Innholdsfortegnelse for September 2023 i Classic Rock

SAM WILLIAMS Getting an 80s flashback from our cover? We hope so! And so does art wizard Sam at Magictorch, who tells us: “Magictorch was founded on a love of the 80s neon of Tron, so this was a great opportunity to dust off the espadrilles, roll up the sleeves of our linen jackets and immerse ourselves in the music and aesthetic of the time! For more – less airbrushed – examples of our work head to magictorch.com.” JO KENDALL This issue, Prog’s Associate Editor Jo has been flinging herself around to Bug by Dinosaur Jr., and the big song of her teenage years Freak Scene. Why? Because she has been chatting to frontman/guitarist J Mascis about his side of the 1980s, and finding out from him how a DIY…

JUDAS PRIEST HAVE replaced Ozzy Osbourne on the bill of the inaugural Power Trip Festival after the Prince Of Darkness reluctantly withdrew from the event, which takes place in California in the autumn. Its other stars include Guns N’ Roses, Iron Maiden, AC/DC, Metallica and Tool. “As painful as this is, I’ve had to make the decision to bow out of Power Trip in October,” Ozzy stated on Instagram. “My original plan was to return to the stage in the summer of 2024, and when the offer to do this show came in I optimistically moved forward. Unfortunately my body is telling me that I’m just not ready yet, and I am much too proud to have the first show that I do in nearly five years be half-assed.” A…

“Classic rock’s in our DNA, but we want to bring a fresher, newer sound.” TEMPT SOUND LIKE all your favourite high-charting hard-rocking bands from the 80s, but retooled for the Tik-Tok generation. On the young New Yorkers’ irresistible self-titled album, catchy single Roses harks back to Slippery-era Bon Jovi. On Camouflage, Hideaway and throughout they wear their love for Def Leppard proudly. Their hook-up with Dorothy, Living Dangerous, could be Foreigner’s Hot Blooded produced by Mutt Lange, who is one of their producer heroes. “Classic rock’s in our DNA,” guitarist Harrison Marcello explains, “but we don’t want to just recreate what we love about it. We want to bring a fresher, newer sound, where the melody’s still strong and the guitar still has the hooks, but it’s palatable and fun…

Roger Waters has confirmed that his controversial solo re-recording of Pink Floyd’s classic album The Dark Side Of The Moon, will be released on October 6 via SGB Records. Two days later, Waters and his band will perform the album, The Dark Side Of The Moon Redux, to just 2,286 fans at the London Palladium. “We’re going to do it live at the Palladium,” Waters confirmed. “We look forward to that… hopefully performing it live on other occasions in the future.” Waters broke news of the project back in March, telling The Telegraph: “Let’s get rid of all this ‘we’ crap! Of course we were a band, there were four of us, we all contributed – but it’s my project and I wrote it. So… blah!” Waters’s former Floyd bandmate,…

Eddie 9V Capricorn RUF There are plenty of young artists who have heard all the right 45s and can hack up late-60s soul-blues pastiches on demand. But 27-year-old Georgia bandleader Eddie 9V is something else: a man out of time who genuinely inhabits goldenera American roots, and knows how to move and breathe with it. Tracked at and named after the storied recording studio once haunted by the Allman Brothers, third album Capricorn is the best showcase yet for a candid performer for whom the warts are the best bit. That fix-it-in-the-mix (or not) philosophy suits this batch of songs. You can almost picture the titular Yella Alligator swimming among the cocksure slide licks, while How Long’s propulsive dust-dry blues riffing is matched by Ed’s bitey vocal. He even knows…

Hurricane #1 Backstage Waiting To Go On GOLDEN ROBOT With frontman Alex Lowe the only remaining link to the band’s original briefly charting 90s Creation incarnation, this fourth post-re-formation album boasts reliably swaggering mod-psych-Britpop material predictably flavoured with a post-Oasis twist of Liamed Lennon. 7/10 Velvet Insane High Heeled Monster WILD KINGDOM The prospect of a Swedish glam trio may not induce tachycardia, but there’s nothing wrong here. Like a Hanoi-haunted, Chinnichap cheese dream, these Roy Wood-grained, Dregen-enhanced stack-topping Scandogroovers spark with seductive authenticy. 8/10 Twink Think Pink V CHERRY RED While 60s scenester and ex-Pretty Thing Twink’s original Think Pink was an of-its-period, Deviants-style free-for-all, this fifth incarnation, in collaboration with Ed Sykes, mines a rich seam of timeless psych tropes (Warrior T.Rex/Screamadelica Primals). A late-career peak. 7/10 Rob…

Much could, and has, been made of the impeccable timing of Suede’s arrival in 1992. That they landed like an extinction-event meteorite into the characterless, tangle-haired swamp of Britain’s post-Madchester alternative music scene struggling to drag its gaze from its footwear long enough to muster a coherent response to grunge. But listening to their remastered Mercury-winning debut album for this 30th-anniversary reissue – apackaging that includes a picture disc and two-CD version including the era’s B-sides – it’s evident that an album this striking, iconoclastic, viscerally melodic and oozing libertine decadence and poetic decay would have had just as seismic an impact – and kick-started just as enthralled a British alt.rock movement as it did in Britpop – had it arrived at any other point in the past 40 years…

“Usually, the bad reviews say the same things as the good ones: ’They’re slow and they’re heavy and they make me puke.’” Melvins frontman King Buzzo told me in 1993. This must have been what it was like when gods roamed the earth: primordial, primitive, loud. Sludgerock interspersed with bursts of pounding, frantic drumming, and Steven McDonald (in red crushed velvet suit, on loan from Redd Kross) holding his bass triumphant above the sweaty, bearded audience with their sweaty, bearded pints. Deep, scary doom metal played at sternum-shattering intensity punctuated by bursts of The Beatles’ I Wanna Hold Your Hand and A-Ha’s Take On Me – which drives the audience into a frenzy even before metallic frivolities have begun. Lead drummer Dale Crover sits impassively stage right, a true rock…

“The bad news is, we don’t have anything new to play you,” Billy Joel teases the crowd from his revolving piano, oozing amiable showman charm. Which means the good news, of course, is that only the odd Manilow lounge workout (Zanzibar) gets in the way of a Hyde Park show rammed with hits. Sweeping strings introduce an acerbic opening duo of My Life and Movin’ Out (Anthony’s Song), and the set only gets sweeter from there, as a 65,000-strong doo-wop choir carries The Longest Time, and Joel apologises in advance if he fails to hit the high note in An Innocent Man (then hits it). He even throws comedic shade on his own stagecraft: “I aint no Mick Jagger,” he jokes, rising from his piano for an awkward peacock strut…

"Ifeel like I’ve been knighted now that I’m in Classic Rock,” says Pelle Almqvist, charismatic frontman with Swedish garage-rockers The Hives. “I guess we’ve been at it for so long that we’re now considered part of that genre.” The pugnacious quintet have actually been at it for 30 years, although it wasn’t until 2001’s Your New Favourite Band compilation (issued on Alan McGee’s Poptones label) that they broke through internationally. The much-anticipated The Death Of Randy Fitzsimmons is the band’s first studio album in over a decade. THE FIRST MUSIC I REMEMBER HEARING Hearing AC/DC’s For Those About To Rock when I was six made me feel excited. I was into comic-book heroes, so I liked the way Kiss looked, but I didn’t like the way they sounded. I kind…

There’s just no getting away from it, I’m a child of the 80s. I remember being the very grateful and excited recipient of an Hitachi doublecassette deck stereo for Chrismas early in the decade (still have it, still works, by the way). And with that boom box my musical education/ obsession began… From eagerly making and swapping mixtapes – that very distinctly 80s artform – to trying to hit pause before the DJ cut in when taping songs from the radio. Staying up late to record Tommy Vance’s Friday Rock Show, collating randomly taped John Peel Sessions, collecting bootlegs (after I discovered what they were!). I even found my four original C90s the other day from when I’d taped Live Aid on that Saturday in 1985. I owe that decidedly…

George Tickner Died July 2023 Journey guitarist Neal Schon has announced the death of George Tickner, a co-founder of the band and their first rhythm guitarist, who played on the first three Journey albums. “Thank you for your incomparable contributions to Journey’s early years,” Schon wrote on social media. “Fly free above the stars, sir…” Tickner was 76 years old. Jane Birkin December 14, 1946 – July 16, 2023 Marianne Faithful led the tributes to actress and singer Jane Birkin who has died at the age of 76. She was best known for her 1969 single Je T’Aime... Moi Non Plus, recorded with partner Serge Gainsbourg, which was banned in a number of countries due to indecent content. “I’m very glad that we got to work together,” Faithful commented on…

MEMBERS OF QUEEN, Guns N’ Roses, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Public Enemy and Smashing Pumpkins were among the multitude of musicians to pay tribute to Sinéad O’Connor as her death, at the age of 56, was announced on July 26. Her family said: “It is with great sadness that we announce the passing of our beloved Sinéad. We are devastated and request privacy at this very difficult time.” The reductive narrative commonly assigned to Sinéad O’Connor, one pegging her as a gifted but troubled and ‘difficult’ artist who could have had it all had she learned to shut her mouth, is one that the Dublin-born singer rejected in her lifetime. Where others viewed her infamous October 3, 1992 appearance on US TV institution Saturday Night Live, during which she tore…

Slash is preparing his second solo album (separate from his work with Slash Featuring Myles Kennedy & The Conspirators). The follow-up to 2010’s Slash will feature vocalists including pop star Demi Lovato. Slash says it will “definitely” have a release in 2024. Trevor Rabin, the former guitarist with Yes and Anderson Rabin & Wakeman, is set to issue his first solo album of vocal material in 34 years. Named after his granddaughter, Rio is due on October 6 via InsideOut Music. Europe release a new single, Hold Your Head Up, on September 15. The Swedish group’s twelfth studio album will be recorded in 2024 and released later that year or in early ’25. Look out also for a career-spanning documentary that’s due at the start of next year. Ted Nugent…

RENIA First Offenders, Transatlantic, UK, 1973. £40. First Offenders is a seemingly forgotten LP, which is quite sad, especially when many averagesounding records seem to be regarded higher these days due solely to rarity. It was released at a time when the market was saturated with quality releases, making it tough for everyone to get a look in. Renia’s sound was leaning more toward the commercial end of prog/hard rock, often coming across like a poppier Gabriel-era Genesis. They had a strong sense of melody, with many songs having extremely catchy and memorable elements. And vocalist Kenny Stewart certainly had the vocals of a rock star. First Offenders opens with You’d Best Believe It, setting out their stall with a high standard. Cowboy’s Dream is another upbeat melodic rocker, combining…

Blaze Bayley is making a strong recovery from quadruple bypass surgery following a heart attack. The former Iron Maiden singer feels “incredibly lucky” to have been at home on the day in March when it happened and he was rushed into hospital. “Who knows? I could have been alone [on tour] in a hotel. I could have been in the Eurotunnel,” he says. Stray, still led by guitarist and vocalist Del Bromham, who co-founded the band in 1966, launch their new album About Time with a gig at London’s 100 Club on September 14. The record will be available the following day via Talking Elephant. Bob Dylan’s mansion in the Scottish Highlands is for sale and is on the market for £3million. It has been reported that Dylan hasn’t visited…

Following a number of major stars who have sold their catalogues recently, Helen Grant, daughter of late Led Zeppelin manager Peter, is looking to monetise her 10 per cent stake in the affairs of the group, having inherited half of her father’s share of 20 per cent. Peter’s son Warren also received 10 per cent. Helen is offering for sale a package that includes rights for recording, publishing, streams and radio airplay, as well as the band’s other business ventures that include trademarks and merchandise. Whoever acquires the stake effectively becomes a minority holder along with Jimmy Page, Robert Plant, John Paul Jones and the estate of the late John Bonham. Helen Grant intends to use some of the money to finance a film about her father. “I never had…

As the 45-year-old son of Allman Brothers Band co-founder Dickey, Duane Betts knows all about expectations. A guitarist, singer and songwriter just like his celebrated father, Duane – also a member of the Allman Betts Band along with Devon Allman and Berry Duane Oakley (respectively the sons of late Allman Brothers Band alumni Gregg Allman and Berry Oakley) – is keen to carve his own path via his solo debut album Wild & Precious Life. You must have stood side-stage at many Allman Brothers gigs. Were you always set on becoming a musician? Yeah, although I started as a drummer at five years old before switching over to guitar at eighteen, that was always the plan. I guess watching my dad and Warren Haynes every night and being able to…

From the cover shot of the band digging a grave plot, taken from the perspective of the corpse, The Hives come not to bury their mysterious founder, mentor and songwriter Randy Fitzsimmons but to further mythologise him. The story behind the Swedish garage punks’ first album in 11 years (and they’re sticking to it) attests that Fitzsimmons disappeared shortly after their 2012 album Lex Hives, leaving them no new material to record for a decade. Then an obituary appeared in a local paper, accompanied by a poem that led them to a specific location where they found a fresh grave. Here, rather than Fitzsimmons’s body, they unearthed the demos for this sixth album and their snazzy new mariachi suits. It sure beats the usual story of label issues, writer’s block…

Roaring Iron Maiden anthems from a wheelchair, Paul Di’Anno shows that the indomitable spirit of heavy metal is alive and well. “You’ve made an old man very happy,” he says, and delivers hale renditions of Wrathchild, Prowler and Killers, while a towering Remember Tomorrow best captures the balance of punkish energy and theatricality that defined his tenure with Maiden. The live debut of KK’s Priest is as much about new beginnings as it is past glories, the former Judas Priest guitarist retaking his legacy in a whirlwind of flames, sparks and explosions. With Breaking The Law and The Green Manalishi in the set, they aren’t sidestepping the hits entirely, but there’s a decidedly heavier bent to the likes of Night Crawler, Hell Patrol and Burn In Hell that makes them…

‘Even after all this time, there’s no show like an Iron Maiden show.’ Ironically for a tour centred on an album titled Somewhere In Time, Iron Maiden are uncharacteristically late on stage. Apparently guitarist and – double irony – local lad Dave Murray took a wrong turning near the Blackwall Tunnel on the way to this second of two nights at this grand arena. Their ever-loyal audience don’t seem too put out, and are rewarded for their patience with a set that leans heavily into 1986’s mock-futuristic album – divisive at the time, beloved now. Caught Somewhere In Time, Heaven Can Wait and classic singles Stranger In A Strange Land and Wasted Years are dusted down, while Alexander The Great – never played live before this tour – is greeted…

Even for punk’s notoriously iconoclastic breed, Rancid have always stood out as outliers, doing whatever the hell they want with such enthusiasm that even as they play Wembley Arena you can’t hear even the faintest whisper of “Sell out”. Granted, tonight the place isn’t close to that – the back part of the venue is curtained off and many seats are left empty, but the dancefloor is positively heaving as they arrive in a flurry of wailing guitars that sound like Chuck Berry on uppers. With just a plain backdrop and 27 fine cuts of punk rock’n’roll, the band then proceed to absolutely own Wembley Arena body and soul for the next 120 minutes, an exhilarating blur of bouncing rhythms and football terrace choruses offered with no pretense. While iconic…

‘Iggy Pop is a living testament to hard rock’s golden age.’ If there was ever a moment for London giggoers to nail their colours to the mast tribe-wise, it’s today. While the Britpop demographic prepare to pledge allegiance to Pulp in Finsbury Park, a veritable ocean of Prosecco-fuelled pop pickers pack Hyde Park for housewives’ choice Take That, as the trad-rock massive descend on Wembley Stadium for doublebilled leviathans Def Leppard and Mötley Crüe. Meanwhile, south of the Thames, in the baking heat of a decidedly frill-free Crystal Palace Park, there’s a massed gathering of the punk rock clans on what looks like a split-level bombsite. Those prepared to shell out a few extra quid enjoy the questionable luxury of The V.I.P. Village where the queues for the bar and…

MO FOSTER, A session bassist who worked with a wide range of rock, blues and progressive artists during a seven-decade career, has died at the age of 78. Foster’s name appeared on records by Phil Collins, Jeff Beck, Michael Schenker, Ringo Starr, Sting, Peter Green, Eric Clapton, Brian May, Gerry Rafferty, Van Morrison, Joan Armatrading, Meat Loaf and many others. Born in Wolverhampton, Foster had to build his own bass guitar as a teenager because none were available for sale locally. After forming the prog-jazz band Affinity in 1968, he began to make inroads into the world of session work and never looked back. He played on more than 400 albums and singles. “I’ve been privileged to play with, for example, Jeff Beck at the Greek Theatre in LA, Phil…

Queen have been awarded a BRIT Billion Award by the British Phonographic Institute to celebrate the achievement of more than one billion streams in the UK. Brian May and Roger Taylor accepted personalised trophies, but John Deacon, the band’s former bassist, did not attend the ceremony. “I would like to thank everyone who has extracted a morsel of enjoyment from our music,” Taylor commented. Jason Becker is selling a rare Wolfgang guitar given to him by Edward Van Halen in order to raise funds for his ongoing medical care, which costs in excess of $100,000 per year. Since 1989 the guitarist, a former member of David Lee Roth’s band, has suffered from Lou Gehrig’s disease and can communicate only with his eyes via a system developed by his father. The…

“It’s sex, drugs and rock’n’roll. Those are our languages. We probably speak those better than we do English.” BEING A NEW, high-octane rock’n’roll band in Los Angeles has its challenges. Tearing through the city’s smallest clubs and bars, crammed onto stages the size of postage stamps, is not for the faint-hearted. Especially when there are five band members to factor in. The Bites have tasted this many times – and they love it. In a city full of trend chasers, The Bites are injecting the present with the fun of the past, qualities that keep the 80s an enduringly golden age. The rush of Van Halen. The horn-dog swagger of Guns N’ Roses. Ingredients that fuel debut album Squeeze – the title track of which (innuendo-heavy, albeit devoid of actual…

Degreed Public Address FRONTIERS A sure-fire contender for the melodic rock album of 2024. One of just a handful of groups up for challenging the status quo within the melodic rock scene, Degreed keep on getting better and better. Public Address, the seventh album from the Stockholm-based band, begins with Big Plans, a fist-punching anthem that fuses rock, pop and metal into one gloriously moreish whole, and keeps that grip until the final chords of its closer, Pressure. With all four members contributing equally, Degreed have a remarkable chemistry. The explosive guitar playing of Daniel Johnansson and Mikael Blanc’s enterprising keyboards are rightfully placed front and centre of the mix, and bassist Robin Eriksson has a fabulous voice that elevates the material to whole other level (his brother Mats is…

PiL albums so often come packed with plenty of snarl, the odd rant and a good dollop of sweary humour. And while End Of The World isn’t short of all of the above, it is also a record bound by a layer of sadness we’ve rarely seen from frontman John Lydon. This album’s poignant first single, Hawaii, was written by the former Pistols frontman as a love letter to his wife Nora Forster who had been battling Alzheimer’s disease since 2018, and became all the more heartbreaking when she died in April this year. The ballad reflects on the happier times the couple spent on the sunny Pacific isles, and finds Lydon at his most vulnerable as he sings softly: ‘All journeys end, some begin again, and we’re here, you…

Osees Intercepted Message IN THE RED Another year, another record, another belter. Secondguessing Osees is a fool’s errand. You’d be within your rights to think that, following an endless stream of releases that keep coming at you like a Terminator, they’d be running in a circle of ever-diminishing returns. Well, think again. Just as it seems that they’ve been pinned down, they slip off again like a Brylcreemed snake. On this album their fusion of punk, prog and new wave is as seamless as it is exciting. Underpinned by Tim Hellman’s prowling bass and boosted by the twin drum attack of Dan Rincon and Paul Quattrone, Tomas Dolas’s keyboards dance this way and that over Submerged Building and the title track, while singer-guitarist John Dyer’s downstrokes add a teethgrinding urgency.…

Magnum Great Adventures: The Jet Years 1978-1983 HEAR NO EVIL British pomp rock stalwarts’ early years in one box. What Magnum lacked in glamour they made up for in class. They may have looked like a bunch of rogue garden gnomes playing at being a rock band, but in the dream team of Bob Catley and Tony Clarkin they had a singer with the goldenest of larynxes and one of the greatest, if most under-appreciated, guitaristsongwriters this country has ever produced respectively. This six-CD box set is a comprehensive overview of the first stage of their long career, bringing together the four studio and one live albums they put out on Don Arden’s Jet label plus assorted B-sides and session and demo tracks. They’d already been kicking around for six…

Siouxsie Mantaray (vinyl remaster) SIOUX SONGS Released to coincide with that rarest of all events, a Siouxsie tour, this ’07 solo debut positively courses with sultry electro menace. There’s fire at its heart and ice in its veins, but, make no mistake, no one’s going to be crying out for these titles from the ‘23 pit. 7/10 Big Country Driving To Damascus (Deluxe) CHERRY RED Another criminally overlooked Big Country record gets belatedly, if comprehensively, four-CD-ed. This, their eighth, from ‘99 and last with Stuart Adamson and Tony Butler, has Ray Davies co-writes, Bs, alts and two discs of demos. A strong, assured swan song. 7/10 Supergrass Life On Other Planets (Deluxe) BMG Their ever-fresh legacy overshadowed by higher-profile contemporaries, Oxford’s glam-influenced (specifically by Bolan), indefatigably perky ‘Grass made far…

“They say it’s the same set every night, but to me it’s all brand new,” Neil Young explains. “I have no idea what I’m doing.” Young is on stage at The Greek, a concrete amphitheatre on the University of California’s Berkeley campus, nearing the end of a West Coast acoustic tour that marks his first shows in four years. Never a man to give audiences what they want, he’d promised to jettison his popular material for the trek, citing Heart Of Gold as precisely the kind of song he wouldn’t be playing. So, naturally enough, he finishes the set with it. Tonight he rotates between electric and acoustic guitar, two grand pianos, an upright and a pump organ. He plays three Buffalo Springfield songs – Burned, On The Way Home…

‘The atmosphere throughout is one of pure celebration.’ A few days before Kiss rolled into Birmingham for the latest stop on their The End Of The Road tour, the band’s co-founder and joint leader Paul Stanley spoke to Classic Rock about his mixed emotions as they take this last trip around the world. There isn’t long to go now. The final dates are on December 1 and 2 at Madison Square Garden in New York, the city where it all began for Kiss, all of 50 years ago. “It gets more emotional as time goes on,” Stanley said. “Philosophically, I understand why it’s ending, and I stand by that decision. And yet emotionally, I know that there’s a tornado coming.” It has been an extraordinary career. “I’m incredibly proud of…

‘One of the greatest live bands in rock’s lifespan enact a master class.’ Halfway through a three-hour, 27-song show in front of 65,000 believers, Bruce and the band launch into a vertiginous run of Backstreets, Because The Night and She’s The One that has those of a certain vintage bellowing along with joyous abandon, teenage dreams reignited. A later surge of Bobby Jean, Glory Days and Dancing In The Dark has the same effect on those a tad younger. Yet, rarely pausing for breath, the 73-year-old one-time “rock and roll future” makes the night about more than nostalgia. An explicit celebration of how ageing and mortality make life more precious, it marries relatively recent material – Ghosts is especially charged – with his classic Church-Of-Bruce canon of cars, girls, friendships…

Support Toby Lee, now 18, has spent 10 years garnering a string of plaudits and TV appearances with his youthful talent. He does the blues in the traditional way… no surprises. Billy Frederick Gibbons, now 73, plays it in his traditional way – so plenty of jaw-dropping guitar solos. Tonight the main surprise is that his trio doesn’t even pretend to deviate from the ZZ Top template. Standing in the stage area that Dusty Hill used to own, guitarist Austin Hanks is dressed Stetson-to-toe identically to Gibbons, playing a mirror-image guitar. It has six strings, so ostensibly he’s playing rhythm, not bass, although his heavier bottom two strings see a lot of action. The stage set is ZZ sparse and comic – four skateboards never ridden, six bottles of beer…

‘No fireworks, no special guests. It’s just over. ’ There are parts of San Francisco that feel doomed. These terrifying little pockets are where the fentanyl crisis has hit hardest, and its victims dot the streets like zombies. But pick that scab and you’ll find that the Summer Of Love is lingering; Haight-Ashbury is still awash with tie-dye. Around the corner, fans pay their respects at the Grateful Dead’s old house. And at Oracle Park, 40,000 deadheads have gathered as the remains of The Dead selfadminister the last rites. It’s quite the occasion. Next door at Pier 48, a Dead-related market is in full swing, selling all sorts of psychedelic paraphernalia. There’s a barter system in place, with goods traded for tickets as the ticketless offer goods. One man holds…