Innholdsfortegnelse for October 2023 i Classic Rock

My first thought when I heard Classic Rock wanted me as a Guest Editor was: “Hell yeah, I’m gonna ask my favourite guitarist, Ritchie Blackmore, to do an interview with me.” I managed to get in touch and we had some good email conversations, but alas we didn’t do an interview. I did, however, offer my services to be the lead singer for his next incarnation of Rainbow if he ever toured Japan again. He said: “I might take you up on that.” Classic rock, hard rock, metal, hair bands, whatever you want to call it, is the backbone of some of the best and most innovative music and lyrics ever made, and I’m happy to discuss or argue that with any of you – especially if you disagree! The…

BRYAN ADAMS GUEST EDITOR “We love Max Webster – they opened for us in the USA back in the 90s, and being Canadian we’re naturally all friends, even though they were from the east coast and we were from the west. (We don’t hold that against them!) Go For Soda is a Canadian classic rock anthem…” "They’ve come over the water from Canada… Max Webster Band!” That was Radio 1 DJ Peter Powell introducing the Websters on Top Of The Pops in May 1979. Like many watching at home, Powell clearly didn’t have a clue who this deliciously odd band were, and might conceivably have thought – erroneously – that one of them was actually named Max. Led by flamboyantly dressed singer/guitarist Kim Mitchell, and big on unique, often surreal…

Hawkwind Space Ritual 50th Anniversary Edition ATOMHENGE 1973: A Space Odyssey. While rummaging the other day, I found an ancient piece of paraphernalia produced by something called the Trustees Of Hawkwind. (As I type, would you believe that just defaulted to ‘Hawkweed’?!) It’s a flyer produced on a now long-defunct Gestetner duplicating machine: a yellowed promo for Hawkwind merch. The prices are insane – aSpace Ritual T-shirt is £1.10 plus 15p p&p. The sizes are S, M and L (no XL or XXL for the slender space-rangers of the 70s). Judging by my mathematical scribblings (1.10 + 15 = 1.25) and the clipped-out order form, it looks like I sent off for a shirt. I must’ve been the coolest kid on the cosmic block. An unfeasible 50 years down the…

Two albums into a second spell, frontman/ guitarist Pete Spiby explains why Britain’s Black Spiders are back from the dead. Given the hard work the band had put in between 2008 and 2017, why did you call it a day? From my point of view we were stuck in a bit of a rut. Things got a bit stagnant. So when the call was made, nobody really sounded too surprised, though we did think of the band as something we could come back to if we felt like it. When the likes of Ozzy Osbourne, who chose you to support him at the iTunes Festival, and Duff McKagan voice approval, you know a band are doing something right. Yeah, but that was another thing. We almost became a ‘band’s band’,…

On July 1, 1968, the arrival of the debut album from a curious new group hit the music community with a resounding impact, its waves of influence felt almost immediately. Music From Big Pink was an enigma, sounding rawer and more rustic than the lysergically layered, overblown rock of the day, and feeling entirely out of step with the current fashion. Its exotic blend of country, gospel and R&B would prove explosively consequential. An enamoured Eric Clapton broke up the virtuosic power trio Cream to pursue similarly down-home ambitions. George Harrison, evangelical with his love for the authenticity of the songs, steered The Beatles back to live studio performances. The Rolling Stones ditched their psychedelic posturing to re-embrace their blues roots. The Who considered its authors bona-fide geniuses. “Music From…

Last year, after Sir Rod Stewart filmed himself filling a pothole near his home in Harlow, Essex, the video went viral. The local council had repeatedly failed to address the issue, so the former Faces frontman leapt into action, wearing a in high-vis jacket, spade in hand. It’s this kind of man-of-the-people approach that has turned him into a star; the Jack the Lad with the voice of a god. It’s no wonder CR’s Guest Editor Bryan Adams wants to interview him. Adams is at home in Vancouver. Meanwhile, Stewart, in his apartment high in Beverly Hills, is playing Rod Stewart perfectly: the open shirt, the carefully unkempt hair, the glint in the eye, the ever-present chuckle. He’s watching football at the same time as he does the interview with…

Across the American south, Chris Robertson tells us, bonfires are “kind of a thing”. After a storm the dead limbs of trees are gathered and set alight. People roast marshmallows. They cook out and have a few drinks, uniting in a primal, cathartic act of communion over fire. It was this image, on the back of a testing period for Black Stone Cherry, that gave Robertson the idea for the title track of their next album, Screamin’ At The Sky. “I just had this idea of the four of us in the band,” the frontman explains, “and our friends and families gathered around a bonfire and simultaneously screaming all of our pains and worries into the sky.” In recent years there’s been a bit to scream about. A pandemic that…

AngelHeaded Hipster: The Songs Of Marc Bolan & T.Rex Dir: Ethan Silverman Glam catalyst’s undervalued legacy reassessed and remodelled. A documentary that attempts to simultaneously serve two purposes and ultimately delivers on both, AngelHeaded Hipster documents the making of the eminently satisfying and star-studded Hal Willner-produced tribute album of the same name, alongside a neatly realised encapsulation of Bolan’s tragically short, if hugely influential and inspiring, life and career. So on the one hand you’ve intimate and illuminating footage of Nick Cave wringing every last drop of intrinsic pathos from Electric Warrior’s Cosmic Dancer, a pugnacious Joan Jett endeavouring (not entirely successfully) to badass the living scheiße out of Jeepster, and the ageless and unassuming Wayne Kramer – barely acknowledged, in Willner’s top-line house band – spicing Kesha’s instinctively salacious…

“The only competition I can imagine is that [co-headliners The Subways] are so good live that they’ll keep us on our toes.” More than three decades since the Northern Irish band’s formation, guitarist and vocalist Tim Wheeler previews a nine-date tour to promote their hardrocking eighth studio album Crashed Out Wasted. The pandemic exerted a strong influence on what is Ash’s first album in five years. That’s true, though we started it before everything was locked down. The separation was a bit difficult, and when the three of us got back together to play again there was such a great buzz. That excitement really rubbed off on the album. It was completed quite a while ago but we decided not to rush it out, maybe to wait until the world…

BRYAN ADAMS GUEST EDITOR “This song was played to death on the radio in Canada. At some point later, I found out it was written by Rod Argent who also wrote Hold Your Head Up and She’s Not There – all brilliant songs. Odd note: Ian Lloyd [best known for being the singer in the band Stories] did a version of Time Of The Season, which was arranged by my friend Jim Vallance.” DIFFERENT GAME: THE ODESSEY CONTINUES Sure, it’s a cliché, but Rod Argent considers Different Game, the seventh and latest album by The Zombies, the group’s best since Odessey & Oracle. “We tried to work in the same way as we had done with Odessey & Oracle – cutting a version with a guide vocal in a three-hour…

Most of us could use more peace in our lives. Whether it’s ongoing conflict across the world we’re considering, or the many little wars we fight on a daily basis – with each other, with ourselves – it’s not difficult to see how fraught the modern age can feel. Our battles are different in nature to those of bygone generations, and in a lot of ways they’re more complicated. More insidious. Horrors, issues and disagreements that get under our skin. Music can hold a mirror up to this. Historically, the ‘protest song’ tends to get more airtime. Heavy music in its politically inclined forms (from early blues and folk to punk and metal) has often taken an oppositional approach: identifying wrong and rallying against it; calling listeners to arms; or…

Black Stone Cherry Screamin’ At The Sky MASCOT The one where they remind us why we fell for BSC in the first place. They’ve been flying the flag for a distinct strand of unyielding southern rock for over 20 years. On Screamin’ At The Sky, album number eight, Black Stone Cherry’s formula remains reassuringly simple: songs that pack a ferocious punch; guitar fireworks that crash and burn; Chris Roberton’s grizzled, last-man-standing vocals; and an admirable refusal to lighten the load with anything as compromising as a ballad. If they came from South Wales rather than South Kentucky they’d be Stereophonics. Rather than embrace the occasionally spacey wanderings of a Lynyrd Skynyrd or the backwoods twang of Molly Hatchet, they noted both the musical density of Daughtry-style grunge and the more…

“Dark Now My Sky hasn’t been played orchestrally since [1971] – maybe never at all. So that’s going to be a biggie.” With his time as a touring musician coming to an end, John Lees previews a pair of historic symphonic concerts by his incarnation of Barclay James Harvest. What made you decide that 2023 should be your final year of touring? I want to quit while I’m ahead, while I can still play guitar and sing. I’ve got two grandkids and it’s difficult to balance music with that. The three years of covid didn’t help, and Brexit has made things so, so difficult. There will be occasional gigs, but as far as organised touring goes, that’s it. The BJH website tells us that these concerts with the Slaithwaite Philharmonic…