Innholdsfortegnelse for September 2020 i Classic Rock

MR WONDERFUL STARS PAY TRIBUTE GETTY “So very sad to hear about Peter. We shared a lot of great music together. He was truly one of the greats.” John Mayall “We know you, BB King and Otis Rush are sharing living tales of wonderment. I cherish and treasure all the time we spent together (especially the time you invited me to be with you and your dearest mother, love the stuffed bell peppers she cooked). A Hard Road, you with John Mayall & the Blues Breakers, The Supernatural just sacred. I love you and I’ll see you, Hendrix, SRV, Albert, Freddie, BB, all the Kings, Albert Collins, John Lee Hooker. Say hello to Coltrane, Miles, Jaco, see you in eternity hall. Peace.” Carlos and Santana band “My biggest regret is…

Ennio Morricone November 10, 1928 – July 6, 2020 GETTY x3 METALLICA HAVE PAID tribute to Ennio Morricone, whose stirring piece of music The Ecstasy Of Gold, from the classic western The Good, The Bad And The Ugly, served as a backstage warm-up and introduced every live concert the band played since 1983. “Thank you Ennio for pumping us up, being a big part of our inspiration and a bonding between band, crew and fan,” said James Hetfield. “I will forever think of you as part of the Metallica family.” Italian composer, orchestrator and conductor Morricone scored more than 500 films, including Once Upon A Time In The West, The Good, The Bad And The Ugly, The Hateful Eight, The Untouchables, The Mission and In The Line Of Fire. His…

Join Our Million-aire Club! Check out Classic Rock's new podcast series. Listen up! Classic Rock has launched a new podcast series, titled The 20 Million Club. Hosted by British broadcasting legend Nicky Horne, it also features guest appearances from the Classic Rock team, with each episode exploring one of the biggest-selling rock albums of all time. Future’s music content director Scott Rowley says: “Prepare for the best-selling albums of all time to be re-evaluated, celebrated and occasionally eviscerated, as we ask: What’s so good about them? Which are the greatest tracks, and which could you live without? What would you change about the record? Who comes out of the album best? And of course: why did they sell so many? It’s a show about the greatest albums of all time, but…

WELCOME BACK The Waterboys Mike Scott on leading the band for almost four decades, and how being a dad helps with the songwriting. Having led the Waterboys for the past 37 years, Mike Scott has overseen their journey from progenitors of Big Music to intrepid crusaders of folk, rock, Celtic soul and beyond. Good Luck, Seeker, the band’s fourteenth studio album, is the final part of the trilogy that includes 2017’s Out Of All This Blue and last year’s Where The Action Is, and it might just be the band’s most expansive yet. Over to Scott… On the new record there’s R&B, dub, hip-hop, Celtic folk, spoken-word… It seems nothing was off limits. It was about having fun in my studio, just going where the music took me. For the…

WELCOME BACK Michael Landau The session ace on punk-jazz, pubbing with Rod Stewart, and pranks with “foul-mouthed” Steve Lukather. MICHAEL LANDAU: AUSTIN HARGRAVE Since the 70s, as the consummate LA session man Michael Landau’s fluid guitar licks have fairy-dusted the music of Pink Floyd, Miles Davis, Michael Jackson and more. And while the audiences are inevitably smaller for the 62-year-old’s solo work, Landau’s new live album Liquid Quartet Live, recorded at LA’s favourite hole-in-the-wall jazz club, The Baked Potato, sees him let off the leash and he goes from virtuosic fusion to wild heavy blues. You must be pleased with the album? Yeah. It’s got a little grit to it. Have you ever been to The Baked Potato? It’s just a little neighbourhood bar, only holds a hundred and twenty…

HIGH HOPES The Middlenight Men Trumpet/guitar-playing sideman steps into the spotlight with his own power-pop A-team. “I’m a huge fan of heaviness surrounded by pop sensibilities and loads of vocal harmonies.” Nick Hughes doesn’t remember playing Wembley with Terrorvision. Afflicted by a tremoring condition since the age of 14, the trumpet-playing sideman had swapped prescription beta-blockers for the steadying, mindnumbing effects of alcohol. On the plus side, he was able to play a great show. On the downside, he can’t really recall the experience. “There’s been a lot of instances [like that],” he says, “where I’ve played amazing shows, and by all accounts I’ve performed alright. But rather than chasing a feeling, I’ve been chasing the suppression of a manifestation of a condition.” Things have improved since he started taking…

6 THINGS YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT… Crown Lands Welcome to the prog-loving shamanic prog-blues duo who say “more is more” and mix brains with musical brawn. Words: Henry Yates Photo: Travis Shinn Six years ago, the still night air of rural Ontario was broken by the first rumbles of Canada’s best new band. Peer into the barn that served as Crown Lands’ first rehearsal space, and the revelation was that this thunderous groove was conjured by just two men, with Cody Bowles on skin-flaying drums and animal howls, while Kevin Comeau pinballed from feral slide guitar to wig-out synth. Now, at last, with their self-titled debut album, Crown Lands have delivered on that early promise. Fusing the bite of The White Stripes with the brains of Rush, exploring social…

FIELD OF DREAMS There were great festivals before it, and great festivals after it, but for a magical stretch in the 80s and early 90s, bands and fans made the pilgrimage to a field in Leicestershire for the greatest hard rock and metal festival of them all. This is the story of Monsters Of Rock. Words: Dave Everley GEORGE BODNAR ARCHIVE/ICONICPIX On a sodden late-summer Saturday in 1980, the world changed. Or at least the corner of it where heavy rock lived did. On that day, August 16, 1980, upwards of 40,000 denim-clad longhairs gathered in a field in the East Midlands to witness the birth of an event that would play a huge part in shaping the decade to come: the inaugural Monsters Of Rock festival. It was far…

ALBUMS Blues Pills Holy Moly! NUCLEAR BLAST Swede soul music, with a pungent psych-blues kick. One of the musical Ten Commandments that becomes more reliably accurate with every passing year is that women do cock-rock way better than men. Take Elin Larsson of Blues Pills, who appears to be channelling not just the lusty thrust and grainy growl of Janis Joplin, Grace Slick and Maggie Bell, but also the hollering exaltation of classic R&B and transcendent liberation of psychedelic soul. With Larsson’s rich vocal range couched in kaleidoscopic guitar work from Zack Anderson (formerly the bassist), this Swedish-American quartet have widened their horizons considerably on their agreeably pungent third album. Since releasing their European chart-topper Lady In Gold in 2016, Blues Pills have built their own studio in a former factory…

REISSUES Creedence Clearwater Revival Cosmo’s Factory CRAFT Fiftieth-anniversary vinyl edition of an American classic, newly remastered. CCR were unstoppable between 1969 and ’70, outselling The Beatles with five monster-selling albums and a seemingly endless run of chart singles. Leader John Fogerty’s songs recalled the golden age of rock’n’roll – ringing guitars, hooks, brusque solos – while also chiming with the urgency and discord of the countercultural era. By the time of fourth album Cosmo’s Factory, however, released in July 1970, CCR were beginning to play against type; the seven-minute Ramble Tamble (an echo of previous long-form pieces like Graveyard Train and Keep On Chooglin’) is more experimental than anything Fogerty had hitherto attempted. What begins as roaring rockabilly soon settles into an explorative kind of bluesy psychedelia, before the band ramp…

Essential Classics Steve Vai Flex-Able 1984 Although many would suggest the iconic Passion & Warfare as the Vai album to go for, the Zappa-tinged Flex-Able is Vai at his most pure. Featuring such gems as Salamanders In The Sun and the peak of ‘stunt guitar’ instrumentals The Attitude Song, it was no surprise that Vai was poached by David Lee Roth a couple of years later; DLR’s Eat ’Em And Smile is a shred album with vocals, after all. A stalwart of guitar magazines since, Vai remains at the top of his game, producing albums that tread the line between baffling chord changes, and music laden with enormous hooks. ALSO TRY Steve Vai, The Ultra Zone (1999) GEORGE CHIN/ICONICPIX Yngwie Malmsteen Rising Force 1984 You can't really talk about classic shred without…

the DIRT RIP Thank you and good night. CP Lee January 19, 1950 – July 25, 2020 Manchester-born Christopher Paul Lee enjoyed a varied professional life, working as an author, broadcaster and lecturer as well as playing music. His group Alberto Y Los Trios Paranoias released three albums between 1976 and ’78, and found chart success through lampooning some of their contemporaries; Heads Down No Nonsense Mindless Boogie, an expertly delivered, playful poke at Status Quo, took them into the singles chart in ’78. Lee was 70 at the time of his passing. Sean Tyla August 3, 1946 – May 17, 2020 Yorkshireman Sean Tyla was sometimes referred to as Britain’s Godfather of Boogie. The guitarist, keyboard player, vocalist and songwriter is noted principally for being a member of the…

Tim Smith July 3, 1961 – July 21, 2020 The frontman with influential British rock band Cardiacs, Tim Smith, has died at the age of 59. The band’s style mixed the fury of punk with progressive rock-style ambition, leading them to be dubbed ‘pronk’. Acts as diverse as Radiohead, Napalm Death, Korn, Supergrass and Blur have hailed their importance. Smith was forced to step back from music in 2008 after suffering a heart attack that affected his speech and movement. Surrey-born Tim and his brother James formed Cardiacs (at the start they were known as Cardiac Arrest) in 1977 alongside Michael Pugh and Peter Tagg, and the band released around 30 albums. Talking about his condition in 2017, Smith said: “I’ve got the luck of the worm that never dies.…

MY FIRST LOVE The Jackson 5 GREATEST HITS By Greg Dulli The Afghan Whigs man on an album of classic hits. I listened to whatever was around when I was growing up. My mom was eighteen when she had me – she was just a kid – so I inherited her record collection. She listened to Dionne Warwick and the Four Seasons and Andy Williams – a lot of cool music that I just absorbed. But if you’re talking about the first record that I really fell in love with, there’s really no other album than the Jackson 5’s Greatest Hits. I was probably seven years old, and they were the greatest group I’d ever heard. I listened to it all the time. I remember seeing them on Soul Train,…

THE STORIES BEHIND THE SONGS Budgie Breadfan A song about people who love money (not loaves), that came out of an ear-bleeding jam session, it became the band’s anthem and a fan favourite. Metallica thought it was pretty good too. Words: Grant Moon Rising young Welsh rockers Florence Black close their shows with a sledgehammer version of Budgie’s best-known tune. “Budgie were awesome,” says the trio’s singer, Tristan Thomas. “They were one of the first heavy metal bands back in the day, they helped start the whole thing. We play Breadfan at the end of our set and kids still go crazy for it. It’s so powerful and unique, it still really sticks in your head.” Over the years some huge bands – Van Halen, Soundgarden, Metallica, Iron Maiden –…

STILL IN LOVE WITH YOU Thirty-four years after his death, new generations of fans and musicians continue to have an extraordinary affection for Phil Lynott, the band he led, Thin Lizzy, and especially the classic, timeless songs they recorded. Here we celebrate half a century of Lizzy, looking back through the eyes of two people who played with him and knew him best: Scott Gorham and Brian Downey. Words: Mick Wall & Malcolm Dome ROSS HALFIN “Phil never had a doubt that this band would keep going forward” SCOTT GORHAM Even though he’s lived in London for almost 50 years now, Thin Lizzy’s longest tenured guitarist Scott Gorham still exudes the kind of laidback cool usually found lounging by a kidney-shaped pool in southern California. I feel obliged to bring…

MONSTERS OF ROCK CAST OF CHARACTERS TIM PARSONS Concert Promoter, MCP ANDY COPPING Fan/future Download organiser JOHN TUCKER Fan, author of Monsters Of Rock: The History Of Donington DAVE HILL Slade guitarist DON AIREY Rainbow keyboard player ROB HALFORD Judas Priest singer BERNIE MARSDEN Whitesnake guitarist 1978-1982 BIFF BYFORD Saxon singer PAUL LOASBY Rainbow promoter/Monsters Of Rock co-founder ALAN PERRY/ICONICPIX x2; GEORGE BODNAR ARCHIVE/ICONICPIX x1 GORGE BODNAR ARCHIVE/ICONICPIX x3 DAVID ELLEFSON Megadeth bassist SCOTT IAN Anthrax guitarist NEAL KAY DJ/compere ERIC BLOOM Blue Öyster Cult singer ALAN LANCASTER Status Quo bassist VINCE NEIL Mötley Crüe singer TOMMY LEE Mötley Crüe drummer FISH Marillion singer BRIAN TATLER Diamond Head guitarist LUKE MORLEY Thunder guitarist…

THE WIGHT STUFF To mark its 50th anniversary, we look back on the iconic 1970 Isle of Wight festival, with its to-die-for star-spangled bill – and also remember the anarchy that made it the last IoW for 32 years. We also look at proposals to ‘recreate’ the festival next year. Words: Hugh Fielder GETTY “It began as a beautiful dream, but it has got out of control and it is a monster.” So said 1970 Isle of Wight festival promoter Ron Foulk, after it was over. The 1970 Isle of Wight Festival remains – by some distance – the biggest rock’n’roll gathering ever held in Britain – and Europe, for that matter. Over the course of the August Bank Holiday weekend it attracted (by police estimates) around 600,000 people, more…

ALBUMS Fantastic Negrito Have You Lost Your Mind Yet? COOKING VINYL/BLACKBALL UNIVERSE Funk, soul, and social justice are the orders of the day from the Cali singer-songwriter. Sometimes inspiration strikes at exactly the right point in history. This latest album from genre-straddling dynamo Fantastic Negrito was, he says, inspired by the classic socio-political albums made by black Americans in the 60s and 70s. Given the fact that his country is in the middle of the biggest civil rights uprising in generations, Have You Lost Your Mind Yet? feels like it was cosmically planted in the right place at the right time. Fantastic Negrito (real name Xavier Dphrepaulezz) has a background that’s the stuff of biographers’ dreams: a former thief, drug dealer, illegal night club owner and hustler who reinvented himself and…

STUFF BOOKS & DVDs Rockfield: The Studio On The Farm Dir: Hannah Berryman BBC Lighthearted but insubstantial look at the renowned Welsh recording studio. Just what is it about dairy farmers and music? From Woodstock’s Max Yasgur to Glastonbury’s Michael Eavis, the lure of rock’n’roll has proved strong. But brothers Kingsley and Charles Ward went that one step further. Having been bitten by the rock’n’roll bug in the 1950s, the pair left behind the agricultural life and their own attempts at making music and converted their family farm into Rockfield Studios, the world’s first residential recording studio, located in the glorious surrounds of rural Monmouthshire. With contributions from Black Sabbath, Dave Brock, Simple Minds, The Charlatans and Oasis’s Liam Gallagher and Bonehead, Hannah Berryman’s charming documentary is rich in anecdote but…

Superior Reputation cementing Joe Satriani Surfing With The Alien 1987 Compared to others from the shred fraternity, the style of this amiable San Franciscan (who taught both Steve Vai and Kirk Hammett) is more laid-back, and more explicitly blues-based. He’s one of the more prolific too, and managed to fit in a spell with Deep Purple (one of his classic rock heroes) after Ritchie Blackmore jumped ship in 1993. This seminal album features some of the most beloved tracks of his career, such as the flee-fingered Satch Boogie and the propulsive, irresistible title track. ALSO TRY Joe Satriani, The Extremist (1992) Greg Howe Greg Howe 1988 Howe’s debut, mixing his bluesy style with neck-snapping rhythms, made some of the biggest waves of all, and was recorded with help from turbobassist Billy Sheehan.…

LIVE! Nick Cave London Alexandra Palace ★ An inimitable solo performance responds to exceptional circumstances. Even when fronting the post-punk car smash that was The Birthday Party in the early 80s, Nick Cave was always a cut above his peers. Back then it was violence and a sonic intensity that transcended performance, music and art to become a whole new entity. Fast-forward through the decades and Cave has extended beyond his core constituency to add author, scriptwriter, actor and film score composer to an ever-growing CV. But it’s arguably in the last decade that he has escaped the gravitational pull of convention and set an agenda purely on his own terms. Cutting through the white noise of social media, his online Red Hand Files have seen Cave communicating directly with…

INSIDE THE WORLD OF ROCK the DIRT PETER GREEN October 29, 1946 – July 25, 2020 He was a singer, songwriter and one of the finest blues guitarists Britain has ever produced. Classic Rock looks back at the life and times of the Fleetwood Mac co-founder. Words: Dave Ling GETTY Peter Green, one of the true greats of blues rock, has died at the age of 73. The guitarist, singer, harmonica player and songwriter, best known for his time fronting Fleetwood Mac, the band he founded in 1967, passed away peacefully in his sleep, five months to the day after some of the biggest names in rock music convened in London to perform at a celebration of his musical legacy. As one would have expected from the genre’s greatest enigma,…

Charlie Daniels October 28, 1936 – July 6, 2020 HAVING HAD A music career that began in the 1950s, Charlie Daniels was both a pioneer of southern rock and an American institution. The Charlie Daniels Band, best known for their signature 1979 hit The Devil Went Down To Georgia, about a lad named Johnny who defeats Beelzebub in a fiddle-playing contest for a shiny instrument made of gold, continued to tour and record music up until his death at the age of 83. Health had gradually failed him over the past two decades, during which time he battled prostate cancer and suffered a stroke and pneumonia. He had a pacemaker fitted to control his heart. Cause of death was a stroke. Born in Washington, North Carolina, Daniels relocated to Nashville…

Judy Dyble February 13, 1949 – July 12, 20201 GETTY x2 Much loved singer-songwriter Judy Dyble, aged 71, has lost a battle with lung cancer. She was a pillar of the English folk rock scene during the 60s, most notably as a founding member of Fairport Convention, and also a vocalist with the cult duo Trader Horne alongside with Jackie McAuley. Dyble’s short tenure with the band Giles, Giles And Fripp, with whom she sang on the track I Talk To The Wind, served as a valuable precursor to King Crimson. Her original tenure with Fairport Convention was short. Following their self-titled debut in 1968, she was “unceremoniously dumped” (her words) and replaced by Sandy Denny. Dyble largely withdrew from the music scene to raise her family, before being invited…

WELCOME BACK Seether Singer/guitarist Shaun Morgan on drugs, trolls and why he’s still seething after all these years. The thing about calling your band Seether, frontman Shaun Morgan says with a grin, is that you can’t ever mellow out. Two decades after they started out, in South Africa, the post-grungers still display gallons of piss and vinegar on eighth album Si Vis Pacem Para Bellum, with the 41-year-old turning both barrels on his bugbears from the modern age, over the heaviest riffing of the band’s career. The album title translates as ‘if you want peace, prepare for war’. The title is infiltrated somewhat by the pandemic situation, and also by the social climate in the world. To me, things feel ominous, like we’re on the crest of this wave and…

ALBUMS Metallica S&M2 BLACKENED James Hetfield and co. revisit their great orchestral-metal triumph, with stellar results. Twenty-one years on, it’s easy to forget how ground-breaking Metallica’s original S&M shows were. Not since Lars Ulrich’s beloved Deep Purple released their Concerto For Group And Orchestra 30 years earlier had the divergent worlds of heavy metal and classical music been so grandly united on stage. As always, where Metallica led, others followed. Cue everyone from Kiss to Yngwie Malmsteen putting in a call to the nearest baton-botherers – with predictably hamfisted results. Metallica themselves let the rabble get on with it, diverting their energies elsewhere. But the 20th anniversary of the original shows was too good to pass up. In September 2019, the band reunited with the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra for a…

ROUND-UP: MELODIC ROCK By Dave Ling Lionheart The Reality Of Miracles METALVILLE Coming three decades after their dissolution, the 2016 reunion of NWOBHM supergroup Lionheart was massively unexpected but successful, with comeback album Second Nature being among the most indispensable melodic hard rock releases of the following year. Album number three, The Reality Of Miracles sees Lionheart casting aside covers and re-recordings of archive material. As usual the first thing that strikes home is the sheer quality of the harmonies. Known collectively as the Lionettes, guitarists Dennis Stratton and Steve Mann and bassist Rocky Newton knit together as though they had shared a cradle (trivia lovers will be aware that Newton was a backing vocalist on Def Leppard’s Pyromania and Hysteria). Not too far behind comes sheer craftsmanship of the compositions.…

REISSUES Thin Lizzy Essential SPECTRUM/UMC Three discs, 51 tracks. What could go wrong? Nothing, as it happens. What we have here is a budget-priced, three-CD collection stretching from the early-70s days of a three-piece Thin Lizzy to the drug-troubled quintet that bade us farewell in 1983. Much about the band and its members changed during that 12-year period, but one thing remained constant: the panache of Phil Lynott’s songwriting. Given the luxury of picking 51 songs, a sceptic might suggest that even a random sample would work. Not so. The triumph here is its combination of care and balance, and a nonchronological running order that echoes Lizzy’s own set-lists: each CD is frontloaded with classics, and continues to thrill all the way to the end. The first decision, though, was a…

BUYER’S GUIDE Shred Fret-meltin’, amp-humpin’, high-octane instrumentalists! Is theirs music made by guitarists for guitarists? Not always. Shred guitar, eh? There’s nothing more likely to cause a rock or metal fan to snigger into his pint than the merest mention of the likes of Michael Angelo or Rusty Cooley. These are genuine players who could run rings around the majority of guitarists in terms of technique, yet have a popularity rating somewhere below that of Gary Glitter. And yet the truth is that most fledgling guitar players want to play as fast as possible. But it takes years of focused dedication to get even half as good as you think you are. Steve Vai – arguably the best-known shredder of the lot – has produced a 10-hour guitar workout specifically…

Good Worth exploring Vinnie Moore Mind’s Eye 1987 As with many other shredders, former Alice Cooper band member Vinnie Moore (currently plying his trade with UFO) made his name via Mike Varney’s column in Guitar Player. After a gig writing music for a Pepsi TV ad, he released a cornerstone album. Equally restrained and incendiary when required, this is one of the few albums of the period that stands up today. It’s his ear for a melody that helps set him apart from all the also-rans. Moore is also one of the more accessible shredders, and commits to lengthy clinic roadshows and the like. ALSO TRY Vinnie Moore, Out Of Nowhere (1996) Chastain Mystery Of Illusion 1985 The band featured guitarist David T Chastain, notable for his shred technique (and also for…