Phil Campbell & The Bastard Sons, Orange Goblin and the rest of the best of year’s Bloodstock…
89 Back To Live
With gigs and festivals taking place again, we talk to Adam Parsons of Siren Artist Management, promoter Stephen Stanley of Solid Entertainments, and Empyre. Plus full gig listings – find out who’s playing where and when.
106 The Soundtrack Of My Life Melissa Etheridge
Iron Maiden
“We all agreed that Maiden wasn’t going to be resting on our history.”
JOHN MCMURTRIE
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his isn’t the editorial I had planned to write. Right before we sent the final pages to press on this issue, the very sad news about the passing of Charlie Watts broke. The wallet and cover (if you’re a UK reader) had already been printed, but there was absolutely no way we were going to lose our chance to honour the Rolling Stone in print in as timely fashion as we could manage. Reviews Editor Ian Fortnam pays tribute to the gentleman drummer from the Greatest Rock And Roll Band In The World from page 10. In brighter news, this month we celebrate the return of Iron Maiden as they release their first album in six years; have some deep talk with Ginger Wildheart in the Classic Rock Interview; try to find out what makes Alter Bridge’s Mark Tremonti tick; take a look at some of the greatest moments that happened on stage that involved a guitar; and much more besides… Last issue I asked for your help in bringing back Communication Breakdown, aka the Classic Rock letters page, and this issue I’m doing so again. Do you have any burning issues you’d like to discuss to help kick things off? Has anything in mag inspired or infuriated you? What would you include as one of guitar’s greatest live moments? Have you made any good music discoveries lately that are worthy of sharing? Please do drop us an email and have your say at classicrock@futurenet.com Until next month…
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Siân Llewellyn, Editor
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This month’s contributors HENRY YATES
Henry Yates is a longtime Classic Rock contributor who has written about music for the Guardian, Telegraph, NME, Guitarist, Total Guitar and Metal Hammer. This issue he sat down with Mark Tremonti to discuss his solo endeavours and more (p64). For more from Henry, visit yatescreativecopywriting.com and follow him @henryyates3 on Twitter.
MICK WALL
Former CR Editor In Chief Mick needs no introduction to longtime Classic Rock readers. This month he sat down with his old friend Ginger Wildheart for an insightful Classic Rock Interview (p40). Mick’s latest book, Rainbow In The Dark: The Autobiography, the official Ronnie James Dio autobiography, which the singer had begun before his tragic death in 2010, is out now.
PAUL BRANNIGAN
Paul Brannigan has been chatting with rock stars for over a quarter of a century. This month we sent him to a West London coffee shop to hang out with Maiden’s Bruce Dickinson, and had him run up his phone bill as he talked to Adrian Smith and Nicko McBrain (p30). Paul’s new book, Eruption: The Eddie Van Halen Story, is published by Faber on September 23.
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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, Will Simpson, Johnny Sharp, David Sinclair, Sleazegrinder, Áƺȸȸɵ ³ɎƏɖȇɎȒȇً (ƏɮǣƳ ³Ɏɖƫƫɀً 0ɮƺȸƺɎɎ Áȸɖƺً hƏƏȇژÈǝƺǼɀɿǸǣً xǣƬǸ áƏǼǼً ¨ƏƳƳɵ áƺǼǼɀً ¨ǝǣǼǣȵ áǣǼƳǣȇǕً Rƺȇȸɵ çƏɎƺɀً çȒɖɎǝ
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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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CHARLIE WATTS June 2, 1941 – August 24, 2021
Ian Fortnam looks back at the life, times and music of the man who not only laid down his unique beat with the Rolling Stones for almost 60 years, but was also one of rock’s nicest guys.
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e was the most stylish man in rock’n’roll, with his easy, laconic, manner, bone-dry sense of humour, matchless wardrobe of bespoke Savile Row suits and deadpan, Buster Keaton stone face. He’d far rather talk about the cricket than about his illustrious 58-year career as the ever-reliable driving force behind the greatest rock’n’roll band in the world. Charlie Watts was the Rolling Stone that even people who had no time for the Rolling Stones couldn’t help but like. There was never any old flannel with Charlie Watts. He spoke as he found. There was no diplomacy, no filter, no swagger and no pretensions to being in any way ‘cool’. And as a direct consequence Charlie Watts was invariably, and effortlessly, the coolest man in the room. Even as the nascent Rolling Stones were being described as Neanderthals, Charlie stood apart. He didn’t say much. He didn’t have to. His aloof demeanour of wry detachment and dismayed indifference spoke volumes.
In October 1964, as hordes of nubile, compliant young women threw themselves screaming at the band’s feet, Charlie quietly slipped away to get married to his sculpture-student girlfriend, Shirley. And their marriage lasted the course. Rather than wile away on-road downtime with serial infidelity, the former graphic designer would assiduously sketch every hotel bed he ever slept in. As his bandmates collected convictions and notoriety, Charlie collected American Civil War memorabilia, signed first editions and classic cars. Meticulously stylish to a fault, he’d have suits specifically tailored to complement each model (including his ultimate prize, a 1937 Lagonda Rapide - one of only 25 ever made). He’d dress, slip into the driver’s seat and contentedly relish its engine’s satisfying purr, but never disengage the handbrake, because Charlie Watts never learned to drive. Devoted to jazz since boyhood, Charlie would far rather discuss Charlie Parker than the Rolling Stones; interviews would regularly disappear down unexpected worm holes, as any question ³ CLASSICROCKMAGAZINE.COM 11
Just getting rolling, the Stones in 1964: (l-r) Charlie Watts, Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Bill Wyman, Brian Jones.
regarding his central day job would veer off into sometimes surprising terrain: Arabian horse breeding, greyhound rescue, the world of difference between a Chicagoan drummer’s shuffle and that of a player weaned in New Orleans. And cricket. Always cricket. Yet Charlie’s outwardly easy-going attitude concealed a steely core. He didn’t suffer fools gladly. Nor was he to be trifled with, as Mick Jagger found to his cost on the occasion that he famously opened a phone call to Watts’s hotel room with the incautious words: “Where’s my drummer?” Minutes later, Watts – freshly shaved, cologned and impeccably dressed – arrived to punch a startled Jagger full in the face, while delivering the immortal caution: “Don’t ever call me your drummer again. You’re my fucking singer.”
bedrooms to study a shared stack of 78rpm 10-inch shellac records (Charlie Parker, Thelonious Monk, Louis Armstrong), and forged a lifelong friendship that culminated in the pair working together from 2009 (Green on bass, Watts on drums) with pianists Ben Waters and Axel Zwingenberger in the ABC&D Of Boogie Woogie.
off and used its body as a snare drum. The following year his parents bought him a drum kit, which he learned to play by practising along with his ever-growing collection of jazz records. After perfecting his chops with a succession of local bands in coffee shops and clubs while attending Harrow Art School, and working in his first job as a graphic designer with Charlie Daniels Studio advertising agency, 17-year-old Charlie joined the Jo Jones AllStars, a step that marked his transition from playing modern jazz to rhythm and blues. Juggling a burgeoning design career with paying gigs that he’d pick up on Soho’s Archer Street alongside fellow drummer and lifelong friend Ginger Baker, Watts’s reputation brought him to the attention of ‘the founding father of British blues’, Alexis Korner, who invited him to join his Blues Incorporated. Watts had already committed himself to a design job in Denmark, but on his return to England (in February 1962) he accepted Korner’s offer. Concurrent to the rigours of yet another straight job (this time with advertising agency Charles, Hobson and Grey), Watts joined Blues Incorporated for their regular Rhythm & Blues Nights at the Ealing Jazz Club. Which is where he entered the orbit of four likely lads of no fixed haircut who were in dire need of a drummer. Brian ‘Elmo Lewis’ Jones, Ian ‘Stu’ Stewart, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, regular faces on the London R&B scene,
‘Charlie’s outwardly easy-going attitude concealed a steely core. He didn’t suffer fools gladly. Nor was he to be trifled with.’
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Charlie and his wife Shirley Ann Shepherd, who married on October 14, 1964.
MAIN: ALAMY; INSET: SHUTTERSTOCK
harles Robert Watts was born in University College Hospital, Bloomsbury on June 2, 1941. His father Charles Richard Watts had been in the Royal Air Force during the war, before becoming a lorry driver for the London, Midland & Scottish railway. The Watts family, completed by Charlie’s mother Lillian and younger sister Linda lived in a humble prefabricated house in Pilgrims Way, Wembley, North-West London. Young Charlie soon became friends with opposite neighbour Dave Green, and the pair soon discovered a common passion for jazz. They’d convene in their
After the family moved to Kingsbury, Charlie attended Tylers Croft Secondary Modern School, where he exhibited a flair for art, music, cricket and football. At 13 (having been inspired by Gerry Mulligan’s drummer Chico Hamilton and clandestine visits to the Flamingo Club in London’s Soho), he bought a banjo, took its neck
THE STARS PAY TRIBUTE “I love you my fellow Gemini. I will dearly miss you, you are the best.” Ronnie Wood “I knew he was ill, but I didn’t know he was this ill, so lots of love to his family and condolences to the Stones. It’ll be a huge blow to them because Charlie was a rock, and a fantastic drummer.” Paul McCartney “Sad news about Charlie Watts. He’s been on the throne for the Rolling Stones the whole time. He will be greatly missed.” John Mayall “Charlie was not a rock drummer, more of a jazz drummer, and that’s why the Stones swung like the Basie band!! Such a lovely man.” Pete Townshend
were gradually coalescing into a band that they intended to call the Rolling Stones, but in order to evolve into a credible proposition they really needed to secure the services of a drummer as adept as Charlie Watts. But they couldn’t afford him. So they set about using all of their available charm to persuade him. Which, needless to say, didn’t work. Eventually, when they appended their singular charm with the tantalising offer of five quid a week, he ultimately crumbled, and the rest, as they say, is history. Watts played his first gig with the Rolling Stones at the Ealing Jazz Club on February 2, 1963.
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pon joining the band (a month after the arrival of bass player Bill Wyman) Watts briefly moved in to the Stones’ infamously squalid flat in Edith Grove, Chelsea. And while Mick Jagger attended the London School of Economics, the rest of the band made a study of Chicago blues. “Brian and Keith taught me about Jimmy Reed.” Charlie told me in 2009. “We used to sit on this bloody great gramophone thing at Edith Grove. Mick would go off to college and the three of us would sit there, after waking up at about one in the afternoon, and Brian would play Bright Lights, Big City.” Following an eight-month residency at the
Crawdaddy Club in Richmond, the Rolling Stones were brought to the attention of management team Andrew Loog Oldham (who’d formerly worked as a publicist for both Bob Dylan and The Beatles) and Eric Easton, who secured them a record deal with Decca Records. On June 7, 1963, the Rolling Stones (freshly trimmed to a quintet following Oldham’s ruthless demotion of Stewart from full band member to piano-playing road manager) released their first single, a perky cover of Chuck Berry’s Come On, and subsequently proved to be quite popular. In fact, just six years, eight No.1 singles and eight UK top-five albums later they were being customarily introduced to audiences on their 1969 US tour as ‘The Greatest Rock’N’Roll Band In The World’. “I didn’t believe it, really,” an ever self-effacing Charlie confided to me as we discussed the Stones’ trademarked title back in 2012 while watching the Test match. “What about Little Richard? Then you have Dave Bartholomew and Fats Domino. Chuck Berry’s studio band – there isn’t a better rock’n’roll band. That’s where we got it from. Roll Over Beethoven by everybody else is a joke, really. We came close sometimes with Little Queenie or Around And Around.” As drug busts, infamy and mayhem plagued the Stones’ 60s, culminating in the tragic death by drowning of Brian Jones in July ’69, and the ³
“Charlie Watts was the ultimate drummer. The most stylish of men, and such brilliant company.” Elton John “I’ve no doubt the Stones will go on. My message to Charlie? Rest in Beat!” Alice Cooper “Our deepest condolences to Charlie’s family and The Rolling Stones. Sincerely, you’ve given us all so much!” Aerosmith “I’m shocked! Charlie was a classy guy, knew his jazz, unmistakable style, good bloke and will be greatly missed.” Ray Davies “The world will miss you, Charlie Watts. Rest in magic.” Nancy Wilson “So sorry to hear this very sad news. Charlie was such a nice guy and a major influence in the music business – he’ll be sadly missed.” Tony Iommi “Charlie was one of a kind. The perfect drummer for the Rolling Stones. His pocket is folklore, and what a lovely fellow he was.” Glenn Hughes
CLASSICROCKMAGAZINE.COM 13
Still rolling in 2005: Charlie Watts, Keith Richards, Mick Jagger, Ronnie Wood.
brutal murder of African-American fan Meredith Hunter by Hells Angels at a free Stones show at Altamont in December that year, Charlie Watts kept a characteristically cool head. He wrote and illustrated Ode To A High Flying Bird, his personal tribute to jazz saxophonist Charlie Parker, further utilised his artistic training to design successive Stones album sleeves and, on March 18, ’68, celebrated the birth of a daughter, Seraphina.
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with Ian Stewart’s Rocket 88, and release jazz albums with his own Quartet, Tentet and, ultimately, realising boyhood big-band dreams, Orchestra. But when the Rolling Stones juggernaut temporarily halted in the 80s, as a direct result of a prolonged feud between Jagger and Richards, which took the band off the road for an unprecedented seven years, Charlie’s life went into free-fall.
‘He provided the backbeat for all of our lives for the best part of six decades, but never really understood what all the fuss was about.’ suit. Of course. “I should have turned up today in a pair of shorts and a T-shirt. The thought of that is horrendous.” As the Rolling Stones’ stratospheric career continued to play out in its regular hurry-up-and-wait schedule of tour after album after tour, Charlie’s life ticked by comfortably. He would complain (famously observing in ’86 that his previous quarter-century with the band could most accurately be defined as “work five years, and twenty years hanging around”), but it was a routine that suited his style, that allowed him time out to indulge other musical passions: he’d record blues alongside Howlin’ Wolf in 1971; play R&B
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veryone I admired was either a junkie or an alcoholic. It’s not something to be proud of, but it’s true,” Charlie told me in 2009. “It was a world that was very glamorous to me, and one that I wanted to be in from the age of thirteen. I used to go to all-nighters down at the Flamingo. That’s where I first met Ginger Baker and Phil Seamen [arguably the greatest jazz drummer Europe ever produced, Baker’s mentor Seamen battled addiction and died in 1972 aged just 46]. I didn’t know it at the time, but half the people down there were junkies. It was the world I was in, so it wasn’t a shock to me when Keith took a liking to it.” Having remained clean throughout the 60s and 70s (“Despite always being on the fringe of it, I was never really interested”), Charlie developed an unlikely mid-life addiction to heroin. With Jagger and Richards at loggerheads, and his daughter Seraphina expelled from school for smoking dope, Charlie’s intake of alcohol escalated dramatically. It was at this point (’84) that the unfortunate “Where’s my drummer?” incident played out in
ALAMY
uring the 70s, as the Rolling Stones continued to bolster their status as the world’s biggest band (initially with Jones’s replacement guitarist Mick Taylor, and latterly, from ’75, Ronnie Wood) via a dazzling run of era-defining albums and singles (Sticky Fingers, Exile On Main St., Goats Head Soup, Some Girls; Brown Sugar, Tumbling Dice, It’s Only Rock ‘N’ Roll, Miss You), Charlie Watts compounded his reputation as an arbiter of style by increasingly suiting, booting and, in ’76, adopting an almost counterrevolutionary French crop haircut that served only to draw attention to his singular sartorial sharpness. As the cricket action continued to unfold at Trent Bridge in 2012, I finally wrestled Charlie’s full attention away from the match by enquiring: “Do clothes maketh the man?”
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“No, they don’t,” he replied, “but they help make the man look great. Not everybody has it. Not many people are interested, for a start, and the general public don’t care any more, so it’s all out the window, really.” It’s a sweltering afternoon in late May, but Charlie is wearing a Prince of Wales check
“We couldn’t be more honoured to have shared the stage with Charlie Watts and the Stones. Thank you for the big beat” The Black Keys “One of the true timeless icons and the backbone of the Stones. Hard to fathom the loss. So very sad.” Paul Stanley “We are so deeply, deeply saddened. The impact Charlie had on musicians and listeners across the planet is profound. His drumming style and drum sound will live on forever in the songs.” Eddie Vedder and Pearl Jam “His unforgettable rock solid backbeat will be remembered forever.” Bob Seger “Charlie always played way back. He had a back beat like no other. But he drove the Stones to greatness. Understated in everything except style. The world of music has lost a great man.” Jimmy Barnes
ALAMY
“A hero is gone. No words. A huge gaping hole in the universe.” Sheryl Crow
Amsterdam. Eventually, boozing led to heroin, and by the end of ’86 “I hit an all-time low in my personal life and in my relationship with Mick. I was mad on drink and drugs. I became a completely different person. Not a nice one. I nearly lost my wife, family and everything.” Eventually, a degree of good sense prevailed, with Watts weaning himself off heroin, by self-medicating even more alcohol, before the ever-dapper drummer finally elected to clean up completely for the most practical, and indeed stylish, of reasons. “I stopped the drugs, but I drank rather heavily, and I ballooned a bit,” Charlie, a recent contender for The Daily Telegraph’s ‘World’s Best Dressed Man’ title and member of Vanity Fair’s ‘International Best Dressed List Hall Of Fame’, admitted as the wickets fell in 2012: “And god, I couldn’t get some of my trousers done up. That was it. I completely stopped everything. I lived on, as Keith always reminds me, nuts, peanuts and sultanas. That’s all I ate for months. I went from Dracula to a slightly bloated Dracula, to this emaciated, little thin thing.” That’s a marvellous incentive to clean up your act though, isn’t it? “Oh yeah, a well-made suit you try to keep fitting you for thirty years is the incentive. I still wear clothes I bought thirty years ago. They cost so much money I refuse to let them go.”
W
ith the Rolling Stones once more finding equilibrium and Watts reclaiming mastery of his waistline, the decades passed. Every few years he’d be persuaded back on the road, but in the intervening periods he’d return to Halsdon Arabians, the Arabian horse stud farm that he ran with his wife, Shirley, in Dolton, Devon. In 2004 he faced a diagnosis of lung cancer, but following a course of radiotherapy, went into remission. As startlingly matter-of-fact as ever, when I asked him in 2012 if he’d read Keith Richards’ recently published autobiography, Life, he simply replied: “No, I don’t have to. I know him.” Sadly, Charlie never felt the urge to write his own. “I wouldn’t know what to say… As you’ve just found out. I’m naturally very private. And forgetful. I wouldn’t want to talk about half the things, and I forget a lot. And then you have to do all that bullshit: press and all that. It’s just too much. I’m not really that interested in talking about me… Me, and the Rolling Stones, actually.” And that was Charlie Watts: an extraordinary talent; the ultimate rock’n’roll drummer; the quintessential English gentleman who provided the backbeat for all of our lives for the best part of six decades; but who never really understood what all the fuss was about.
“For almost 60 years Charlie Watts was the heartbeat of Rock & Roll. No one provided more backbeat, rhythm, personality, and style to Rock & Roll music.” Warren Haynes, Gov’t Mule “Rest in peace. Our love and deepest condolences go out to Shirley, Seraphina, Charlotte and all The Rolling Stones family.” Yoko Ono “Charlie Watts. Mourned and beloved by all.” Patti Smith “Rest in peace to one of the greatest and most important architects of the music we love.” Tom Morello “Bands can only be great bands if their drummer is truly great – Charlie Watts, you were essential to the language we all learned as rock’n’roll.” Thurston Moore “Not only was he a big influence upon my playing but he was a friend. Charlie was a gentle soul, impeccable not only in his drumming but in his manners, his dress sense and the way he treated his fellow man.” Simon Kirke, Bad Company
This month The Dirt was compiled by Bill DeMain, Malcolm Dome,
Dannii Leivers, Dave Ling, Henry Yates
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Joey Ambrose March 23, 1934 – August 10, 2021
Thank you and good night. Eric Wagner April 24, 1959 – August 22, 2021
Eric Wagner, the co-founder of US doom-metal pioneers Trouble, has died at the age of 62 after being hospitalised for covid-19. Wagner left and rejoined the band several times before forming The Skull. “I still remember asking the guy behind the counter at Revolver Records in Coventry to play Psalm 9, their debut album,” said Cathedral’s Lee Dorrian. “It literally felt like the building was about to collapse.”
The saxophone player on Bill Haley & Comets’ biggest hits, including Rock Around The Clock, Shake, Rattle And Roll and See You Later Alligator, Joey D’Ambrosio (his given name) was inducted to the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame in 2012. He was 87 years old.
Don Everly February 1, 1937 – August 21, 2021 Don Everly, half of pioneering rock’n’rollers the Everly Brothers, has died of yet-to-be-confirmed cause at the age of 84. The other half, his brother Phil passed away in 2014. Don Everly was born in Brownie, Kentucky, and formed the Everly Brothers with Phil in 1956. Famous for their close-harmony singing, they scored a raft of hits from 1957’s Bye Bye Love onwards, other massively popular songs including Wake Up Little Susie, All I Have To Do Is Dream and Cathy’s Clown. Along the way the Everlys influenced Bon Dylan, Neil Young, the Bee Gees, Simon & Garfunkel, the Beach Boys, Graham Nash and The Beatles. Former Beatle Paul McCartney name-checked them in Let ’Em In the 1976 hit with his band Wings. Keith
Richards once hailed Don as “one of the best rhythm guitar players I’ve ever heard”, while Status Quo’s Francis Rossi is another long-time admirer of the Everlys. Following an on-stage breakup in 1973 that saw Phil smash his guitar and storm off stage, the pair began what would become a decade-long estrangement, before reuniting with a concert in London. The brothers were inducted to the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame at its inaugural ceremony in 1986, and 11 years later they received a lifetime achievement award at the Grammys. They continued to tour until the mid-2000s. Don’s daughter Erin, who was briefly married to Axl Rose, was the inspiration behind GNR’s hit Sweet Child O’ Mine. DL
Charles Connor January 14, 1935 – July 31, 2021
Paul Cotton
Having played with Little Richard, Sam Cooke and James Brown in the 1950s, Charles Connor helped to write the rulebook of rock‘n’roll drumming. John Bonham recreated Connor’s parts on Little Richard’s Keep-A-Knockin’ for Led Zeppelin’s Rock And Roll. Connor was 86 and died of a brain disorder.
February 26, 1943 – August 1, 2021
Mike Finnigan April 26, 1945 – August 11, 2021
Mike Finnigan played a Hammond B3 organ for a diverse array of artists that included Jimi Hendrix, Joe Cocker, Rod Stewart, Jane’s Addiction, Leonard Cohen and Peter Frampton. He also recorded two solo records in the 70s. The 76-year-old Finnigan had been battling kidney cancer.
Michael Horovitz
Alabama native Paul Cotton (pictured) became the guitarist of country rockers Poco in 1970, replacing Jim Messina, and wrote their hit Heart Of The Night. After leaving in 2010, Cotton released several solo albums. Poco co-founder Richie Furay described Cotton as “the complete package – great singer, exceptional songwriter and what a guitar player”. He was 78.
Tom T Hall
April 4, 1935 – July 7, 2021
May 25, 1936 – August 20, 2021
Born into a Jewish family in Frankfurt, Horovitz’s family escaped the Holocaust by fleeing to England. As a Beat poet he filled the Royal Albert Hall in 1965, and went on to be a counterculture trailblazer, and is the author of 12 books. In 2002 Horovitz was awarded an OBE. There were also musical collaborations with Paul Weller, Damon Albarn and Graham Coxon. Horovitz was 86 when he died following a fall.
Best known for his 60s song Harper Valley PTA, country artist Hall earned the nickname ‘The Storyteller’. Aged 85, he died at home in Franklin, Tennessee. Don McLean, The Oak Ridge Boys, TG Sheppard and Janie Fricke were among those to pay tribute.
Connie Hamzy
Brian LaBlanc
January 9, 1955 – August 21, 2021
August 24, 1962 – August 13, 2021
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American AOR musician Brian LaBlanc has died of a heart attack at the age of 59. He and his brother Robbie were members of the group Blanc Faces, whose 2009 album Falling From The Moon remains a cult favourite of the genre.
August 11, 1933 – August 9, 2021 Walter Yetnikoff was a music business executive from the era when flamboyant boardroom characters were every bit as influential as the artists whose records they sold. Having risen through the ranks from a lawyer to becoming president of CBS Records in 1975, through a fog of drink, drugs and sex the Brooklyn-ite pulled the strings to make megastars of Bruce Springsteen, Pink Floyd, Michael Jackson and Barbra Streisand, among others, before entering rehab in 1989. He was axed by the company the following year. Yetnikoff’s feuds with rival Svengalis were a thing of legend, and at times the bad
blood drove the decisions he made, such as poaching artists from other labels. His 2004 memoir Howling At The Moon: The Odyssey Of A Monstrous Music Mogul In An Age of Excess provides a shocking window into the indulgencies encouraged by power and ego. “I charged full steam ahead [with everything I craved],” he wrote in the book. “I might have been middle-aged, but I adopted the youthful battle cry of more sex, drugs and rock’n’roll. I wanted more of everything, and I wanted it with a vengeance.” Yetnikoff was 87 years old. The New York Times reported that his death was due to cancer. DL
Nanci Griffith July 6, 1953 – August 13, 2021 Singer, guitarist and songwriter Nanci Griffith has died at the age of 68. No cause has yet been announced, although Griffith survived battles with breast cancer in 1996 and thyroid cancer two years later. Born just outside of Austin, Texas, she was one of the great country-rock storytellers. She once said of her style: “You take a whole lot of Woody Guthrie and a whole lot of Loretta Lynn, swoosh it around and it comes out as Nanci Griffith.” Griffith found success with the songs Late Night Grand Hotel, Trouble In The Fields and
Anyone Can Be Somebody’s Fool. Emmylou Harris and Willie Nelson sang on Gulf Coast Highway on her 1990 album Duets. After receiving a Lifetime Achievement Trailblazer Award from the Americana Music Association in 2008, four years later Griffith released what turned out to be her final studio album, Intersection. Hootie & The Blowfish frontman Darius Rucker paid tribute to her, Tweeting: “I lost one of my idols. [Nanci] is one of the reasons I am in Nashville. She blew my mind the first time I heard Marie And Omie [a song from 1984].” DL
GETTY x4
Famous within the groupie world as ‘Sweet Sweet’ Hamzy administered pleasure to bands travelling through Little Rock, Arkansas. She was mentioned in Grand Funk Railroad’s song We’re An American Band, and her name was in lyrics by Cheap Trick and the Guess Who. She was 66 and had been suffering from a short illness.
Walter Yetnikoff
Plant & Krauss New Album Meanwhile, the official Led Zep documentary is finished Robert Plant & Alison Krauss are to release a second collaborative album. Raise The Roof, released on November 19 via Warner Music, is the follow-up to 2007’s Raising Sand, which reached No.2 in the UK, had multi-platinum sales and earned six Grammy Awards including Album and Record Of The Year. Like its predecessor, Raise The Roof was produced by T-Bone Burnett in Nashville. Plant and Krauss will tour together in 2022, with dates yet to be arranged. Meanwhile, the first officially authorised and endorsed full-length Led Zeppelin documentary is completed. Featuring “unprecedented access” to the band, including new interviews with surviving members Plant, Jimmy Page and John Paul Jones, Becoming Led Zeppelin covers the band’s early years. It was directed by Bernard MacMahon and features unseen archive film and photographs, state-of-theart audio transfers of Zeppelin’s music and the music of other artists who shaped their sound. No release date has yet been set. DL
Alison Krauss and Robert Plant: album and tour announced.
Bo-Rap 2 Film A Possibility? Brian May reveals that Queen are “looking at ideas”.
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A 40th-anniversary edition of The Rolling Stones’ 1981 album Tattoo You is released on October 22 via Universal Music. It includes a remaster of the original 11-track release, plus nine other tracks that were completed by the band with additional vocals and guitar. Promoters Live Nation have issued new covid requirements for giggoers wishing to gain entry to their venues and events within the UK. Ticket holders must now produce either proof of full vaccination (with a second dose received at least 14 days before the event) a negative NHS lateral flow test, or evidence of natural immunity in the form of a positive PCR test within 180 days.
The Barenaked Ladies They're back with a new album – and the frontman’s secret project with Geddy Lee “that I can’t talk about”. “We’ve never been easy to explain,” says Barenaked Ladies frontman Ed Robertson. “But that’s made it very free for us to do whatever we do.” Detour De Force, the band’s latest album, continues their category-defying blend of goofy humour, catchy tunes and deft musicianship, with singles like Flip and New Disaster commenting playfully on contemporary issues. We caught up with Robertson at his home outside Toronto, surrounded by guitars and his collection of vintage pinball machines. What does the Detour De Force record mean to you? We made a record we felt strongly about, a tour de force. But Detour De Force was a great play on words, for the detour that everybody had to take through the pandemic and lockdown.
Barenaked Ladies are part of a rich comedy tradition in Canada. What makes Canadians so funny? I think it’s being your upstairs neighbour [laughs]. We’re the Scotland of North America. We sit perched above a world superpower, and get to talk about how we would’ve done everything better.
“I was in the studio with Geddy Lee yesterday…”
How did you approach making it? It’s always just ‘follow the song’. Sometimes the songs are silly, so the arrangements are bombastic and fun. Sometimes it’s a very vulnerable lyric and it needs a delicate touch.
Carlos Santana (pictured) and Matchbox Twenty singer Rob Thomas are back together for their first song in 21 years. The pair, who set the charts alight with Smooth, have recorded a track titled Move for the new Santana album Blessings And Miracles, released on October 15. Other guests include Kirk Hammett, Chick Corea and Steve Winwood.
we ask Geddy?”It wasn’t just another instrument laying around in the studio. “There’s my guitar, there’s Jim’s bass and there’s Geddy’s Taurus pedals.” They’re like sacred objects [laughs].
You borrowed Geddy Lee’s Moog Taurus bass pedals. Tell us about your relationship with him. Geddy is somewhere between my surrogate father and imaginary big brother. I love him so much. I was in the studio with him yesterday for a super-secret project that I can’t talk about. When Barenaked Ladies were inducted into the [Canadian Music] Hall Of Fame in 2018, they said: “Give us a list of who you want to do the induction.” We said: “Geddy is number one, two and three.” When it came time to make this record, we discussed using Taurus pedals, and were like: “Where are we going to find those?” Jim [Creeggan, bass] said: “Could
After thirty years, what do you think accounts for the band’s success and longevity? There’s not a road map for what we did, because it was so filled with luck and timing. But the one thing we did was to keep playing live. We played clubs, the tree-planting ceremony for the local green initiative, the opening of a local bakery, the Christmas party for my mom’s office. We said yes to fucking everything!” What do you think the next year will bring? I’m optimistic about the future of the band. We’re at a point where we got nothing to prove. What I’m pessimistic about are external things: social media, civil discourse. But you know, we just did our first public show in over a year this weekend. And I thought: “Fuck everything that isn’t an audience in a room, being entertained by a band that is grateful to be there and enjoying every minute of it.” Yes, there were hassles and protocols and covid tests to get there, but we left feeling excited and elated. And nothing else really matters but that. BDM Detour De Force is available now via Raisin’ Records.
PLANT & KRAUSS: FRANK MELFI
Brian May says that despite having earlier pooh-poohed the idea, Queen are considering a sequel to their hugely successful 2018 film Bohemian Rhapsody. In May 2020 the guitarist told Rolling Stone that while the idea of continuing the band’s story on celluloid – the film effectively concluded with the group’s triumph at Live Aid in 1985 – had been “looked at pretty seriously”, they had reached the conclusion that a film focused on Freddie Mercury’s final years and his battle with HIV was not “the story we want to tell at the moment”. Now, speaking on an Instagram Live, May says Queen are “looking at ideas” to that end, adding that “it’s going to be hard to follow that one, as none of us could have predicted how massive that was going to be,” he admits. “It would have to be a great script. It’s going to take a while to figure that out.” The original film grossed more than $900 million at box office. DL
The man who as a baby featured on the cover of Nirvana’s Nevermind is suing the band, alleging sexual exploitation. Now 30 years old, Spencer Elden is seeking damages of $150,000 (£109,000) from each of 15 different defendants that include surviving Nirvana members Dave Grohl and Krist Novoselic, and also Courtney Love and photographer Kirk Weddle.
Amyl And The Sniffers
JAMIE WDZIEKONSKI/PRESS
The Aussie punks know their time in the sun could be brief, so they’re shooting for the Moon.
of 2019. But as the pandemic hit and Australia went into lockdown in March 2020, this time the writing process didn’t come as easy as before. “During 2020 I got pretty depressed, and that definitely shaped the lyrics, but in a way that I’m proud of,” Taylor says. “I feel like some of the lyrics are Sometimes even the most nonchalant punks have their pinch-me messages to myself to push myself out of the slump.” moments. “I was within earshot of Robert Plant at a festival once,” recalls The band finished writing the album in the early months of the Amyl And The Sniffers guitarist Dec Martens. “I always thought Led pandemic, locked down together in their shared house, yet that wild, Zeppelin were not real, they’re so mythical. They didn’t get old like all the nervous energy that is so integral to what they do never feels smothered. other bands and keep playing.” And while the record boasts fun, stomp-alongs like Security, FOR FANS OF... Did you talk to him? tracks like Knifey, Laughing and Choices rail against male violence, “No! I said: “Oh my god, that’s Robert Plant,” and he heard me. and advocate for self-worth and empowerment. So I was like, that’s it, I ruined it.” “Any kind of job I’ve had, I’ve pretty much been touched where Melbourne punks Amyl And The Sniffers’ rapid progression is I don’t want to be,” says Taylor. “Knifey is my experience of being a source of amusement for them, and cheerfully admit that when a female; you feel like you can’t walk at home at night. Every time they started the band in 2016 they had no expectations. Back then, I’m walking around at night, I’m always checking the corners, when their only ambition was to play to mates at house parties, checking the back, taking weapons out trying to protect myself. “This album to me is the they recorded their first EP, the rough and raw, Stooges-meets-The But I don’t want to be violent, I just want to get home.” best hybrid of metal, Damned and Sunnyboys Giddy Up, in their shared house in one All this means that Comfort To Me is very much a record for now. punk and rock,” Dec evening. “We wrote each song and recorded it by ten p.m.,” says Just don’t expect the Sniffers to be around for ever. “I didn’t expect Martens says of 1980, by short-lived Danish singer Amy Taylor. “We picked a picture for the front cover, picked us to get to a second album,” says Martens, explaining that the band group Brats (by 1981 a band name and put it out the next day on Bandcamp.” might very well pull a Zeppelin themselves: record a few more they’d disbanded). Since then they’ve sharpened their self-taught skills, drawing albums and then fold, passing into myth. “If you’re here for a good “It introduced me to shredding solos with blood on their 2019 self-titled debut album, and maintaining time, not a long time, you might as well make your stamp.” DL punk music. I first the same white-knuckle energy during frenetic live shows. They heard this album in started writing for their second album, Comfort To Me, at the end 2016, and after listening Comfort To Me is out now via Rough Trade Records. to it I was motivated to bunker down and learn how to solo.”
“If you’re here for a good time, not a long time, you might as well make your stamp.”
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MY FIRST
LOVE The
Beatles RUBBER SOUL
By Paul Stanley The Kiss frontman on the 60s classic with which The Beatles raised the bar.
Now And Then by Paul Stanley’s Soul Station is out now via UMC. 20 CLASSICROCKMAGAZINE.COM
David Lee Roth has responded angrily to Gene Simmons after he was axed as an opening act on Kiss’s farewell tour. Simmons said that in his day Roth had been “the ultimate frontman” but added: “I don’t want to think of bloated naked Elvis on the bathroom floor.” Responding on Instagram, Roth posted 18 identical images of a child raising its middle finger, each with the message ‘Roth to Simmons’.
John Lydon (pictured) has lost a lawsuit against his former Sex Pistols bandmates Paul Cook and Steve Jones, effectively granting them use of the band’s songs in the TV drama Pistol, which is being directed by Danny Boyle and made by Disney. Original Pistols bassist Glen Matlock supported the pair’s position, along with written submissions from the late Sid Vicious’s estate. A statue of Philip Lynott was unveiled in West Bromwich, the Midlands town where the late Thin Lizzy leader was born, on his birthday, August 20. The six-foot statue was crowdfunded by Thin Lizzy fans worldwide.
Herman Rarebell As well as touring his new art project, he’s itching to set the record straight on his contribution to the Scorpions. Herman Rarebell will always be best known as the drummer with the Scorpions, who he was with from 1977 for 18 years, during their most successful period. He also wrote lyrics for some of the band’s best-known songs, including Blackout, Dynamite and Rock You Like A Hurricane. Since his Scorpions days he’s recorded a number of solo albums, and worked with Michael Schenker, John Parr and Ginger Baker, among others, pursuing a varied career that currently includes him being a member of art ensemble the Seeing Tree. His 1981 debut solo album, Nip In The Bud, is now being reissued to mark its 40th anniversary.
You were briefly in Temple Of Rock with Michael Schenker and former Scorpions bassist Francis Buchholz. Why did it last only a short time? In 2016 Michael decided he wanted to tour as Schenkerfest, so Temple split up. But maybe we will get back together one day. Were you disappointed that the Scorpions didn’t ask you back when they fired James Kottak in 2016? I’ll tell you how disappointed I am. I sent them a message offering my services, and never even got a reply. I thought that was very rude. Now I hear the Scorpions are claiming their new album will be a return to the glory days of the eighties. If they’re serious about that, they should get Francis and me back, and also Dieter Dierks who produced all those classic albums. You know why they won’t do that? Greed! It would mean having to share everything five ways and not three.
“I’m planning to tour symphonic versions of Scorpions songs.”
Why did you do a solo album in 1981? I had a number of songs I’d written with a couple of musician friends in 1976, just prior to joining the Scorpions, which weren’t at all right for the band. However, they deserved to be heard, so I did the album.
How did the rest of the Scorpions react to you doing a solo record? Not very well. Rudolf Schenker asked me why I didn’t give these to the Scorpions. But they were too heavy for them. You were involved in writing some of the Scorpions’ best-known songs. Does it irritate you that you never get much credit for that? It does. In fact the band never mention me in interviews, which I find ridiculous. But there’s a new documentary in the pipeline from ITV on the band. I am being interviewed for this, so I can finally set the record straight on my role. I am also planning to do a tour with what I’ve called the Hurricane Orchestra, doing symphonic versions of those songs I wrote with the Scorpions.
There’s long been a rumour that the Scorpions started recording the Love At First Sting album with Bobby Rondinelli on drums. Is it true? Yes it is. I had real alcohol problems at the time, so the band brought in Rondinelli to replace me. I understand why they did it, but he was too heavy for them. So Dieter asked me to return. Is the Seeing Tree your new band? It’s an art project, mixing music with painting. If you check out the video for the new song The Beat Goes On you’ll see what I mean. We hope to give performances at art galleries around Europe, and leave the art created during these presentations as exhibits. MD The reissued Nip In The Bud is out now via Aviator Management.
HERMAN RAREBELL: NICO MASS/PRESS; JOHN LYDON: ALAMY
“Clearly, The Beatles were being influenced by what Bob Dylan was doing, and with Rubber Soul they took a much more eloquent and strippeddown approach to their songs. Not only did Rubber Soul show the depth and breadth of their writing – as if that wasn’t obvious enough – they raised the bar. It was influenced by the folk music movement. This time there was no superfluous adornment to anything. A song like In My Life was just stunning, and the same applies to Norwegian Wood. “The music being made by Dylan, Donovan and Judy Collins had really rubbed off on them, and yet they retained who they were. Their own identity that made them so great was kept. I found that album really, really impressive. When I sit down with an acoustic guitar, In My Life is usually among the first songs that I’ll play. It’s completely gorgeous and soul-bearing. The words hold up so well. “I think I paid around four dollars for my original edition of Rubber Soul. For the longest time I was a poor musician, and gradually my vinyl was sold piece by piece, but I’ve since then bought it many, many times on different formats.” DL
Cradle Of Filth frontman Dani Filth and pop star Ed Sheeran have discussed teaming up. Filth claims that Sheeran loved death metal when he was younger, and they have exchanged emails about recording a song for charity. “He said he’d do anything, quite literally,” said Filth. “He said he’s a massive fan. He seems like a genuinely very nice guy actually.”
“Bumblefoot just handed me a double-neck fretless guitar…”
Troy Redfern
ROB BLACKHAM/PRESS
Hats off to the Herefordshire slide guitar player risking it all for rock‘n’roll.
Rockfield and ask Paul Winstanley to produce, that was a huge letting go of the reins. I hadn’t physically met the band before. We didn’t even have a rehearsal!” That’s Hans Zimmer’s occasional sideman Dave Marks you hear on bass As a man who looks to be dressed for an Old West card game, it follows That’s the aforementioned Bumblefoot, spraying a bona fide Americanthat Troy Redfern has never been afraid to try his luck. There was the time made shred solo over the sleaze-rocking On Fire. Those break-your-nose the Herefordshire slide guitarist stepped on stage unrehearsed for an alldrum fills, meanwhile, come from Darkness and Gary Moore alumnus star jam at Poland’s Satyr Blues Festival – “Bumblefoot from Guns N’ Roses Darby Todd. “Darby is a monster, such a heavy hitter,” says Redfern, “and just handed me a double-neck fretless guitar, which I’d never that really set the sound of the album.” FOR FANS OF... played before in my life”. Or how about the time Redfern risked But it’s Redfern himself who pushes the envelope furthest, with abject humiliation by following a golden god – but emphatically songs that were born from chaos but ultimately unfold like road held his own. “Deborah Bonham was on the bill before us at movies (Scorpio) and lost Aerosmith classics (Lay That Love Down). a festival, and Robert Plant joined her for the last song. The crowd “I’m from the David Bowie or William S Burroughs school of ‘cut was surging, and we’re thinking that everyone is gonna go home up’ lyrics,” he explains. “I turned off any filter, sang phonetically afterwards, but we smashed it.” and then worked backwards from that initial outburst. There’s Since setting out in 2015, Redfern has seen first-hand the giant a lot about relationships and freedom, and the imagery on songs “Son House would leaps a new artist can make by never ducking a challenge. Every like Scorpio has the vibe of a movie like From Dusk Till Dawn.” have been the earliest ding on his 1929 National Triolian resonator guitar is testament When we speak to Redfern, his head is still spinning, the influence,” says Redfern. to his hyperactive recording schedule (last year he released sessions now more like a happy dream he has to keep checking “Mississippi Fred McDowell is another a frankly ludicrous five albums) and never-say-no gigging actually happened. But if this album really was an Old West card huge one. Johnny philosophy (he’s played everywhere from Scandinavia to Russia). Winter. Bonnie Raitt. But game, this lifelong gambler just played his ace. “It’s all a bit of But creatively – not to mention financially – this year’s The Fire as a touchstone I’d have a blur for me,” he admits. “Making this album was a huge risk. But to choose Aerosmith’s Cosmic album is Redfern’s biggest gamble to date. “I’ve always the way it’s come out… it’s really upped my game.” HY Permanent Vacation. recorded everything, played all the instruments, mixed my I love the vibe of that albums myself. So to hire these great players, pay for sessions at The Fire Cosmic is out now via RED7 Records. album. It’s the perfect meeting of blues and rock, with St. John being a standout track for me.”
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THE STO RIES BEH IND THE SON GS
Jane’s Addiction Been Caught Stealing How a track that started with the accidental sound of a barking dog turned LA’s weirdest band into the godfathers of alternative rock. Words: Dave Everley
CAUGHT ON CAMERA!
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a characteristically sideways spin on the funk-rock sound that the likes of the Red Hot Chili Peppers and Jane’s themselves had helped pioneer, while the song’s opening line – ‘I’ve been caught stealing, once, when I was five’ – was rooted in reality. “There was a candy store on the corner by my house in Queens, and I would go there all the time,” Farrell told Rolling Stone. “I thought I was pretty good at stealing, but a guy caught me stone-cold while I was taking a Pennsy Pinky [a kids’ sports ball made out of pink rubber].” The song’s lyrics found Farrell and his girlfriend embarking on a shoplifting spree, picking up skirts and razors and laughing as they added them to a pile of stolen goods. The singer batted away suggestions that he was encouraging such activities – or that he was preaching much of anything in any of his songs. “I didn’t get into this to make sermons or set up structures for others to live by,” he told BAM in 1990. “My intent has nothing to do with teaching. It’s to amuse myself on this completely boring planet.” While the song sounded breezy, sessions for the album were anything but. The band’s drug use – Farrell, Navarro and Avery were all enthusiastic heroin users – was part of their mythology. But by the time of Ritual, their chemical proclivities were beginning to drive them apart. “Eric, Perry and I were all dealing with the same demons at different times and not talking to each other about it, which was really weird,” Dave Navarro told Rolling Stone. “So in certain ways there was this level of secrecy and being at odds with each other, and in other ways there was this sense of understanding and unspoken knowledge. All of which really made for a bizarre dynamic.” Somehow, that dynamic worked. Ritual De Lo Habitual was released in August 1990, and Been Caught Stealing followed in November. It was accompanied by a video
in which an array of weird and wonderful characters acted out the song’s lyrics in a mini-market. The clip went into heavy rotation on MTV, helping propel the single to No.34 in the Billboard chart. Been Caught Stealing wasn’t just Jane’s Addiction’s biggest hit to that point, it was also a watershed moment for the burgeoning alternative rock movement. R.E.M. had risen from the college rock underground to become mainstream darlings, and Faith No More had bagged their own breakthrough hit with rapmetal anthem Epic earlier in 1990. But Jane’s Addiction were something different: a full-on unfurling of rock’s freak flag. Their status as cultural figureheads was rubber-stamped the following year when Farrell conceived groundbreaking festivalcome-travelling circus Lollapalooza. Headlined by Jane’s Addiction and
“Eric, Perry and I were all dealing with the same demons at different times and not talking to each other about it.” featuring Nine Inch Nails, Living Colour, the Rollins Band and more, it acted as a lightning rod for the alternative nation. It also proved to be Jane’s swan song. The cracks that appeared during the album sessions had become an unbridgeable chasm. On August 28, 1991, the inaugural Lollapalooza festival came to an end, and so did Jane’s Addiction. “There was something romantic about splitting up when we did,” Farrell told Q in 2018. “But we couldn’t have gone on anyway. We were killing each other.” It may have been over for Jane’s Addiction, at least until a reunion later in the decade, but their success had uncorked the bottle and the genie was out. In September 1991, less than a month after Jane’s played their final date, Nirvana released Nevermind and the steady drip of change became a torrent. The 1990s were truly under way.
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It was the John Waters-meets-Monty Python music video – mixing theft, crossdressing and general dicking around to surreal effect – that drove Been Caught Stealing firmly into the eye of the mainstream. Director Casey Niccoli – Farrell’s girlfriend and muse at the time – was a driver of the band’s aesthetic, who can also be seen in sculpted form on the cover of JA’s 1988 debut studio album Nothing’s Shocking (as a pair of naked Siamese twins with their heads on fire). Of course it was the song itself, though, that really left a mark. “I didn’t think it was possible for another band to come out with a sound or an arrangement that I hadn’t heard yet,” Alice Cooper told Metal Hammer in 1994 (Cooper also chose the song in his BBC Desert Island Discs selection). “They accomplished that with this record. It was something that was just so exciting and so different that I couldn’t help myself turning it up.”
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he voice that introduces the song that invented the 1990s wasn’t a human one. It belonged to Annie, a dog picked up from a rescue centre by Jane’s Addiction singer Perry Farrell. It was Annie’s rhythmic barking that ushered in Been Caught Stealing, the track that would give the alt.rock visionaries their biggest hit yet. “She was quite needy, so I brought her down to the studio that day rather than leave her at home,” Farrell told Classic Rock in 2000. “I’m singing in the booth with the headphones on, and Annie gets all excited and starts going: ‘Ruff! Ruff! Ruff!’ The fact that she ended up on the track was just pure coincidence.” Coincidence or not, it was the perfect opening hook for the song that sparked the alt.rock revolution. Been Caught Stealing and parent album Ritual De Lo Habitual brought the left-field into the mainstream, positioning Jane’s Addiction as pied pipers for a wave of bands that followed. Jane’s were formed in Los Angeles in 1985 by Farrell, guitarist Dave Navarro, bassist Eric Avery and drummer Stephen Perkins. Glam-metal was cresting, but the music they made was a world away from that scene’s hairspray-choked frothiness. Farrell and his bandmates didn’t just walk on the darker side of life, they also lived it. Amazingly, that wasn’t enough to put off major label Warner Bros, who signed them on the back of 1987’s selftitled live debut album, released through independent label Triple X. The followup, 1988’s electrifying Nothing’s Shocking, sounded like nothing else around, drawing on everything from 60s psychedelia to 70s hard rock to early-80s British post-punk. But with Ritual De Lo Habitual, Jane’s Addiction’s musical ambitions jumped up a level. The album was broadly divided into two halves. The first side of the original LP was filled with short, terse rock songs, albeit filtered through the band’s unique prism, while the more expansive second side they took their sound into places few other bands were going. Been Caught Stealing, with its dog-bark introduction, closed side one of the record. Written by Farrell and Avery, it put
Jane’s Addiction in 1991: (l-r) Eric Avery, Perry Farrell, Stephen Perkins, Dave Navarro.
THE FACTS RELEASE DATE November 15, 1990 HIGHEST CHART POSITION UK No.34 US (Alt) No.1 PERSONNEL Perry Farrell Vocals Dave Navarro Guitar Eric Avery Bass Stephen Perkins Drums WRITTEN BY Perry Farrell and Eric Avery PRODUCED BY Dave Jerden LABEL Warner Bros
Samantha Fish The Kansas City gunslinger on smashing up guitars, shooting down sexists and shaking off the covid blues.
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Words: Henry Yates
ad you pulled up a bar stool at Kansas City’s Knuckleheads club in the noughties, you couldn’t have missed Samantha Fish. Patently underage, but with an old-soul guitar touch steeped in the Rolling Stones, Bonnie Raitt and Stevie Ray Vaughan, the loitering blonde quickly segued from chancer to crowd favourite, then from local legend to the pride of Ruf Records’ blues roster. At the age of 32, Fish is just about to release her seventh album, Faster, which still bears the thumbprint of those first influences, while also throwing pop, electronica and even a guest rapper at the wall. “The trick for me,” she says, “is making something modern, but also timeless.” Faster isn’t your average dreary pandemic album. No. I was surprised by that myself. I credit a lot of that positivity to meeting Martin Kierszenbaum, the producer. Before that I was writing some really sad, angry, angsty music. But he came in with such good energy, I started writing from a point of where I wanted to be, rather than where I was. Empowered. Confident. Sexy. Powerful. We recorded in The Village in LA, where Fleetwood Mac made Tusk. The Stones recorded there. Bob Dylan. Nine Inch Nails. So just to be in that historic arena, I was pretty stoked about that. You’ve said this album is about “taking charge”. Yeah. It’s a very ‘feminine energy’ kind of album. Y’know, it’s about flipping the roles of power and taking control of your situation. As a woman in the industry, you feel powerless sometimes. Don’t get me wrong, there’s songs that are more vulnerable, but I think this album has a really ballsy front. I love the album sleeve, with me licking my guitar. It’s got some strong ‘I don’t give a fuck’ energy, right? In early days of performing you had sexist hecklers at your gigs. Have you got rid of them? I don’t think we’ll ever be rid of the sexist men. But there’s less guys who come up and say: “You’re good for a girl” or “I came for your legs”. And, honestly, my tolerance is so much lower now. I used to be polite about it, but I’m not afraid to tell somebody to kick fucking rocks. By and large, things have gotten slightly better. But if you look on the internet you still see a lot of crap. It’s there. But I’m not going to let that mess with my head. Because we’ve got better shit to do, y’know? We’re making music. Could you tell us about a few key songs on the new album? The title track is kinda bold and brash, but that felt like a perfect opener for the record. Sorta like: “Buckle up, this is what you’re in for’. All Ice No Whiskey, that’s about meeting somebody of substance, and whoever I’m talking to in the song, they aren’t it. Twisted Ambition feels like an anthem for the entire album. We made a video where I got to smash up cinder blocks with a sledgehammer. After a year of being cooped up, filming that was pretty frickin’ awesome. They already had the take, but I kept asking if I could smash one more block.
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Maybe you’d enjoy smashing up your gear, too? We did that once as a joke. We had a Halloween show in Kansas City where we dressed up like a hair-metal band and played Van Halen covers all night. We came in with little bags of flour, and Jack Daniel’s bottles full of iced tea. For our last song of the night I smashed up one of those First Act guitars that you can buy in Walmart for thirty dollars. They don’t smash that easy, I will say. What influences were you tapping into when you were writing and recording the album? I’m always inspired by the things I grew up on, like the Stones. I listened to a lot of George Harrison and Tom Petty over the pandemic. I’m huge into north Mississippi music, so with my guitar playing I’m always trying to channel something in the vein of Junior Kimbrough. I like repeating motifs. I wanted guitar tones that were out-there and big. Like, Jack White has a tone that’s so raw, almost abrasive. And I was super-jazzed getting to know Martin. I’m a huge fan of the work he’s done with Lady Gaga. I was trying to bring pop hooks with a dark, industrial feel. Something moody and vibey. The track Hypnotic starts out as electronica, then kicks into a monster guitar solo. I was trying to channel the master, Prince, on that one. He had such a way with a dynamic shift. So you’ve got this kind of quirky, spooky, almost whispered, sexy song, then you have this juxtaposition of a really brash solo. If you can take someone from nought to sixty, I’m always trying to do that. What were the best and worst moments of your pandemic? In a way, it was positive for me creatively, because I could wake up and say, ‘Today, I’m just going to write a song’. But I had a few moments when I thought it might be all over. We got called back from our Europe run, and once it had sunk in, I got pretty depressed a few times. You look around and realise you’ve dedicated your life to music. You question your choices. What’s the strangest headline you’ve read about yourself? I did an interview with this Norwegian magazine years ago, and sarcasm doesn’t always work when you’re dealing with different languages. They asked me: “Where do you see yourself in ten years?” I was just being silly, and told them: “Well, I’d love to say I’m the next Mick Jagger.” But you shouldn’t make jokes. Next thing, I read the headline and it was: ‘Samantha Fish: I Am The Next Mick Jagger’! If you had to listen to one song for the rest of your life, which one would it be? Oh god. That’s hard, because you’d have to really love the song, but know full well you’re going to end up hating it. I guess [Tom Petty’s] American Girl. I’ve heard that on the radio a zillion times and I’m still not sick of it. I still turn it up. Faster is released on September 10 via Rounder Records. Samantha Fish tours the UK in January/February 2022.
KEVIN BURNSTEIN & DIANA KING
“We dressed metal band anup like a hairHalen covers d played Van all night.”
Blacktop Mojo Hammered Phil Collins covers? Celine Dion karaoke? Just everyday goings-on for this Texan quintet. Interview: Will Simpson
Nobody could accuse Blacktop Mojo of lacking commitment. Five years ago the Texan five-piece – who mix the intensity and power of Soundgarden and Alice In Chains with a southernstyle soulfulness – took the brave move of ditching their day jobs and moving into a shared house in their home town of Palestine. “We always liked hanging out with each other,” frontman Matt James explains. “It sounds clichéd, but we are all each other’s family.” They spent lockdown putting together their fourth self-released album (this one self-titled). Recently, though, the family has been splintering. Well, kind of. “Our drummer Nathan [Gillis] and guitarist 28 CLASSICROCKMAGAZINE.COM
Chuck [Wepfer] have both gotten married and moved out. People are gradually leaving the nest now, growing up and becoming adults.” Inspiration comes from historical figures. “It’s easier to succeed if you don’t have a Plan B,” James surmises. “If you’ve got that Plan B you’re always going to be looking back, with one foot still over there. I think moving in together was a big push to take music seriously; this is the way you’re paying your bills, making your living. You’ve got to treat it like a job. That’s why we called our second album Burn The Ships, cos like Alexander [The Great] or [Spanish Conquistador] Hernán Cortés there was no going back for us at that point.”
They’re happy to stay in Texas. “We take a lot of inspiration from here,” says James. “Not only classic southern bands like Lynyrd Skynyrd and Molly Hatchet, but from the country songs you hear on the radio – you hear some of that twang in our music.” He doesn’t feel the need to move from Palestine. “It’s a good spot for us. Less expensive than LA or New York. Plus we’re only a couple of hours from Dallas, Houston and Austin. We can get pretty much anywhere we need to go quickly from here.” Seattle is close to their hearts too. Although they’re too young to remember grunge first-hand, all the group have fallen in love with the
Blacktop Mojo: home is where the heart (and soul) is.
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music of that era. “Soundgarden, Pearl Jam, Mother Love Bone…” says James. “I’m pretty sure we’ve watched every documentary on every band from that time. We fell in love with their story of how they came out of the middle of nowhere, isolated from everything else and they blew the door off of the world. It’s a huge inspiration for us.” A cover they did of a Phil Collins song made Blacktop Mojo YouTube stars. Google ‘Blacktop Mojo’ and ‘Phil Collins’ and you’ll come across a video the band made of them playing an acoustic cover (slightly inebriated) of In The Air Tonight in the unusual setting of a distillery in Fort Worth.
“We were being given a tour by a friend who works there,” explains James. “It’s located in this old ranch-style factory and one part of it is abandoned. We walked into that part and every word you said echoed. So we got our guitars out.” It has since picked up more than five million views. Not bad for an “unplanned spur-of-themoment thing”. The band once won a competition to support Bon Jovi. A few years back, Bon Jovi launched a competition in which they picked a local act from each city they played to open for them. “We entered it on a whim, really. You had to
submit original music, so we sent off a video for our song Where The Wind Blows. We got to open to a sold-out twenty thousand crowd. At that point we’d only ever played in front of two hundred. The whole thing was like skydiving! Stepping out on to that stage was like falling out of an aeroplane.” After a show they like a bit of karaoke. “One of our favourite things to do on the bus to unwind is karaoke to Celine Dion,” says James. “She’s got some seriously good songs. I think our favourite has to be It’s All Coming Back To Me Now. Come on, man, it’s classic Jim Steinman!” Blacktop Mojo is out now (self-released). CLASSICROCKMAGAZINE.COM 29
Of course, every band and artist will tell you that their latest record is something special. Iron Maiden are no different – except that with the proggy Senjutsu they are right. We talk to Bruce Dickinson, Adrian Smith and Nicko McBrain about old dogs and a very good new trick. Words: Paul Brannigan Art: Akirant Photos: John McMurtrie 30 CLASSICROCKMAGAZINE.COM
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Raring to let the “remarkable” new album loose on the fans: (l-r) Nicko McBrain, Adrian Smith and Bruce Dickinson.
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aking care not to be observed by fellow guests at Reading’s Holiday Inn, Rod Smallwood ushered Bruce Dickinson into his hotel room. Earlier that same day – Saturday, August 29, 1981 – Iron Maiden’s manager had observed Samson’s 23-year-old frontman charm a rowdy Reading Rocks crowd eager for the arrival of Angry Anderson’s Aussie yob-rockers Rose Tattoo, and he grudgingly had to concede that the singer had something about him. As darkness fell on the site, Dickinson, better known to fans of the NWOBHM stalwarts by his stage name Bruce Bruce, was backstage downing celebratory post-gig beers, intending to wander out into the audience to watch ex-Deep Purple frontman Ian Gillan close out the weekender’s second day with his solo band, when he recognised Iron Maiden’s manager barrelling towards him purposefully. Aware that his presence backstage would generate some curiosity among the London music business ‘faces’ in attendance, and keen to avoid rumours being sparked, Smallwood asked Dickinson if they could go somewhere quieter to talk. Once inside his hotel room, he wasted no time in laying his cards on the table: although their increasingly erratic frontman Paul Di’Anno had yet to be informed of this fact, he confided, Iron Maiden were soon to have a vacancy for a new vocalist, and bandleader Steve Harris wanted to know if Dickinson might care to try out for it. “First of all, you know I’ll get the job, or you wouldn’t ask,” the singer remembers responding. “When I do get the job, and I will, are you prepared for a totally different style, and opinions, and someone who is not going to roll
over? If you don’t want that, tell me now and I’ll walk away.” For once, the louder-than-life Yorkshire-born, Cambridge-educated Smallwood was lost for words.
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thought it was probably best to go in there with all guns blazing,” Dickinson says today, laughing. That gung-ho energy remains an integral part of the singer’s ebullient character. Arriving for this interview on a bicycle, he’s barely affixed a padlock to secure it before enquiring if anyone from Maiden HQ managed to screenshot the moment when the video for the band’s new single, Writing
arrangements were made for a test recording session at Battery Studios in north-west London with producer Martin Birch. “You can imagine how many ten-pence pieces were shovelled into public phone boxes to sort everyone’s schedules. “Ironically, we were booked into the exact same room where I’d just recorded Shock Tactics with Samson,” Dickinson recalls. “We recorded my vocals over some live tracks they’d recorded with Paul – Remember Tomorrow, Twilight Zone, Wrathchild, and I think Prowler – and that was it, job done. UFO were playing Hammersmith Odeon that night, so it was [get] backstage, get pissed, and forty years on here we are.” That fabulously succinct summation of Iron Maiden’s storied career might be a little light on detail, admittedly, but we’re going to trust that you, our learned and much-valued readers, are at least moderately familiar with their epic journey from junior draughtsman Steve Harris’s Leytonstone bedroom to the stages of the world’s biggest stadiums. Bruce Dickinson wasn’t on board for the entire trip, of course, having left the band in 1993 to embark on a solo career, but his rejoining in 1999 (along with returning guitarist Adrian Smith) served as a catalyst for Maiden’s current, extraordinary fourth act. That summer, this writer joined Maiden on the road in New York to see them with Dickinson back at the helm, and was told by him: “I don’t want to equal people’s expectations, I want to exceed them. This band is far better now than it was at its supposed peak. We’re going to be unstoppable.” That proved to be more than ³
“There have been raised voices and slammed doors in the studio in the past.”
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Nicko McBrain On The Wall, hit 6,666,666 views on YouTube: “I wasn’t going to sit up into the wee small hours to catch it, but I was hoping someone would,” he says. “Funny shit.” Warmed by the mid-July afternoon sunshine as he takes a seat outside a West London coffee shop near his home in Chiswick, Dickinson takes a sip of a latte before sharing still-vivid memories of his initial introduction to Britain’s biggest and bestloved metal band 40 years ago. He recalls “a little rehearsal in Hackney” before the East Londoners set off to Scandinavia to complete what would be their final tour with Di’Anno, while clandestine
“What you’ve done in the past might be great, but it shouldn’t be a guarantee of a meal ticket for years to come.” Bruce Dickinson CLASSICROCKMAGAZINE.COM 33
“Can you keep the bloody engine noise down!” Iron Maiden on their The Legacy Of The Beast tour.
just standard Dickinson swagger. The run of albums Maiden have released since, from 2000’s Brave New World through to 2015’s The Book Of Souls, are arguably superior, pound for pound, to the essential, genre-defining records made by the group’s ‘classic’ line-up between 1982 and 1990. Senjutsu, their new one, he says without a flicker of self-doubt, “might be the best thing we’ve ever done. “What you’ve done in the past might be great,” he says “but, for me, it shouldn’t be a guarantee of a meal ticket for years to come. I’m not a big one for anniversaries, or nostalgia, I’m more interested in looking forward than looking back. Which is good, because right now there’s a lot for Iron Maiden, and Iron Maiden fans, to look forward to.”
that photographs and geo-tagged social media posts placed at least three members of the band, plus their long-time studio collaborator Kevin Shirley, in the French capital in the spring of 2019. Elsewhere online, on a thread titled ‘Iron Maiden studio album 17 rumours and speculations’ on the MaidenFans forum, a poster named Trevoire collated a wealth of international
And then the world stopped turning as the rapid spread of a newly discovered, highly infectious and potentially lethal new virus named covid-19 was officially classified as a global pandemic, and Iron Maiden’s meticulously laid plans were, in guitarist Adrian Smith’s words, “knocked sideways”. As Smith recalls, dialling in from London, the initial plans for what became Iron Maiden’s seventeenth studio album began at the tail end of 2018. He was holidaying on the Turks and Caicos islands, and decided to “pop across” to the Bahamas to pay a visit to Steve Harris to knock around some ideas, “since we were in the same part of the world”. Smith has the good grace to laugh when he throws out this casual jet-setting anecdote. “Forty years ago I’d have been popping over to his house in Leytonstone from my place in Hackney,” he acknowledges. “But this is our life these days.” He recalls that the visit led him to show the bassist the outline for a new song he was writing, which would be introduced by booming Japanese kodo drums. In his head, he explained to Harris, he envisaged the dramatic, stirring music as a soundtrack to an epic battle. And with that, the
“It’s Steve’s band, ultimately, his vision from day one.”
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hey’re up to something in Paris…’ With these words, an online message board thread started by a Redditor named it-was-zero alerted fellow Headbangers, Earthdogs, Rivet Heads, Hell Rats and Metal Maniacs (as Maiden helpfully categorised their fans in the sleeve-notes for The Number Of The Beast)
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Bruce Dickinson interview quotes, social media postings from Maiden crew members and confirmed sightings by eagle-eyed board members. Trevoire concluded that the English musicians and their Californian producer had been in residence at Studio Guillaume Tell, the birthplace of Maiden albums The Book Of Souls and Brave New World, and all logic pointed to the imminent release of new Maiden ‘product’, whatever form that might take.
first cornerstone of what would become Senjutsu was laid in place. When Classic Rock last spoke at length to the members of Iron Maiden, back in 2015, Steve Harris revealed that in the studio during the mixing of The Book Of Souls, he turned to Adrian Smith and said: “If this was our last album, it would be a good one to go out on.” That was an uncertain time for Maiden, with Bruce Dickinson recovering from cancer, and no one entirely sure how their singer’s health might stand up when the band locked in to their usual rigorous touring patterns. But such concerns were swiftly laid to rest, and when this writer last spoke to Steve Harris, in 2018, during a break in his band’s hugely successful, career-spanning The Legacy Of The Beast tour, Maiden’s redoubtable leader had his eyes fixed firmly on the future. “When Bruce came back to this band, we all agreed that Maiden wasn’t going to be resting on our history,” he stated. “The Legacy Of The Beast tour is a nice way of telling the old stories in new
at the end of the day? Fortunately, that isn’t how relationships, whether professional or personal, work. Yet, bizarrely, this is how some people seem to imagine how bands of a certain vintage operate; as if Steve Harris walks around Iron Maiden’s dressing room with a notepad and pen at the end of each world tour, earnestly asking each of his bandmates in turn whether they might be up for recording another album, and/or spending another 18 months on the road. While no one in the band can recall exactly who it was who summoned them to assemble in Paris in March 2019, all six musicians were excited to see what might result from the latest pooling of their talents. “The only person who was grumpy about it was Nicko [McBrain],” Dickinson divulges mischievously. “He came in and was like: [adopts gruff Nicko-esque voice] ‘What the Getting his wings: fuck are we doing ’ere? I fancied an Steve Harris makes a point. ’oliday!’ But it seemed entirely sensible for us to go in and make an album while we were still hot from the tour and months of playing together.” “Oh, Bruce said that, did he?” Nicko McBrain says later, affecting indignation, during a phone call from his home in Boca Raton, Florida. “He dropped me in it? Cheeky bugger! I was a bit pooped from touring, I’ll admit, but I was as excited as everyone else about getting stuck into the work. If I was complaining, I was only complaining because it was cold over there in Paris. We did The Final Frontier in the Bahamas, and that would have been more pleasant in March. And eating l’escargot day after day can get a bit samey…” “But I love that studio, and once we started working I had a blast,” the drummer continues, more seriously. “Honestly, if you were a fly on the wall you wouldn’t believe how much of a laugh we Triple threat: (l-r) Adrian Smith, Dave have, because at times it’s hilarious. We’re Murray and Janick Gers. perfectionists, and it’s not always a giggle when a bunch of opinionated musicians come together ways. But I think we’re all already excited at the with different creative ideas. There have been thought of starting some new stories too.” raised voices and slammed doors in the studio in the past. But we love one another and we’ve a lot magine a scenario where, let’s say, your of respect for one another, and I think you can workplace is signing off for the Christmas hear in the album how much we enjoy the holidays, and as you reach for your coat your dynamic we have.” boss sidles over and asks if you still want your job “I love the energy of it,” says Dickinson. “We in the new year. Or imagine your significant other turn up to the studio with nothing planned, and look at one another and go: ‘Okay, what have you got?’ And then Steve or Adrian reaches into their box of toys and pulls out a riff or half a song, and I go: ‘Alright! I’m liking that! Let’s go!’ We jiggle and tweak things – it’s like a cross between a game of tennis and a juggling match – and Adrian Smith we see what comes out. Steve is pulls out of your embrace on the sofa as the credits a lot more controlling about his stuff, it’s fair to roll on season two of Succession, and asks solemnly say. He might take a riff from Janick [Gers] or if you’re up for staying together at least until season Adrian and disappear for three or four days, and three gets a broadcast date, after which you can then he’ll resurface and go: ‘Right, I’ve three both see how you feel, see if you fancy committing songs ready to go!’ The pressure he puts on to another six months, maybe? How insecure himself is phenomenal, and he rises to the would that make you feel as you climbed into bed challenge every time. ³
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“People often see singles as throwaway, trashy pop, but I think writing singles is an under-appreciated art form.”
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be beaten down by the darkness that at times can seem overwhelming. “They’re wonderful pieces of music, aren’t they?” says McBrain. “When I sat down with this album, a few months back, I was absolutely blown away with what we’d done. I think it’s stunning. I think we would all say that Maiden are a live band, and we’re musicians who feed off the energy of an audience, but I think we’ve created something remarkable here. Steve has excelled himself, Bruce sounds amazing, and the drummer ain’t too bad either [laughs]. But seriously, we can’t wait for people to hear it. It’s been weird sitting on it for so long. Not that we had a choice, really. I look back at the first year of this pandemic as being like a hurricane, which blitzed through the whole world, and now we’re in the midst of a tropical storm, trying to find our feet again. God willing, we’ll have peace and quiet in the world before long, and we can give this album the platform it deserves, and enable it to get the hearing it deserves.”
“When I sat down with this album, I was absolutely blown away with what we’d done… I think we’ve created something remarkable.” Nicko McBrain “When Steve and I sit down to work on the vocals and melody lines, he’ll have the arrangements nailed down very precisely, and he’ll often have, in his mind, a very specific place for every syllable of the lyrics. As a singer, my job is to look for the spaces where I can put in the performance. If you visualise his writing as being like a city skyline, with blocks of skyscrapers, I’m rolling and diving, undulating around that grid, finding my own path. This deep into our career, we know how to work together and read one another. Steve is very picky, but I understand his ways. And over the years my voice has got fatter, and a lot more solid in the lower registers. Pus I’ve got new tonalities as I’ve grown older, and that has opened up a lot of new avenues of expression. Which is exciting, for Steve as well as me, I think.” And if you don’t like what he’s written, what then? Is there a democratic vote on which song ideas get worked up by the band, or…? “It’s Steve’s band, ultimately, his vision from day one,” says Dickinson. “Have you met Steve Harris? If Steve wants a song on the album, the song is going to be on the album, believe me [laughs].” As with Speed Of Light from The Book Of Souls and, further back, album-introducing singles 2 Minutes To Midnight and Flight Of Icarus, the most instantly accessible song on Senjutsu, The Writing On The Wall, is a Smith/ Dickinson composition. “I think writing singles is an under36 CLASSICROCKMAGAZINE.COM
appreciated art form,” says Smith. “People often see singles as throwaway, trashy pop. But I got into music through Jimi Hendrix singles and Thin Lizzy singles, and as much as I love Deep Purple and Sabbath, I appreciate the skill behind a short, sharp, three-minute song as well.” But for much of its 82 minutes, Senjutsu (a Japanese term relating to the tactics a warrior or army will prepare ahead of combat) is an unashamedly progressive rock album. From the stirring title track – ‘Call to arms all the men far and wide,’ Dickinson sings, warning of ‘invaders from the north’ and bloodthirsty ‘nomads who come from the plains’ – via the brilliant Lost In A Lost World with its extended acoustic opening and soaring female choir, through to the gloriously infectious Gers/ Harris collaboration The Time Machine, it’s the work of a band pushing boundaries and operating at the peak of their powers. As impressive as the album’s first seven tracks are, however, it’s the three closing, Steve Harris-written tracks, weighing in at, respectively, 10-plus, 12-plus and 11-plus minutes, where Senjutsu leaves its peers in the dust. Death Of The Celts, The Parchment and Hell On Earth are remarkable, thrilling, widescreen encapsulations of everything a metal fan could love about Iron Maiden. Hell On Earth in particular, written before anyone ever heard of or put a name to covid-19, is a harrowing state-of-the-world address from a band refusing to
I
n the early part of 2021, that notion was also consuming Bruce Dickinson. Asked what he’s been up to while waiting out the pandemic, he laughs and says: “Medical improvements… prosthetics.” Having snapped his Achilles tendon while fencing in Paris during the recording of Senjutsu, he also had to have a hip replacement operation in October. Resting up in Paris, after “watching everything watchable on Netflix” he began to mentally piece together a storyboard for a promotional video for Senjutsu’s first single, The Writing On The Wall, a track that would do justice to the album’s sense of scale and ambition. Mindful that restrictions imposed to combat the transmission of covid would make it impossible to assemble the band on a video set – with Harris in the Bahamas, McBrain in Florida, Dave Murray in Hawaii, Smith in London and Janick Gers in Newcastle – Dickinson hit on the concept of an epic animated video for it. “I said to Rod: ‘Don’t you think it’s time we came out of the blocks with something a bit special in terms of a video?’” he recalls. “I told him about Rammstein’s Deutschland video – which transcends the idea of a music promo and becomes a piece of filmic art – and said: ‘I’m not suggesting we do the same as Rammstein, but we could try to have something with a similar impact in our world.’ I’m not sure that Rod ever watched the Rammstein video – he doesn’t have much interest in anything that’s: a) not Maiden, or b) made after 1975 – but he gave me the go-ahead to come up with some ideas. So I started piecing together ideas based on biblical references, themed around the idea of Belshazzar’s Feast, aka the story of The Writing On The Wall, from the Book Of Daniel. “I was thinking about how our whole political culture is fucked, as is the world, with the rich getting richer and the have-nots having even less, and I was thinking about how we’d have to destroy everything and start the world anew. From watching Netflix, specifically Sons Of Anarchy, I suddenly had this vision of ‘The Four ³
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Don’t look back: Dickinson and Harris on the World Slavery Tour in late 1984.
Bikers Of The Apocalypse’, with each one being Eddie. And then thinking about the biblical creation story, I was thinking about Adam and Eve, and then Eddie being the serpent tempting them. And then I had a story to work with.” Collaborating with animators Mark Andrews and Andrew Gordon, formerly of Pixar (the animation studio behind Toy Story and Finding Nemo, among others), both of them devoted Maiden fans, the result is a visual treat, with a host of subtle references to Iron Maiden’s storied past. So thrilled was everyone with the result that they almost overlooked one tiny detail: the reason the main character is at the feast in the first place. “The Maiden fan was supposed to be clutching this invite to Belshazzar’s Feast. That’s what lured him to the desert in the first place,” Dickinson explains. “Otherwise why is everyone here? But they forgot to put it in. I said: ‘Where’s the invite? It doesn’t make sense without it.’ People were like: ‘Oh, it’s kinda too obvious with that included.’ Is it fuck! So then we created the invite as like an old-school rave flyer, black and white. And once we had that, an idea grew about how we could tie all this in to a cryptic way to announce the album.” On the weekend of this summer’s Download Pilot festival in June, mysterious posters/flyers with the words ‘Belshazzar’s Feast’ were spotted on walls around the festival site. By pure coincidence, Iron Maiden super-fan Frank Turner was interviewed on-site wearing a T-shirt displaying the same image. On June 28, appearing on Sky News to complain about the British government’s dismissal of UK music industry concerns about the impact of Brexit on touring artists and the ecosystem surrounding live music, Bruce Dickinson was swearing the same T-shirt. Soon enough, Maiden promised a ‘reveal’ on July 15. At which point the video for The Writing On The Wall was released, and Maiden had the attention of every rock fan in the world once again. Almost as if they’d planned it this way from the start. Who says you can’t teach old dogs new tricks? “I have to say, listening to the album now, I’m blown away by it,” says Adrian Smith. “When I’ve listened to albums we’ve made in the past, the
Steve Harris: fully embracing the Japanese-themed title of Maiden’s new album.
memories are still raw, and I end up picking up on tiny things I wish had been done differently. But having had a year or more to live with the album, hearing it afresh is thrilling. The fact that this band can continue to surprise us all is a huge tribute to what we do.
today. It’s a privilege to do this, but that work ethic, that legacy, allows Senjutsu to exist in 2021, and allows Maiden to exist in 2021.” “When they hear this album, people are going to go: ‘Fuck me!’” says Dickinson. “Every song is Maiden at the top of our game. Every song could be a live favourite. We haven’t played a Maiden album from start to finish since [2006’s] A Matter Of Life And Death, but this album is so good that it could warrant being played in its entirety. Obviously we haven’t finished the Legacy tour yet, but the thought of taking this album on the road is exciting to all of us. Making it come alive on stage, with all its time changes and shifts of tone and mood, is going to be a challenge. But if I didn’t relish a challenge I wouldn’t have joined this band in the first place. No one is mellowing with age, we’re all committed to this, and taking on the world again after everything being on pause is going to be one hell of an adventure. We look forward to seeing you there.”
“When Bruce came back to this band, we all agreed that Maiden wasn’t going to be resting on our history.”
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Steve Harris “When I joined this band I was a boy. I may have seemed like a man, but really I knew nothing. You could probably say the same for all of us. And we all gave everything to Maiden. For years there was nothing in our lives but Maiden. It was full-on. And I can’t pretend it didn’t get on top of me at times. Now I can step back and appreciate everything more and appreciate everything we’ve built together. All the work we put in back then is the foundation of where we are and what we do
Senjutsu is out now via Parlophone.
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His is the story of the young Geordie who grew up with a violent stepfather, eventually escaped into the redemptive arms of rock’n’roll, and went on to become a prolific and acclaimed songwriter whose music has embraced rock, pop, punk, thrash, country, metal and more. While he has operated in many guises, it’s with The Wildhearts that his star has shone brightest. Interview: Mick Wall Portrait: Will Ireland
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GINGER WILDHEART
The 1991 line-up of The Wildhearts: (l-r) Bam, Ginger, Danny McCormack, CJ.
H
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depression and anxiety ensued. Along the way there were suicide attempts. He is Ginger Wildheart (real name David Leslie Walls) and his band are about to release the latest in high-end, ultra-rock Wildhearts albums, 21st Century Love Songs. And they’re out there on tour again smashing the world to tiny pieces. Today he talks to Classic Rock via Zoom from his home in York. We first met when you were in the Quireboys, in the eighties. You’re the one who’s responsible for all of this. That’s kind, but you got where you are today with your own talent and courage. Well, I stuck with it because of your positive words. You don’t get thirty years in this business unless you had some good support. I was living with Ray Zell [creator of the Pandora Peroxide comic strip in Kerrang!]. It was a good time, but you
were the one that said people will care if you do something solo. I went, maybe he’s mad or maybe he’s got a point. But I never really looked back. What are your memories of getting fired from the Quireboys? I don’t have a lot of memories, because I was actually as drunk as they tell people I was. Going to LA with the Quireboys was the first time I’d been on an airplane in my life. I had no idea if I got airsick or not. Then I behaved like any young boy in LA should behave. There was partying, a lot of people doing drugs, and I just went “Hello”, then found out later they were all more into alcohol. But I thought [firing me] was a weird thing to do. Sharon Osbourne was managing us, and I was called into her office. Guy and Spike were sitting on a couch, avoiding eye contact. I think Sharon just thought I was going to get a telling off. When they said: “Ginger, you’re fired from the band,” Sharon went: “He’s fired?” As in: ‘What the fuck you firing him for?’ But when I was walking around in LA, I had this sound in my head: Cheap Trick melodies, but with really heavy thrash guitars and early-80s punk, like Discharge. Nothing that [the Quireboys] would do.
“I was meant to do this, to be a pain in people’s ass and release far too much music and make a lot of noise.”
TOP: GEORGE BODNAR ARCHIVE/ICONICPIX; BOTTOM: WILL IRELAND
e’s the guy whose band The Wildhearts took off like a rocket in the early 90s – and he hasn’t returned to earth yet. He’s the guy who got fired from the Quireboys in the late 80s because he had the best haircut; well, that and his early adoption of speed and coke and thrash and pop and booze – lots of booze – and distorted guitars and… Well, you get the picture. He’s the guy who has released dozens of brilliantly inspired singles and albums by dozens of variously titled projects not including the juddering, monumental Wildhearts releases. The guy whose breathtaking range as a songwriter encompasses rock, punk, thrash, country, folk, psychedelia, heartrending ballads, infectious super-pop, teeth-grinding metal, future-shock lyrics and every colour of the rainbow if rainbows included black. He’s the guy from Newcastle who grew up the tormented child of a vicious, violent stepfather. Whose mother was beaten bloody until one night she fought back by sticking a ten-inch blade into her aggressor’s stomach. A lifetime fighting
With The Wildhearts at the 1994 Monsters Of Rock at Castle Donington.
When I was fired, the only thing I could think of was, well, I’ll form this band that’s a mixture of all these different elements. We did the first Wildhearts album [Earth Vs The Wildhearts, 1993] and I was just expecting the press to all go: “Pop and thrash. That’s not going to work.” But everyone gave it five stars, and a lot of people like yourself gave us a lot of support in the early days. I’ve read a lot about Buddhism, and that says there is no past and there is no future, so if something’s on your mind it’s probably because you know you’re going to do it. I knew I was meant to do this, to be a pain in people’s ass and release far too much music and make a lot of noise.
GETTY x2
That first Wildhearts album sounded like Mad Max-meets-The Beatles. How do you recall those times? It was just non-stop alcohol and speed and then other things, as and when we could afford them. We weren’t sober ever. I remember hearing a thing about Mötley Crüe where Tommy Lee was going: “We have a few days on water and then we go back to drinking.” I’m thinking: “A few days on water?!” I hadn’t drunk water, apart from ice cubes in drinks, for years. We just enjoyed every step of it, thinking we might not get to do it again. It was one of those bands I thought Motörhead would be like. Hanging around with Motörhead must have been better than hanging around with any other band. Tell me about your relationship with CJ [Christopher Paul Persaud-Jagdhar, who Ginger originally shared guitar and vocals with in The Wildhearts]. It was a complete fluke. I was in a club, and Tattooed Love Boys were playing and I was like, fucking hell, that guy, I’m going to have to meet him and see what he’s all about. We talk, and we like the same music, the same expression, and we were so tight as friends. Couldn’t separate us. He
“Well, nobody’s perfect.” Dublin, Ireland, 1997.
had a girlfriend who worked in a Japanese restaurant. She used to feed us. Then we really got into coke. And it distorted my relationship with CJ. My idea of self-importance, that was very much distorted. It went like that for a long time. I thought: “I’ve put this band together, I can do it again. I can find people like CJ”. I didn’t realise that there’s no one like CJ. Who not only plays guitar like me, but sings like me. We’re the same fucking height. Bizarre. It’s finding out about relationships by fucking up relationships and realising that the one constant thing that’s wrong is you.
bigger than Top Of The Pops and bigger than a lot of great things that happened then. I started having suicidal thoughts for the first time in my life and there was no one to talk to. There wasn’t support networks for this kind of thing back then. I wouldn’t say it spoiled everything, but it definitely soiled it a bit. I was young, free and having a whale of a time, yet I was carrying this fucking huge weight around that I couldn’t talk to anyone about. I think that informed most of what I did and how I reacted to a lot of things – like nothing’s important. That’s when I started thinking: “When’s it going to be?” It hasn’t happened at twenty-seven, twentyeight, and every year since then I’ve thought: “This is going to be the year where I bow out.” I used to tell people that it’s a good job I’m from England, because if I’d been from America I could’ve got a hold of a gun and then I would’ve just done it one day. Cocaine definitely didn’t help, because it completely depletes your serotonin levels. Alcohol is a depressant. If you’re clinically depressed, and you have cocaine and alcohol, they end up killing you one way or another. But fifty-six years old and I still haven’t done it, so it’s looking good. ³
“Creative people, it’s not really a choice, it’s a glorious punishment.”
I remember going to Top Of The Pops with you [in 1995] for I Wanna Go Where the People Go. Oasis were on the show, and Liam Gallagher was giving you the stink eye. You just gave him the face. He was a boy; you were a man. That was the first time it struck me how far you had come since your Quireboys days. Well, those days were the first time I’d really thought about depression. Which makes a lot of sense why things happened the way they did. Back then no one talked about depression. Especially not from Newcastle. I was finding I was battling something every day that was
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GINGER WILDHEART
Ginger and son Jake at Hammersmith Apollo on the Britrock Must Be Destroyed tour.
The Wildhearts flying high at Koko, London, 2018.
Was music your life raft? I don’t know how anyone can exist without music or seeing the medicinal properties that it has. Whether I’m listening to music or I’m writing it, I’ve got that outlet. I just crawl into my guitar and the emotions come out. And then when that comes out commercially and someone says it affected them, it’s bigger than a hobby. Growing up, all the artists I liked weren’t very successful. Sparks being a prime example. It only gets as good lyrically and creatively as Sparks. Other people could describe them as underachievers, but they were my band. Maria McKee never got to be a great star. Fishbone didn’t get to be as big as the Red Hot Chili Peppers. It was music first, commerce second, and they kept making it. Sparks have got, like, thirty albums or something now? I’m still catching up.
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Ever fancy a night off? Well, I used to think that you had to choose. Which is why the band split up because I wanted to do something different. Now you don’t have to choose. If I get a song and that’s a Wildhearts one, push it in that bag, or if that’s a Sinners one push it in another bag. Then I’ve got another lot, what am I going to do with them? You put it in another bag and it ends up as a solo album. I feel pregnant with music, it needs to fucking get out. If I’ve got something in my mind and I don’t record it, it’ll turn into a virus in my brain. With Mutation, we couldn’t finish the first album, it took years to finish it, but I knew it only had a lifespan of three albums. Creative people,
The last time I heard, you had two children. Have there been any more? I still have those two and there’s another one. Two children to one lady and one child to another lady. But you live alone? No, I live with my dog, Maggie. Any later-life regrets about not marrying, or do you see the benefits now of the fact that you haven’t been stuck in one place?
“I could scream at the unfairness of my childhood, but most people are going through a terrible childhood.”
WILL IRELAND x3
he Wildhearts broke up the first time at the end of 1997. That was followed by a tremendous outpouring of other projects for Ginger: Supershit 666, Silver Ginger 5, Howling Willie Cunt. This carried on through the years: side-jobs like Mutation and Hey! Hello!; the online G*A*S*S* fan club project; online diaries; crowd-funded
albums, his own record label, Round Records; guesting with The Throbs, Jason And The Scorchers, Backyard Babies, Brides Of Destruction and many others. There have been various solo albums over the years, embracing styles of metal, punk, pop, country, folk, rockabilly and – back with The Wildhearts since 2001 – a kaleidoscope of blends and flavours.
it’s not really a choice, it’s a glorious punishment. I can’t just enjoy being in The Wildhearts, same as the rest of the guys can, because there’s so many problem makers. Or there’s a ballad that I can’t do with The Wildhearts that I need to do. The best thing about being a creative person is being led down these weird dark alleys and have no idea if it’s a fucking cul-de-sac or a fucking Utopia. Let’s not get too far down this one, but the alien power of the universe, now that’s finally getting acknowledged and declassified, is that they’ve got a purpose here. They’ve been here forever, they’ve got a purpose, don’t know what it is. Presumably it was some kind of genetic thing, which has always made sense. We were 250 million years of dinosaurs and then humans came along about 250,000 years ago. Fucking hell, it’s moving quick. There’s got to [have been] some extraterrestrial intervention. That makes sense of why I’ve nearly died so many times and I’m kept here, because I’m important to someone. I’m not a religious person, and I don’t believe in guardian angels, but it’s definitely weird that I haven’t died yet. Whatever it is, it’s nothing like we think. They’re not putting the keys in the spaceship, flying from Venus to visit us. It makes sense that there’s portals, different dimensions. We’re threedimensional beings, we don’t understand fourth dimensional and fifth dimensional things. So if it is fifth dimensional, we can only see where a thirddimensional being can see. The thing is so out of our understanding. I presume they’re older than dinosaurs, and this planet is a Petri dish. And we’ve just got to ask loads of questions and keep our minds open. It’s the reason why I’ve got so much self-belief in the music that I do. Not as a person, I’ve got very little self-belief for myself as a person. I don’t even think of myself as an artist until I’m talking to you about me.
I don’t know about the benefits of not getting married. It’d be horrible to say that. [But] anyone who’s a little bit of a cynic would look up the success rate of marriage and go, like, if I was bungee jumping [I wouldn’t risk it], you know what I mean? My ex- who’s got my current kids, we’re best friends, we’ve got nothing but the best in mind for each other and she runs my record label. I know she’s not going to rip me off, because all the money goes to feed our little boy. That’s beautiful that music’s helped feed my family. As long as I keep the quality up. I have a lot of love, which doesn’t always happen when there’s someone hanging around all the time. I don’t fight with anyone on a regular basis. It’s almost like this is my payback to get to do this. I don’t want money. I’ve never been interested in money. I just like the idea of not worrying about money. And I’ve afforded myself that. I’ve got a job for life, really. That’s pretty good.
WILL IRELAND
Was there ever a moment in your career where a Sharon Osbourne-type figure approached you? Like: “Stick with me kid, and you’ll have a mansion with a guitarshaped swimming pool.” Yeah, quite a few times. Thankfully none of it panned out. They eventually realised I’m impossible to market. And I realised that they haven’t got my best interests at heart. You just look at the amount of people that are chasing the big payday with the hit. It hobbles people, the songwriter’s success. There are very few examples of it not affecting people negatively. Success and money, it turns people lazy. Maybe they were lazy already, but people’s output gets a lot less when they have some success and some money. This management that thought they were going to do that, I won’t cheapen it by saying the names, but I’m glad it didn’t work. Things couldn’t be better for me, because I’m in control. I can do pretty much what I want, as long as I believe in it and the kids all get fed. You eventually put The Wildhearts back together with CJ back in the band. How did that work in your mind? We hadn’t recorded anything for about ten years, but we did used to do gigs, usually around Christmas, so everybody had some money for Christmas. We used to see each other, me, CJ and Ritch [Battersby, drummer], and usually get together at my birthday bash [December 17]. We’d do a little Wildhearts set. We’ve always been really good friends and respect each other very much. Danny [McCormack, bass], on the other hand, went into the wilderness for a long time, lost a leg, terrible nightmare stories that he’s got. We did a tour with Terrorvision and Reef [the 2018 Britrock Must Be Destroyed tour] where we said: “Let’s just see if we can get through a tour before we talk about anything else.” We did, and people were saying: “Oh my God, it sounded
“I’m not a religious person, but it’s definitely weird that I haven’t died yet.” great.” So, the next thing was I better do [a Wildhearts] album then. At least that will be a snapshot before one of us does die. You know? And we’ve just done the second one now. It’s the Wildhearts. We all know this band so well. We know what we’re not going to get out of it, as much as what we’re going to get out of it. In what way? It’s going to be tiresome. It’s going to cost you things. I’ve always liked pathologically honest bands, like The Replacements and things like that. The Wildhearts is very much like that. You got to be careful expecting too much from it, because that’s not what it is. There is something very speedy about The Wildhearts. That will be the speed.
Yet you wrote a song called Sick Of Drugs. Which was supposed to come out on April the first, but the record company fucked it up. It came out on April the third. So it was a spoof? Yeah. We weren’t sick of drugs then. Sorry. I am sick of drugs now, though. It looks better when you’re young. But there’s still problems with drugs surrounding The Wildhearts. And there always will be, only now it’s more of a drag. Yeah, back then it was highly ironic. I stayed up all night and wrote Sick Of Drugs and Red Light, Green Light and I wrote them on speed. The new album, 21st Century Love Songs, crackles and burns right from the minute it begins. The title track jumps out at you. Sleep Away softens the pace a teeny bit and is uber-catchy. ³ CLASSICROCKMAGAZINE.COM 45
GINGER WILDHEART
[Points to the corner of the room] That’s my stereo from the eighties. It still works perfect. I’ve got to get a new stylus every now and again, but I’m still completely addicted to vinyl. Every other day I get a new vinyl, because I’ve won ebay auctions. That’s part of the addiction as well. But I’m going back and doing my education on earlyseventies music that kind of passed me by. Americana and British roots rock. I’ve never got into Wishbone Ash or Caravan. Steely Dan I never got into. But I keep hearing the names and it’s been great. I’m a huge Steely Dan fan at fifty-six years old.
Do you think your childhood traumas became the grit in the oyster that made the pearl, so to speak? I’ve got a story I like to tell. First time we did Top Of The Pops it was done on a Tuesday, shown on a Thursday. Life was really chaotic and I put in an appearance [at home]. I didn’t even know what day it was. But it popped up on the telly. I was like: “Huh, this is weird.” And my stepfather went: “David, you’re not much of a singer, are you?” I was like: “I’m on the telly.” He went: “You’re not much of a frontman either, are you? You should probably just get a proper singer in your band.” I remember thinking I’ve made this leap from leaving home to currently be on a TV show most people in England are watching, and it meant nothing. I think, could I ever be that dismissive about anything in my kids’ lives? And that taught me one of many lessons on how to deal with things: to not expect things to be good and not expect people to be supportive. Then when you find good supportive people, tattoo them on to yourself, or The Wildhearts at London’s Hammersmith Apollo in 2018: (l-r) Danny McCormack, handcuff yourself to them. Don’t let Ginger, CJ, Ritch Battersby. them go. Because you know what it’s like on the other side. It’s made me a good judge of character. poor mother, and you and your sister. Have you ever had therapy for it? It’s inspiring hearing you talk. Because I know No, not yet. But it’s still an option. I don’t write you have big ups and downs, or have had. stuff like that off. I’m actually weaning myself off I still do. the last medication I’m hopefully ever going to take. I’m glad that medication helps people get Is it like: “Today is a good day,” and not overover the hump, but it’s not helping them in the concern yourself with tomorrow, which long run, because it just puts these things to one might not be a good day? side. Yeah. I could go mad about it. I could scream One day you can wake up good and it could turn at the unfairness of my childhood, but most bad by the afternoon, and vice versa. You can wake up in a terrible place, and someone, or my dog, will put me in a better mood. What normally happens is I keep myself busy during the day, and then in the evening it hits me. It’s just a juggling act to get Maggie for her final walk and people are going through a terrible childhood, then get up to bed and find a movie to watch and especially my generation. They loved you, but they then everything is good. Me and my dog have didn’t tell you. They didn’t want to make you soft. both put on weight because we’re in bed early to You didn’t get cuddles and stuff. No. maximize the happiness of the day and we’ve both A lot of people that I know went through that been snacking a bit too much. I’m starting a fast to sort of thing. Mine was specific to my life, but get into shape, which is going to be fun. She’s not I don’t think it was any better or worse. A one going to like it, but it’s going to be fun. hundred per cent awful childhood is a one There’s a saying: ‘A dog wags its tail, not hundred per cent awful childhood, its tongue.’ even if it meant missing a Christmas We’re going to put her out as an emotional every now and again. Mine was a bit assistance dog. I brought her up as a puppy and more extreme than that. But it made I’ve trained her. She knows when there’s a wave me realise that all I’ve got to do to be on the way before I know it. She’ll come up and do a better father than the ones that were this thing where she kind of puts her weight on me there for me is stick around and and I have to keep a hold of her so she’s engaging be supportive. I’m so soppy me in something. I’m like: “Oh, I wasn’t even with my kids. My youngest is aware that I was in a bad mood.” Dogs are now a teen. We’re just so tactile incredible. For the most part we don’t deserve and so loving. He’s got no them, but some of us do. concept of things not being like that. I can’t change what The Wildhearts’ 21st Century Love Songs is out happened to me, but I can now via Graphite Records. change things for them.
“When you find good supportive people, don’t let them go.”
You say that’s the addiction now. Do you feel that you are an addictive personality, or an obsessive one? Yeah, yeah. You could say it’s a healthy addiction now, but I don’t suppose any addiction is healthy. Thankfully I’ve never had to give up all my vices. I still enjoy a drink, which never gets to be embarrassing or anything like that. The things I get addicted to now are just a stimulant. I haven’t got a lot of choice. If it’s unhealthy, I’m going to have to wrestle it to the ground and beat it on points. I see a guitar, and I can’t think of anything else other than this guitar; it has to be mine. Even if it’s a bass. I don’t play bass, but I bought a bass recently that I saw and was like: “There’s only one thing wrong with that – I haven’t got one.” I’m still very addictive, but it’s a lot cheaper than crack. And better quality.
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WILL IRELAND x2
I was rereading some of your online diary the other day, and the stuff about your stepfather, and your
Making a point on the Britrock Must Be Destroyed tour. CLASSICROCKMAGAZINE.COM 47
A huge amount of rock’n’roll is built on great live guitar work. All the players featured here – and many more besides – have laid down enough killer solos, licks and riffs to fill more magazines than we’ll ever have the time or manpower to make. Then there are those instances, captured on record or on camera, that truly stand out; those iconic moments in rock’s history when the guitar (and, crucially, the person playing it) transcends boundaries, forges new paths for subsequent generations or just really freaks out everyone fortunate enough to be watching. Whether through one-off collaborations, reunions, genuinely magical playing (Clapton’s finest Crossroads solo, Prince’s George Harrison homage), envelope-pushing instrumentation (Jimmy Page’s bow, Rick Nielsen’s five-necked axe) or shocking stage antics (Jimi’s flaming guitar at Monterey, Blackmore losing his shit at Cal Jam), the guitar has been central to some incredible live moments. Here, we think, are some of the best… Words: Amit Sharma, Polly Glass, Henry Yates, Ian Fortnam, Paul Henderson, Damian Fanelli, Richard Bienstock, Andy Aledort, Joe Bosso 48 CLASSICROCKMAGAZINE.COM
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Sister Rosetta Tharpe shreds with fury TV Gospel Time, mid-60s Footage of Sister Rosetta Tharpe’s earth-shaking guitar playing continues to go viral, and rightly so. Very few video recordings of Tharpe (who’s often called ‘the Godmother of Rock’n’Roll’) exist, which only adds to her legend. In one of her most famous clips she’s performing Up Above My Head on TV Gospel Time, proudly wielding her ’62 Gibson Les Paul Custom with the Olivet Institutional Baptist Church Choir behind her. The sheer ferocity in her playing is phenomenal, even by today’s standards.
Bob Dylan plugs in Newport Folk Festival, 1965 For many of the committed folk purists attending the 1965 Rhode Island festival, Bob Dylan committed the ultimate sin. They were expecting an acoustic performance; instead their poster boy turned up with an unannounced band and plugged in and played his firstever electric set. It was an act of rebelliousness that forged a path for so many artists who followed. At the time, however, it was a lot for the audience to take in; radio broadcaster John Gilliland described how the acoustic prophet “electrified one half of his audience and electrocuted the other”. The following year in Manchester, Dylan was famously heckled “Judas!” for the same reasons.
Jimi Hendrix lets us stand next to his fire – literally Monterey Pop festival, California, 1967
Fiddling about: Jimmy Page with The Yardbirds in 1967.
Mary duels with Paul, on Les Pauls The Colgate Comedy Hour, 1954 In the 1950s, when the name Les Paul was spoken it was often in tandem with that of Mary Ford, his wife and musical partner. The duo were among the biggest recording artists of the early 50s, with 16 Top-10 hits. In 1951 alone, they sold six million records. Small wonder that in 1952 Gibson sought out Les to put his name on their new solid-body electric guitar. While Ford was the featured singer on the couple’s songs, she was also a fine guitarist, as heard in a famous – and 100 percent live – YouTube clip (search for ‘Les Paul & Mary Ford Live Part 2 Of 3’) from a performance on US TV show The Colgate Comedy Hour originally aired in March ‘54. In the clip, Les and Mary perform a mock guitar battle during a performance of There’s No Place Like Home.
Chuck Berry’s ‘duck walk’ is born The Alan Freed Show, Paramount Theater, New York City, 1956
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The Beatles light a (figurative) fire The Ed Sullivan Show, February 9, 1964 “Seeing The Beatles on Sullivan was a defining moment in my and millions of other guys’ lives, all of us naively thinking: ‘I wanna do that!’” Aerosmith’s Joe Perry tells us. Yes, it’s no secret The Beatles helped popularise guitars more than any band before them. Instrument orders skyrocketed as a direct consequence of their debut live appearance on American TV’s The Ed Sullivan Show on February 9, 1964, which broke records for its viewing audience – going out to 73 million people, almost half a TV-watching nation. “I read somewhere that after The Beatles appeared on [the Sullivan shows] Gretsch sold 20,000 guitars a week, or something like that,” said George Harrison, who played a walnut Gretsch Country Gentleman that day. “I mean, we would have had shares in… Gretsch and everything, but we didn’t know.”
Jimmy Page wields a violin bow for the first time Bouton Rouge, France, 1967 The sight of Jimmy Page, bow in hand, lurching around the stage, is one of rock’s most iconic, and is written into Led Zeppelin lore thanks to its central role in Dazed And Confused. Page’s guitar-bowing premiere was actually when he was in The Yardbirds, when that song was more a prototype beast, not yet the grandstanding epic it would become on Led Zeppelin, and there’s a rawness and an eerie, Eastern mystique to its first appearance, in 1967. Technically Page wasn’t the first rock star to make use of this technique (that, as far as we know, was British guitarist Eddie Phillips, who used a bow on his guitar from 1963 as a member of The Mark Four and The Creation), but the way Jimmy used it, in both sound and appearance, is by far the most memorable.
Clapton’s Crossroads solo like you’ve never seen it Winterland Ballroom, San Francisco, 1968 Cream bassist/vocalist Jack Bruce has said that Cream played better versions of Crossroads than the one at
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Charles Edward Anderson Berry became a star in the 50s, but it was this show – in particular the debut of this now-infamous stage move – that would ingrain him into the fabric of live rock’n’roll. Guitarist T-Bone Walker was ‘duck walking’ back in the 30s, but it was Berry who made it popular. It was later famously copied by
AC/DC’s Angus Young. There’s some debate as to when Berry did that show (he told the Washington Post it was 1956, though other sources suggest it was 1955). Similarly, his reasons for doing it in the first place have been subject to speculation (some say it was based on a move he did as a child, others argue it was an attempt to hide the wrinkles in his suit). Either way, it became a signature part of his stage show, making him ultimately more memorable – and more imitated – than his peers.
Very few images, if any, epitomise the dawn of a new age for rock’n’roll as much as Ed Caraeff’s shot of Jimi Hendrix sacrificing his Strat to the flames during Wild Thing at the end of his landmark set. It’s symbolic for so many reasons, although arguably it’s the sheer look of unabashed amazement and joy on his face, almost in a state of surrender to the flames rising from the melting pickups. It was actually Hendrix’s second attempt at a guitar-meets-lighter-fuel flare-up, having surprised audiences in London a few months earlier while playing Fire, and perhaps surprising himself too – he later visited hospital in need of treatment for minor burns.
Sister Rosetta Tharpe ripping it up on tour in the UK in 1964.
Winterland in March ’68 that first appeared on their album Wheels Of Fire. If they did, then it’s a crying shame they weren’t recorded, as they must have been stupendous. Because that performance of the Robert Johnson tune 53 years ago is still one of the most spinetingling four minutes and 13 seconds of live rock music ever (thankfully) committed to tape. In a thunderous reading of a song that Cream often just skipped through, Clapton plays out-of-this-world double solos that are precise, controlled, electrifying, jaw-dropping, the second one hitting just when you’re marvelling, still bedazzled, at the first one. Truly magnificent.
The Allman Brothers Band make southern rock history Fillmore East, New York City, 1971 Few live albums feel as career-encapsulating as the Allman Brothers Band’s At Fillmore East, a double album recorded over two consecutive nights in March 1971, to the point where it’s these renditions of the songs on it that have since become the renditions. The interplay between the band members over these drawn-out, elongated jams is what set them the Allmans apart. At the very forefront of their brilliance was Duane Allman, a figure still regarded as one of the greatest slide players of all time, trading against the dynamics of founding guitarist and occasional singer Dickey Betts’s bluesy contributions.
Ziggy fellates Ronno’s axe Oxford Town Hall, 1972 In January 1972, Bowie unveiled Ziggy Stardust in all his androgynous glory. Around the same time, Bowie came out as gay (he’d later come out as bisexual), paving the way for a persona that changed the image of ambiguous sexuality in the mainstream. Draping his arm around guitarist Mick Ronson’s shoulders may seem like regular rock-star behaviour now, but at the time – only five years after the legalisation of homosexuality in the UK – it was as revolutionary as it was outrageous. It all came to a head, so to speak, at Oxford Town Hall in June that year, when Bowie/Ziggy took the whole guitar-as-a-penis-extension idea to a new, rather more literal place. Known as the ‘guitar fellatio’ moment, Bowie’s expression of appreciation for Ronson’s… erm, instrument, was repeated at subsequent shows, carving its way into rock history.
Rory Gallagher risks life and limb Ulster Hall, Belfast, 1972 It is rumoured that when Hendrix was once asked how it felt to be the world’s greatest guitarist, he replied: “I don’t know. Go ask Rory Gallagher.” We’ll never know for certain exactly what was said, but the Irish singerguitarist would have certainly been worthy of such high
Getting down: Bowie and Mick Ronson create a classic image in rock history. praise. When he performed at Belfast’s Ulster Hall on New Year’s Day 1972, there hadn’t been a rock concert there in over six months. Understandably so, given that it was at the very height of the Troubles, at a time when multiple car bombs were going off a night. If anyone was going to find a way through the chaos, it always going to be Gallagher, whose father was from Derry, the second-largest city in Northern Ireland, and whose mother came from Cork, the second-largest south of the border. What he delivered that night was some much-needed escapism from the continual unrest and lingering threat of death, using blues to heal and unite on an island where religion and politics had so tragically conquered and divided.
BB King reduces prison inmates to tears Sing Sing Prison, New York, 1973 Johnny Cash’s Folsom set might be better-known, but the sight of BB King bringing hardened convicts to tears in this notoriously harsh, maximum-security institution in New York is nothing short of magic. The Thanksgiving day show, including behind-the-scenes footage, with performances by Joan Baez and others, was captured in full by filmmaker David Hoffman, and it was Guess Who (originally a crooning, piano-led ballad by Jesse Belvin) that saw BB. and ‘Lucille’ grab the hearts of those watching. Alternating between big, bear-like soul vocals and sweet, from-the-gut blues solos, he gave one of his defining performances behind Sing Sing’s bars.
Ritchie Blackmore losing his shit at California Jam Ontario Motor Speedway, California, 1974 Backstage at this huge outdoor festival the MkIII Deep Purple played in ‘74, tensions had been running high. Blackmore in particular was more than a bit pissed off, and when he hits the stage it shows. Gear is dismantled. Guitars – so many guitars – are destroyed, lobbed into the crowd, rammed into the lens of a pesky cameraman that kept getting in Blackmore’s way. Amps explode, sending smoke and flames across the stage – only just missing Glenn Hughes’s skin-tight flares. It’s like a scene from Dante’s Inferno, with guitars and several burning amp heads. Through it all, Blackmore fixes those around him with steady, serial-killer eyes, like it’s no big deal. Frankly, everything else that’s happened on any rock stage ever looks tame compared to this.
Thin Lizzy’s Still In Love With You at its finest Hammersmith Odeon, London, 1976 Still In Love With You, a truly heartbreaking song, was proof (if anyone needed it) that Thin Lizzy really weren’t just about good-time shitkickers like The Boys Are Back In Town and Jailbreak. Frontman Phil Lynott is on devastating form on this performance, the song’s defining live rendition (it would go on to appear on Lizzy’s seminal live album Live And Dangerous), but ³ CLASSICROCKMAGAZINE.COM 51
One giant leap for rock: Pete Townshend with The Who circa 1978.
technoflash were never Cramps guitarist Poison Ivy’s stock in trade, she’s as reliably stoic as the day’s long. Her entire career was typified by unshakeable poise. Despite the auto-destructive FrankenIggy antics of the wildly unpredictable Lux Interior perpetually playing out about her (in scraps of lingerie, teetering on stilettos, crawling up her legs with a microphone down his throat), the ice-cool, Elvis-sneering Ivy simply set to work teasing forth her Scotty Moore runs and Link Wray rumbles. Her trademark grace under pressure never faced a sterner test than at Napa State Mental Hospital where the unstoppable force (Lux) faced the immovable object (the hospital inmates) with neither stage nor security. Captured in shaky, psychobilly Cuckoo’s Nest, snuff-movie monochrome, poker-faced Ivy casually delivers Human Fly’s gloriously understated guitar solo as one patient in the audience screams maniacally into Lux’s abandoned microphone and another performs enthusiastic ‘press-ups’ at her feet. Über-cool incarnate.
Having a smashing time: Ritchie Blackmore with Deep Purple at the California Jam, April 6, 1974. it’s Brian Robertson and Scott Gorham’s solos that really elevate it above all others, with Gorham soaring in with Santana-esque tones to compliment his bluesy partner in crime, both guitarists leaving their hearts on the strings. Robertson, who left the band at the end of the tour that this features on, reportedly considers Still In Love With You his signature Lizzy song.
Van Halen show us what they’re made of Pasadena Convention Center, 1977
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Keith Richards fights off a stage invader Hampton Coliseum, Virginia, 1981
Shepperton Film Studios, Surrey, 1978 Filmed before an invited audience specifically for The Who’s movie The Kids Are Alright, the band’s visceral assault on Won’t Get Fooled Again, the climactic closing track on their 1971 album Who’s Next, marked not only Townshend’s defining live guitar moment, but also drummer Keith Moon’s final performance. As Roger Daltrey punctuated primal über-mod roars with bouts of alpha-male microphone twirling, and John Entwistle morosely applied himself to delivering a dazzling display of bass guitar dexterity, Pete Townshend capered, spun, windmilled, leaped and generally beat the living shit out of his instrument. Possibly the most physical player around, Townshend’s passion teetered on the brink of madness as lasers lacerated a pulsing synth breakdown that only offered apprehensive calm before the inevitable storm. As Daltrey screamed his iconoclastic ‘Yeah!’, Townshend simultaneously power-chorded and took flight, finally landing a cross-stage knee-slide that really has to be seen to be believed. Awesome.
Poison Ivy keeps her cool in a mental institution Napa State Mental Hospital, California, 1978 While show-stealing spats of improvisational
If anyone ever found themselves invading a stage occupied by the Rolling Stones, then hopefully they took great care to avoid Keith Richards at all costs. Because, as one over-enthusiastic fan found out when he invaded Keith’s space at a gig at the beginning of the 80s, he would probably take off his Telecaster, wave it around and beat you with it until you leave. Footage of him doing that was uploaded by the Stones themselves a few years ago – perhaps as a stark warning to anyone mad enough to be thinking about gatecrashing their set.
Rick Nielsen’s five-neck guitar arrives Chicagofest 1981 It was the year Cheap Trick guitarist Rick Nielsen’s fiveneck monster came into being, and the mad-for-it hometown crowd proved its joyous, cartoonish appeal – whooping in delight as it was whipped out for Just Got Back. Built by laminating the bodies of five Hamer Specials together, it’s one of the most bonkers, backbreaking and, ultimately, iconic guitars in rock. “The original concept was to have a six-neck that spun like a roulette wheel, so that I could play one neck and then rotate to the next,” Nielsen says, “but then I decided to go with something more conservative – five necks in a row!” Yeah, five necks in a row is really conservative. ³
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If any concert marked the arrival of Van Halen, it was this (since widely bootlegged) performance in their home city just weeks after recording their gamechanging debut album. Guitarist Eddie Van Halen, then only 22, was already very much the full package, from those perfectly overdriven tones to his whammy-bar stunts and, arguably the most groundbreaking of all, the two-handed licks covering great distance at high speed with natural finesse. Armed with a killer set of their earliest songs, the band were taking no prisoners, which is what makes the recordings such a wildly enticing listen all these years later – dazzling charisma and talent captured in its full, unadulterated glory. Guitar music would never be the same again. “Friends, it’s true, Van Halen is here,” singer David Lee Roth said with a grin as Eddie tuned his higher strings. “Do you know when we started out here, there weren’t too many people, but now it appears things have changed!”
Pete Townshend’s epic knee-slide at Shepperton
Prince plays a truly astonishing solo on While My Guitar Gently Weeps at The 19th Annual Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame Induction Ceremony.
Stevie Ray Vaughan gets booed by blues ‘purists’ Montreux Jazz Festival, Switzerland, 1982 To a present-day Stevie Ray Vaughan fan, the idea of the iconic blues maverick being booed by anyone is unthinkable. That he rose above it all so brilliantly speaks volumes about his innate virtuosity and no-bullshit character. During his performance of Texas Flood at the ’82 Montreux Jazz Festival, Vaughan reached into his bag of Albert King-meets-Jimi licks – not to mention reaching behind his back, where his Strat rested for the final quarter of the epic performance. SRV floored almost everyone that night; a handful of very loud-andclear blues purists can be heard (and clearly seen in YouTube clips) booing him, bassist Tommy Shannon and drummer Chris Layton. Still, he must have known it went well when David Bowie appeared backstage, and an important alliance was born.
A young Dimebag Darrell rips it up Projects In The Jungle tour, 1984 You don’t have to look hard to find video footage of groove metal superstar Dimebag Darrell doing what he did best. And while there’s an abundance of material from Pantera’s glory years, it’s a video from their second-album tour – shot in 1984 when the guitarist was just 18 – which surfaced some 13 years ago that best showcases just what a world-beating talent he was at such a young age. During an elongated guitar solo, he rips through Van Halen and Randy Rhoads licks at blistering speeds, almost without a care in the world. It offered proof that he was destined to become the guitar hero for a new age.
Queen at Wembley Stadium stun the world
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Live Aid, 1985 Even Bob Geldof admitted that, despite stiff competition from Led Zeppelin, Elton John and David Bowie, Queen were the undisputed highlight of the pair of charity concerts he organised in 1985. With a tight 20-minute set-list comprising Bohemian Rhapsody’s first half, Radio Ga Ga, Hammer To Fall, Crazy Little Thing Called Love, parts of We Will Rock You and finally We Are the
We are the champions: Queen at Live Aid, Wembley Stadium, July 13, 1985. Champions, it’s easy to understand why. It was the moment when they reminded us just how wonderfully Brian May’s snarling mids (paired with Freddie’s soaring vocals) led those skyrocketing anthems.
Giving it their all for Les Paul Brooklyn Academy Of Music, 1988 On August 18, 1988, a now-hard-to-fathom collection of famous guitarists got together to celebrate the life and music of guitar great Les Paul, who was 73 at the time. The show, which was released on VHS (with an ridiculously long title), brought Paul on to the same stage with Eddie Van Halen, David Gilmour, Brian Setzer (who bellowed: “Hey, Eddie Van Halen, get your butt up here, man!”), BB King, Stanley Jordan, Steve Miller and even Waylon Jennings. This show has become even more poignant now that some of its biggest stars – Paul, Eddie and BB – have passed on. It’s a bit like that video of George Harrison, Eric Clapton and Ringo Starr performing While My Guitar Gently Weeps in 1987; it was cool then, but it’s priceless now.
Tom Morello slays Bullet In The Head at the BBC The Late Show, BBC studios, London, 1993
Just occasionally, the BBC pulls a blinder. By 1993, most of America’s alt.rock’s big beasts had visited BBC2’s high-minded arts show The Late Show, including Pearl Jam, Sonic Youth and Jane’s Addiction. But almost three decades later it’s Rage Against The Machine’s live take on Bullet In The Head that remains white-hot in the memory. It was a performance so blistering and bristling that it threatened to splinter the nation’s TV screens, with frontman Zack De La Rocha’s f-bombs and his ‘Fuct’ T-shirt enough to give squeamish producers the cold sweats. But it was guitarist Tom Morello who scrawled six-string revolution in flaming foot-high letters, kicking off with a fair impression of a Black & Decker drill, kneeling before a Marshall stack to conjure screeds of frayed morse code from his Arm The Homeless guitar, and attacking the song’s anarchic final straight like a man with seconds to live. The Beeb had never seen anything like it.
Nirvana go acoustic Sony Music Studios, New York City, 1993 There are numerous factors as to why Nirvana’s MTV Unplugged In New York set would become one of their most renowned. As the band’s first release in the aftermath of Kurt Cobain’s death, those live recordings were a stark reminder of what the world had just lost – a brilliantly talented songwriter whose thoughtprovoking lyrics, chordal simplicity and chromatic single-note motifs made a difference to many lives. It was often his imperfections that made him such a truly left-field visionary. A case in point is the opening part of his outro solo on the cover of David Bowie’s The Man Who Sold The World, which may very well have been a mistake. If it was a mistake, then the way he owns it and recovers is what makes the interpretation perhaps even better than exact correctness, giving the line a somewhat menacing, atonal flavor.
Prince dazzles on an allstar cover of a Beatles song New York City, 2004 An all-star tribute to George Harrison – featuring an impressive collection of some of his friends (Tom Petty, Jeff Lynne, Steve Winwood) – was planned for the 2004 Rock ‘N’ Roll Hall Of Fame Show at the Waldorf Astoria. As Prince was in attendance for his own induction, he was also invited to play with them. On Harrison’s While My Guitar Gently Weeps, Jeff Lynne’s guitarist Marc Mann took the first solo. But as the coda commenced, Prince cooly strolled on to ³ CLASSICROCKMAGAZINE.COM 55
Big Four become Big One: members of Metallica, Megadeth, Anthrax and Slayer share the stage at Sonisphere, Sofia, Bulgaria, 2010. the stage, and delivered a searing, Hendrix-channeling extended closing solo that incorporated joy, passion, dazzling showmanship and sheer brilliance. As George’s son Dhani Harrison (playing acoustic rhythm) looked on beaming, Prince emoted, extemporised, lolled backwards on to outstretched hands, and finally threw his HS Anderson Mad Cat guitar over his head (where it disappeared, like a magic trick) before casually bouncing off into the wings. Disappearing guitar or not, no single performance captured Prince’s unique magic better than this one.
frontman Corey Taylor, before portcullis-faced Mick Thomson unleashes the anvil-heavy riff whose fathoms-deep, drop-A tuning threatened to shoot a fault line across the churning turf of Donington Park. No doubt there have been esoteric cult-metallers who have dropped lower still for the benefit of a basementclub crowd, but never before have so many souls been left so shaken on this epic scale.
that should have made songwriter Brian Tatler a household name. As the Sonisphere stage filled with hair and hornéd guitars, the six-string contingent forming an unholy chorus line, only the absence of Slayer’s Kerry King, Jeff Hanneman and Tom Araya took the shine off this moment of metal synergy. “The other guys,” shrugged Dave Lombardo (who did show up), “they don’t do that kind of thing.”
Joe Bonamassa duets with Eric Clapton
Led Zeppelin remind us of their genius
Royal Albert Hall, London, 2009
David Gilmour climbs up Roger Waters’s Wall
O2 Arena, London, 2007 Will the Ahmet Ertegun Tribute Concert end up being the last time we see the surviving members of Led Zeppelin on stage together? Quite possibly. “I knew it was going to sell out quickly, but the tidal wave of euphoria that preceded the gig, the anticipation, went beyond what I could possibly have imagined,” Jimmy Page said after the event. “We’d had a few shambolic appearances in the past, like Live Aid, so if we were ever going to come back together we were going to do it properly and stand up and be counted.” Which is precisely what they did, thundering their way through Zeppelin classics such as Ramble On, Trampled Under Foot, No Quarter and Kashmir (and let’s not forget For Your Life!) with John Bonham’s son Jason behind the kit.
Slipknot go Psychosocial
Joe Bonamassa had bet his house on his Albert Hall booking (“Behind the scenes, we could have gone out of business”) he admitted in the Guitar Man documentary. But while that night’s assured performance marked his flip from plucky upstart to top-table bluesman, Bonamassa’s coming of age was given the rubber stamp by the blues-boom hero whose licks had been the voice of god in his teenage years. Even out of context, this Bonamassa/Eric Clapton spin through Bobby ‘Blue’ Bland’s classic Further On Up The Road was punchy and powerful. More significant, though, was the younger man’s mile-wide grin at the end, the handshake and the sense of a torch being passed. “I knew it was either gonna be the beginning of the end or the beginning of the beginning,” Bonamassa said. “I owe Eric a debt that I can never repay.”
If you’ve ever wondered what thousands of people losing their shit at the same time sounds like, look up this moment on YouTube. Even with all the acrimony that existed before (and indeed after), David Gilmour’s surprise appearance, on a spine-tingling Comfortably Numb, made it seem that all was right in the Pink Floyd universe for a few magical minutes. For a moment, even Waters became a Gilmour fan again, a look of genuine delight on his face as his old bandmate delivered a perfect slice of the style that made him one of the most emulated guitarists in rock. Maybe the six years since their last gig together (Live 8) had proved healing. Maybe it helped that they were separated by a 35-foot wall. Either way, with Gilmour’s starry, searing guitar lines leading the way, it was a moment of bright light in an otherwise darkened relationship.
The ‘Big Four’ reunite for an Am I Evil? jam
Angus Young meets GN’R Coachella festival, Indio, California 2016
It was a thrasher’s wet dream. It was unfeasible enough that the four architects of 80s metal had buried not inconsiderable hatchets in order to share the same bill. But the real ‘do not adjust your set’ moment – captured for posterity on the Live From Sofia, Bulgaria release – was Metallica, Megadeth, Anthrax and (some of) Slayer locking horns in a climactic jam. Politically, of course, the song choice was loaded with friction – even a mollified Dave Mustaine wouldn’t touch Enter Sandman with a bargepole. But common ground was found with Am I Evil?, the 1980 Diamond Head classic
2016 was a big year in terms of ‘guitar events’. You had Guns N’ Roses’ Not in This Lifetime… tour featuring Axl Rose, Slash and Duff McKagan, and AC/DC’s Axlfronted tour (Rose was filling in for Brian Johnson, who was sidelined by issues with his hearing). The event that tied them both together, however, took place that April, when AC/DC’s Angus Young joined GN’R on stage at the Coachella Valley Music And Arts Festival. The eternal schoolboy put his all into Whole Lotta Rosie and Riff Raff, and Axl (who was still singing from his Dave Grohl-owned ‘recovery throne’) nailed the Bon Scottera vocals. Not a bad year, eh?
Sonisphere, Sofia, Bulgaria, 2010
Download festival, Castle Donington, 2009
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ROSS HALFIN
It takes a special kind of heaviosity to quake the innards of Download’s volume-hardened crowd. But in 2009, an hour into their Saturday headline set, Slipknot deployed the song that made everyone else on the bill sound like they were strumming ukuleles. We already knew Psychosocial as a nasty little highlight from the previous year’s All Hope Is Gone album, but that was nothing compared to the assault and battery of experiencing it from the front row for the first time. “It’s time to go Psycho-fucking-social!” announces
02 Arena, London, 2011
Listening to Don Broco’s new album will leave you fired up. This aggression, combined with a disregard for genre boundaries, has taken the British alt.rockers to the charts and beyond. Words: Polly Glass
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ome records are intentionally angry, What started out as a bit of fun (early band fuelled deliberately by political ire from names included Club Sex and Don Loco) has the outset. Others… well, they just evolved into one of the UK’s sharpest, weirdest come out that way. Given the tensions alt.rock exports. Not to mention one of the most of recent times, such inadvertent anger successful; their previous two albums – 2015’s in new rock releases is especially understandable. pop-heavy Automatic and 2018’s heavier, edgier “It is a very strange, confusing time,” Don Broco Technology – were UK Top 10 hits, and shortly vocalist Rob Damiani says of the world that fed before covid hit they headlined a packed Wembley into Amazing Things, the band’s heavy, fearlessly Arena. Now, with Amazing Things, a marriage of eclectic fourth album. “It led me to the most rock, metal, industrial and electronic tones, with aggressive vocal styles we’ve done on a record. It biting lyrics that incite laughter, anger and even just felt right with the music. When you’re hearing emotional catharsis, they seem set to continue a riff, you’re: ‘I just want this winning streak, to shout over this. Shout where originality something angry.’” pays dividends. It’s difficult to know “Whenever we come what to expect from up with anything that Damiani. Recent music we think we haven’t videos have shown the seen done before,” commanding 34-yearDamiani says, “or old frontman in another band would be a boxing ring (for potentially too scared hard-hitting album to do, we’re like: ‘We Rob Damiani opener Gumshield), in should do that, even if a Star Trek uniform it’s scary.’” creating David Beckham clones in a lab (bizarro hen we meet in a North London pub, social media commentary Manchester Super Reds a cheery Damiani looks practically No.1 Fan), and full astronaut gear (stirring, balladic box-fresh. Tall and toned, in another ode to human fragility One True Prince). life he could have been a lifeguard or sports coach. Since forming in 2008, Don Broco have made it Unlike many artists, Don Broco were due to their business to subvert expectations. Completed spend much of 2020 at home anyway, working by singer/drummer Matt Donnelly, bassist Tom on their album. Eighteen months on they’re ready Doyle and guitarist Simon Delaney, they create an to get back out there. “This is the first time we’ve impact that’s part bro-rock lads gang, part slick, released music where we haven’t had any shows oddball experimentalists. If Shinedown were whatsoever to break up the promotion that you funnier, and more in love with movies, Deftones do for an album,” he says, talking fast and and Linkin Park, they could’ve turned out like this.
“We’re not the most confident musicians in the world, but there’s a magic that happens between the four of us.”
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enthusiastically. “You’re putting out music, and getting people on social media saying they like it, but it doesn’t equate, in any way, to playing a show, seeing the reaction and hearing people sing along – seeing how it affects people in real life.” Real life, both online and in the flesh, is at the heart of Amazing Things. The aforementioned Gumshield slams the pitfalls of social media. Uber touches on present-day racism. The expansive, arena-ready Anaheim is about “the depression that comes with not being able to do/be what you think you are”. Then there’s Manchester Super Reds No. 1 Fan, an unorthodox but brilliant commentary on cyber bullying. “I’d written about social media before, on Technology,” Damiani says. “It was like: ‘Okay, this is the new world where social media isn’t a thing people talk about as an aspect of life, it almost has become life [laughs]. Now, you spend less time in real life than online. And the pandemic
heightened that. It was getting me down how horrible people were online. “I’d like to think I’m relatively thick-skinned most of the time,” he continues. “But you don’t know what people are going through. It can be one thing, you decide to voice your opinion, however innocent you think it is… And the anger that involves, and the stress, it can be one thing that sends someone over the edge. And people do hurt themselves over these things.” Damiani had his own brush with the darker side of social media in 2017, when allegations were made and spread via Twitter, accusing him of inappropriate behaviour with a fan after a show. The allegations were swiftly refuted and retracted and an apology was issued, but has the anxiety of that experience fuelled the social media-geared side of Don Broco’s music? “Yes and no,” he says thoughtfully. “It was more an observation for everyone. Manchester Super Reds
was the hate people can put out online; Gumshield was more, from my perspective, the anxiety of putting almost anything out online. Whatever you say [online], good or bad, people want to get into a debate about it. It became a thing where I would second-guess every Tweet I would write, or every caption with an Instagram. You’d think: ‘Can someone find something in this they’re going to be offended by?’ ‘Should I not do that?’ It’s very different going to the pub with a mate, where they might have a different opinion and you talk it out in a casual way.” Don Broco’s worlds have changed a lot since the band took their first steps. Growing up in Bedford, Damiani sang in children’s choirs and played cello. Music in their house was largely confined to his dad’s opera CDs and Michael Jackson. “They pretty much liked, exclusively, Michael Jackson,” Damiani says, grinning. “He was the only thing we listened to.”
It was meeting his bandmates in school that changed everything. They went on to Nottingham university together, studying, partying and laying down Don Broco’s roots, discovering that their strength was as a unit, coupled with a willingness to work hard and try things (a mind-set reflected in the literally hundreds of songs they wrote for Amazing Things). For the band’s first five years they juggled gigs with shifts at an Autoglass call centre to pay the bills. It set the tone for a strong work ethic, and a camaraderie that’s served them well. “We are four guys who are not the most confident musicians in the world,” he says, “but there’s a magic that happens between the four of us. We all contribute equally to the writing process. What makes Don Broco so special is the four of us together.” Amazing Things is released on September 17 via Sharptone Records. CLASSICROCKMAGAZINE.COM 59
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At the dawn of the 90s Mr. Big were just another LA hard rock band who could barely get arrested. Then along came monster hit To Be With You, which turned them into accidental pop stars. Words: Dave Ling Photos: Neil Zlozower
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very record we made came with pressure from the record company, and it always felt like we were chasing our tails to deliver a hit single. Then from out of nowhere we did that with To Be With You… and things only got worse. The success of that song came as a gigantic blessing, but it was also a curse, because each time they said: ‘We want that next To Be With You, and we just couldn’t do it.” Talking to Classic Rock, Mr. Big’s chatterbox frontman Eric Martin is mentally reeling back the three decades since his group’s second album, Lean Into It. The early 90s was a memorable era for hard rock, and with the right look, some decent stylists and the patronage of MTV even an average band was capable of shifting a million copies of a record, sometimes even two or three. Mr. Big’s self-titled debut, released in 1989, had ticked most but not all of those boxes. As well as having Journey’s producer Kevin Elson working with them, the quartet – completed by former Racer X guitar shredder Paul Gilbert, ex-David Lee Roth/Talas bassist Billy Sheehan, and drummer Pat Torpey who had played with Robert Plant and
Ted Nugent – were signed to Atlantic Records and boasted a heavyweight manager, Herbie Herbert (another Journey connection), to match those undeniable credentials. Nevertheless, Mr. Big had peaked at No.46 in the USA, selling a creditable quarter of a million. Back in 1991, an irritated Sheehan told me: “We sell 250,000 copies, and we see corporate record labels draw some guys together who have
After Mr. Big’s self-titled debut stalled just inside the Billboard Top 50, Atlantic made it very clear that with their second they needed to do better. “We were lucky to have one of the very best managers in the business in Herbie Herbert to buffer us from those demands,” Billy Sheehan reflects. “Herbie was right in there and fighting for us – sometimes literally.” However, the fact remains that with their muso reputations and Martin’s soulful vocal delivery, Mr. Big stood out from the pack, musically if not visually. With a self-effacing laugh, Martin chews over the band’s image ‘problem’. “Back then, everybody in the band had long hair but none of us were prepared to wear make-up,” he says with a smile. “Maybe we were too ugly to be pin-ups. But you know what? We kinda liked our ugliness.”
“Being Number One was a life-changing moment. I wish everyone could experience that feeling at least once.” Billy Sheehan amazing make-up and hair, they use samples on stage, and they sell five million records. I can’t say that doesn’t rub me up the wrong way.” “I still feel just the same,” he says today, smiling. “And we still don’t use any samples.” He’s right. Mr. Big are having the last laugh. While many of those rival acts are long gone, a healthy demand for product featuring Messrs Martin, Sheehan and Gilbert still remains (Pat Torpey, who developed Parkinson’s, died in 2018).
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iven their respective backgrounds, perhaps it isn’t so surprising that Mr. Big had had to deal with the ‘supergroup’ tag. “At first we thought it was cool, like being acknowledged as the best of the best, though it brought some baggage,” Martin says. “Herbie Herbert was our Svengali and mentor, but we ³ CLASSICROCKMAGAZINE.COM 61
“a cross between Gladys Knight and Paul Rodgers” – was established. “I was still fairly new to the world of rock music,” Martin admits now. “I felt like a bit of a chameleon. I didn’t want to just sing corporate rock. If we were going to do that I would always add my little-devil soul shit. The guys would say: ‘Hey, Otis Redding, do you want to dumb that down a little?’” Preparing for their second album, which would eventually be titled Lean Into It, the band knew they had to up their game. “Our first album had been written in about eight days,” Martin reflects. “It was a good freshman effort, if you like. But with the second one we put a lot more energy and time into the writing.” To avoid the commute from San Francisco or living in a hotel, Martin stayed at Paul Gilbert’s place in “a shitty, fucked-up, crime-ridden area” of Los Angeles. “I brought along a gym bag full of cassettes,” Martin remembers. One of theme included the acoustic ballad that would change everything for Mr. Big. “I still remember playing Paul a demo of To Be With You, which he really liked. I had written it many years earlier about a girl I knew who was always looking for her knight in shining armour.” Martin recalls that another song that set Mr. Big on the right path with their second album was the psychedelia-tinged Green Tinted Sixties Mind. “Paul Gilbert really branched out with that one, it was really left-field for us,” he offers. “When he brought that one in, oh man, the gates were well and truly open.” Martin had “really clicked” with a writer called André Pessis, who had delivered smashes for Bonnie Raitt, Europe and Huey Lewis, and Ladies’ man: Billy “girl in together the pair cooked every port” Sheehan. up four of the songs on Lean Into It, including two of its hits. Although Gilbert had conceived the riff that drove one of them, the swaggering anthem Daddy, Brother, Lover, Little Boy (The Electric Drill Song), Sheehan stepped in to carry it forward, and producer Kevin Elson’s crucial request for a rewrite transformed it into something special. Martin wrote the words not about himself, but in “Mike told me to pick honour of his bass player’s a team, to be rock or to standing as something of be soul,” Martin says. a lothario. “I really didn’t know what I was doing. I liked the “I wasn’t promiscuous back then; I was always records I made, but nobody else did. So he put his married or in a relationship,” the singer says with friend Billy Sheehan on the line to discuss my a chuckle. “Those lyrics – ‘If you’re a red-hot fire joining this band. And although I had seen him in cracker, I will light your fuse’, and the part about doing the [David Lee Roth] Yankee Rose video I didn’t ‘the horizontal mile’ – came from Billy’s vernacular. know who he was.” I don’t want to embarrass him, because since then Billy Idol’s guitarist Steve Stevens and drummer he’s met the love of his life, but back then he was Gregg Bissonette, also of David Lee Roth’s band, Lord Byron. The guy had a girl in every port.” were both early members before the arrival of After a journalist had asked Gilbert how fast he Gilbert and Torpey, but finally the Mr. Big sound could play, he had been moved to tape a plectrum – blues-infused yet distinctly hummable arena to an electric hand drill, which he then applied to rock, backed by impeccable technical skills and the guitar strings. The idea of transforming it into topped off by a voice that Billboard once hailed as a song, and then into a part of the live show, Power-tooled up: Paul Gilbert takes the strain out of shredding.
“We wrote those records completely for ourselves. We really were not trying to chase a trend.” Eric Martin
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wrote those records completely for ourselves. We really were not trying to chase a trend.” In stark contrast to so many of the bands they were up against, the Mr. Big line-up had been pieced together in an organic way. “I got a call from [producer and Shrapnel Records founder] Mike Varney,” recalls Martin, who just before joining Mr. Big was struggling to break through with a soulful direction, despite a major-label deal with Capitol. “I was down in the dumps because it looked like I was going to be dropped – again.” Although Varney, whose Shrapnel Records label was a home for muso-friendly players, didn’t come clean straight away, Sheehan was silently monitoring their conversation.
MR. BIG
Still batting for Mr. Big: Eric Martin would make another album “in a heartbeat”.
started out as a joke, says Sheehan, who did likewise with his bass. “In the end we got an endorsement from the Makita power drill company,” Sheehan says. “Herbie called them up, they asked how much we wanted as a fee, and when he replied “One million dollars” they actually agreed. True story.” To the band’s chagrin, it was Atlantic Records who added the suffix of ‘(The Electric Drill Song)’ to the title Daddy, Brother, Lover, Little Boy. “It detracted from the novelty of the real title,” Martin sighs. “You want more sugar to the sugar?” The singer is also furious that the label kept ‘CDFF’, an acronym for ‘Compact Disc fast forward’, in the title of CDFF–Lucky This Time, a Jeff Paris tune they covered for the record. “Why the fuck is that there?” he fumes. On the road, Daddy, Brother, Lover, Little Boy (The Electric Drill Song) became a highlight of the band’s concerts, with Gilbert and Sheehan delighting audiences when they got the drills out. But then one night it all went wrong when the guitarist got his hair caught in the power tool… “We were playing to twenty thousand people in Atlanta opening for Rush,” says Martin, struggling to stifle a grin. “I was behind the amps, and when we came to that part of the song, I heard ‘diddle, diddle, diddle…’ and it stopped. Then the crowd burst out laughing. Paul was running across the stage like a chicken with its head cut off.” “One of the crew guys hit the ‘reverse’ button [on the drill], and although Paul’s hair unzipped, it got caught in the other direction,” Sheehan adds. Incredibly, the same thing happened again in
Atlanta on their next tour. “Paul decided to wear a wig and recreate that scene as a joke,” Martin says. “Only the drill caught his real hair from beneath the wig. Oh, dude, that was a good Mr. Big laugh.”
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he band were playing at Finky’s, “a shitty club in Daytona Beach, Florida”, when To Be With You went to No.1 in the US. Suddenly it seemed like everybody knew Eric Martin’s name. “Until that point none of the fans knew who I was,” he recalls. “After a show people would ask me to go backstage and get Billy and Paul’s
Kotzen, in February 2002 they disbanded in fairly acrimonious circumstances. Although the original line-up reunited to celebrate the 20th anniversary of their debut, and went on to release a further three records, following the loss of Torpey their current status as a band is uncertain. The three surviving members all have solo careers or are members of other bands. Sheehan, who plays in Sons Of Apollo, is talking to Classic Rock from the writing sessions for a third album from the Winery Dogs. Martin, having spoken the loudest about calling it a day following tours with Matt Starr on drums, is past the grieving stage and open to the idea of making another Mr. Big record. “Fuck yeah, I would do that in a heartbeat,” he enthuses. “I had this idea of using all of the drummers that Pat liked – the guy from Korn [Ray Luzier], Gregg Bissonette [ex-David Lee Roth], Matt Sorum [Guns N’ Roses, Velvet Revolver] – a different one on each song, though Billy and Paul told me I had lost my mind. I thought that Matt Starr did a great job with Mr. Big, but without Pat, who was the anchor of the band, I’m not so sure about touring again.” “I would like for us to go out and tell stories and play songs, without a drummer,” Sheehan concludes. “That could be a pretty good evening, I think.”
“Maybe we were too ugly to be pin-ups. But you know what? We kinda liked our ugliness.” Eric Martin autographs. I swear to God. They’d ask: ‘When is the singer coming out?’ and I’d reply: ‘I’m right here!’ Then To Be With You happened, and the devil inside me went: ‘Hey-y-y-y’.” “Being Number One was a life-changing moment. I wish everyone could experience that feeling at least once,” Sheehan says with a grin. “To this day we still feel the effects of that point in our lives. Wherever we go in the world, somebody knows us thanks to that song.” Mr. Big never managed to top the charts again, and in 1999 Paul Gilbert quit. After two albums made with his replacement Richie
The 30th-anniversary edition of Lean Into It is available now via EVOXS. CLASSICROCKMAGAZINE.COM 63
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SIGN OF THE TIMES Taking the pulse of a world turned to ashes, Mark Tremonti’s fifth album with his own band was born from self-doubt, fears for his unborn child – and a local karaoke bar. “Things weren’t turning around,” he says. “They just kept getting worse.” Words: Henry Yates
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ou can set your watch by Mark Tremonti. For three decades the guitarist has run his career like a military campaign. There’s the album and tour cycle, as regular as clockwork. The precise guitar solos, never a note missed. And, sure enough, here he is on Zoom at eighteen hundred hours, black-clad and as closecropped as a Navy Seal (if a little longer and greyer of beard). “My kids have made fun of me for cutting my own hair over lockdown,” the 47-yearold sighs. “I think I’d be a lot cooler to them if I was a basketball player.” While Tremonti has been a steady presence through the biblical bluster of Creed in the 90s, the arena-filling ascent of Alter Bridge in the noughties and the first four entries in his solo career since 2011, this year’s Marching In Time, he remembers, marked his first professional wobble. “I had a little period, maybe five months deep into the pandemic, where things weren’t turning around and just kept on getting worse. I lost my drive – to get to the studio, to write, to even pick up the guitar. I just kinda fell into this gloomy daze. “I got into painting my house,” he continues, squirming like a sinner in a confession box. “I spent a month painting a mural on the wall of
my baby daughter’s bedroom – this big garden scene, bugs and flowers. But a few months into that period I started to feel ashamed of myself.” Did you worry your mojo might have flown? “Well, me and Myles Kennedy have the same theory on songwriting. It’s a creative muscle. If you turn it off long enough it’s gonna take you a while to get it back, and it might come back in a different way than before. So every night, as I fell asleep, I’d say to myself: ‘Dammit, I only played guitar for twenty minutes today. What the hell was that?’ In the end it was like: ‘Pick up the damn guitar. Get the next album done.’ And I did.” Perhaps it’s understandable that Tremonti needed a run-up before embarking on an album as intense as Marching In Time. Despite his muso following, the guitarist is far from a dead-behindthe-eyes shred drone, and has written eloquently of the wrenches in his life, not least the loss of his mother in 2002 (she’s saluted in the Alter Bridge song In Loving Memory). But it’s on his most recent solo work, and especially 2018’s nihilistic robotthemed metal-opera A Dying Machine, that his lyrics have really rivalled the fretboard flash, with Tremonti going to darker, starker places that suggest this consummate professional has stormy waters within. “I think this new album has the ³ CLASSICROCKMAGAZINE.COM 65
TREMONTI “I lost my drive – to get to the studio, to write, to even pick up the guitar.” heaviness of [2018’s] A Dying Machine,” he says, “but it doesn’t take you so deep down the rabbit hole.” Marching In Time could be a Roger Waters album title, it’s suggested to him. Frankly, it looks like one, too, with the sleeve depicting a line of shadow men circling like ants into a plughole. All that’s missing is the giant hammer. Tremonti nods. “Yeah. When I was writing the melody to that song, right off the bat, I said: ‘So many lives, marching in time’. That’s how I write lyrics, I just spit stuff out, then try to make sense of it. To me that line sounded like a bunch of lemmings, doing the same thing, to the same end.” He says he often writes from a fictional place, but that eerie title song – the cornerstone of the album, thematically – is deeply personal, drilling into the experience of creating a life while the universe was busy snuffing out millions of them. “During the worst part of the pandemic, my wife told me she was pregnant. So the sentiment of the song is about a father speaking to his children, saying: ‘Don’t let this world corrupt you.’ It’s about trying to shelter your children from all this. And it’s about being afraid of bringing a child into the world as it’s been. Right now there’s more cases of children getting sick with the virus. I worry about my baby daughter. The problem is she’s so adorable that everybody wants to hold her. ‘Can I hold your baby?’ ‘No! Go wash your hands!’” Marching In Time is not a downbeat album, as such, but nor is there much light relief. Tremonti says the brittle chug of Thrown Further is about “how someone saw themselves as a child and now, as an adult, they’re kind of disappointed with what they’ve become”. He doesn’t necessarily think it’s about him – but perhaps the bleak jangle of The Last One Of Us cuts closer to home. “It’s about someone you look up to, a leader of people. But your hero is starting to lose steam and fail, and your whole world comes crumbling down.” Last year Tremonti emailed me a testimonial to Eddie Van Halen. It was heartfelt stuff. On some level, with The Last One Of Us was he writing about the fading legends who set him on this path? “It’s getting to that time now,” he says. “No matter how young our legacy heroes were when they started, they’re starting to pass. It’s depressing. It’s sad. It makes you think about your own mortality – and the legacy you want to leave behind.” Being fifty isn’t so far off now for you. Do you ever think about how old is too old? “I don’t think any time is too old, as long as you’re adapting to your age,” he considers. “I just did a tour with Iron Maiden on the last Tremonti run. I don’t know how old those guys are, but they’ve gotta be ten or fifteen years older than ³ 66 CLASSICROCKMAGAZINE.COM
Making Their Mark The essential Tremonti playlist. YOU WASTE YOUR TIME
DUST
The debut single that vindicated Mark Tremonti as a viable artist in his own right, and pays a rampaging salute to the speed-metal influences that had flipped his teenage switch. As the guitarist told MusicRadar, he couldn’t have done anything more to make his new project fly: “I put everything I had into it.” From All I Was (2012)
If some suspected that Cauterize’s sibling album Dust – which was recorded in parallel – held the dregs of the sessions, its stately title track quickly corrected them. “The title track, I think, has the best chorus of the whole recording process,” Tremonti said, “and it has my favourite solo. It’s definitely not the B-sides.” From Dust (2016)
LEAVE IT ALONE
A DYING MACHINE
The riff is brutal, but the feel-led solo, melodic smarts and emotional intelligence announced that Tremonti was here to do more than bludgeon us. “The lyrical content is pretty much about growing up and becoming jaded,” he explained, “and putting your walls up after you’ve seen people take you for granted or turn on you.” From All I Was (2012)
Tremonti has admitted he wasn’t previously a fan of concept albums, but after he sketched out the seed of a story – about a future where synthetic humans wrestle with their sentience – it sprawled into A Dying Machine’s six-minute, shape-shifting title track. From here on in he was indisputably far more than just a shredder. From A Dying Machine (2018)
ANOTHER HEART
TAKE YOU WITH ME
Leading off the Cauterize album, Another Heart is big on atmosphere, with the verse’s malevolent chime coming on like a funeral bell, before the chorus conjures storm clouds. Strange to think that the guitarist wasn’t convinced by the song’s single potential: “I was kind of on the fence with it at first.” From Cauterize (2015)
A Dying Machine had some highfalutin ideas, but it wasn’t difficult to appreciate this full-pelt charger. “It’s about someone convincing someone else to be proud of their scars and their imperfections,” Tremonti told Billboard, “and never forgetting where they came from and who they are.” From A Dying Machine (2018)
FLYING MONKEYS Sludge-slow, this fan favourite came out of a sound-check riff. “When I played it,” Tremonti told The Rockpit, “our drum tech would come out doing a dance and say it reminded him of the flying monkeys march from The Wizard Of Oz.” From Cauterize (2015)
MY LAST MISTAKE Dust’s opener is not just the best showcase for Tremonti’s world-class picking hand, but also the lick he pulls out to test whether a prospective amp has the required grunt. “I like playing that riff for the heavy stuff,” he told MusicRadar, “to make sure an amp is tight on the low end and percussive.” From Dust (2016)
A WORLD AWAY Kicking off like the cacophonous clank of some dystopian machinery, Tremonti knew this was an opener that couldn’t be ignored. “The fifteen seconds of Marching In Time that are gonna grab you the quickest come at the beginning of that song,” he says. “So that had to be the opening song.” From Marching In Time (2021)
LET THAT BE US A thunder god groove propels this highlight of the latest album, but the deal is sealed by its most stadiumtooled chorus, offering a flash of optimism on a track-listing that doesn’t spare the bad tidings. As Tremonti tells us: “You hope for the best for the world.” From Marching In Time (2021)
TREMONTI
Tremonti: (l-r) Ryan Bennett, Mark Tremonti, Eric Friedman, Tanner Keegan.
I am and they’re just killing it. If you look at them from afar it’s like Iron Maiden from the old days, jumping around. When I was younger, going into it, I figured this life would wear you out. That you’d party all the time and get old quick. But I feel like this career keeps you young. “When I stop,” he counters, “that’s probably when my hair is gonna fall out and I’m gonna get arthritis. But there’s never been a moment when I’ve thought: ‘I’m tired of this.’ I’ll be really depressed when nobody cares any more. It might be when I’m sixty, but who knows?” For now, Tremonti’s technique is as eyepopping as ever, flying out of the blocks with the brutal groove of A World Away, a song iced with a guitar solo that seems beyond the capabilities of human physiology. “The most challenging thing for me is coming up with the solos,” he says. “I don’t write them before we know which songs are going on the record. But once that record starts tracking, I’ve got a strict deadline, maybe five weeks, where I’ve got to write fourteen solos, all different, with as many new techniques as I can come up with. It’s a race to the finish and I’m driving myself nuts. Sometimes I’ll write a solo in an hour.” Doesn’t that ‘shredmaster’ reputation put pressure on you, though? People come to a Mark Tremonti solo album expecting fireworks. “I try not to adhere to rules that people outside my little creative group throw at me,” he shrugs. “I always loved writing songs way more than being a technical guitar player. I do think that with this band people expect an amount of heaviness to it. If Not For You is kind of a mid-tempo rock song, and then Marching In Time is more of your atmospheric, epic kind of thing. I’ve seen some people saying:
‘Where the hell is our speed metal?’ ‘Where’s the pounding metal stuff?’ But I won’t change what I’m writing.” What happens at the microphone, he adds, has always given him the most grief. “I wasn’t a good singer. But I wanted to be. As a new frontman you have to throw yourself to the wolves. You gotta get up there and do it. Nowadays you can get on YouTube and learn how to do almost anything. How to fix your car, whatever you want. But you can’t learn how to be a public entertainer. You could watch Freddie Mercury, or say: ‘Well, Roger Daltrey did this.’ But you’ve just got to do it for yourself. “In my early days as a frontman I was like
like to hear that desperation in your voice when you’re trying to hit a note. But when I sing Sinatra stuff, his vocal range is my vocal range. I can practise my pitch, my vibrato, my control, my phrasing, my pronunciation. Sinatra is probably my favourite singer of all time.” And a total rock star, of course. Tremonti nods. “I’ve probably read four or five Sinatra biographies over lockdown. He was the greatest guy in the world – and he was also a guy you wouldn’t like sometimes. He raised over a billion dollars for charity. Of course, he also walked off the set of movie shoots. He had that big ego and everything. He had ups and downs.” Unlike such mercurial heroes, Tremonti prefers a smoother trajectory: every album a little better, every tour a little bigger. But with Marching In Time the guitar player breaks into a swagger. As our own time runs out, we return to the subject of Thrown Further, that song about youthful idealism curdling into adult compromise. I ask what he thinks the 17-year-old Tremonti would make of his 47-year-old self. “I think the younger me would like the older me,” he decides. “I’ve chased down the paths I wanted to go down and tried to get as good as I can be. I always dreamed of being in an arena rock band. To write songs that thousands of people sing, and suddenly what means so much to you now means so much to them. Music is this thing that’s not material, but it affects people more than almost anything else in the world. That’s always been so magical to me.”
“When I was younger, I figured this life would wear you out… But this career keeps you young.” a WWE wrestler, like: ‘Come on!’ But as you get more confidence, I think you get calmer on stage. I think a good first step to dipping your toe in the water is to go find a karaoke place. On vacation I’ll find the band on the cruise ship and sing with them. I don’t mean metal songs, I mean songs like Purple Rain and Dock Of The Bay.” How did you sharpen up your vocals for the new album? Tremonti grins, reaches off-camera and comes back holding a Frank Sinatra album. Seriously? “Yeah, I’m serious,” he insists. “When I’m making these solo records, I’m singing above my vocal range, and I’m having to push. I think people
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Walking roads less travelled on her new album.
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Edited By Ian Fortnam
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Andrew W.K.
Iron Maiden Senjutsu PARLOPHONE Seventeen studio albums in and the enduring heavy metal flag carriers still divide opinion.
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Senjutsu is another double set, again with a playing time of more than 80 minutes, and none of its ten selections last for anything less than four minutes. The second disc comprises just four tracks, three of which – Death Of The Celts, The Parchment and Hell On Earth –clock in at more than 10, 12 and 11 minutes respectively. They are likely to cause fans of Maiden’s proggier side to lose their minds. The naysayers who bemoan what they see as the messy production style of Kevin Shirley will still pine for the late, great Martin ‘Headmaster’ Birch and his pristine clarity, although a large number of plus points by far outweigh all such minuses. Bruce Dickinson’s air-raid-siren vocal delivery remains inhumanly good, and as the album begins with Senjutsu’s eight-minute title track, with waves of rolling drums and interlocking guitars, it’s difficult not to marvel at Iron Maiden’s sheer sense of scope. This is a remarkable album from a band that still has plenty to say and to offer. Its high point, Death Of The Celts, a fruity 10-minute-plus guitar showcase for the Three Amigos that could be the Iron Maiden equivalent of Thin Lizzy’s celebrated Róisín Dubh (Black Rose): A Rock Legend, is little short of jaw-dropping. QQQQQQQQQQ Dave Ling
Jesse Malin Sad And Beautiful World WICKED COOL
New York troubadour flexes his musical muscles on diverse double album. It’s certainly been a long and winding road for Jesse Malin, from teenage hardcore band Heart Attack and glam-punk outfit D Generation to his ever-evolving role as giltedged songwriter. Expanding on the meditative mood of 2019’s Sunset Kids, the 17-track Sad And Beautiful Worlds finds him showing off those songwriting skills, delivering country-tinged ballads (Sinner), bubblegum pop (Come On) and twinkling Americana (Greener Pastures) in typically effortless fashion. It’s when he lets his guard down, however, that Malin is at his most impressive. Crawling Back To You finds him looking back over the ups and downs of a 30-year career, while the scalding The Way We Used To Roll is a funky kiss-off to bad habits. State Of The Art, meanwhile, is the sort of stirring
Carcass Torn Arteries NUCLEAR BLAST Extreme metal veterans return with hit-and-miss, bowelbursting bloodbath. Eight years after their strong post-reunion comeback album Surgical Steel, Bill Steer’s groundbreaking grindcore legends have returned belatedly to their foul-smelling sonic abattoir. Torn Arteries’ title track invokes classic Carcass in its breakneck jazz-metal ferocity, while The Scythe’s Remorseless Swing closes the album with a slow, spellbinding churn of malevolent brooding. In between, Flesh Ripping Sonic Torment Limited is a stand-out nine-minute progthrash monster featuring flamenco-style guitar flurries, clobbering martial beats, turbonoodling solos and unexpectedly tender soft-rock interludes. But overall these Merseyside extreme-metal veterans sound a little unfocused and uninspired on this record, falling back on tired retro-metal tropes on tracks like gargoyle-voiced Hammerhorror blues-rocker The Devil Rides Out. Behind its darkly funny title, sadly Eleanor Rigor Mortis is not the exhilarating, eviscerating eruption of disgusting gore-punk that Carcass might once have belched out in their uncompromising prime. It seems like their heart is not really in it, even if their shredded bowels and mangled testicles are. QQQQQQQQQQ Stephen Dalton
Amyl And The Sniffers Comfort To Me ROUGH TRADE Aussie punks refuse to be held back by 2021. For a band living the Australian pub-punk dream of ripping up stages worldwide to breathless acclaim on the back of their award-winning self-titled debut album in 2019, being suddenly confined to a shared house for the covid duration naturally turned them into caged animals. Their second album – more highly flammable melodic buzzpunk, now with added flecks of Stranglers atmospherics –
JOHN MCMURTRIE/PRESS
ince their honeymoon with EMI Records ended in the early 1980s, Iron Maiden have, broadly speaking, done whatever they pleased. The returns of Bruce Dickinson and Adrian Smith late last century allowed them more freedom still, and the ‘new’ six-man Maiden have brought their progressive rock influence closer to the surface than ever before. Since a reunion forged with 2000’s aptly titled Brave New World they have routinely buccaneered through seven-, eight- and nine-minute pieces. For those of us that appreciate prog rock every bit as much as metal, and who cite 1988’s Seventh Son Of A Seventh Son among Maiden’s defining moments, this was a very good thing. However, you can’t please all the people all the time, and when Dickinson chipped in last time with an 18-minute epic called Empire Of The Clouds, followers brought on board decades ago by the economic immediacy of The Trooper, Run To The Hills and Flight Of Icarus could be excused for raising their eyes to the sky. For those who occupy the latter category yet found their interest piqued by its quirkily atypical first YouTube video, The Writing On The Wall, new album Senjutsu (loosely translated from Japanese as ‘tactics and strategy’) will likely provide more pleasure than 2015’s overly cumbersome The Book Of Souls.
God Is Partying NAPALM Party on. Suitably epic return from frat-rock icon. Blame it on 18 months of lockdown, but this follow-up to You’re Not Alone finds the party-obsessed singer in pent-up mood. Pinballing between galaxysized anthems (My Tower), Wagnerian schlock-rock (Everybody Sins), FM earworms (Stay True To Your Heart, Not Anymore), death metal headbangers (I’m In Heaven) and Meat Loaf-style break-up ballads (And Then You Blew Apart), Andrew W.K.’s fifth album is as mind-bogglingly ambitious as it is grandiose. The classically trained musician’s virtuosity – he plays all the instruments – is impressive, and it’s matched by his lyrical themes, which are infused with a quasi-spiritual belief in positive energy, summed up in I Made It’s heartfelt couplet: ‘The song I’m playing is my way of praying.’ Twenty years on from his debut album I Get Wet, Andrew W.K. remains the perfect man to get the global party started once more. QQQQQQQQQQ Paul Moody
heartland anthem achievable only by those with ‘rock’n’roll’ tattooed on their soul. QQQQQQQQQQ Paul Moody
doesn’t find bawler Amy Taylor joining Ian Brown’s league of anti-lockdown rockers, but instead projecting her feelings about restriction and lack of control on to the wider social canvas. Choices is a battle-cry of self-determination in a world of online groupthink (‘I can make my own choices!’), Capital berates humanity’s slavery to capitalism, Don’t Fence Me In kicks back against stylistic pigeonholes, and the atmos-punk Knifey makes a blade-toting stand for women who just want to get home safely. It’s a record fired by postpandemic anticipation though: Freaks To The Front sounds like the Ramones leading the charge into the Roaring Twenties, Security is a retro-rock plea to just be let into a pub. QQQQQQQQQQ Mark Beaumont
Unable to tour last year’s Grit Your Teeth, they used pandemicenforced downtime to bring in new members Billy Taylor (guitar) and Pete Newdeck (drums), and to channel their pent-up energies into Anarchy And Unity’s notably consistent collection of songs. Their ability to set rousing choruses amid bare-knuckle riffs and clichéfree arrangements is amply demonstrated, and modern production flourishes (End Of The Fade, Beautiful Lie) balance more traditional moments (Kneel To You, Had Enough). Peppered with lung-busting vocal performances from Nick Workman, shredding solos and ear-catching guitar harmonies, Anarchy might be Vega’s strongest album yet. QQQQQQQQQQ Rich Davenport
Vega
Hawkwind
Anarchy And Unity FRONTIERS Vega’s lucky seventh. Vega’s way with a tune is such that James (keyboards) and Tom (bass) Martin have written material for labelmates Joe Lynn Turner and Danny Vaughn. Joe Elliott gave Vega a nod of approval, adding backing vocals to their cover of Def Leppard’s 10X Bigger Than Love, and like Def Leppard they’ve sharpened their melodic rock with a contemporary edge.
Somnia CHERRY RED Album number 34 from veteran space-rockers takes another grand cosmic tour. Dave Brock turned 80 this August, but he has lost little of his essence. Supplemented here by Richard Chadwick on drums and Magnus Martin on bass and keyboards, on Somnia he deals with the topic of sleep, the lack thereof, fever dreams, and Hubble-telescope visions of the
cosmos beyond the reach of Bezos and Branson, but welltoured terrain for Hawkwind. Unsomnia is Neu-esque, hitting the road, blasting echoing, fiery trails of guitar in its wake, and the temperature increases still further with Strange Encounters and the twisted, tossing, pastoral Counting Sheep. It’s Only A Dream feels personally reflective on Brock’s part, acknowledging the reality of age, but then, following the rich drones of Meditation, the album takes off into the realms of the fantastic, with the deep and spacious Pulsestar, the meteorite thickets of Barkus and the distantly galactic Cave Of Phantom Dreams. Gratifyingly, these old space dogs haven’t just stuck to their own tricks, but have availed of contemporary studio technology to create a nuanced, wellcolourised upgrade of their 70s sound, and Somnia is a worthy addition to their oeuvre. QQQQQQQQQQ David Stubbs
Angels And Airwaves Lifeforms RISE Former Blink 182 truth seeker looks to the skies once more for album number six. It’s seven years since Angels And Airwaves’ last album, 2014’s The
Dream Walker. In the meantime, frontman Tom DeLonge has busied himself as pop-punk’s self-appointed Fox Mulder, searching the skies for alien life. He might choose to believe, but what the extra-terrestrial community makes of the man behind Blink 182’s Enema Of The State remains, for now, a mystery. All the stargazing was worth it, though, as Lifeforms allows DeLonge to once again explore the proggier side of his nature, the base-level pop-punk bolstered by spacy synths as well as rave beats (opener Timebomb – not a Rancid cover), new-wave atmospherics (Spellbound – not a Siouxsie And The Banshees cover) and, in Automatic, a bass line that’s ripped straight from the New Order songbook. Despite lofty ambitions to write a letter ‘from God to humanity’ on Restless Souls, these are counter-attacked by Rebel Girl (definitely not a Bikini Kill cover), an overstuffed, oversweetened, male gaze-heavy, lovelorn confection that completely overrides the potential of its title with the nauseatingly infantilising line: ‘the shoe fits my little Cinderella’. Urgh. Nevertheless, Lifeforms is beautifully produced and catchy as hell, earning itself a spot on any intergalactic playlist. QQQQQQQQQQ Emma Johnston
ROUND-UP: SLEAZE
Sex Punk Power SELF-RELEASED Sleazy rock’n’roll is basically secondnature to most Australians, but even so, Melbourne’s finest sons Grindhouse are fucking wizards when it comes to balls-out raunch. Overweight, balding, and sliding full-tilt into middle-age, they
nevertheless operate like they’re all skinny teenagers with cool cars, a dashboard covered in cocaine, and pockets full of cash. What they call good times, in other words. And the aptly titled Sex Punk Power offers up greasy globs of all three. The album’s highlight is the incredible Shit Together, an expletivefuelled, sleaze-punk plea to the world (‘Why don’t you get the fuck
The Innermost Journey To Your Outermost Mind LIVEWIRE/CARGO RECORDS
Solo bassman takes a (mostly) rockin’ trip. After spending just over a decade in Michael Monroe’s band, former Hanoi Rocks bassist and latter-day New York Doll Sami Yaffa makes time for solo work. This record’s 11 songs, mostly co-written with MM guitarist Rich Jones, echo Yaffa’s CV and so range widely from punk to reggae/dub/ska to rock and back. It often sounds like a homage to his heroes The Clash, but there are echoes of the Rolling Stones (particularly their Ventilator Blues on You Gimme Fever) and Rocks-era Aerosmith in the harder-edge riffs of opener Armageddon Together and The Last Time. Yaffa’s vocals are more junkyard-mean than melodic, but they are well suited to the songs. For a change of pace there’s the semi-acoustic Down At St Joe’s and a superbly soulful guest vocal by Nicole Willis on closer Cancel The End Of The World as Yaffa’s bass lines funk around unexpectedly in David Gilmour territory. An eclectic and engaging album. QQQQQQQQQQ Neil Jeffries
By Sleazegrinder
Grindhouse: wizards of balls-out raunch.
Grindhouse
Sami Yaffa
outta my face? Why don’t you get your fucking shit together? ’) that feels like some kinda national anthem in these divisive times. There’s plenty more where that came from, though, from the hooky death-punk come-on of Hello Hamburg to the fiery garage-punk of Teenage Heart, to the grimy scuzz-glam of Ass Tonight and Phone Sex. Punk as fuck, and fun as hell. QQQQQQQQQQ
Bad Actors
The Whores
Black Static CD BABY Bad Actors are the best garage rock band I’ve ever heard from Omaha, Nebraska. Also the first. If this record is any indication, maybe it’s a new hotbed of trashy rock’n’roll. Opener Steal Your Heart has strong New York Dolls vibes, all boogie-woogie dishevelled glam, but elsewhere they mix a 90s alt. rock sensibility with driving early-80s LA punk clamour. A jammer. QQQQQQQQQQ
A Private Audience With The Whores With songs clocking in at less than two minutes, and titles like C**tstruck and Violence Is Fun, you figure this’d be some teenage hardcore punk-type situation. But Britain’s Whores actually play rock’n’roll. They just do it like snot-nosed 15-year-olds in detention. I definitely hate it, but I also kinda love it. QQQQQQQQQQ
Black Sheriff
RMBLR
Time to Burn SAVAGE MAGIC The German Supersuckers, basically. Most of the time Black Sheriff are blasting out highvelocity bruisers like Get Drunk With Me and Love Exorcist, both of which would not be out of place on a Danko Jones album. Occasionally they mix it up, as on country-fried rocker One You Love, with vocals from Bellrays force of nature Lisa Kekaula. And that shit’s good too. QQQQQQQQQQ
MF/EP SPAGHETTY TOWN They’re not making a big deal out of it – frankly, I don’t think they care one way or the other – but Atlanta’s RMBLR are in fact one of the greatest rock’n’roll bands in America. Led by irrepressible frontman Chase Tail, they’re like if Iggy Pop joined the Stones midway through Exile On Main St and they all died before they got old. This EP is perfecto. QQQQQQQQQQ
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Pond
Roger Taylor Outsider UMUSIC Queen drummer’s sixth solo album, and the first one he’s really got right.
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The real surprise is how graceful this lockdown-inspired album is: Taylor prefers the word ‘autumnal’, and he’s spot-on. The gorgeous Tides opens in lugubrious, stately fashion (think Nothing’s Happening By The Sea beginning Chris Rea’s magical Water Sign), KT Tunstall brings elegant vocals to the empathetic We’re All Just Trying To Get By, and the closing Journey’s End, a seven-minute single from 2017, is the sound of a man who (to the outside world) has done it all, musing on what there might be left to do. Nodding discreetly to Fleetwood Mac’s Albatross, it’s moving in a way Roger Taylor has never been moving before. Elsewhere he gets quietly angry on Gangsters Are Running This World (it’s also resurrected on a more aggressive Purple version), where the gentle piano and poppy chorus masks a diatribe against the tendency to authoritarianism. Perhaps it’s the absence of a pressing need to contribute new Queen music, perhaps it’s something as prosaic as lockdown thumb-twiddling, perhaps it’s something else, but, to be honest, it doesn’t really matter why Taylor is blossoming so late in life. Let’s just be thankful that he is. QQQQQQQQQQ John Aizlewood
Jeff Scott Soto The Duets Collection Volume 1 FRONTIERS Pairing up to look back. Instead of climbing the walls during the pandemic, the hyperactive Jeff Scott Soto re-recorded a bunch of his finest songs and then transform them into duets with some of his favourite singers. Not surprisingly, songs from his old band Talisman feature strongly; Shaman’s Alirio Netto joins for I’ll Be Waiting, Mr. Big’s Eric Martin is more than up for Mysterious, Electric Mob’s Renan Zonta joins for Colour My XTC and Candlemass’ Mats Leven takes on Again 2 B Found. Soto also dips back to his early days with Yngwie Malmsteen for Don’t Let It End, joined by Animal Drive’s Dino Jelusick, and duets with Axel Rudi Pell’s current vocalist Johnny Gioeli on Warrior, which he recorded with the German guitarist in 1994. Everyone’s ego is in check, and the emphasis is on having fun, diverting attention away from
Various Artists I’ll Be Your Mirror: A Tribute To The Velvet Underground & Nico VERVE Much-covered songs covered yet again, in sparkless fashion. Sometimes it seems like everyone who ever heard the Velvet Underground went out and made a tribute record straight afterwards. For a band that allegedly nobody ever liked, they’ve become almost a corporate cult band, their songs covered by R.E.M., David Bowie and many more. Now here’s another VU tribute album, with notable appearances from the usual suspects (a gorgeous Sunday Morning from Michael Stipe, who must have covered the first album in its entirety by now), a spiky Heroin by Thurston Moore featuring Bobby Gillespie (which is the most Thurston Moore-featuring-BobbyGillespie thing ever). There’s a brilliantly ramshackle I’ll Be Your Mirror from Courtney Barrett and a really bouncy Run Run Run by Kurt Vile. But while nothing here is wrong, very little – unlike the VU themselves – is unexpected or thrilling. QQQQQQQQQQ David Quantick
Howlin Rain The Dharma Wheel SILVER CURRENT
Contemporary concerns fed through the filter of classic jamming rock. The reductive view of Howlin Rain is one of a band way too in thrall to the past to actually feel as if it has anything new to offer this far down the line from the 1970s. And that, as with most perspectives following the path of least resistance, is to miss out on music that boasts its roots in Americana while reaching far out into the cosmos. Led by singer-guitarist Ethan Miller along with bassist Jeff McElroy, drummer Justin Smith and guitarist Dan Cervantes, Howlin Rain have fashioned an album that eschews the harder rocking moves of predecessor The Alligator Bride for a mellower
LOLA LENG TAYLOR/PRESS
ike his Queen bandmates, Roger Taylor has rarely flourished outside the mothership. His band The Cross were hard to bear, and while his clutch of solo albums had their moments, he wisely seemed to save his best work for the group. A peak of sorts came when Nazis 1994 revealed to a startled world who the bad guys in World War II were. Now comes his latest solo album, Outsider, and it’s fair to say that expectations could be higher. Perhaps they should have been, for at the age of 72 Taylor has turned in the solo effort of his life by whatever a country mile is. As ever on his solo records, Taylor plays almost everything himself – drums, of course, but also guitar and most of the keyboards – but he’s in cahoots with Joshua J Macrae, his long-standing collaborator from The Cross. Taylor has dipped into his own back catalogue to gently re-jig Absolutely Anything from Terry Jones’s 2015 film of that name. More radically, his rocking 1994 single Foreign Sand is re-cast as a bittersweet ballad, while there’s a spartan, brassy trawl through The Clapping Song, on which Taylor growls through a loud-hailer like Mark E Smith as a line-dance caller. Clumsy title aside, More Kicks – A Long Day’s Journey Into Night…Life is Taylor at his most grizzled and jagged.
9 SPINNING TOP Scintillating space-funk from Australian quintet. While Tame Impala have gradually sought out a postSupertramp kind of middle ground, it’s been left to sometime running buddies Pond to continue exploring wilder terrain. Latest album 9 deviates from the left-field psych-pop of their most recent ones by hunting down the groove, taking cues from early-70s krautrock and delivering an irresistible set that pulses with echoes of Giorgio Moroder, Detroit techno and Young Americans-era Bowie. The rubber-coated funk of Pink Lunettes and America’s Cup typify this renewed sense of freedom. Dispensing with regular producer Kevin Parker (Tame Impala), Pond have chosen instead to steer this one themselves, making for a richly dense experience that also channels syncopated avant-pop (Take Me Avalon I’m Young), semi-symphonic prog (Gold Cup / Plastic Sole) and luxuriant softrock (Toast). And if you’ve ever fantasised about Tom Verlaine fronting a rave band, then Rambo should leave you fully satiated. QQQQQQQQQQ Rob Hughes
the instrumental re-recordings that some serious fans might have a problem with. QQQQQQQQQQ Hugh Fielder
although no less impactful approach. The twin leads and harmony vocals of the rollicking Rotoscope are irresistibly joyous despite Miller’s sombre observation that, ‘We’re watching our lives go by’, while the epic 16-minute title track will delight the most seasoned of heads. QQQQQQQQQQ Julian Marszalek
Don Broco Amazing Things SHARPTONE Feisty fourth album from genre-straddling Bedford rabble-rousers. For a band who built their reputation the traditional way, touring relentlessly and stomping new holes in festival stages, Don Broco must have been more frustrated than most since the pox descended. But the restrictions seem to have had the effect of making them even more determined to ignore the rules of the straight world and keep blending post-hardcore, electronica, pop hooks, danceable grooves and pithy lyrics in combinations that confound as many people as they delight. While in the past they’ve flirted with pop aesthetics a little too readily for some tastes, the raucous likes of Gumshield, Swimwear Season and the Underworld-meets-screamo
electro-rock of Uber and Endorphins show that during their time away from stages, they’ve grown a ferocious new set of teeth. QQQQQQQQQQ Johnny Sharp
into orbit, feeling twitchy and scratchy at first, but once it reaches higher planes its serenity is imposing and august. He’s still out there. QQQQQQQQQQ Chris Roberts
Vangelis
Ministry
Juno To Jupiter DECCA Keyboard master is motivated by magnetosphere. In a parallel dimension, Evangelos Odysseas Papathanassiou is a cool cult hero of pioneering electronica; a music nerd’s name-to-drop as revered as Moroder or Can. Instead, 78-year-old Vangelis, as he’s better known, settles for being extremely successful and respected in circles both cinematic and classical. His discography sprawls far and wide beyond Blade Runner and Chariots Of Fire, Aphrodite’s Child and his Jon Anderson collaborations. He’s been honoured by NASA for previous compositions for their space missions, and Juno To Jupiter is inspired by their ongoing probe. Greek Vangelis plays up the mythological links, referencing Zeus, Hera and veils of clouds. He incorporates sounds from the launch and journey, and opera singer Angela Gheorghiu drops in with diaphanous vocals. The album takes a while to get
Moral Hygiene NUCLEAR BLAST Industrial metal’s favourite blood shitter is back. Somewhere in the last couple of decades, Al Jourgensen decided that the pulverising machine-metal he pioneered with 1992’s Psalm 69 was it, the Ministry sound, for ever and ever. For better or worse, he’s stuck to it, and Moral Hygiene labours under this parochial safety net. See, for example, pummelling opener Alert Level, funk-inflected lead single Good Trouble, or the seething, creepy-crawling cover of Stooges’ classic Search And Destroy. Chunky, repetitive stungun guitars, sore-throat howls, throbbing digital backbeats, check, check, check. But we can’t live in the 90s for ever, and thankfully Ministry’s fifteenth album provides a few surprise twists. Death Toll is a fun throwback to 80s industrial disco, all stripped-down stuttering beats and frantic vocal samples. Jourgensen’s old Lard co-conspirator Jello Biafra pops in for the album’s highlight, the
dancefloor-filling hard rocker Sabotage Is Sex. The sinister We Shall Resist is a doomy dark soundscape full of tension and dread. The synth-heavy Believe Me harkens back to the band’s new-wave salad days. Lyrically, of course, it’s all hair-on-fire pandemic panic, but what isn’t these days? QQQQQQQQQQ Sleazegrinder
Tremonti Marching In Time NAPALM Tremonti find their feet with thundering fifth album. After their stuttering conceptual album A Dying Machine (you said it, pal), Tremonti are back to their banner-waving, lightersaloft best. After years with Creed and his day job with Alter Bridge, Mark Tremonti knows how to light up an arena. Heavier but with a melodic lightness of touch that brings lustre to the songs, new album Marching In Time is both an assault on the senses and the sort of thing you’ll find yourself whistling an hour after you’ve finished listening to it. Especially good is the rattling A World Away, which hits like a kidney punch, ditto the shuddering Let That Be Us, with a hook that upends the song’s seemingly straightforward premise. There’s light and shade too: the sighing
ROUND-UP: MELODIC ROCK
IV FRONTIERS A little over a decade ago, Classic Rock’s Geoff Barton hailed Houston’s self-titled debut as the essential AOR pick of 2010. The accolade helped to catapult the Swedish band from obscurity to some of the biggest festival stages in Europe. But 11 years in music
can be a lifetime in real life, and Houston’s momentum never quite stabilised before gradually fizzling out. Now frontman Hank Erix has brought back former keyboard player Ricky Delin, an absentee for 2017’s Houston III, as a co-writer and producer. His claim that “this will be the Houston album above all others” doesn’t exactly hold water, although from the pulsating drama of opener She Is The Night to
Wayward Sons Even Up The Score FRONTIERS The Sons come of age on album number three. It’s taken time, but at last Wayward Sons have hit their mark – and in a significant manner. Frontman Toby Jepson has assembled the strongest line-up to date, and Even Up The Score is 11 energetic, pulsating and dynamic tracks. Blasting off in anthemic fashion on the title track, the album races along with Jepson and guitarist San Wood feeding off each other ravenously, and drummer Phil Martini delivers a stirring groove. There’s a fullblooded sense of British attitude, bringing to mind The Temperance Movement, with the added punch of The Almighty. The best moments come on the melodic yet intense Faith In Fools (a dictat about politicians?) and the heavy bounce of Fake, but nothing lets down the overall quality. Wayward Sons have stepped up a level. Their next album could be sensational. QQQQQQQQQQ Malcolm Dome
By Dave Ling
Houston: we don’t have a problem.
Houston
Not Afraid To Lose is shot through with pain. A sublime album that just happens to be turned up to 11. QQQQQQQQQQ Philip Wilding
the Survivor-esque Heart Of A Warrior and A Lifetime In A Moment it’s a big step in the right direction. Sure, there are times when the album’s pacing seems just a little too sedate, but the music is as smooth as silk. Having been left eating the dust of so many Scandi-AOR rivals, IV offers a solid, encouraging reminder of why Houston were once considered real contenders. QQQQQQQQQQ
Peter H Nilsson
Robin Red
Sign Of Myself AOR HEAVEN Peter H Nilsson has a lighter than usual touch, and this followup to 2019’s Little American Dream straddles the divide between AOR at its purest and lazy, hazy West Coast elegance. There’s an easy flow to Can’t Get Over You, Learning To Let Go and the sassy title track that soothes and satisfies. This is one of those albums that Sunday mornings are made for. QQQQQQQQQQ
Robin Red FRONTIERS Given its stylistic sidestep, Robin Eriksson, bassist and lead vocalist with Swedish modern rockers Degreed, advisedly releases this debut solo set under a nom de plume. With Dave Dalone of H.e.a.t as producer, guitarist and co-writer, and the same band’s Jona Tee on keyboards, Eriksson’s desire to create something a little more organic than usual has paid dividends. QQQQQQQQQQ
Wildstreet
Danny Danzi
III GOLDEN ROBOT Missing in action for the past decade, New Yorkers Wildstreet continue to specialise in hummable, sleazy, raucous hard rock. There are some massively enjoyable, glammy anthems here, and the band are probably lots of fun on stage with the benefit of a belly full of booze, although the remedial standard of their lyrics is just an embarrassment to rock music. QQQQQQQQQQ
Tribulations ESCAPE MUSIC Amazingly, Tribulations is only the third fulllength album in this American artist’s 20-year career, so it speaks volumes that its 15 tracks were inspired by the challenges of everyday life. Danzi is quite a guitarist, although he doesn’t ram those skills down the listener’s throat, and it’s his fluent, easyon-the-ear harmonies that really forge a lasting impression. QQQQQQQQQQ CLASSICROCKMAGAZINE.COM 75
ALBUMS
Lindsey Buckingham Lindsey Buckingham RHINO Amid much turmoil, the man not currently in Fleetwood Mac forges forward, brilliantly.
L
ike discovering in your 40s that Neighbours is still going, there was something sweetly reassuring to hear that Fleetwood Mac were still at each others’ throats in 2018. According to Lindsey Buckingham, a spat about award show walk-on music and an unforgivable acceptance speech smirk saw him fired, at Stevie Nicks’ behest, and the drama didn’t end there. The following year he underwent a triple heart bypass following a heart attack. And now, in the middle of a divorce, he’s said to be patching things up with the dysfunctional Mac family. Rock’s greatest soap opera remains packed with cliffhangers. Meantime, the fresh focus on his solo career – which Nicks claimed was behind his dismissal in the first place – has produced the first Buckingham album since 2011 (not counting the all-but-Nicks surrogate-Mac record that was 2017’s UK top-five Lindsey Buckingham Christine McVie). And it proves that, musically too, there’s still a lot more story to be told. Frankly, it’s a dazzler; a dynamic folkpop record steeped in style and bristling with modern touches. The gorgeous I Don’t Mind repurposes the chopped-up vocal effects of Little Lies in an attempt to create a sonic cubism. Swan Song is so swamped with R&B throbs, frantic EDM beats and processed backing vocals that 76 CLASSICROCKMAGAZINE.COM
Buckingham sounds like a man lost in the machine. The electronic ballroom western Blind Love, the bubbling electro-pop Blue Light and frail and amorphous closer Dancing would all slot beautifully on to a Magnetic Fields compendium. What Tango In The Night did for the evolution of Fleetwood Mac’s sound into a definitive 80s aesthetic, this album does for melodic folk rock in 2021. It’s a record about endings. Time is an enemy on both Byrds-y Pozo-Seco Singers cover Time and the experimental laptoppop Power Down, either a very lively deathbed address or a digital divorce song driven by edgy nervous tension. Blind Love similarly smacks of couples counselling, while Santa Rosa details a family fleeing Los Angeles for the wine country in the style of a synthetic Springsteen. Most intriguing, On The Wrong Side tackles Buckingham’s backroom issues with Fleetwood Mac on tour – ‘another city, another crime, I’m on the wrong side’ – with the same sort of wailing exuberance that made Go Your Own Way a master class in sounding jubilantly miserable. Yet musically Lindsey Buckingham is all new beginnings and bold futures. Fleetwood Mac missed a trick by not having their name on it. QQQQQQQQQQ Mark Beaumont
Medicine Head
Duel
Warriors Of Love LIVING ROOM Tranquilising the mind. Having disbanded in the late 70s, Medicine Head remained dormant until 2011 when John Fiddler, one half of the original duo, revived the name for Fiddlersophical, effectively a solo album with Fiddler writing and performing everything. A decade later comes Warriors Of Love. While Fiddler brought in various musicians to help him out (notably guitarist Dave ‘Bucket’ Colwell and Mott The Hoople’s keyboard player Morgan Fisher), his songs remain somewhat downbeat and one-paced, and although his voice and guitar retain their charm the album struggles to hold your interest from midway through. Indeed you may not even notice that the opening title track is reprised at the end. More significantly, there’s none of the natural eclecticism and eccentricity that made John Peel, John Lennon, Eric Clapton and Pete Townshend Medicine Head devotees in the early 70s. Instead it feels like Fiddler is waving a gentle goodbye. QQQQQQQQQQ Hugh Fielder
In Carne Persona
Ray Wilson The Weight Of Man JAGGY D/SOUL FOOD
Ex-Stiltskin/Genesis man returns in thoughtful mood. As someone who had fleeting semifame as frontman of one-hit wonders Stiltskin and then fronting Genesis in the late 90s, Ray Wilson seems to be actively inviting us to view his new album’s opening track, You Could Have Been Someone, with the nearly-man narrative. If so, then its haunting, regret-filled lament suggests he deserves more than that reductive billing. Elsewhere he ponders recent world events (Mother Earth) and themes such as fake news (We Knew The Truth Once). And while he has a tendency towards clunky lyrical couplets (‘You are a rock star and a queen, everything you wanted in a magazine,’ he emotes on Almost Famous), skilfully crafted, atmospheric AOR melodies succeed in maintaining a captivating vibe of wistful reflection. QQQQQQQQQQ Johnny Sharp
HEAVY PSYCH SOUNDS
Balls-out stoner rock with a good bad attitude. Four albums in, Duel are kicking up a furious rock’n’roll stink, plundering the ragged glory of the NWOBHM era, injecting it with a fat dose of Sabbathian thunder and topping the whole thing off with lyrics of a decidedly witchy and wicked hue. Steeped in the muscular boogie of their southern rock forebears, the Texans have also embraced their inner rock gods on this album, and everything from turbo-rumbling opener Children Of The Fire to doomy denouement Blood On The Claw comes armed with fistfuls of fervently classic hard rock hooks. The Veil is a grimy, menacing street-doom shuffle with a faint whiff of the mystic East; Bite Back is pure early-80s pub-metal worship, shoutalong chorus included; Lizard Tongue struts and swaggers like UFO or Aerosmith in their prime, but with much cheaper booze in the dressing room and enough viscous bottom end to dislodge the ornaments. It all rocks. QQQQQQQQQQ Dom Lawson
Tigress Pura Vida HUMBLE ANGEL Essex four-piece earn their stripes on debut full-length. As those who know way more about fashion than any of us here at Classic Rock could ever hope to have announced, the 90s are back in vogue. Which is excellent news for those of us who are still getting good use out of our original Doc Martens, and even better news for Tigress. Pure Vida, the debut album from the Chelmsford band, is crammed with the kind of gleaming, post-grunge pop-rock anthems that characterised the end of the decade, frontwoman Katy Jackson channelling her inner Alanis Morissette on opener Generation before blossoming into her own notably confident creation. Lyrically, though, Tigress are an entirely 21st-century proposition, exploring the chasm between the perfect lives people present online and their warts-and-all reality, backed by fat riffs and metallic futurism, which on Feel It doffs its knowing cap to Pixies’ Where Is My Mind?.
No shrinking wallflowers or underground warriors, Tigress clearly have grand ambitions for mainstream success. And on the evidence of this album there’s no reason to think they won’t achieve it. QQQQQQQQQQ Emma Johnston
The Bevis Frond Little Eden FIRE New album summons past forces to defy present-day austerity. The cover image of Little Eden – a very British, very brutalist tower block, taken by the group’s frontman Nick Saloman – leaves no doubt as to its provenance. It’s from this place that The Bevis Frond weave their guitar dreams. These songs are halycon concoctions, recalling 60s rock, English psychedelia, the best, most melodically tinged of grunge, Dinosaur Jr in particular (as on Everyone Rise), as well as the ingenious lyrical graft of a McCartney or Prefab Sprout. There’s a sense on Little Eden, from the bitter You Owe Me to the extended compassion of They Will Return, that we’re a long way from where we could and should be right now. For all its retrospection and melancholy there’s a determination on Saloman’s part to relight past fires, face down the miseries of
This Britain, especially evident on 10-minute closer Dreams Of Flying, a glorious guitar pyre: ‘Hang on to your higher calling.’ QQQQQQQQQQ David Stubbs
pulverising doom. This is basically what Conan The Barbarian would listen to, if he had a decent record player. QQQQQQQQQQ Sleazegrinder
Witchcryer
Alan Vega, Ben Vaughn, Barb Dwyer, Palmyra Delran
When Their Gods Come For You RIPPLE MUSIC Second album of fantasythemed doom from these Austin riff tyrants. Witchcryer guitarist Jason Muxlow was the founder and bleeding light of Earthen Grave, the Chicago-based doom juggernaut that featured Trouble bassist Ron Holzner and a fulltime violin player. He is a man prone to grand visions, and the Austin-based Witchcryer certainly fits the bill. Anchored by the breathy, ethereal vocals of Suzy Bravo, When Their Gods Come For You is high-concept occult rock rooted, as these things usually are, in early-70s proto-metal, but with expansive flourishes that are very much Witchcryer’s own. Nemesis The Destroyer, for example, rides a hushed 90s alt. rock verse before exploding into a crushing chorus. It’s like Veruca Salt jamming with St Vitus. The album’s highlight, Sisyphus (Holy Roller), is strutting, sleazy arena rock. But even in full destroyer mode (Hellmouth, I Rise), the band let the music breathe, adding psychedelic touches to their
Left’s ghostly hoodoo, River Of No Shame’s churning motorik, celestial ascendance on Wings Of Glory or over beatless cosmic detritus on The Record Speed. There was no one else like him. QQQQQQQQQQ Kris Needs
God Damn Raw Coward ONE LITTLE
Alan Vega After Dark
INDEPENDENT
IN THE RED
West Midlands neo-grungers mix lowbrow lyrics with highenergy riffs on album four. ’There’s no such thing as rock and roll!’ Thomas Edwards proclaims during Shit Guitar, one of several archly titled highlights on Raw Coward, adding ‘your idols are all paedophiles!’ for good measure. He fills his ragged, distorted diatribes with casual profanity and combative humour, ranting about dog shit and wanking. Perhaps he hopes to provoke a reaction, but thankfully these Wolverhampton neo-grungers have beefy tunes to balance their more juvenile impulses. Newly expanded from a trio to a five-piece, God Damn deepen their raw, sludgy sound here without diluting their agreeably untamed garage-rock energy too much. There are clear Nirvana echoes on unruly moshpit anthems like Cowkaine and Radiation Acid Queen, but the album also includes more experimental interludes, from the one-minute instrumental howl English Slaughterhouse
Late Suicide singer’s last live band session. Following Mutator’s electronic future-rock onslaught in April comes this likewise previously unheard set catching the late Suicide singer in latenight blues/rockabilly ballad mode with Ben Vaughn and Pink Slip Daddy in 2015. Approaching their one-off New York studio session, Vega, then 78, said he wanted to “feel connected” with the band, as when recording 1996’s Cubist Blues with Vaughn and Alex Chilton. In contrast to Vega’s circuit-frying solo maelstroms, the skeletal Gene Vincent riffs and shimmering ballad backdrops invoked by Vaughn’s guitar, bassist/keyboard player Barb Dwyer and Sirius XM DJ Palmyra Delran’s drums provide static-charged space for his spontaneous vocals, working spellbinding magic over Nothing
ROUND-UP: BLUES Razor Blade Smile MR
Joanne Shaw Taylor: making a statement.
CHRISTIE GOODWIN/PRESS
The Blues Album KTBA A decade on, most of Britain’s noughties blues cubs have strayed from the genre that launched them. But while Oli Brown’s rebirth as a Mephistopheles-bearded berserker in RavenEye has stuck, the equally
Hey What SUB POP Spellbinding creations from prolific minimalist duo. The new album from Alan Sparhawk and Mimi Parker – their thirteenth in 27 years, is as elegiac, brutally minimalist, silent and hymnal, disturbingly open and ultimately rewarding as before. Hey What is comprised of 10 pieces that mirror distortion and repetition, tonal changes and textures, yet always have a beautiful sad lament at their core. One of the joys of listening to Low, from the solemn reaffirmation of I Can Wait to the inch-perfect harmonies of Days Like These, is the way the duo are unafraid to build, to fold and build again, to layer texture upon texture of sound and then, equally as chillingly, cut it off. Hey What is a beautifully composed elegy to life itself, and it’s difficult indeed not to fall under its spell. QQQQQQQQQQ Mark Beaumont
Ain’t A Reason is perfect for Taylor’s smokering vocal, while Little Village’s Don’t Go Away Mad is sufficiently obscure for her to claim ownership. Even when it’s a big name, Taylor takes the road less travelled: for example covering not Fleetwood Mac’s Need Your Love So Bad, but that ’68 single’s B-side, Stop Messin’ Round – and kicks its teeth in. As a back-to-basics statement, this album is hard to beat. QQQQQQQQQQ
Walter Parks & The Unlawful Assembly
MUDSHOW MUSIC
The Unlawful Assembly
Running on fumes from bad romances, New Yorker Duff’s smoke-blackened heart rarely leaves her sleeve on these 10 powerful originals. A barbed yet tender vocalist, Duff brings the stories alive, and when she leaves us, on the wonderful, accordion-wheezing Nicotine And Waiting, there’s still a guttering candle of hope QQQQQQQQQQ
ATOMIC SOUND RECORD COMPANY
Mark Harrison Band The Road To Nowhere HIGHWAY
questing Joanne Shaw Taylor’s latest album – with Joe Bonamassa at the desk – reaffirms her vows. For many a musician at their career mid-point, a blues covers album is a creative shrug of the shoulders. Shaw’s feels different, firstly because she gives less weight to the sacred cows, and mostly picks the cultsters you can kick around without the purists pissing blood. A louche take on Little Milton’s If That
Low
By Henry Yates Emily Duff
Joanne Shaw Taylor
Blues to the haunting psych-pop lullaby poetically titled Dog Shit In The Autumn Leaves. Sometimes even puerile schoolboy humour hits the spot, especially when it’s backed up by killer riffs. QQQQQQQQQQ Stephen Dalton
Everybody should be talking about Mark Harrison. On this sixth (double) album, the folk-blues songwriter’s graceful dance across the frets of his resonator is met by lyrics that are wry, clever and kind. Try Same Roads’ sweetnatured ode to stasis, or the rolling twang of Skip’s Song, but do try him. QQQQQQQQQQ
Walter Parks’s examination of the spirituals that built American roots shows the guitarist has a historian’s head and the gravitas to pull this music off. After hearing tracks like Early In The Morning, anything else you listen to that day will sound hopelessly lightweight. QQQQQQQQQQ
Dakota Jones Black Light LORD PLEASE The year’s first great frontwoman arrives on Black Light, with the New York four-piece giving Tristan CarterJones the floor space to shout out her black, queer manifesto, and to hell with anyone who can’t handle it. The holler and husk of her vocals is the cherry atop a record that’s airtight-funky, effortlessly cool and, on standouts like I Did It To Myself, surely heading overground. QQQQQQQQQQ CLASSICROCKMAGAZINE.COM 77
ALBUMS
The Ugly Kings Strange, Strange Times NAPALM
Yes The Quest INSIDE OUT MUSIC Prog veterans’ first album without late bassist Chris Squire is a mixed bag.
Y
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Bernstein-type orchestral passages, which burst into life suddenly and then just as soon fizzle out. As the album progresses it becomes ever more twee and unchallenging. There’s no drama (pun intended); everything sounds far too fragile (ditto). Pomp rock without the ‘m’? You could say so. This is a two-CD set and yet, curiously, the second CD comprises only three tracks. This would be understandable if each of them was 20 minutes long, but only one manages to exceed the fiveminute mark. Sister Sleeping Soul is admittedly an affecting love song, but dyed-in-the-wool Yes psychos will be shocked to the core by the trite lyrics: ‘Teenage magic tragic nights… Hazy crazy days of our youth.’ It’s like the Silver Surfer’s Power Cosmic has been expunged by Galactus and replaced by the cast of Happy Days. The throwaway Mystery Tour appears to be a paean to The Beatles, complete with references to Maxwell’s Silver Hammer and the Tour itself, while Damaged World – which one would expect to be full of foreboding and impending eco-doom – ends up as lightweight as Victoria Beckham after having a lettucefuelled lockdown. Come back Starcastle, all is forgiven. QQQQQQQQQQ Geoff Barton
Deafheaven Infinite Granite SARGENT HOUSE Post-metal standard bearers go full shoegaze. A decade on from their acclaimed debut Roads To Judah, Deafheaven have jettisoned any lingering sense that they wish to keep scowling black metal fans happy. The Californians’ transformation into a dreamy shoegaze outfit is now complete, and as a result Infinite Granite is vastly more satisfying than any of their previous albums. Older readers will appreciate the huge debt that songs like wild and windswept opener Shellstar owe to the early-90s experiments of My Bloody Valentine, Slowdive and Ride, but Deafheaven have retained the queasy undertow that once enabled them to cross genre boundaries with ease. As beautiful and disarming as melodic mirages like Great Mass Of Color and Lament For Wasps are, the band still wield fearsome sonic power that, however hazily, nods back to
The Killers Pressure Machine EMI The Killers return with a melange of Americana heavy on the melancholic. The darlings of noughties rock have turned pensive; interviews recorded in singer Brandon Flowers’s home town of Nephi, Utah, address issues from domestic violence (Desperate Things) to drug possession (West Hills). Cody ties rocks of cynicism to your ankles through the story of a young pyromaniac and a despair of faith and religion. Quiet Town and Runaway Horses exhibit tender lyrical themes (‘Small town girl, put your dreams on ice’), and there’s brief respite in the dreamy haze of Sleepwalker and Pressure Machine. However, nostalgia and the shattering of childhood idylls reoccur through In The Car Outside and In Another Life. Both are also welcome melodic and rhythmic injections among the album’s acoustic echoes. The threadbare Terrible Thing reflects the album’s bleakness. while Desperate Thing laments the sacrifices made for toxic love. The album is a documentation of life in a small town, thrown into stark relief when the cracks of hope shine through. QQQQQQQQQQ Phoebe Flys
Iron Lizards Hungry For Action THE SIGN Paris is the new Detroit (if you want it to be). French garage rock is the most savage music in the world. Seriously, death metal’s got nothing on snotty Parisian punk. From The Dogs to the No Talents and The Hatepinks, something about the snarly accents and the frantic guitar abuse really puts them in a league of their own. And so it is with Iron Lizards, France’s latest assault on common decency. Hungry For Action is completely devoid of subtlety and nuance. Iron Lizards worship at the altar of the Stooges and the MC5, their
GOTTLIEB BROS/PRESS
es’s first new album for seven years – and their first without talismanic bass player Chris Squire, who died in 2015 – is a curiously muted beast. It begins promisingly with The Ice Bridge, its Fanfare For The Common Man-style opening transporting the listener immediately into a classic Yes realm of floating forests, nebulous mountains and, of course, icy bridges. Like most, if not all, of the tracks on The Quest, it has a strong Thunberg theme, warning of the dangers to the world of climate change and suchlike. Singer Jon Davison ably emulates Jon Anderson, his voice more airy-fairy than Tinker Bell on a helium high, while guitarist Steve Howe’s nerdy noodlings have never sounded better. The Ice Bridge is also likely the first song in rock history to use the word ‘exponential’ in its lyrics, neatly knocking Lemmy’s ‘parallelogram’ into a cocked hat. But then it all goes awry. For an album recorded at the height of the covid crisis and supposedly dealing with the subject of imminent global Armageddon, this writer certainly didn’t expect to be comparing tracks such as Future Memories to Crosby Stills Nash & Young. Leave Well Alone also raises eyebrows, its introduction sounding like El Condor Pasa mixed with the soundtrack to Saturday Night Fever. Several tracks are punctuated by curious Elmer
Desert grooves with a side order of blues from Aussie four-piece. Impeccably selected touchstones, a foothold in the blues and an innate sense of drama make Melbourne’s The Ugly Kings an intriguingly timeless prospect. Their second album finds them tackling subjects as weighty as the riffs surrounding them, from the eco-panic of the title track – a full-pelt, elephantine desert-rock anthem that transplants Queens Of The Stone Age into the heart of Mad Max’s apocalyptic battleground – to the crazed world of internet truthers on Do You Feel Like You’re Paranoid?. Vocalist Russell Clark is blessed with a deep tone that switches from a Jim Morrisonstyle shamanic baritone to gothglam theatrics (on the Cultish The Devil Comes With A Smile), giving the impression that storytelling comes naturally to him, while the band’s sound piles on the heaviness without letting it overwhelm the core message. Perfectly pitched for festival afternoons in the sun, The Ugly Kings are all set to soundtrack these strangest of days. QQQQQQQQQQ Emma Johnston
those metal roots. In every other respect, Deafheaven have truly hit their stride here, and Infinite Granite resounds with delight in its own ingenuity. QQQQQQQQQQ Dom Lawson
raging proto-metal played with all the willfully destructive abandon of, say, The Dwarves or The Mummies. Just imagine a bunch of French dudes destroying your house with fire and guitars. Every song is a furnace blast of feedbackdrenched action-rock that will have even the lamest among us riding a Harley chopper into the heart of the sun. This is one hell of a debut album. QQQQQQQQQQ Sleazegrinder
The Record Company Play Loud CONCORD Bluesy Californians’ third tries to broaden their appeal. On their first two albums, this Los Angeles trio successfully built a sound around earthy, bluesy rock. Now, they clearly feel the need to branch out. This more diverse third album both benefits and suffers from the input of chart songwriters for hire, with radio-friendly hooks offset by a rock’n’soul sound a little too slick to suit them on the INXS-like Never Leave You. They fare better crunching the slide-guitar gravel on Gotta Be Movin’ and Awake, while Paradise is an impressive power ballad. Elsewhere, the anthemic feel of Live As One and Midnight Moon seem tailormade for festival singalongs, offering immediacy even if at times it’s at the expense of some of their old down-home grunt. QQQQQQQQQQ Johnny Sharp
Goat
A Pale Horse Named Death Infernum In Terra LONG BRANCH
Abandon hope all ye who enter here. Former Type O Negative man Sal Abruscato is one of metal’s least cheerful souls. His arts are dark, but then he is from Brooklyn. There’s morbid wit blowing down his alley though. Believe In Something (You Are Lost) trundles along like a driverless meat wagon, building on a dirty triple-guitar riff that segues into a tinkle of piano and the doom-laden Cast Out From The Sky, oddly reminiscent of Tull’s Aqualung. The music doesn’t so much rock as lurch out of the shadows. Shards Of Glass could be prime Nirvana played in unrelenting slo-mo. It’s all extremely unpleasant, which is the point: not so much the antidote as the disease. Sal’s mantra is: we’re all screwed, get over it. The closing Souls In The Abyss seems relatively soothing, if graveyards and medi-evil ossuaries are your thing. In that case APHND’s dark satanic thrills are just the ticket. No returns available. QQQQQQQQQQ Max Bell
The Felice Brothers From Dreams To Dust YEP ROC
Love, death and life’s legacy wrapped up in band’s eighth. Swinging hard for the bases, the Felice Brothers latest album is big in scope and loaded with ambition. Maybe it’s the passing of time, but reflection is to the fore with this crisp 40 minutes or so of folksy Americana. As always, the Felice Brothers’ tropes – wry interjection, canny observation, droll asides – are intact, singer Ian Felice rhyming ‘St Francis of
Assisi’ with ‘fans of AC/DC’ without batting an eyelid. It’s a slow-burn of an album, sounding more layered with each listen, the strain of a pedal steel woven into the fabric of the songs. With Ian Felice switching between dry narrative and lusty vocal, it’s like travelling through an ever changing but still familiar landscape. They’re Warren Zevon reborn in the deft Blow Him Apart, woozy and whimsical in Jazz On The Autobahn, but remain, uniquely and happily, the family Felice. QQQQQQQQQQ Philip Wilding
The Vaccines Back In Love City AWAL/SONY Rock’n’roll punks set thrusters for sci-fi electro-rock ‘satisfaction zone’. As indie guitar culture selfdestructed, there’s been a frantic scramble for the electronic escape pods. Amid more cynical synth-pop and disco reinventions, on this fifth album frontman Justin HaywardYoung’s is skilfully conceived to best win round the previously Vaccines-hesitant. Their electronic rebirth is set in Love City, a futuristic neon dystopia of illicit romance, scandal and regret, based, presumably, on Matt Hancock’s office. In this sordid, lawless metropolis, humanoids dream of afterlife affairs (Paranormal Romance), sexbots check punters’ papers in the ‘satisfaction zone’ (Back In Love City) and revolutionary ‘guns for hire’ roam The People’s Republic Of Desire. All the while, disco beats, synthetic horns and Balearic sizzles zoom by along hoverways straddled by a gigantic holographic Freddie Cowan playing a digitised reconstruction of 1950s surf guitar. Heart Land’s love letter to all things American brings the record back down to earth, and some of its best tricks are pilfered from Muse – spaghetti western goes sci-fi fuzz-metal on Wanderlust, Bandit is pure android disco, and XCT aspires to sound like Mozart doing 25th-century cyber-punk. But by the mechanised bop of Jump Off The Top and sublime closer Pink Water Pistols, The Vaccines’ retro rock’n’roll clearly suits this kind of next-generation upgrade. QQQQQQQQQQ Mark Beaumont
BEST OF THE REST Other new releases out this month.
Mac McGaughan The Sound Of Yourself MERGE Ex-Superchunk frontman abandons grunge-punk concision for a schizophrenic sub-Berlin Bowie-esque blend of instrumental moods, torpid 80s indie and self-regarding songs that never entirely clear their launchpad. 6/10
Sweet Teeth Acid Lain LÖVELY A brutal, scintillating mush of frill-free Scandinavian power-pop aggression that calls to mind Hüsker Dü at their most angst-driven and impatient. The Teeth, four Swedish journeymen, invariably offset sweet hooks with sour swagger. 6/10
Hamish Hawk Heavy Elevator ASSAI RECORDINGS Cavernous guitar-heavy production applied to a dark-brown voice has a tendency to mask a central lyric, and while Heavy Elevator sounds suitably epic, Neil Hannon-esque Hawk’s exquisite storytelling should have been allowed to shine brighter. 6/10
Gloo How Not To Be Happy HASSLE Blazing, punk-paced exuberance born of a diet of dad’s AC/DC and gazing out to sea from a seaside town they forgot to close down. Littlehampton trio Gloo hoof significant arse with undeniable charm and hooks that cling like Evostick. 8/10
Tito Jackson Under Your Spell GULF COAST/HILLSIDE GLOBAL Unsurprisingly, considering the pool of talent on display on Under Your Spell (George Benson, Stevie Wonder, Joe Bonamassa), this debut blues album from the ex-Jackson 5 guitarist/vocalist exudes assurance and class. Technically exemplary and reliably steeped in soul. 8/10
Lurk Around The Sun PURE NOISE In many ways, Chicago’s Lurk sound like punk progression: there’s ferocious new(er)-wave complexity, raging ambition, but in many other ways they sound like a Stourbridge band in big shorts who’ve been stuck in traffic since 1993. 7/10
The Raven Age Exile EX1 Metal runs deep in this London quintet (the guitarist’s dad is Maiden’s Steve Harris). Even this ‘alternate acoustic style album’ resorts to huge wattages of electricity. Four live tracks close proceedings in more orthodox, if less rewarding, style. 7/10
Sonny Vincent Snake Pit Therapy SVART Legendary in the sense of having been around for aeons without selling too many records, NYC stalwart/ex-Testors frontman Sonny Vincent’s latest addition to his vast discography evokes his formative CBGB 70s. Spirited, savage, very Stiv. 7/10
Elvis Costello & Sebastian Krys Spanish Model UME Quite why El Vis has chosen to release a remixed and reinterpreted Spanish-language version of his 1978 album This Year’s Model featuring leading Latin artists one can only speculate (Which cynic said: “Cash”?). Whatever, it’s surprisingly excellent. 9/10
Eric Bibb Dear America PROVOGUE This blues-laced ‘love letter’ to his country from Paul Robeson’s 69-year old grandson is a rich, 13-track seam of soul, passion and resonant post-BLM hope that’s positively awash with complementary collaborative voices. 8/10
Chris Jagger Mixing Up The Medicine BMG From the galumphing oompah-reggae of its opening track onwards it’s all a bit Sunday-lunch-at-the-West-London-rock-pub meat-’n’R&B-potatoes, but the heartfelt lament of Hey Brother is worth the price of admission alone. 7/10
BEST OF THE REST REVIEWS BY IAN FORTNAM
Headsoup ROCKET Compelling spring clean from the mysterious psych outfit. Of all the bands to have played a crucial role in the revival of psychedelia over the past decade or so, Sweden’s heavily disguised collective Goat are arguably the most idiosyncratic. Fusing intricate Middle Eastern rhythms with face-melting guitar breaks and the kind of chants redolent of tranceinducing religious ceremonies, their heady mix of influences has always coalesced into a coherent whole. Headsoup is a clearing of the vaults, bringing together obscure A-sides, B-sides and unreleased ephemera to present
the band’s full onslaught. Of particular interest are an unreleased radio edit of 2018’s Let It Burn in which the widespread vista of the original is compressed into an intense explosion of rhythm and groove, and the wah-wah’d funk of obscurity Dig My Grave. Best of all are the two brand new tracks Queen Of The Underground and Fill My Mouth, whose hypnotic propulsions auger well for what’s coming next. QQQQQQQQQQ Julian Marszalek
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S E U S REIS
Ozzy Osbourne
Black Sabbath Technical Ecstasy: Deluxe Edition BMG Sabbath’s much-maligned 1976 album gets its time in the spotlight.
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She’s Gone sounds like it was written for the world’s bleakest Disney film; and the Beatles-y, Bill Ward-sung It’s Alright shows that the drummer really was the beating heart of the band. Best of all is You Won’t Change Me, an epic cri de cœur that’s one part defiance and one part desperation. There’s plenty of bonus material packed into the box. The inevitable Steven Wilson remix doesn’t add a lot to proceedings, but a live show recorded in 1976 is a rough-asarses yet exhilarating snapshot of a band barely holding it together, and the disc of alternative mixes is a fascinating, if incomplete, picture of how the album came together (someone really should put together a compilation of Ozzy’s studio banter). But the gold medal goes to the reprinted 1976 tour programme, complete with vintage interview and a Kipper Williams comic strip featuring the pair of shagging robots from the sleeve. It’s an impressive package, albeit one that’s unlikely to lift Technical Ecstasy from the bottom of the league table of 70s Sabbath albums, where it languishes with Ozzy’s equally patchy swan song Never Say Die. But cash-rich Sabs-heads will appreciate the chance to show a little love to a sad orphan of a record that doesn’t really deserve its pitiful reputation. QQQQQQQQQQ Dave Everley
Various Something Inside Of Me (British Blues 1963-1976) WIENERWORLD
Basement blues. Beneath the edifice of the British blues boom in the 60s was a network of clubs and pubs and a multitude of groups of all shapes and sizes scuffling around in search of a gig. The prize at stake was a support slot with a famous name band or a headline spot on a dead Monday night. Some made it, most didn’t. Something Inside Of Me shines a light into this subterranean world of the blues, diligently trawling through club flyers and
Deep Purple Soundboard Series EAR MUSIC Praise the Lord. Here the Soundboard Series, Purple’s plan to beat the bootleggers at their own game, has come up with a couple of contrasting shows from the beginning of this century. Live In Wollongong (7/10) finds the Mark VII version of the band in fine form Down Under in March 2001. They are still feeling the rejuvenating effects of guitarist Steve Morse’s arrival, and there are three songs from the Purpendicular album to prove how much life there is beyond Blackmore. Having an enthusiastic audience helps, and even hoary classics like Lazy, Black Night, When A Blind Man Cries and Highway Star feel the benefit. Local hero Jimmy Barnes joins Ian Gillan for Speed King, and only a lacklustre Smoke On The Water dampens things. Live In London (4/10) is for fans only (to take back a phrase). Recorded at Hammersmith Apollo in February 2002 (the first of three shows they played there that year), it’s historically significant for being Jon Lord’s last show with the band. But the show itself is something of a disaster, with Gillan stricken with flu and barely able to even croak his way through a song. Which is probably why his vocals are so low in the mix. The set-list has been hurriedly altered, and both Lord and Morse stretch their parts to the hilt in what is effectively an
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ll good things come to an end. In Black Sabbath’s case it was the white-hot streak of six irrefutably brilliant albums they released between 1970’s bruising self-titled debut and 1975’s wide-eyed and spangled Sabotage, brought to a screeching halt by Technical Ecstasy. Sabbath lore has it that that seventh album was the point where the whole edifice that was the Ozzy era started to crumble. Certainly it sounded like the work of a band who had spent half a decade flogging themselves into the ground and had to be dragged, groaning, out of the cocaine igloo they’d built around themselves to make a new record. This lavish, four-CD (or six LP) box set won’t suddenly re-frame Technical Ecstasy as Sabbath’s great lost masterpiece, but it does go some way to boosting its reputation. The original album remains as hit-and-miss as ever. Meat-and-potato rockers Back Street Kid, Rock’N’Roll Doctor and the eternally dire Dirty Women (a song that takes forever to get to the good bit at the end) are weighed down by the kind of tired riffs and clichéd lyrics that Sabbath had previously left to lesser mortals. It’s when they head off-piste that things get interesting: All Moving Parts (Stand Still) is an average song enlivened by an uncharacteristically funky, Stevie Wonderinspired bass line; the heavily orchestrated
No More Tears 30th Anniversary Expanded Vinyl Edition SONY Solo highlight returns to vinyl, with bonus tracks. It’s hard to imagine in the light of his householdname status since The Osbournes, but at the point of his ousting from Black Sabbath Ozzy Osbourne’s future looked shaky. Retrospectives invariably focus on decapitated bats, and bladder emissions on sites of historical significance, at the expense of acknowledging the fact that comeback Blizzard Of Ozz (1980) and Diary Of A Madman (1981) set the bar for much 80s metal. In a 2016 ranking of Ozzy’s solo catalogue, Classic Rock placed No More Tears (1991) at number three behind those two early-80s classics, a rating borne out in the quality of songwriting and the intensity of performance from Ozzy and his band. Guitarist Zakk Wylde’s dominant musical presence is key to the album’s success, his big riffing, and squealing licks and solos hot-wiring highlights No More Tears and I Don’t Want To Change The World. Elsewhere Ozzy’s gift for memorable vocal melodies gels with lyrical contributions from Lemmy on Mama I’m Coming Home and Hellraiser. This two-LP edition enhances the original with the addition of bonus tracks (Party With The Animals, Don’t Blame Me) worthy of replacing lone stinker Zombie Stomp, demos and live tracks. QQQQQQQQQQ Rich Davenport
the classified ads of the weekly music papers in search of bands who populated this circuit, and getting them to search their cupboards and garages for unreleased acetates and reelto-reel tapes of their carefully replicated blues covers. The result is this 96-track, four-CD collection from 15 bands in and around the Thames Delta. Blues students will be familiar with some of the names: Dave Kelly (now with the Blues Band), Duster Bennett (on the verge of breaking through when he was killed in a car accident), Danny Kirwan (guitarist with Boilerhouse who later joined Fleetwood Mac). The rest are lost to obscurity, although the accompanying booklet does a fine revival job, evoking the atmosphere of this bygone age. QQQQQQQQQQ Hugh Fielder
instrumental Purple show. Arguably it should have been left on the shelf, but that might have encouraged some bootlegger to give it a credence it doesn’t deserve. Hugh Fielder
Pixies Trompe Le Monde 4AD In retrospect, this is as good a Pixies album as any. Which makes it some album indeed. The first two Pixies albums (1988’s Surfer Rosa, 1989’s Doolittle) were so game-changing in their tightly coiled fury and explosive quietloud dynamics that it was easy (at the time) to overlook the final two albums from the original line-up, especially with the Coolest Person In Rock™ Kim Deal already mostly out the door by the time Trompe Le Monde was released in ’91. Yet the demonic surf/spacerock of Bossanova (1990) and follow-up Trompe are stunning to listen back to. The novelty might have worn off, but the intensity and wired pop splendour of songs such as the title one, U-Mass, Planet Of Sound and the rampant Mary
Chain cover Head On are as charged, smart and driven as anything early Pixies produced. And the album is full of hidden surprises, delirious squeals and moans from a fully charged Black Francis and the guitar of Joey Santiago and rhythms to kill-dance for. Subbacultcha by itself is greater than 99 per cent of all rock. Yes, there’s a Kim Deal-shaped hole in some of this record. But it doesn’t matter. To celebrate its 30th anniversary, Trompe Le Monde is reissued on limited-edition marbled green vinyl. QQQQQQQQQQ Everett True
Genesis The Last Domino? UMC/VIRGIN Turning the favourites on again. Again. Great band, hefty back catalogue featuring plenty of absolute crackers. But does anyone really want/need another Genesis ‘best of’? Surely long-time fans with 40-plus years on the clock will already own just about everything the band have released, and part-timers will have long-since scooped up all
the tracks they want plus a few more for luck. Which leaves The Last Domino? appealing mostly to just late-comers to the Genesis party, and collectors/ completists compelled to scoop up yet another repackaged I Know What I Like, The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway, Invisible Touch, Firth Of Fifth, Mama and the rest on this 27-track, twoCD/four-LP collection. With three musically distinct phases of Genesis – the early, ‘underground’ years, the postGabriel mid-period and the even-grandma-knows-them hit-singles years – choosing the tracks for The Last Domino? must have been a bit of a bugger, to say the least. But they’ve done a decent job, and the collection is reasonably representative, if somewhat skewed towards the more commercial tracks, although a puzzling omission is anything from Trick Of The Tail, arguably one of Genesis’s very best albums and also a pivotal one. Bookended by Duke’s End and Abacab, the running order isn’t chronological, and seems to be based on musical dynamics. Coinciding with Genesis’s hotticket first tour in ages – and almost certainly their last – The Last Domino? will find buyers.
But with not much (certainly compared with today’s standards for bells-and-whistles collections) in terms of valueadded packaging – a hardback gatefold book affair including some rare and unseen images – and better, more desirable Genesis compilation packages out there, they’re unlikely to be queuing round the block come on-sale day. QQQQQQQQQQ Paul Henderson
Small Faces Live 1966 NICE Mod icons redefine maximum R&B. Small Faces drummer Kenney Jones’s new archive label’s debut release presents a pair of eyeopening sets from The Twenty Club, Mouscron, Belgium that serve to spotlight just how raw, untamed and electrifying a proposition the diminutive modernists were in their preOgdens’ first flush. Live 1966 features 14 slices of feral R&B at odds with the quartet’s concurrent, significantly more commercial, studio output, including two versions of
Muddy Waters’s You Need Love (restyled as You Need Loving, with Steve Marriott at his untamed blues-shouting best) that are so obviously prototypes for Led Zeppelin’s Whole Lotta Love that it’s not even funny. The only real concession to the teenybopping chart-watchers in their enthusiastic audience (who are so entirely overcome with awe that they’re even compelled to scream during Ian McLagan’s organ-led instrumental version of Mel Tormé’s Comin’ Home Baby) is a version of contemporary UK single What’Cha Gonna Do About It? that’s so punchily punky and fundamentally slack-jawed that it’ll very probably leave you sneering involuntarily. Featuring tantalising tracks the band never took into the studio, Live 1966 is an essential purchase for mods and rockers alike, and apparently only the first in a series of releases from a newly rediscovered Jones archive of rare and previously unreleased recordings that span his entire illustrious career. So tartan-scarved Faces fans would be well advised to watch this space. QQQQQQQQQQ Ian Fortnam
Uriah Heep Every Day Rocks BMG Heep box clever with vivid vinyl and album-art apparel for the discerning rocker.
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riah Heep were unfairly dismissed by critics in the 70s, but their unshakeable status as a people’s band and the enduring quality of their music (cited as an influence by Queen and Iron Maiden) have enabled them to thrive through 40 million album sales to enjoy their ongoing goldenanniversary celebrations. But with compilation albums up the wazoo, and the career-spanning 50 Years In Rock box set released last year, can Every Day Rocks deliver anything worthwhile? Surprisingly, it can, by complementing music from arguably Heep’s most essential period with imaginative extras that present an original alternative to the usual box-set add-ons of alternative takes and live tracks. Whereas 50 Years In Rock rounded up Heep’s studio catalogue on CD, Every Day Rocks is aimed squarely at vinyl aficionados. Containing a picture disc each of studio album from 1970’s Very ’Eavy, Very ’Umble debut to 1974’s Wonderworld, it includes the influential classic tracks and deeper cuts on which Heep’s reputation was built. Very ’Eavy’s Gypsy establishes key elements
of their classic sound, David Byron’s operatic vocals melding with Mick Box’s scything guitar playing and Ken Hensley’s eloquent keyboards, over five-part vocal harmonies. Their sense of gothic melodrama is refined through the elaborate arrangement on Salisbury, subsequently brought together into more concise material on Look At Yourself, the propulsive shuffle style of the title track patenting another Heep hallmark. Lee Kerslake (drums) and Gary Thain (bass) arrived to complete the classic Heep line-up in time for 1972’s twin peaks Demons And Wizards (home to the essential Easy Livin’) and The Magician’s Birthday, and both albums are presented here with original and re-imagined artwork from Roger Dean. Sweet Freedom (1973) brought the blues elements of their sound to the fore, typified by the irresistibly slinky Stealin’. The relentless pace takes its toll on the patchy Wonderworld, but the six preceding records justify Heep’s place on
rock’s Mount Rushmore alongside Black Sabbath, Deep Purple and Led Zeppelin. This set also includes seven T-shirts featuring the covers of the albums included. Rounded off with lyric cards, a year planner, and Mick Box’s autograph, Every Day Rocks is a refreshing reboot of the traditional box-set format. QQQQQQQQQQ Rich Davenport
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REISSUES
Marillion Fugazi: Deluxe Edition PARLOPHONE
Faust 1971-1974 BUREAU B Box set of 70s West German experimentalists, including three albums of previously unreleased material.
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hen in 1973 Virgin Records released Faust’s third album for the price of a single, some 60,000 UK rock fans decided to give it a punt. Def Leppard’s Joe Elliott was one of them. He hated it, tried to abandon it at a friend’s house, only for his friend to come chasing after him to give it him back. Others, however, including Jim Kerr, Julian Cope and Joy Division’s Stephen Morris, adored Faust, who would become a post-punk touchstone Faust were put together by ex-journalist Uwe Nettelbeck, who somehow persuaded West Germany’s Polydor Records, on the basis of a brilliant but decidedly avantgarde demo, Lieber Herr Deutschland (included here), that they could be fashioned into a ‘German Beatles’. Band members including Jean Herve Peron, Werner, Diermaier and Hams-Joachim Irmler were dispatched to the village of Wümme, and set up studio in an old school building. Engineer Kurt Graupner constructed ‘black boxes’ for them, enabling individual musicians to modify and mutate at will the music they created with conventional guitar, drums, organ, bass and vocals, using wah-wah, fuzz and spring reverb among other effects. Polydor were aghast when the band delivered their debut. Beginning with excerpts of The Beatles’ All You Need Is Love 84 CLASSICROCKMAGAZINE.COM
and the Stones’ Satisfaction going up in a crackle of electronic flames, it was a wild, Dadaist collage of lengthy rock jamming, inebriated vocals, electronic barrages and fleeting pastoral passages. Self-titled, it was released in 1971 on clear vinyl. For the second album, So Far, the label asked that the band at least chop it up into digestible chunks. They did, but there is something sarcastically ‘straight’ about the remorselessly linear title track and the thudding It’s A Rain Day, Sunshine Girl. Kicked off Polydor, they decamped to Virgin. Faust IV was almost conventional, quite beautiful (Jennifer). The infamous The Faust Tapes, however, was a series of glimpses of possible ideas, thrown up then discarded, and this is also the spirit of the previously unreleased material here – Punkt, recorded in 1974, as well as Momentaufnahme I and II, discarded Wumme recordings – tantalising fragments, the shards of an imaginary musical ‘whole’ shattered by modernism, its oscillation between a hankering for peace and violent disorder perhaps reflected in the turbulent soul of group member the late Rudolf Sosna. Faust, still active, are of eternal relevance to those, present and future, seeking to re-form/de-form rock music. QQQQQQQQQQ David Stubbs
The dark horse album of their Fish era gets a 21st-century spruce-up. Marillion’s second album, Fugazi usually trails a distant last in rankings of the four studio albums they made with original singer Fish. But while it lacks the spiky rush of its predecessor Script For A Jester’s Tear and the bulletproof commerciality of follow-up Misplaced Childhood, Fugazi is better than its reputation would have it. This four-disc reissue is a chance to revisit it with fresh ears. A new remix makes some welcome changes both large (fleshing out the album’s tinny production) and small (swapping the epic title track’s original anti-climactic fade out for a proper ending). There’s also a 5.1 surround-sound mix – obligatory on any high-profile prog reissue these days. The gold here for Marillion aficionados comes with the lengthy and illuminating documentary on the Blu-ray disc, detailing the album’s turbulent gestation, plus footage from a stellar appearance on Swiss TV and a recording of a gig at Montreal’s Spectrum Club in June 1984 (a handful of tracks from which appeared on that year’s Real To Reel live album). It’s the live material that best represents Marillion at this stage in their career – a prog band with a punk band’s energy, something they’d never truly capture again despite all the successes that followed. QQQQQQQQQQ Dave Everley
Sex Pistols 76-77 UNIVERSAL Ever get the feeling...? If this comprehensive collection of pre-Bollocks Pistols demos does nothing else, at least its long-awaited dissemination of the three tracks the band recorded with Chris Spedding (their initial studio date of any kind) at Majestic Studios in May ‘76 will finally dispel longcirculated unfounded rumours that it was the Motorbikin’ former Womble who actually played Steve Jones’s guitar parts on Never Mind The Bollocks. One listen to the
Majestic version of No Feelings (on which Spedding plays guitar fills) proves beyond reasonable doubt that while Spedding is more accomplished, he simply doesn’t possess any of the all-important iconoclastic savant brutality of Jones. In fact, cluttered as it is with sore-thumb Chris curlicues and relentlessly over-busy bass guitar runs from class swot Glen Matlock, Spedding’s Feelings is positively rinky-tink in its unremarkable pub-rockery. Mark you, John Lydon’s epoch-defining ennui-steeped vocal delivery was intrinsically and inimitably Rotten from sneer one, and remains the central sell through all four discs and 10 sessions that take us through producers Dave Goodman, Mike Thorne and ultimately Chris Thomas to the fully formed Bollocks beast that we all know and love/loathe. But do we really need 80 embryonic (some instrumental, 90 per cent of them previously available) takes of 16 original songs and eight shambolic covers? Hmm… define ‘need’. The ever acquisitive punk demographic will certainly want them, but will struggle to find them for under 50 quid. So there’s that. Whatever, Chris Thomas delivered the Pistols’ defining statement with Never Mind The Bollocks’ titanic multiple guitar overdubs and thuggishly minimalist bass bludgeons. Sometimes you do need a sledgehammer to crack a nut. QQQQQQQQQQ Ian Fortnam
Mötley Crüe Dr. Feelgood (40th Anniversary Remastered) BETTER NOISE MUSIC
The band’s only No.1 album gets a new coat of paint. Can it really be 40 years since Mötley Crüe staggered out of the garage and fell down somewhere along LA’s Sunset Strip, lipstick askew? Apparently so. The multi-platinum, Bob Rockproduced Dr. Feelgood might be only 32 years old (think about that for a moment and wonder where your favourite Girls, Girls, Girls T-shirt is now – and if it’ll still fit you), but has time been kind to this glam-rock behemoth that kissed off the end of the 80s? It has. No one’s pretending the Crüe’s fifth album would have passed the #metoo litmus test
– every other song is about some girl somewhere in some state of undress, and the lyrics to She Goes Down still have the power to make your contact lens pop out. But when it hits, it hits hard. The pulsing title track, the effervescent Kickstart My Heart, the deft swing of Same Ol’ Situation (S.O.S)… Crüe would never have it so good again. QQQQQQQQQQ Philip Wilding
Thunder All The Right Noises BMG British rock warhorses’ 2021 album, now with added livestream DVD. It’s difficult to begrudge bands scrabbling to maximise their income streams right now. And so, just six months after it was originally released, Thunder’s thirteenth studio album is reissued in bulked-out form. All The Right Noises was a solid latter-day Thunder record – one impressive enough to give them a top-three album in the UK. This reissue is bolstered by a second CD featuring four bonus non-album tracks and eight songs recorded live without an audience at Rockfield Studios, all of which appeared on the deluxe edition of the original album back in the spring. The main draw this time around is the inclusion of a DVD featuring the livestream recorded to mark the album’s release. Leaning heavily on new tracks, it’s as professional and eye-catching as these things get, although even a singer as charismatic as Danny Bowes can’t paper over the lack of atmosphere that comes from the absence of a real-life audience. Still, it’s a nice memento for anyone who watched it at the time, and if this reissue helps keep the wolf from the door then it’s hard to argue with it. QQQQQQQQQQ Dave Everley
Mark Knopfler
Jimmie Vaughan The Jimmie Vaughan Story LAST MUSIC CO
Thunderbirds are go! Jimmie Vaughan will likely always live in the shadow of his more celebrated younger brother, but this five-CD distillation of his career thus far gets beneath his skin far more revealingly than anything similar did for Stevie Ray. The album title is something of a misnomer; this is not a ‘story’ in the sense of having a beginning, a middle and an end. There is no timeline to the 96 tracks gathered here. Sure, it starts with the Fabulous Thunderbirds, the Texas bar band that established Jimmie’s reputation. But there’s no chronology to their 41 tracks. Instead it ducks and dives around Jimmie’s decade with the band. And if you want to hear unreleased tracks from Storm, Jimmie’s first band, you’ll have to wait until CD number five. It’s the same with his solo
career. But it highlights the big difference between him and his brother: while Stevie Ray was a self-contained blues colossus, Jimmie’s greatest asset is his ability to strike sparks off other performers. That began with Fabulous Thunderbirds singer and harmonica player Kim Wilson, and was followed by some 25 collaborations with Eric Clapton, Bonnie Raitt, John Lee Hooker, Bo Diddley, Lou Ann Barton (a particular favourite), Billy Gibbons, Susan Tedeschi, and more harmonica players than you can shake a stick at. QQQQQQQQQQ Hugh Fielder
BEST OF THE REST Other new releases out this month.
Bob Marley & The Wailers The Capitol Session ’73 TUFF GONG/MERCURY STUDIOS Directly following their debut UK and US tours, a newly post-Bunny, Burnin’-era Wailers (with Joe Higgs deputising) performed before an invited audience at Hollywood’s Capitol Records Tower, and here it is on red ‘n’ green (or black) vinyl. 8/10
Nick Lowe The Convincer (20th Anniversary Ed) YEP ROC As the climactic third instalment of a trilogy of releases that found the former Brinsley at his most consistent, 2001’s The Convincer is Home Counties country rock at its very best: honest, casual, assured… convincing. An evergreen treat. 8/10
Violent Femmes Why Do Birds Sing? CRAFT
Garbage Beautiful Garbage BMG Twenty years on, Garbage’s third gets the everything-butthe-kitchen-sink treatment. Released in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, Garbage’s album Beautiful Garbage passed a lot of people by, and confused a lot of those who did cross its path. A deviation from the futuristic rock that had defined them previously, it saw them exploring multiple genres from modern R&B on Androgyny, to dreamy and melancholy 50s girl-group pop on Can’t Cry These Tears. Listening to it now, 20 years on, Beautiful Garbage has a lot more going for it than many gave it credit for. Singer Shirley Manson is as expressive and flawless as ever, at one minute conveying deep sadness, at another, on the joyous Cherry Lips, an air-punching positivity in support of the fearless and fabulous characters who dare to walk their own path. Less digitally scrubbed than its predecessors, and perhaps a bit unfocused, it still gleams as the band wholeheartedly grasp the pop nettle. This new box set is rammed to the gills with bonus tracks, demos, acoustic versions, live takes and remixes – there are 10 alternative versions of Shut Your Mouth alone, from the stark to the almost unrecognisable. It’s all far too much for one sitting, of course, but plenty for completists to delve into and see how much can be done from a single starting point. And with a new Garbage album on the way it’s a perfect appetiser for the new material to come. QQQQQQQQQQ Emma Johnston
1991’s newly expanded fifth from Milwaukee’s quietly influential Gordon Gano-led folk-punk pioneers finds the trio in upbeat mood. Not exactly vintage Violents, but an extra live disc rounds out a rewarding picture. 7/10
Tintern Abbey Beeside: The Complete Recordings GRAPEFRUIT Clearly not psychedelic in the sense of ‘knocked up while tripping’, this comprehensive two-CD trove of mostly unheard ’67/68 psych (rich in mind-altering, Eastern-tinged ingenuity) recalls Ogdens’ Faces, The Move or Syd’s Floyd at their most concise. 7/10
Beau Brummels Turn Around (Complete Recordings) NOW SOUNDS Underrated Bay Area pioneers (from Anglophile beat beginnings, through psych-folk fruition to full-on country rock) get the eight-CD box their all-but-forgotten legacy deserves. A teen-idol profile stripped them of rock credibility, but they’re ripe for reappraisal. 7/10
Cats In Space Diamonds: The Best Of HARMONY FACTORY An assured, newly repolished collection from an often overlooked collective of persistent journeymen rockers in the harmony-heavy tradition of Sweet, ELO, Queen and Jellyfish. Great songs, OTT production, textbook classic rock. 7/10
White Cowbell Oklahoma Textos Raros Vol.1 2001-2011 SLICK MONKEY As good a place to start as any with Toronto’s semi-legendary riffpropelled bludgeoning megaröckers, this tongue-in-stetson collection of rarities and previously unreleased tracks distils 10 years of kicking ass into 11 belt-loop-thumbing blurts. 7/10
All Night Radio Spirit Stereo Frequency BIG POTATO Engaging psych-rock eccentricity (originally unleashed via Sub Pop in ‘94, now back on purple-and-black vinyl) courtesy of ex-Beachwood Sparks’ Dave Scher and Jimi Hey. An eclectic mid-60s-channeling aural hallucination. Borderline genius. 8/10
Spirit Sunrise & Salvation ESOTERIC Collating experimental double Spirit Of ‘76, focused career highlight Son Of Spirit, Future Games’ inspired eccentricity and ‘84 live-in-studio redux ‘hits’ set Thirteenth Dream, Sunrise & Salvation is an extrasheavy, eight-CD Mercury-era box of delights. 8/10
Slade Slayed? (Deluxe Vinyl) BMG The crucial third album upon which Slade graduated from imagechallenged, cover-playing provincial live draw (Move Over) to glitterflecked, UK chart-busting heavyweight champs (Mama Weer All Crazee Now). Yellow-and-black splatter vinyl? If you must. 9/10
Quireboys A Bit Of What You Fancy (30th Anniversary Edition) OFF YER ROCKA Arriving a year late to your own party? How very Quireboys. Three decades-plus haven’t rendered 7 O’Clock’s Faces-on-steroids haphazard-hair-’n’-superfluous-scarves bar-room riff brawl any less irresistible. Get in. 8/10
BEST OF THE REST REVIEWS BY IAN FORTNAM
The Studio Albums 1996-2007 EMI/UMC Dire Straits mainman’s steadygoing box set showcases the value of underplaying. Gathering his first five postDire Straits solo albums (not counting film scores), and a bonus disc of B-sides titled The Gravy Train,
this collection is as sleepy and nonchalant as an old friend’s affable shrug. Knopfler does what he does, blending folk, blues, country and rock into a tension-free take on Americana that’s faintly personal but more about delivering a carpet atmosphere of reflective rumination. You could easily play these through and forget there were individual songs going on, such is the consistency of feel, the conscious decision never to tread outside self-imposed lines. Could it be argued that this is just as valid a choice as the strict limitations observed by Ramones or Kraftwerk? Not sure you’d get much traction, but knock yourself out. Generally pleasant, sometimes boring, the albums here span from 1996’s Golden Heart, which burrs with warmth but doesn’t offer what dynamism Dire Straits had, through the excellent Sailing To Philadelphia/ (2000), which locates rather more energy and features guest vocals from James Taylor and Van Morrison, to 2007’s Kill To Get Crimson, which yields unheralded gems such as The Fizzy And The Still. Throughout, Knopfler’s gentle guitar playing is so understated it’s almost arrogant, so unshowy it borders on splashy. QQQQQQQQQQ Chris Roberts
CLASSICROCKMAGAZINE.COM 85
F F U T S BOOKS &
Bowie Odyssey 71
DVDs
Eruption: The Eddie Van Halen Story Paul Brannigan FABER & FABER The game-changing guitar legend gets the biography he deserves.
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charisma was just as important as Eddie’s mercurial playing, but Brannigan has done his detective work well enough to be able to debunk much of the myth-making from Roth’s 1998 memoir Crazy From The Heat, while also taking a refreshingly detached view of stories such as early Van Halen patron Gene Simmons’s claim that Eddie was ready to replace Ace Frehley in Kiss at one point (not on his watch, claims Paul Stanley). The more lurid aspects of the music industry around the turn of the 80s are delved into, from payola to groupies to mountains of cocaine, and the patchy nature of some of Van Halen’s output over the years isn’t glossed over. More importantly, though, the thrill of Eddie’s impact on rock music when the band emerged is evoked vividly, along with the threat that they posed to the established rock elite, such as the times in 1978 when Black Sabbath were outshone by their support band. “I only hope they last as long as we’ve lasted,” Ozzy gasped at the time, just 10 years into Sabbath’s career. Rock music has come a long way since then, but Eddie Van Halen’s singular talents, as this book reflects, still shine as brightly as they did when he first tapped his fingers on those frets. QQQQQQQQQQ Johnny Sharp
Talking To Myself Chris Jagger BMG Mick’s younger brother tells his tale. Being Mick Jagger’s brother is a psychological tightrope, fraught with both opportunity and self-esteem issues, but sweetnatured Chris takes the wisest course here. He name-drops to his heart’s content (Hitchcock and Brando as well as Hendrix and McCartney), while staying close – but not too close – to the sibling he would never emulate. As a result, Talking To Myself escapes the trap of bitterness, even when Chris becomes a Post Office temp and a minicab driver, without slipping into hero worship. It’s at its best when it paints pictures such as a 60s Stones gig in Soho before Bill Wyman and Charlie Watts joined, or an 80s trip around India with a comically disguised Mick. An empathetic ghost writer would have sprinkled
The Best Of Jamming! Selections & Stories From The Fanzine That Grew Up 1977-86 Tony Fletcher OMNIBUS Classic (post)-punk journal anthologised. A once essential publication that rapidly burgeoned from DIY fanzine roots to monthly glossy status, Jamming! was the quintessential punk rock product. Inspired by a Sounds article on fanzines, and an abiding love of The Jam, 13-year old schoolboy Tony Fletcher manned a typewriter, wrote to some likely interviewees and, learning on the job, managed to capture the zeitgeist as well as, if not better than, many selfappointed arbiters of style in the mainstream music press. Early haphazardly typewritten Q&As with the likes of Weller, Ant, Townshend and even McCartney (all reprinted here) are extraordinary. Fletcher is fearless in his naivety, his subjects unguarded, open. But as the budget blossomed (even to the point of offering covermounted EPs), times, and tone, changed, and the title folded after issue 36. With Fletcher offering additional insight, this compendium offers extracts from every issue and captures its era perfectly. QQQQQQQQQQ Ian Fortnam
Decades: Joy Division + New Order John Aizlewood PALAZZO Engaging, definitive telling of an often-told story. The story of Joy Division and New Order has been told so often that in Macclesfield and Stockport parents chant it to their infants to send them to sleep. But if it’s going to be retold, definitively, by someone who doesn’t have an axe to grind (i.e. not an
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f the stars had aligned, right about now Van Halen fans might have been looking forward to a tour bringing together an expanded reunion of the band’s original line-up, alongside postRoth frontmen Sammy Hagar and Garry Cherone. That was a plan under discussion at one point, according to Eddie Van Halen’s son Wolfgang, before the legendary guitarist fell ill and eventually passed away last October. Instead we’re left to look back on a stellar career that surely had even more to give. At least we have this diligently researched, perceptive and well-written biography, written by Classic Rock contributor Paul Brannigan, to enhance our appreciation. Many a writer might have felt obliged to write an overly reverent account of EVH’s life and work, fearful of saying anything even remotely less than glowing about a recently departed rock deity. Instead Brannigan doesn’t flinch from colouring in his subject warts and all, painting a convincing portrait of a personality who was sometimes as troubled as he was inspired and inspiring. He also joins the dots between other accounts of the band’s back story to give a more rounded account than ever before about Van Halen. David Lee Roth might feature heavily, as befits a figure whose showmanship and
Simon Goddard OMNIBUS PRESS Make way for the homo superior. Author Simon Goddard’s evocation of David Bowie circa ’71 is imagined as brilliantly as its predecessor, which was the best book written about its subject until this one. He begins by fixing his thousand-yard stare on the Gay Liberation Front and London town in flux, before virtually accompanying Bowie on his first, semi-farcical promotional trip to the USA to break The Man Who Sold The World: as fruitless as all Bowie’s other endeavours, except that it laid image-shaping groundwork for Aladdin Sane. Gradually a 360-degree picture of the artist and his chums emerges around the sights and smells of South East suburban London, with forays into the seedy nicotine glamour of Tin Pan Alley and the delightful world of girl teen magazines Mirabelle and Fabulous 208, Bowie’s true fan base. The detail is minute but the narrative is immense, the period argot as wily as the bohemian atmosphere of Performance. Stupendous. QQQQQQQQQQ Max Bell
a little more magic on sometimes perfunctory prose, but if you want to know what it’s like to walk along the street with Mick Jagger, his brother is the man to explain. QQQQQQQQQQ John Aizlewood
ex-member of Joy Division), then rock journalist (and football reviewer) John Aizlewood is your man. His dry, sardonic prose and attention to detail perfectly suits the dour and often absurd story of a band that crashed into oblivion when their singer ended his own life, and then rose again like a very bad-tempered phoenix. To be one huge influential and unique band is, to quote Lady Bracknell, remarkable, to be two is surely taking the piss. But, as Aizlewood shows in this wellwritten and detailed book, it happened. One for your shelves. QQQQQQQQQQ David Quantick
The Who Much Too Much PALAZZO Career overview of Shepherd’s Bush’s finest, including rare photos. Even the most avid fan of The ’Orrible ’Oo must be wondering if their book shelves can stand yet another tome dedicated to their heroes. Mercifully, this glossy 240pager warrants the risk. Author Mike Evans ploughs his way through the band’s amazing journey from pill-popping mod upstarts to stadium-slaying rock behemoths to wizened elder statesmen, via each studio album and various solo releases. While The Who’s story is one that barely needs retelling, Much Too Much comes with an authoritative air. Former Who PR Keith Altham provides the foreword, and Evans squeezes in plenty of interesting trivia along the way: who knew that the band’s helicopter landing at the Isle of Wight very nearly ended in disaster, or that Townshend’s notorious drunken night at The Speakeasy came at the end of a thirst-inducing 11-hour meeting with shady music business figure Allen Klein? QQQQQQQQQQ Paul Moody
Double Talkin’ Jive By Matt Sorum with Leif Eriksson and Martin Svensson RARE BIRD The Cult, GN’R and Velvet Revolver drummer’s wildly entertaining war stories. Often it’s not the A-list figures in rock’n’roll who have the best stories to tell – and the
willingness to tell them. While Matt Sorum’s skill as a drummer has enabled him to carve out a tidy career with The Cult, Guns N’Roses, Velvet Revolver et al, he’s probably not the first man in those bands that book publishers would be fighting to sign up. But this memoir is riotous fun. His own back story is startling enough, taking in mercy-killing his abusive stepdad and cocaine trafficking before he hits the big time with The Cult. Then the tall tales keep coming, whether it’s his mum smoking pot with Axl, giving Sebastian Bach a cunnilingus tutorial or trying to persuade Phil Spector not to kill Celine Dion. We also get some intriguing perspectives on Guns/VR (Axl’s mood-swinging mania is viewed more kindly than Slash and Duff’s passive deceit), and cameos from Metallica, Motörhead et al add further colour. QQQQQQQQQQ Johnny Sharp
Barry Adamson Up Above The City Down Beneath The Stars OMNIBUS Magazine/Bad Seeds bassist’s offbeat autobiography. Barry Adamson is best-known for being the bass player with (among others) Magazine and Nick Cave’s Bad Seeds. As a solo artist he composes intricate cinematic soundscapes. His autobiography starts disconcertingly with a first-hand account of his own birth. The book continues in a similarly disorienting manner – delving into the 19th-century underworld of his home town of Hulme, Manchester; 1960s football and superhero comics. His prose style is rich, conversational, rewarding in its uncanny, offbeat detail and broken legs. It’s all about the bass. Feels like it’s already a movie. The narrative progresses snake-like through Bryan Ferry and pot, fights at school, kisses, until we reach rock-music 70s, hard rock, Nazareth and Kiss, collarless shirts and… moving forward, trauma and punk rock, Spiral Scratch and some detail – delicious, delirious detail – on the formation and continuation of Magazine. Later: great madcap stuff on Pete Shelley, Mick Harvey and Nick Cave. Now read on… QQQQQQQQQQ Everett True
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The High-Voltage What’s On Guide Edited By Ian Fortnam (Reviews) and Dave Ling (Tours)
90 Interviews
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95 Tour Dates
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WILL IRELAND
Bloodstock
Judas Priest headline a high-voltage bill returning us to the joys of live music in a field. CLASSICROCKMAGAZINE.COM 89
Uriah Heep – one of the bands Adam Parsons (inset) looks after – back in their natural environment.
is w e i v “My his that t here ] is [covid rest of e for th ys, like a our d ids and A Sars, thing every .” else
Siren Artist Management Even with gigs returning, band manager Adam Parsons sees a difficult future still ahead for the whole live music industry.
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hat is it like to guide a band or artist through a pandemic? We ask California-based Englishman Adam Parsons, a former musician who co-founded Siren Artist Management with business partner Ace Trump in 2003. Almost 20 years later their roster includes Saxon, Uriah Heep, Europe, Stiff Little Fingers, Diamond Head, Black Star Riders, Thin Lizzy and Tax The Heat. When live music shut down in March 2020, how soon did you realise there would be a long term problem? I knew right away. From being at a music conference in England it took me ten days to get a flight home [to 90 CLASSICROCKMAGAZINE.COM
America]. And although people were saying it might last for three months, after the summer [of 2020] got cancelled we put everything back till late 2021. The latest moving of the Saxon dates [now set for January ’22] is the fifth, though one of those was due to Biff’s triple-heart bypass. There are still so many uncertainties. We had Europe headlining the Steelhouse Festival [in Wales this year] but couldn’t get them into the country. Black Star Riders are headlining StoneDead [in Nottingham], but with statistics in America going through the roof we are praying to God that happens. Multiple postponements of a tour like Saxon’s must be financially calamitous.
It would have been, but almost nobody requested refunds, and it’s the same with my other tours that were moved two, three or four times. For Uriah Heep, due to celebrate their fiftieth anniversary in 2019, this was a major disappointment. We knew the [initial] postponement till 2021 was provisional, but it’s now re-booked for the end of 2022. It’ll still be a big show, including the Palladium in London, only now the celebration takes place a little bit later than intended.
Almost overnight, artists required new income streams. That must have been challenging? Oh, absolutely. Part of being an artist manager involves being a therapist. The situation hit everyone very hard. Our company deals mainly with what’s known as heritage acts, that don’t make much money from new records. Live income and playing the hits is how they survive. One of our acts sold the master royalty rights back to their record label for a lump sum, which helped them immensely. My view is that we are right at the end of the first era of rock’n’roll. Taking Elvis as a benchmark, if you were 20 in 1955 then you are now 86. With the whole business so tempestuous, a lot of older artists are cashing in. And I don’t blame them. It’s pretty obvious that some vintage bands simply won’t return after covid. I agree. Many of these guys are now beyond retirement age. God bless Ian Hunter, who’s still going at eighty-plus, but [David] Coverdale is lining up his last tour. The Scorpions have been doing theirs for more than a decade. Two of my artists have breathing issues, it’s very scary. And a lot of crew guys took delivery jobs with Amazon. They’re in their late fifties; they find themselves with a pension plan and medical insurance. Why would they give all of that up?
efore the pandemic hit, Solid Entertainments promoted between 150 and 200 shows per year around the UK since 1979. Stephen Stanley, the company’s owner, looks back, at the present and to the future.
Siren are an American company, so presumably didn’t get an assistance grant from the UK? We have opened up a limited company in the UK, with eight British employees, that’s now down to six. But because it happened just before covid hit we were ineligible. Two payouts came from the US government, but it wasn’t a lot of money. We are surviving on loans and savings and won’t be back on track till 2022.
When did you realise that lockdown was going to be something very serious for the industry? After a few weeks of postponing and then having to postpone the same gigs again, venues remaining closed and incoming tours becoming cancelled.
In the US and UK, major tours are now being derailed when a band member or person travelling inside their bubble tests positive – often falsely. What steps can you take to prevent that happening? The whole entourage takes a lateral flow test, but every morning is Russian roulette.
NICK GARNER
Solid Entertainments
As month after month of lockdown passed, were you reassuring clients that their careers were not over? We had some mental breakdowns, for sure, but what we offer our acts is solid, twenty-four-seven personal assistance. I was trying to deal with everything for myself, too. But somehow we survived two years… and looking ahead it could still be three, four or five years. My view is that this [covid] is here for the rest of our days, like Sars, Aids and everything else. We’ve just got to find ways of controlling the fear and of dealing with the fact. That’s down to people being sensible, and the problem is that so many are selfish.
And we haven’t even discussed Brexit yet, and how that has affected everything. Five years after the vote we still have no fucking clue what’s going on. The rest of Europe is just laughing at us. Once international touring returns, fans will end up paying for their decision. Believe me, I deal with the fallout every day. Ticket prices will rise, and of course those increases will be passed on to the fans. So if you voted to leave, don’t come crying to me when the sweatshirt that used to cost you twenty quid will now cost forty. DL
Promoter Stephen Stanley on getting live gigs back “in a safe way”.
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How did you become a promoter? I used to regularly attend concerts at Cleethorpes Winter Gardens, and suddenly they seemed to stop. When I rang the venue to ask why, I was told the former promoter had moved on. I just said: “I’ll do it.” By my second gig I was promoting the Ian Gillan Band, Randy California and Samson.
Were you forced to lay off any employees? I employed three office staff who had to go onto the government’s furlough scheme, so I was doing everything myself – like that first year all over again. Did you receive any government assistance? Because I own a ticket shop and offices I did get the basic grant, and it helped in the short term, but the government doesn’t seem to understand the role of the ‘promoter’ – the very people that hold the live music sector together. We pay for everything and take all the risks, and we have been totally overlooked in that regard. How many tickets did you sell on so-called ‘Freedom Day’? Just one! Obviously, that wasn’t good. After fifteen months of being stuck at home, we expected the gates to open and all live music fans to return. That hasn’t been the case. Attendances in general are down fifty per cent. The pandemic is a long way from being over. Half want to get back out no matter what, and the rest just don’t feel safe.
Do you sympathise with those who fall into the latter category? Yes, of course. Health is the most important thing in life. We need to get back to live gigs in a safe way and learn to live with the situation. All audiences, acts and venues are responsible people, and will adapt to the new normal to keep the virus under control. From September, concerts are limited to people who can prove they’re fully vaccinated. Do you consider that common sense? Yes. It’s in the interest of everyone’s safety. We cannot be going back to any more live lockdowns. In what ways has the uncertainty over Brexit affected things? The cost of UK work visas for incoming acts is a further blow, especially for less established artists trying to break into the UK. Those charges need lifting, and free movement in and out of the country for UK acts going into Europe should be restored. The so-called ‘pingdemic’ is the latest headache. As well as that affecting reduced audience numbers, I recently lost two acts having to cancel on short notice. Which new Solid Entertainments tours are you most anticipating? I’m looking forward to seeing those I’ve previously worked with. I develop a lot of incoming acts, including Crow Black Chicken, Eliana Cargnelutti and Félix Rabin, plus my good friend Corky Laing from the band Mountain, and Finland’s Erja Lyytinen, to name a few. What would you like to see happen next to help the live music sector? The government should provide positive safety guidelines that do not change on a weekly basis. And VAT on entertainment must remain at five per cent. DL
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pt the e k e “W e in v i l a d ban inds m s ’ e l peop leases, e with r nd live a videos ms.” strea
Empyre Playing festivals and tours, they’re out to rebuild lost momentum.
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mpyre were busier than most musicians during lockdown. Vocalist/guitarist Henrik Steenholdt explains how in 2020 the Northampton band released an album and six singles, performed livestreams and even managed to play three proper, physical gigs. How did Empyre come to play physical concerts at a time when they were mostly off limits? We got lucky with socially distanced, sit-down outdoor gigs and pilot events, but basically we were seeking opportunities as early as we could. Returning to the road in April, how did it feel to be back? An early indoor gig at the Waterloo in Blackpool was surreal – do you shake hands or hug? Masks or no masks? It felt like: “Should we really be doing this?” It took a while to get into the vibe. Overall, how was your personal lockdown experience and what did you do? My own was good because I used it positively. I learned about orchestration and I developed my skill sets in various areas – not just musical ones. We 92 CLASSICROCKMAGAZINE.COM
kept the band alive in people’s minds with releases, videos and live streams, and we wrote a new album. Were Empyre’s streamed gigs ticketed? Ours were free, though we encouraged fans to donate if they felt it appropriate. We had spent a lot of time maximising the quality of the video and audio content, but we saw them as a morale booster. We knew that people were struggling, why place even more burden on them? During quarantine the band won the Tracks Of The Week competition at the Classic Rock website three times. You must feel that covid cost Empyre valuable momentum? That was our biggest concern, as we had just come off our most successful gig at the Winter’s End Festival. So we chose to focus on what we could do instead of the impossible, and to ensure the strongest chance of exiting lockdown as we’d gone in. I think we succeeded in that as well as we could have done. Do you think the government treated musicians, and the live scene in general, in a fair manner? No, they didn’t consider everyone’s situation, but the
music industry is so complex. For instance, our lead guitarist Did [Coles] is a performing musician and a music teacher running a music school. Is a musician self-employed? Is a band a limited company or a partnership? So many questions. Can a government get all of those things right? They should do, they’re the government… but it’s almost an impossible task. How big a blow was Brexit? Happily it’s not an immediate problem for Empyre because we’re not quite big enough to gig overseas, but from day one our primary goal as a band has been to play Europe’s largest rock festivals. The Brexit deal should have existed before the vote – don’t ask us to make a decision based on conjecture, bullshit, lies and misinformation. Empyre had a track on the recent New Wave Of Classic Rock compilation album. Its lofty chart position suggests the NWOCR is heating up. How incredibly thrilling it was to see the album reach the national Top 10. It was a dream come true to go into HMV and look for myself… though sadly they didn’t have the NWOCR album in stock. If all goes to plan, what does the next 12 months have in store for Empyre? New singles, festivals and tours – in September and October we are out with Mason Hill and Hollowstar – and there will almost certainly be an album in 2022. We intend to be in your face. DL
Tour Dates ARENA
Southampton Sheffield London Bilston Kinross Liverpool
1865 Venue TBC Camden Lock Powerhaus Robin 2 Backstage At The Green Hotel Academy
BAD TOUCH, PISTON
Norwich Newcastle Glasgow Dundee Manchester Nottingham Wolverhampton Leeds Buckley Newport Cardiff Exeter Southampton London Gravesend
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
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
BLAZE BAYLEY, ABSOLVA
Carlisle Blackpool Stoke-on-Trent Norwich Sheffield Winchester London Glasgow Newcastle Grimsby Manchester Peterborough Wolverhampton
Sep 29 Sep 30 Oct 1 Oct 2 Oct 3 Oct 4
Brickyard Waterloo Music Bar Eleven Waterfront Corporation Railway Camden Underworld Ivory Blacks Trillians Yardbirds Club Club Academy Met Lounge KK’s Steel Mill
Sep 17 Sep 18 Sep 19 Sep 24 Sep 25 Oct 15 Oct 16 Nov 24 Nov 25 Nov 26 Nov 27 Dec 10 Dec 11
BEAST IN BLACK
London
Islington Assembly Hall
THE BLACK CROWES
London Manchester
Brixton Academy Apollo
Dec 1 Oct 23, 24 Oct 26
BLACK STONE CHERRY, KRIS BARRAS BAND
Leeds Manchester Glasgow Edinburgh Newcastle Liverpool Folkestone Cardiff Exeter Southampton Cambridge London
Academy Apollo Barrowland Usher Hall Academy Academy Leas Cliff Hall St David’s Hall Great Hall Guildhall Corn Exchange Royal Albert Hall
Sep 14 Sep 16 Sep 17 Sep 18 Sep 20 Sep 21 Sep 23 Sep 24 Sep 25 Sep 27 Sep 28 Sep 29
BLACKWATER CONSPIRACY,
THESE WICKED RIVERS
Stoke-on-Trent Leeds Oxford Blackpool Newport Sheffield Leicester Birmingham Gravesend Swansea London Belfast Dublin
Eleven Warehouse Academy 2 Waterloo Music Bar The Patriot Corporation The Musician Academy 3 Red Lion Patti Pavilion Islington Academy 2 Empire Whelans
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
BLUES CARAVAN
JEREMIAH JOHNSON, WHITNEY SHAY, RYAN PERRY
Chislehurst Nottingham Grimsby Doncaster Hartlepool Edinburgh Bilston London
Beaverwood Club Bodega Yardbirds Club The Leopard United FC Bannerman’s Bar Robin 2 Oxford Street 100 Club
BRAINSTORM
London
Tufnell Park Boston Music Rooms
Sep 14 Sep 15 Sep 16 Sep 17 Sep 18 Sep 19 Sep 20 Sep 21 Oct 3
BUCKCHERRY, DAMON JOHNSON & THE GET READY, SCARLET REBELS
Milton Keynes Leeds Blackpool
Craufurd Arms Warehouse Waterloo Music Bar
Nov 29 Nov 30 Dec 1
London Nuneaton Newcastle Manchester Chester Wolverhampton Southampton Cardiff
Islington Academy Queen’s Hall Riverside Academy 2 Live Rooms KK’s Steel Mill Engine Rooms Tramshed
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
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
Southampton 1865 Stamford Mama Liz’s Newcastle Cluny 2 Bilston Robin 2 Edinburgh Bannerman’s Bar Liverpool Phase 1 Sedgefield Rock & Blues Club Lincoln Blues, Rhythm & Rock Festival
FRANK CARTER & THE RATTLESNAKES
Dublin Nottingham Norwich Southampton Bristol Lincoln Birmingham Newcastle Glasgow Edinburgh Liverpool Manchester London
Academy Rock City UEA Guildhall Academy Engine Shed Academy Academy Barrowland Corn Exchange Academy Academy Brixton Academy
CATS IN SPACE, VAMBO
Norwich Southampton Brighton London Nottingham Dover
Epic Studios Engine Rooms Concorde 2 Highbury Garage Rescue Rooms Booking Hall
Nov 11 Nov 14 Nov 15 Nov 16 Nov 17 Nov 18 Nov 19 Nov 20
Nov 10 Nov 11 Nov 13 Nov 15 Nov 16 Nov 17 Nov 19 Nov 20 Nov 22 Nov 23 Nov 24 Nov 25 Jan 21, 22 Sep 15 Sep 16 Sep 23 Oct 2 Dec 15 Dec 16
NICK CAVE AND WARREN ELLIS
Oxford Bradford Manchester Edinburgh Sheffield Gateshead Liverpool Stockton-on-Tees Leicester Birmingham London Brighton
New Theatre St George’s Hall Bridgewater Hall Playhouse City Hall The Sage Philharmonic Hall Globe De Montfort Hall Symphony Hall Royal Albert Hall Dome
Sep 14 Sep 15 Sep 17 Sep 20 Sep 23 Sep 24 Sep 27 Sep 29 Oct 1 Oct 2 Oct 6, 7 Oct 10
ROSALIE CUNNINGHAM,
TUPPENNY BUNTERS
Southend-on-Sea Cambridge Leicester Manchester Co Durham Edinburgh Glasgow Newcastle York
Moonraker Portland Arms The Musician Night People Northern Kin Festival Sneaky Pete’s Nice & Sleazy Trillians Fulford Arms
…
NDS
FISH
Dec 3 Dec 4 Dec 5 Dec 7 Dec 8 Dec 10 Dec 11 Dec 12
Tivoli Academy 3 Unit 51 Garage Brickyard Nightrain Limelight 2 Grand Social Rescue Rooms Thekla Old Fire Station Patti Pavilion
ELIANA CARGNELUTTI
RECO MME
Sep 14 Sep 15 Sep 16 Sep 17 Sep 19 Sep 20 Sep 20 Sep 22 Sep 23
A shame to see the singer bowing out of the live arena, but these farewell-tour shows promise to be something special. See below for dates. Currently November 14 to November 24. Bedford Bilston Winchester London Chelmsford
Esquires Robin 2 The Railway Islington The Lexington Hot Box
THE DAMNED
Glasgow Manchester Birmingham London
Academy Apollo Academy Hammersmith Apollo
THE DARKNESS, BRITISH LION
Brighton Margate Bournemouth Southend-on-Sea Norwich Cambridge Reading Cardiff Exeter Guilford Liverpool Manchester Hull Stoke-on-Trent Bristol Glasgow Newcastle Leeds Nottingham Birmingham London
Dome Winter Gardens Academy Cliffs Pavilion UEA Corn Exchange Hexagon Great Hall Great Hall G Live Academy Academy Bonus Arena Victoria Hall Academy Barrowland Academy Academy Rock City Academy Shepherd’s Bush Empire
Sep 24 Oct 27 Oct 28 Oct 29 Oct 30 Feb 11 Feb 12 Feb 16 Feb 18, 19 Nov 17 Nov 19 Nov 20 Nov 21 Nov 23 Nov 24 Nov 26 Nov 27 Nov 29 Nov 30 Dec 2 Dec 3 Dec 4 Dec 6 Dec 7 Dec 9 Dec 10 Dec 11 Dec 13 Dec 14 Dec 16, 17
DAY OF THE DEMON
DEMON, TYTAN, NEURONSPOILER, RAMPANT
London
Camden Unicorn
Sep 18
THE DEAD DAISES, THE QUIREBOYS
Birmingham Liverpool Bristol Oxford Norwich Nottingham London Cardiff
Institute Academy Academy Academy Waterfront Rock City Shepherd’s Bush Empire Tramshed
EAGLES OF DEATH METAL
Brighton Cardiff Newcastle Birmingham Dublin Belfast Glasgow Leeds London Nottingham Manchester Bristol
Chalk Tramshed University Institute Academy Limelight SWG3 Beckett University Chalk Farm Roundhouse Rock City The Ritz Academy
Oct 30 Oct 31 Nov 3 Nov 4 Nov 6 Nov 7 Nov 10 Nov 11
Nov 22 Nov 23 Nov 24 Nov 26 Nov 27 Nov 28 Nov 29 Dec 1 Dec 2 Dec 3 Dec 5 Dec 6
EVERGREY, WITHERFALL, DUST IN MIND
London Nottingham Bristol Manchester
Gt Portland Street 229 Club Rescue Rooms The Fleece Academy 3
Oct 9 Oct 10 Oct 11 Oct 12
Newcastle Glasgow Dublin
St Dom’s Social Club Cathouse Voodoo Lounge
Oct 13 Oct 14 Oct 15
Recommended 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
Dec 3 Dec 4 Dec 5 Dec 6 Dec 8 Dec 9 Dec 10 Dec 11
FISH, DORIS BRENDEL Glasgow Frome Southampton Cambridge Sheffield Liverpool Leamington Spa
FOCUS
Norwich Nottingham New Brighton Kinross York Carlisle Exeter Whitby
Academy Cheese & Grain 1865 Junction Academy Academy The Assembly
Nov 14 Nov 15 Nov 16 Nov 18 Nov 19 Nov 20 Nov 24
Epic Studios Rescue Rooms Floral Pavilion Green Hotel Crescent Community Centre Old Fire Station Corn Exchange Pavilion
Nov 3 Nov 4 Nov 5 Nov 6 Nov 11 Nov 12 Nov 15 Apr 1
FOZZY, THE TREATMENT
Manchester Club Newcastle Glasgow Dublin Belfast Chester Birmingham Bournemouth Swansea Nottingham London
Academy Riverside Garage Opium Limelight Live Rooms The Mill Old Fire Station Sin City Rescue Rooms Islington Academy
GAMA BOMB
Leeds London Norwich Manchester Birmingham Glasgow Belfast Dublin
GENESIS
Dublin Belfast Birmingham Manchester Leeds Newcastle
Damnation Festival Camden Underworld Brickmakers Star & Garter Asylum 2 Classic Grand Limelight 2 Voodoo Lounge 3 Arena SSE Arena Utilita Arena Arena First Direct Arena Utilita Arena
Nov 30 Dec 1 Dec 2 Dec 4 Dec 5 Dec 6 Dec 7 Dec 8 Dec 10 Dec 11 Dec 12 Nov 6 Nov 7 Nov 8 Nov 9 Nov 10 Nov 11 Nov 12 Nov 13 Sep 15, 16 Sep 18 Sep 20, 21, 22 Sep 24, 25 Sep 27, 28 Sep 30, Oct 1
CLASSICROCKMAGAZINE.COM 95
RECO MME Liverpool Glasgow London
M&S Bank Arena The Hydro O2 Arena
Oct 3, 4 Oct 7, 8 Oct 11, 12, 113
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
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
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
Nov 18 Nov 19 Nov 20 Nov 21 Nov 25 Nov 26 Nov 28 Dec 1 Dec 2 Dec 3 Dec 4
South Downs Folk Festival Hall Cornwall Acoustic Festival Plough Arts Centre The Maltings Spinney Theatre
Oct 7 Oct 8 Oct 14 Oct 15 Oct 16 Oct 17 Oct 20 Oct 21 Oct 22 Oct 23 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 Sep 16 Sep 17 Sep 18 Sep 19 Nov 12 Nov 14
STEVE HARLEY & COCKNEY REBEL
Birmingham Bridlington Edinburgh Yarm Lancaster Lytham St Anne’s London Port Talbot Holmfirth Harrogate Leamington Spa Bury St Edmunds Cheltenham Bath Bexhill-on-Sea Glasgow
BETH HART
Bournemouth Warrington Cambridge York Bath London Newcastle Birmingham Bexhill
Town Hall Oct 21 Spa Oct 22 Queen’s Hall Oct 23 Princess Alexandra Auditorium Oct 24 Grand Theatre Nov 3 Lowther Pavilion Nov 5, 6 Shepherd’s Bush Empire Dec 5 Princess Royal Theatre Dec 8 Picturedrome Dec 9 Royal Hall Dec 10 The Assembly Dec 11 Apex Dec 15 Town Hall Dec 16 Forum Buildings Dec 17 De La Warr Pavilion Dec 18 Armadillo Mar 5
BIC Parr Hall Corn Exchange Barbican Forum Palladium City Hall Symphony Hall De La Warr Pavilion
HAWKWIND
Brighton York Liverpool Manchester London
Dome Barbican Grand Central Hall The Ritz Palladium
Oct 25 Oct 27 Oct 29 Oct 31 Nov 3 Nov 5, 6 Nov 10 Nov 11 Nov 14 Sep 14 Sep 16 Sep 26 Sep 27 Oct 28
THE WARNER E HODGES BAND
Blackpool Leicester Sheffield London Edinburgh
Waterloo Music Bar The Musician The Greystones Islington Hope & Anchor Bannerman’s Bar
INGLORIOUS, MERCUTIO
Guildhall Phoenix Arts Centre The Junction Engine Rooms Chalk Thekla Islington Assembly Hall
96 CLASSICROCKMAGAZINE.COM
JANUS STARK
London
Islington Hope & Anchor
Dec 12 Dec 13 Dec 14 Dec 16 Dec 17
Sep 15 Sep 16 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
NDS
MYLES KENNEDY
Sep 25
ROBERT JON & THE WRECK,
Cardiff Sittingbourne Chester Leeds Newcastle Manchester Nottingham London Edinburgh Aberdeen Hartlepool
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
AYRON JONES
London
Hoxton Colours
MYLES KENNEDY
Bristol Leeds Glasgow Newcastle Manchester London Birmingham Bournemouth
Academy Academy Academy Academy Academy Shepherd’s Bush Empire Academy Academy
Sep 16 Sep 17 Sep 18 Sep 19 Sep 20 Sep 21 Sep 22 Sep 23 Sep 24 Sep 25 Sep 26 Dec 7
See below for dates. Currently December 3 to December 14. Dec 3 Dec 4 Dec 6 Dec 8 Dec 9 Dec 11 Dec 13 Dec 14
KING KING, CATS IN SPACE, RAINBREAKERS
Chepstow
Castle
Aug 20
Recommended CORKY LAING PLAYS MOUNTAIN Great Yarmouth Edinburgh Kinross Leeds London
HRH Blues Festival Bannerman’s Bar Green Hotel Brudenell Social Club Oxford Street 100 Club
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
JOHN LEES’ BARCLAY JAMES HARVEST
Manchester London Leeds
RNCM Islington Assembly Hall City Varieties
Nov 11 Nov 13 Nov 14 Nov 15 Nov 16
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
Nov 20 May 10 May 12
LINDISFARNE
London Bradford Stanhope Lowdham Shoreham-by-Sea Bilston Porthcawl Skegness Kinross Carlisle Morecambe Newcastle
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
MANIC STREET PREACHERS
Cardiff Newcastle Edinburgh Dundee Stoke-on-Trent Manchester
Motorpoint Arena City Hall Usher Hall Caird Hall Victoria Hall Apollo
Away from Alter Bridge and Slash’s band, the singer/guitarist is just as impressive when going out under his own name.
Sep 19, 20 Sep 26 Sep 28 Sep 29 Oct 1 Oct 2
York Glasgow Leeds Portsmouth Bournemouth Cambridge Bath Brighton London
MARILLION
Hull Edinburgh Cardiff Manchester Cambridge Birmingham Liverpool Bath London
Barbican Barrowland Academy Guildhall Academy Corn Exchange Forum Dome Wembley Arena City Hall Usher Hall St David’s Hall Bridgewater Hall Corn Exchange Symphony Hall Philharmonic Hall Forum Hammersmith Apollo
MASON HILL, HOLLOWSTAR
Cambridge Sheffield Bristol Brighton Southend-on-Sea Cardiff Southampton Bradford Blackpool London Manchester Wolverhampton Leeds Nottingham Norwich Newcastle Liverpool Dover Oxford
Junction 2 Corporation The Fleece Patterns Leos The Globe Joiners Nightrain 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
Southampton Exeter Birmingham Manchester Southend-on-Sea Cardiff Newcastle Liverpool Glasgow
Engine Rooms Cavern Club Academy 2 Club Academy Chinnerys The Globe Riverside Hangar 34 Garage
CHANTEL MCGREGOR
Sheffield Morcambe Hull Edinburgh Kinross Aberdeen Glasgow Bristol Looe Tavistock Derby Grimsby
Greystones The Platform Adelphi Bannerman’s Bar Green Hotel Café Drummond Hard Rock Café Thunderbolt Blues Festival The Wharf Flowerpot Yardbirds Club
THE MISSION
Frome Cardiff
Cheese & Grain Tramshed
Oct 4 Oct 5 Oct 7 Oct 8 Oct 10 Oct 11 Oct 13 Oct 14 Dec 3 Nov 14 Nov 15 Nov 17 Nov 18 Nov 20 Nov 21 Nov 23 Nov 24 Nov 26, 27
Norwich Brighton
MOGWAI
Glasgow London
Royal Concert Hall Alexandra Palace
Nov 7 Feb 25
Warehouse The Globe KK’s Steel Mill Engine Rooms Oxford Street 100 Club
Nov 28 Nov 29 Nov 30 Dec 1 Dec 2
NIGHTWISH, AMORPHIS, TURMION KÄTILÖT
Dublin Birmingham London
3 Arena Resorts World Arena Wembley Arena
Nov 17 Nov 18 Dec 13
ORANGE GOBLIN, SPIRIT ADRIFT, KING CREATURE
Buckley Belfast Dublin Glasgow Manchester Birmingham Cardiff London
Sep 15 Sep 17 Sep 18 Sep 19 Sep 21 Sep 22 Sep 23 Sep 25 Sep 26
Wolverhampton Manchester Bristol London Nottingham
Oct 26 Oct 27
Oct 28 Oct 29
MOLLY HATCHET
Leeds Cardiff Wolverhampton Southampton London
Sep 14 Sep 15 Sep 16 Sep 17 Sep 18 Sep 20 Sep 21 Sep 22 Sep 23 Sep 24 Sep 25 Sep 26 Oct 3 Oct 4 Oct 5 Oct 6 Oct 7 Oct 8 Oct 9
Oct 15 Oct 22 Nov 13 Nov 24 Nov 25 Nov 26 Nov 27 Dec 3 Dec 4 Dec 5 Dec 9 Dec 16
Waterfront Chalk
PEARL JAM
London
Tivoli Limelight 2 Grand Social King Tut’s Wah Wah Hut Gorilla Asylum Globe Camden Underworld
British Summer Time Festival Jul 8, 9
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
KK’s Steel Mill Academy 3 SWX Highbury Garage Rock City
POWERWOLF
London
Chalk Farm Roundhouse
PRAYING MANTIS, VAMBO
Southampton Newbury Gravesend London Crumlin Norwich Milton Keynes Blackpool Looe Cannock Bradford Newcastle
Dec 9 Dec 10 Dec 11 Dec 13 Dec 14 Dec 15 Dec 16 Dec 17, 18
The Brook Arlington Arts Centre Red Lion Raynes Park Cavern The Patriot Brickmakers Craufurd Arms Waterloo Music Bar Cornwall Rocks Festival The Station Nightrain The Cluny
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 Oct 7 Oct 8 Oct 9 Oct 10 Oct 12 Oct 13 Oct 14 Oct 15 Oct 16 Oct 17 Oct 18
THE PSYCHEDELIC FURS, PAULINE MURRAY
Bristol Nottingham
Academy Rock City
Sep 27 Sep 28
KEVIN NIXON
Gloucester Exeter Plymouth Southampton Brighton Bristol London
Craufurd Arms Sin City Asylum Waterfront Phase One Sugarmill Tivoli Academy 3 Riverside Cathouse Night Train Picturedrome
TROY REDFERN
STEVE HARLEY ACOUSTIC BAND
Bognor Haslemere St Ives Great Torrington Ely Northampton
Milton Keynes Swansea Birmingham Norwich Liverpool Stoke-on-Trent Buckley Manchester Newcastle Glasgow Bradford Holmfirth
…
Glasgow Manchester Liverpool London Cambridge
SWG Academy 2 Academy Royal Albert Hall Junction
Sep 29 Oct 1 Oct 2 Oct 3 Oct 5
Nottingham Bexhill-On-Sea Guilford Coventry London
Oct 17
Wolverhampton Sheffield
PURE REASON REVOLUTION,
GAZPACHO
London
Islington Assembly Hall
QUIREBOYS, MASSIVE
Belfast Glasgow Aberdeen Leeds Gateshead Stoke-on-Trent Manchester Gloucester Brighton Birmingham Oxford Southend-on-Sea Bristol Nottingham
Empire 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
TERRORVISION
Oct 12 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
MICHAEL SCHENKER GROUP, DORO
Glasgow Leeds Newcastle Wolverhampton London
QMU Academy City Hall KK’s Steel Mill Shepherd’s Bush Empire
Oct 27 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 Liverpool Leeds Oxford London Bristol Nottingham Swansea Birmingham
St Luke’s Liquid Rooms Riverside Brewery Arts Centre Academy 3 Arts Club Warehouse Academy King’s Cross Lafayette The Fleece Glee Club Sin City The Mill
SKIDS, THE VAPORS
Leamington Spa
The Assembly
SKINDRED, ROYAL REPUBLIC
Cambridge Oxford Northampton Leeds Birmingham London Cardiff Bristol Nottingham Glasgow Southampton Sheffield Newcastle Bexhill-on-Sea Manchester Norwich
STRAY
Wavendon
Junction Academy Roadmender Academy Institute Chalk Farm Roundhouse Tramshed Academy Rock City SWG3 Guildhall Corporation University De La Warr Pavilion Academy UEA The Stables
Nov 23 Nov 24 Nov 25 Nov 26 Nov 27 Nov 2 Nov 3 Nov 5 Nov 6 Nov 7 Nov 9 Nov 10 Nov 12 Nov 14 Nov 16 Nov 17 Nov 19 Nov 18 Nov 4 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 Nov 21
ANDY TAYLOR, SPIKE, LUKE MORLEY, MORE
Newcastle
Wylam Brewery
CHRISTIE GOODWIN/PRESS
ROGER TAYLOR
Newcastle Manchester York Cardiff Liverpool Norwich Bath Bournemouth Plymouth
Academy Academy Barbican St David’s Hall Academy UEA Forum Academy Pavilions
Rock City De La Warr Pavilion G Live Empire Shepherd’s Bush Empire
Sep 15 Oct 2 Oct 3 Oct 5 Oct 6 Oct 8 Oct 9 Oct 11 Oct 12 Oct 14
THERAPY?
Cambridge Norwich Nottingham Brighton London Portsmouth Cardiff Exeter Bristol Wolverhampton Manchester Leeds Newcastle Glasgow Dublin Belfast
KK’s Steel Mill The Foundry
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
RICHARD THOMPSON
York Glasgow Perth Gateshead Birmingham Manchester Cardiff London Dublin
Oct 15 Oct 17 Oct 19 Oct 20 Oct 22
Barbican Royal Concert Hall Concert Hall The Sage Symphony Hall Opera House St David’s Hall Palladium Vicar Street
Oct 25 Oct 26 Oct 27 Oct 28 Oct 30 Oct 31 Nov 1 Nov 2 Nov 3
RECO MME
…
JOANNE SHAW TAYLOR
The British singer/guitarist delivers her blues-rock with both soul and grit. Grab some before the year is through. See below for dates. Currently November 2 to November 18.
Recommended
Newcastle Leeds Nottingham Bristol London Wolverhampton
THUNDER
THE WILDHEARTS
Wolverhampton Glasgow Leeds Cardiff Birmingham London
KK’s Steel Mill Clyde Auditorium First Direct Arena Motorpoint Arena Resorts World Arena Wembley Arena
MARTIN TURNER EX-WISHBONE ASH Havant Whitby Hull Chislehurst Sutton Lowther Derby Dartmouth Cardiff Glasgow Kinross Newcastle Selby Maidenhead Swindon
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
TYTAN, SATAN’S EMPIRE, THE DEEP
London
VEGA
London Belfast Stoke-on-Trent Blackpool Aberdare Newcastle Bradford Buckley Inverness Bilston
Nov 12
Camden Underworld Voodoo Lounge Eleven Waterloo Music Bar Jac’s Riverside Nightrain Tivoli Monsterfest Robin 2
Oct 9 Oct 16 Oct 28 Oct 29 Oct 30 Nov 1 Nov 5 Nov 12 Nov 13 Dec 17
The Joiners Cobblestones Level 3 Corporation The Exchange Eleven Independent Opium The Parish Live Rooms New Adelphi Dead Wax Academy 3
WAYWARD SONS
Dublin Belfast Manchester Glasgow
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 Black Heart
VIRGINMARYS
Southampton Bridgwater Swindon Sheffield Bristol Stoke-on-Trent Sunderland Edinburgh Huddersfield Chester Hull Birmingham Manchester
Dec 17 May 21 May 22 May 26 May 27 May 28
Opium Limelight 2 Academy 3 Cathouse
Sep 30 Oct 1 Oct 2 Oct 3 Oct 5 Oct 7 Oct 8 Oct 9 Oct 10 Oct 13 Oct 14 Oct 15 Oct 16
Wolverhampton Looe Newcastle Leeds Galashiels Stirling Aberdeen Sheffield Southampton Birmingham South Shields Inverness
Riverside Wardrobe Rescue Rooms Thekla Islington Academy KK’s Steel Mill
Nov 11 Nov 13 Nov 14 Nov 15 Nov 17 Nov 18
KK’s Steel Mill Cornwall Rocks Boiler House Stylus Mac Arts Tolbooth Lemon Tree Foundry Engine Rooms MMH Radio Birthday Bash Hedworth Hall Monsterfest
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
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
Festivals ARCTANGENT FESTIVAL
OPETH, CULT OF LUNA, TERRERACT, MORE
Bristol
Fernhill Farm
Aug 17-20
LAMB OF GOD, MERCYFUL FATE, DIMMU BORGIR, MORE
Catton Park, Derbyshire
Aug 11-14
Oxfordshire
Cropredy Village
Aug 11-13
DESERTFEST
ELECTRIC WIZARD, SHELLAC, WITCHCRAFT, MORE
London
Camden, various Venues Apr 21-May 1
GIANTS OF ROCK FESTIVAL
FM, NAZARETH, TEN YEARS AFTER, ATOMIC ROOSTER, MORE
Minehead
Butlins
Jan 21-24
GRAVITY FESTIVAL
THE TREATMENT, PRAYING MANTIS, HELL’S ADDICTION, MORE
Cannock
The Station
Oct 15-17
LINCOLN BLUES FESTIVAL
FÉLIX RABIN, THE CINELLI BROTHERS, ZOE SCHWARZ, MORE
Lincoln
Alive
Nov 20
LOOE BLUES FESTIVAL
AYNSLEY LISTER, MARTIN TURNER, THE BLOCKHEADS, MORE
Looe
Tencreek Holiday Park
Dec 3-5
MONSTER FEST
FM, THE WILDHEARTS, MARCO MENDOZA, MORE
Inverness
Ironworks
Nov 12-15
NORTHERN KIN FESTIVAL
BIG COUNTRY, WILKO JOHNSON, NAZARETH, MORE
Co Durham
Castle Park
Sep 17-19
ROCKIN’ THE BOWL CORP SESSIONS, BLAME THE SACRED
THOSE DAMN CROWES, STEAL THE CITY,
Sheffield
Corporation
Nov 11
SOUTHPORT BLUES, RHYTHM & ROCK FESTIVAL SARI SCHORR, DANA GILLISPIE, KYLA BROX, MORE
Southport
The Atkinson
Oct 10
UPRISING FESTIVAL
DIAMOND HEAD, HEART OF A COWARD, INGESTED, MORE Academy
Sep 10-12
WHITBY BLUES RHYTHM AND ROCK FESTIVAL
SARI SHORR, DANA GILLESPIE, KYLA BROX Pavilion
Oct 9
WHITBY ROCKS
CINELLI BROTHERS, SOUTHBOUND, LEE AINLEY’S BLUES STORM, MORE Beachcomber
Oct 24
CORNWALL ROCKS
THE WILDHEARTS, PRAYING MANTIS, TYGERS OF PAN TANG, MORE Tencreek Holiday Park
STEVE HACKETT, CLANNAD, TREVOR HORN, MORE
Whitby
CLEETHORPES BLUES, RHYTHM & ROCK FESTIVAL
Looe
CROPREDY FESTIVAL
Leicester
BLOODSTOCK FESTIVAL
Cleethorpes Nov 6 Nov 7 Nov 9 Nov 10
NDS
Oct 15-17
MARTIN TURNER EX-WISHBONE ASH, PISTON, JOAN OV ARC
Whitby
Pavilion
Oct 9
WINTERSTORM FESTIVAL
HARDLINE, VANDENBERG, GLASS TIGER, MORE
Troon
Concert Hall
Nov 26, 27
CLASSICROCKMAGAZINE.COM 97
Bloodstock
Saxon
Catton Park, Derbyshire With music from a wide-ranging roster of artists glad to be on a stage again, this year’s model was never going to be less than triumphant. FRIDAY
SATURDAY
Any concerns that the live music scene wouldn’t be able to recover from the negative impact of the past 18 months are soon dispelled as the Bloodstock experience serves to emphasise the sheer joy of simply standing in a field while watching live musics. Well, technically EVILE are playing in a tent that houses the Sophie Lancaster Stage, but the joy is still unabated as the veteran British thrashers power through to a respectable audience. The same goes for RAGING SPEEDHORN, with their ferocity and drive unconfined. When Ginger is in the mood, THE WILDHEARTS are a devastating act, and today he’s clearly up to the task, as he and the band get a healthy crowd bopping and headbanging to 10 songs including Vanilla Radio, Caffeine Bomb and the evergreen I Wanna Go Where The People Go. Nobody is better at getting fans to fever pitch than Benji Webbe. Today the frontman is almost on fire as he leads SKINDRED through a set that is among the highlights of the weekend. Kill The Power is monstrous, and they even throw in a taste of Van Halen’s Jump, mixing it in with their own Jump Around. And when the Newport Helicopter – this band’s variation on the more traditional mosh pit – gets into action at the end of their performance the atmosphere is electrifying. Received wisdom suggested that Main Stage headliner DEVIN TOWNSEND would inevitably tailor his set list to take account of the fact that Bloodstock is essentially a metal event. But the Canadian singer/guitarist is always unpredictable, so while there are certainly heavy moments, he spans the spectrum of his talents and musicality. He opens with Strapping Young Lad’s Aftermath, but soon has everyone bathing in his stunning virtuosity and appeal with more from SYL, and from the Devin Townsend Project and the Devin Townsend Band. He also brings both an elephant and a gorilla into his act. No, these are not real – the outburst from animal rights activists would probably have been deafening if they were – but animatronic ones. However, they add a certain sense of surrealism to the evening, which seems appropriate for someone as off-the-wall as Townsend. He encores with Vampira, and then apparently has to seek medical aid for a bad back injury presumably sustained during what is an energetic and breathless performance. This is someone who gets very close to perpetual motion. As is traditional at Bloodstock, the headliners on the Sophie Lancaster Stage don’t go on until after the Main Stage entertainment has finished. So NAPALM DEATH get into frenzied action rather late in the day, but the tent is still packed, and while the band display a little understandable stage rust they’re in manic mode from their opener Silence Is Deafening. Napalm debut two new songs, Fuck The Factoid and Contagion, and finish off with a cover of the Dead Kennedys’ classic Nazi Punks Fuck Off. A fittingly raging way to end the first day of the festival.
“Hands up who has had covid?” Day Two of the Big Bloodstock Comeback, and WHILE SHE SLEEPS singer Laurence ‘Loz’ Taylor is asking the questions that everybody is secretly wondering. “I’ve had it,” Taylor confesses to a lively mid-afternoon crowd. “I was fucked but I’m still fucking here!” Making their belated Bloodstock debut, the Sheffield metalcore quintet bring impressively fierce energy to their Main Stage set, detonating major moshpit chaos with their propulsive grooves, mountainous chorus hooks and Exorcist-style fullcircle head spins. Guitarist Sean Long also provides extra visual razzle-dazzle with his fluorescent yellow axe and sly ‘wanker’ gestures in Taylor’s direction. Sophisticated Yorkshire wit, you can’t beat it. Next on the Main Stage, fellow Yorkshiremen PARADISE LOST usher in a smoother black-velvet mood by revisiting their best-selling 1995 album Draconian Times in full. “These are the same jeans I wore in 1995,” quips singer Nick Holmes, “so there’s a bit of chafing going on.” The Halifax goth-metal veterans have got soaring tunes galore, but their delivery today feels plodding and ponderous, like clunky old-timers still easing themselves out of lockdown inertia. Bloodstock greets them warmly anyway, but it’s a perfunctory show. By contrast, CRADLE OF FILTH deliver a fullspectrum blast of glamour, humour and diabolical drama with a sense-swamping audio-visual spectacle that features the live debut of their new keyboard player Annabelle Iratni, who trades operatic vocals with frontman Dani Filth. These East Anglian extreme-metallers are easily mocked for their cosplay Satanism and uber-goth pomp, but there is a real high-art finesse to this production, especially the bigscreen backdrop films of demonic ritual and erotically charged horror imagery. Crucially, the Filth don’t take themselves too seriously, balancing mighty anthems like Heartbreak and Seance and Lilith Immaculate with self-effacing irony. “Next weekend we’ll probably be vomiting through our eyeballs somewhere,” growls Dani, in a voice that owes more to Gary Crowley than to Aleister Crowley, “so let’s have a fucking good time in case this never happens again!” As the set climaxes, he thanks the crowd “for braving this horrid pandemic, and I’m not just talking about people”. Gallows humour has never cut so deep. One of a small handful of overseas acts to make it to Bloodstock this year under covid restrictions, Saturday’s Main Stage headliners KREATOR explode into action like they have been building up to this volcanic guitar-gasm for the past 18 months. “Metal has returned!” Miland ‘Mille’ Petrozza declares with a joyous grin. Kreator might have been active for almost 40 years, but these German thrash veterans sound nothing like a creaky heritage-metal act, marrying breakneck speed with surgical precision on eyebrow-scorching blitzkrieg numbers like Violent Revolution, Extreme Aggression and Hordes of Chaos. Featuring fire cannons, confetti explosions and a lusty vocal cameo by Dani Filth on Betrayer, this ³
98 CLASSICROCKMAGAZINE.COM
Skindred
Gloryhammer
Diamond Head
‘Who need s pyro whe n you’ve got heavy meta l’s beloved pa nto dame.’
REVIEWS
Judas Priest
CLASSICROCKMAGAZINE.COM 99
‘Devin Tow nsend soon has everyo ne bathing in his stunnin g virtuosit y.’
Napalm Death
Devin Townsend
is a full-blooded festival stage production. But Kreator’s real power lies in the sheer brute physicality of the lean, mean, speedriffing machine they are on stage. Maximum respect to drummer and co-founder Jürgen ‘Ventor’ Reil, at the age of 55 still a relentless rhythmic locomotive. After dedicating Fallen Brother to musician friends lost over the past 18 months, including Neil Peart and Joey Jordison, Petrozza declares “this is the most emotional show we have ever played”. The same probably goes for others playing here this weekend. Cradle Of Filth Speaking of fallen rock heroes, Lemmy is still a palpable presence at Bloodstock even today, more than five years after his passing. The festival’s main public bar is named after the grizzled Motörhead icon, after all, which is surely what he would have wanted. Rounding off Saturday night on the Sophie Lancaster stage, Lemmy’s long-time sideman and his superbly named family band, PHIL CAMPBELL & THE BASTARD SONS, pay their own skewed homage with a covers-heavy set including the ’Head’s Born To Raise Hell, Ace Of Spades and Killed By Death. Campbell’s multi-guitar collective is a much more matey, bluesy, pub-rock affair than his former band, with inevitably less biker-punk grit and guttural speed-grind. Even so, inspired inclusions like Hawkwind’s Silver Machine are a welcome reminder that hard rock is a sprawling family tree, and on one level we are all Lemmy’s bastard sons. Unbowed by tragic loss, plague and pandemic, the indestructible Black Spiders metal army marches on…
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SUNDAY A refreshing inclusion among the seasoned old-timers at Bloodstock, young Hertfordshire alt.metal quartet VEXED transform the Sophie Lancaster tent into a giant centrifugal moshpit. One of the festival’s depressingly few female performers, singer Megan Targett is a force of nature, her voice switching gear between gravelled death growl and melodic goth-rock croon, over juddering, pulverising beats. Strong candidates for the Main Stage next year. DIAMOND HEAD might be eternal bridesmaids in the history of proto-thrash and new-wave metal, but they earn a rousing reception for their midday show, blasting out punchy, crunchy classics like Belly Of The Beast and Am I Evil? Singer Rasmus Bom Andersen wasn’t even born when these Stourbridge veterans first formed in 1976, but he’s now firmly settled in as their powerhouse frontman. He knows how to work a crowd, too, which includes thanking the NHS “for keeping us all alive… now all we need to do is pay them more”. Cue huge cheers. “It’s Sunday, Priest are here. Welcome to the church of heavy fucking metal!” This booming voice belongs to Ben Ward, frontman with stonermetal stalwarts ORANGE GOBLIN, sounding like some giant hairy cousin of Ed ‘Stewpot’ Stewart on Crackerjack. Clearly elated to be back playing to big crowds, Ward and the rest of the band are celebrating not just Bloodstock’s 20th anniversary but also their own postponed 25th, powering through vintage valve-amp psych-rock beasts like The Man Who Invented Time, The Devil’s Whip and Red Tide Rising with clobbering exhilaration. From their ³
Brian Blessed
‘Kreator m arry breakneck speed with surgical pr ecision.’
Kreator
Orange Goblin
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big-hearted bear-hug tunes to guitarist Joe Hoare’s ZZ Top tribute T-shirt, the Goblin make everything alright. THERAPY? aren’t a classic Bloodstock band, but they squeeze every drop of metal from their DNA in a nicely ragey, politically conscious set – helped by the sort of volume that burst many an eardrum back in their 90s heyday. “Have you got lots of fucking pent-up aggression?!” Andy Cairns roars at the crowd, eyes wide, beard trimmed to perfection. You can’t help thinking he’s also talking to himself. Symphonic power metallers GLORYHAMMER are greeted by cheers and… lots of inflatable unicorns. What follows is the sort of Dungeons & Dragons fever dream that makes Nightwish look positively tasteful. Hammers are raised. Quests are proposed. The unicorns bob intently. At one point guitarist Paul Templing uses a mic effect that’s basically Darth Vader-meets-Mr Blobby. By this point we’re declaring that this is the greatest thing we’ve ever seen – though for all but the very committed the novelty does wear off (if the set had been any longer we’d have likely murdered them. Or ourselves). There’s a solid, workmanlike class to SAXON’s career-spanning set – introduced by Brian Blessed (though not before he’s bellowed ‘Gordon’s aliiiive?!’ at the crowd several times). If that sounds like a backhanded compliment, it absolutely isn’t one. On the contrary, it’s a reminder of how relatively underrated these bastions of frills-free NWOBHM are; how consistent their catalogue is, from classics like Wheels Of Steel to more recent cuts like Thunderbolt and Battering Ram. And Biff Byford’s unbridled glee at being back on stage (“I couldn’t sleep a fucking wink last night! I’m more excited
than when I had my first shag!”) has to be one of the festival’s happiest moments. In a weekend of comebacks, BLACK SPIDERS arguably top the lot. Dormant since their premature farewell tour in 2017, the Sheffield swashbucklers made the gloriously perverse decision to re-form and record a new album during the pandemic. Back together on the Sophie Lancaster stage, they hit the ground running with a riotous splurge of guitar-jousting party-rockers that sound proudly stuck in traffic somewhere around 1974, from their sloppy-drunk good-time swagger to their analogueera song titles like Balls and Stick It To The Man. It’s unashamedly trad fare, but delivered with infectious energy and winning humour. But it’s JUDAS PRIEST who incite the biggest ripples of anticipation, and deliver with a roaring, rarity-packed 50th-anniversary set. Industrial backdrops are set. The Priest trident hovers overhead. A cry of “I am the god of heavy metal!” booms out, and the cheers shoot up an octave or two. And so begins a ride of fully leathered, weaponsgrade chuggernauts, where seldom-played surprises (Rocka Rolla, The Sentinel, a brilliant A Touch Of Evil) sit alongside lovable clichés (Hell Bent For Leather without the motorbike is basically unthinkable by this point), all of it helmed by a fluffy-bearded, bang-onform Rob Halford. Who needs pyro when you’ve got heavy metal’s beloved panto dame in studded leather and gold tassels? In a moving moment, guitarist Glenn Tipton joins them for a closing trio of Metal Gods, Breaking The Law and Living After Midnight. Punters sing and dance unselfconsciously, briefly forgetting the past year, as if they were 16 years old again. This is the stuff that just can’t be replicated by livestreams. Bloodstock 2021, you nearly killed us – and it was totally worth it. Welcome back. Words: Stephen Dalton, Malcolm Dome, Polly Glass Photos: Will Ireland, Tina Korhonen
The Soundtrack Of My Life Singer, guitarist, songwriter
Melissa Etheridge on the records, artists and gigs that are of lasting significance to her. Interview: Polly Glass
THE FIRST MUSIC I REMEMBER HEARING
The Beatles. I have a very distinct memory of being about three years old, in the driveway of my neighbour’s house. I had a transistor radio – I think my sister handed it to me and said “hold this” or something – and the most amazing sound was coming out of it. It was angels, and they were singing ‘I wanna hold your hand’. I remember being taken away by that, thinking: “What is this?”
THE FIRST SONG I PERFORMED LIVE
I had started just writing songs for fun when I was in fifth grade. They were very simple. My grandmother would listen to them. When my grandmother died I wrote a song that was a little deeper than that, called Lonely As A Child. It was kind of a war protest song. I was singing for my friends, and my friend called me and said: “Hey, there’s a talent show at the plaza,” and we went there and we got up and sang it. I was hooked.
THE SONG I WANT PLAYED AT MY FUNERAL
I probably haven’t written it yet, probably in a few years I’ll write that song. But if tragedy were to strike now, I would say In Your Eyes by Peter Gabriel.
“Joan Armatrading had a way of crafting a song that surprised you. She broke the rules.” 106 CLASSICROCKMAGAZINE.COM
One Way Out is out on September 17 via BMG. Melissa plays London’s Shepherd’s Bush Empire in June 2022.
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