Innholdsfortegnelse for April 2024 i Classic Rock

“Let’s give ’em the works!” That was the rallying cry when Queen returned to the studio in 1983. And that’s exactly what they did. After a couple of years indulging some pop and disco whims, they decided that what they really needed to do was to return to rock. But it wasn’t all plain sailing. As The Works celebrates its 40th birthday, we take a look back at how Queen got back to basics and delivered a bit of a belter… This issue we also subject The Black Crowes’ Robinson brothers Chris and Rich to the Classic Rock Interview as the band return with their first album of new material in 15 years (p34), catch up with Judas Priest as they release a new album and prepare to hit the…

Mary Weiss December 28, 1948 – January 19, 2024 New Yorker Mary Weiss found fame in the 1960s as the lead singer with the vocal group the Shangri-Las, whose single The Leader Of The Pack topped the US chart. It was later covered by Twisted Sister. After decades away from music, Weiss released a solo album, Dangerous Game, in 2007. She was 75 years old. Frank Farian July 18, 1941 – January 23, 2024 Best remembered as the guiding light of the huge-selling disco-pop group Boney M, also the infamous Milli Vanilli, Frank Farian also founded Far Corporation, whose remake of Stairway To Heaven was a Top 10 hit in 1985, and produced Meat Loaf. Farian was 82 years old. Cause of death has not been announced. Essra Mohawk April…

TRIBUTES HAVE BEEN paid to the trailblazing BBC DJ and broadcaster after her death at the age of 83. Annie Nightingale was Radio 1’s first female presenter, joining in 1970 and remaining until her final show on December 19 last year. During that time she became the BBC’s longest- serving face and voice. She was also a presenter on BBC TV music show The Old Grey Whistle Test. According to a statement from her family, she passed away at her home in London after a short illness. Anne Avril Nightingale was born in Middlesex. Her TV career began on Ready Steady Go! Abroad taste in music and a dedicated work ethic made her a force of nature, and over the years she became as famous as the stars she interviewed.…

Psychedelic rock album Music Emporium has been bootlegged countless times over the years and also legitimately reissued, but nothing can truly compare to the original pressing. It is without doubt one of the most soughtafter US records from the psychedelic era, and with good reason. However, the sleevenotes claiming that “Music Emporium, collectively, comprise the freshest, musically provocative and inventive new sounds to hit the pop music scene since The Beatles” might be an exaggeration. All of the musicians are of a high calibre; leader Casey Cosby (organ and vocals) won the Frank Sinatra award competition at UCLA in 1967, and other members were either studying for or had already attained Masters degrees in music. The rhythm section of drummer Dora Wahl and bassist Carolyn Lee was nothing less than…

“I’d say I’m a mixture of Johnny Cash and Jimi Hendrix.” HAD THINGS GONE to plan, Taylor McCall wouldn’t be a musician at all. The South Carolinian was intent on a career in the great outdoors, studying fisheries and wildlife management at Montana State University. But then he hit a crisis point. “I was in a state of depression, a very dark spot,” he explains. “And there wasn’t much to do in the middle of a Montana winter. So I picked up my guitar and just started letting some emotions out. I’d gotten to such a place in my life where I had nothing to lose.” He began writing songs in earnest, self-financing his 2017 debut Southern Heat, and tried his luck in Nashville. By September the following year, McCall…

“Here’s one for all you heavy metal fans to have a good jerk-off to,” Freddie Mercury said to the audience gathered inside Auckland’s Mount Smart Stadium. On cue, Brian May struck up the riff to Hammer To Fall – and hoped the singer would remember the words to it. It was April 13, 1985, during the final leg of Queen’s The Works tour, and Mercury was, in his own words, “fucking pissed”. Pop dandies Spandau Ballet were having a day off on their New Zealand tour, and earlier in the day vocalist Tony Hadley had gatecrashed Queen’s sound-check. Mercury spirited him away for “a little drinkie”. One bottle of Stolichnaya vodka and another of vintage port later, and it was show time. Just before going on stage, Mercury was so…

It’s easy to think we’ve heard it all – to think that every last stone in rock’n’roll has been turned, and turned again. In one sense that’s sort of true. But then… well, then you find Day-Glo pop-rockers with a funk-’n’-soul horn section, a bunch of dudes in pearls and leather jackets doing disco-Van Halen, and a cloaked seven-piece from Australia mixing old-school metal with trippy psych and calling themselves Battlesnake, and suddenly all isn’t quite as it seems. The vocabulary may be familiar, but the combinations, the fusions etc continue to reaffirm rock’s capacity for surprise. Not to mention fresh riffs on old formulas. With such easy, constant access to every musical style imaginable, is it any wonder that the world of new and upcoming bands is so fertile?…

Long-running American trio push the punk envelope. Chicago’s punk scene may not be feted with the same acclaim as hotspots like London and New York, but it has yielded an embarrassment of riches since the late 70s. Like Windy City forbears Naked Raygun and Pegboy, Alkaline Trio temper napalm guitars with a keen sense of melody, placed front and centre on Blood, Hair, And Eyeballs by Hot For Preacher’s dark, dramatic opening flourish, and continued with impressive consistency throughout its 11 tracks. Vocal interplay between Matt Skiba (guitar) and Dan Andriano (bass) centres the post-punk atmospherics of Meet Me and the thrusting title track with equal efficiency, and sparks fly frequently as the band drive their sound forward with artful, idiosyncratic arrangements. ■■■■■■■■▢▢ Rich Davenport…

From Scandinavia, a veritable pomp-rock-meets-melodic master class. Missing presumed deceased after almost a decade without a new record, Swedish sextet Moon Safari finally release a follow-up to their fourth album. Amid such circumstances it’s traditional for writers to reheat the well-worn cliché, ‘it’s been worth the wait.’ Regrettably unfamiliar with the Moon Safari catalogue, your correspondent won’t resort to such laziness, although had they been released earlier these nine tracks might have put in a strong challenge for my favourite album of 2023. You worship progressive rock and AOR? Well, awash with stirring, pastel melodies and advanced by grandiose arrangements, here’s the record for you. Three tracks last for approximately 10 minutes, and Teen Angel Meets The Apocalypse clocks in at double that, but the band operate far more concisely on…

Album number 16 from the enduring British punk/folk/ rock mainstays. Is there any other British 80s rock band as dependable as New Model Army? Formed in 1980 by vocalist/guitarist/songwriter and sole continuous member Justin Sullivan, for over 40 years they’ve been ploughing their own distinctive furrow of punk/ folk/rock, far outliving the shortlived 80s genres into which they were often inappropriately categorised. Album opener and lead-off single First Summer After is classic NMA: a mesmerising bass riff and powerful tribal drumming buttressing intricate and delicate guitar melodies. Sullivan’s ireful yet poetic lyricism tells a story with the timeless vernacular of a homily or fable but without the dogmatic preaching of NMA’s significant diversity (Unbroken was delayed by last year’s Sinfonia – stunning ‘classical’ arrangements of back-catalogue tracks performed live), while…

A couple of storming live sets. Witnessing top-notch entertainers in their element is a joy. And judging by the gigs captured on this brace of live beauties, there’s nothing Thunder enjoy more than getting elemental. Live At Islington Academy, a concise 10 tracks from a 2006 Christmas gig in London, finds the band in fine fettle promoting their Robert Johnson’s Tombstone album, the title track and The Devil Made Me Do It rubbing shoulders with inevitable fan favourites such as Backstreet Symphony and Dirty Love. Live At Leeds is far more expansive, its 16 tracks recorded in 2015 as the band basked in the glow of having delivered a bit of a corker in Wonder Days, and The Thing I Want and Resurrection Day are among the highlights. There’s a…

Shocking. Ace Frehley claims 10,000 Volts channels the hypercommercial hard-rock spirit of his former band Kiss’s 1976 album Rock And Roll Over. Truth is, it’s a lowwattage washout. The guitarist co-wrote most of the tracks with Steve Brown from Trixter, which is likely where the problem lies. (We ain’t exactly talkin’ Desmond Child here.) Frehley’s goofiness is muted and past glories merely hinted at. Tracks such as Walkin’ On The Moon and Fightin’ For Life should be jaunty and incisive, but end up flat and uninspiring, as if they’ve been recorded by an Ace imposter. The bubblegummy Cherry Medicine includes a notable lyrical retread: ‘You make me feel better when you’re in your black leather.’ There’s an almost identical passage in Shock Me, from Kiss’s ’77 album Love Gun, renowned…

Aussie alt.progsters’ lockdown diary reveals hidden depths. Charcoal Grace is a heavy record in every sense of the word. Musically, the progressive metallers haven’t so much thrown in everything but the kitchen sink as strapped it to a trebuchet and catapulted it into space, causing as much collateral damage on the way down as possible. From pummelling poly-rhythms and serrated guitars to moments of Muse-like hysteria, via episodes of pretty, gentle grace and oldschool, fingers-on-fire riffs, to tough alt.rock melodies, each long, meandering track and suite on the album is an exercise in inner-space exploration. Thematically, too, it’s on the weighty side, a direct product of the pandemic and the uncertainty and panic of the time, particularly in the stuttering Golem, in which the light struggles to break…

Eight years after the seventh album comes the eighth. Modern English never quite broke through, although the Americans seemed set to succumb in the 80s. Since then they’ve split and re-formed every few years, and these days, while they have the look of defrocked university lecturers, musically there’s an unmistakable spring in their step. They’ve shed their mildly goth aura in favour of something altogether more urgent and rather more lavishly layered. There are hints of former contemporaries from Kissing The Pink to The Fixx, and Plastic nods extremely vigorously to Is Vic There? Yet the production is undeniably 21st-century, even on the Bunnymen-esque Out To Lunch. Robbie Grey declares ‘I still don’t know what time it is, I still don’t know what day it is’ on the impossibly catchy…

Is there life on Mars? Not half. Ex-Mötley Crüe guitarist Mick Mars says the title of his album refers to the two sides of his playing style: the Mötley side and the Mars side. Which begs the question: why have we waited so damn long to hear the Mars side? Unencumbered by the Crüe’s kooky cabaret, the man born Robert Alan Deal has magicked up a full-scale solo stormer: a 90s grunge record made by a marauding horde of evil mutants. One suspected Mick was up to something special when he released a teaser, Loyal To The Lie, on Halloween last year. It sounded vicious, vituperative, vengeful. The accompanying video resembled a Hammer Horror film directed by a serial killer, Mick lunging out scarily from the screen: be-cloaked, cadaverous, white-faced,…

Status Quo bassist takes another solo ride. John ‘Rhino’ Edwards has struggled to take time out from cutting his much-loved figure in the Status Quo line-up to follow 2000’s debut for his solo vehicle and 2015’s Rhino’s Revenge II. But Just Sayin’ will surely be warmly received by Quo loyalists, not least because there’s a comfortingly familiar Quo-esque chug underpinning the infectious Taking Care Of Mary and My Side Of The Road. Never Too Old’s bar-room blues rock even sounds just about fit to get arena audiences punching the air. The more pastoral, folkrock approach of Good Evening Primrose and Caravan Man is less arresting, though, and on PC World he just sounds like a grumpy old man: ‘You can silence anyone, just call them a phobe or an ‘ist’,…

Ten albums in, Elbow continue to surprise. In contrast to the gentle neoprog of 2021’s Flying Dream 1, Elbow’s return to action is wild, sweaty fun, like Tigger on a trampoline. It’s grating that some label them an ersatz Coldplay, as their music over a quarter of a century has always dug deeper and wider. This album, with influences from Marc Bolan to Tom Waits worn lightly, squeezes their reanimated pleasure zones. Lovers Leap builds from a marriage of War’s Low Rider with Bowie’s Look Back In Anger, while the boisterous Balu has Guy Garvey’s typically astute lyrics floating over heavy, hungry swirls of rhythm. Knife Fight is a tasty slice of swagger. The energy and buoyancy never sacrifice Elbow’s innate knack for emotional impact, as Garvey sings with poetic…

On-off Creed singer offers big tunes and vulnerability on fourth solo album. Scott Stapp embodied all that was wrong with late-90s American rock music: a singer whose preening self-importance was in direct proportion to the massive success of his band Creed. But the passage of time and diminishing commercial returns have seemingly bought both wisdom and humility. His fourth solo album shoots big musically. The title track is a churning arena-metal anthem, while Deadman’s Trigger is armed with a classic 90s-style chorus and some meaty wahwah guitar. Elsewhere he’s in reflective mood. ‘They’ve seen me crawl, seen me fall, seen me stand,’ he sings on the pared-back If These Walls Could Talk, a duet with powerhouse vocalist Dorothy. It’s a moment of stark self-awareness from a man who has not…

Technicolor extravaganza.   Neal Morse is no stranger to the Bible, and this record is the conclusion to last year’s first part of the story of Joseph (he of the multicoloured coat), which was itself a follow-up to 2019’s Jesus Christ The Exorcist. The less than devout might raise a cynical eyebrow at this Biblical onslaught, but they will be swept aside by Morse’s fervour, musical passion, multiinstrumental skills, compositional ability, mastery of moods and time signatures, hooks and melodies, all presented with a theatricality that builds to a shuddering climax. He’s brought in most of Spock’s Beard, the band he co-founded, to help out with the gymnastic vocal harmonies. And nobody can say they weren’t warned. Morse has been a committed Christian prog rocker for more than 20 years,…

KillerStar KillerStar HIGHWIRE Featuring a veritable glut of Bowie alumni (Slick, Dorsey, Garson, McCaslin), Rob Fleming and James Sedge have produced a record so purposefully reminiscent of post-RCA Dave as to be entirely bereft of personality. Aclever AI-esque pastiche yes, but… Move on. 5/10 Lesbian Bed Death Midnight Lust WORMHOLEDEATH Occupying the time-honoured female-fronted arena where the fine line between ‘sexy’ and ‘sexist’ never seems to matter, trad/gothmetalling, Runaways-echoing LBD sound exactly as you’d expect. That name? Well, it’s hardly going to hurt, is it? Not yet, at least. 7/10 The Blamers Class Living AGITATED ‘Fuck you, Adam, the Devil’s alright,’ sneers Isobella Grist, munching her way through The Apple, opening blurt of Sydney’s Blamers’ primal Class Living debut. Well, if you’re gonna sin, at least make it original. Unvarnished,…

Four-CD compilation of the Geordie Lennon’s collected pre-fame demos. Lindisfarne may have been the hottest new(ish) band of 1972, but their success was at least partly due to the stash of recordings made by main man Alan Hull between 1967 and 1970 at Impulse Sound in Wallsend, mostly when he was working as a trainee psychiatric nurse at the local St. Nicholas’s hospital. This 90-track compilation, which includes 77 previously unreleased, finally lifts the lid on this sonic treasure trove. While prototype versions of Lindisfarne classics Lady Eleanor (recorded with Brethren in 1970), Winter Song and Clear White Light (Part 2) feel like the obvious place to start, this collection of aural sketches, works in progress and lost gems is a fascinating listen from beginning to end. Hull’s development as…

Jazz-rock gladiators shine again. Brandishing fearsome chops forged on UK jazz and blues circuits, Colosseum arrived in early 1969, led by dazzling drummer Jon Hiseman, fresh from playing with Graham Bond and John Mayall, alongside co-founding sax titan Dick Heckstall-Smith, plus organist Dave Greenslade from Chris Farlowe’s Thunderbirds, bassist Tony Reeves and singer/guitarist James Litherland. Hiseman declared Colosseum “probably the first jazz-rock band in Europe”. That claim was affirmed potently by landmark debut album Those Who Are About To Die Salute You, its blistering entrance with Bond’s Walking In The Park unleashing skin-tight arrangements driven by Hiseman’s supercharged polyrhythms, Greenslade’s classical-infused Hammond predicting prog, and Heckstall-Smith’s cool jazz alchemy. Follow-up Valentyne Suite, their first album on Vertigo, consolidated Colosseum’s multi-tiered extrapolations with its epic title track peak, Pete Brown’s lyrics…

Northern Ireland’s band of brothers. For a few years in the 80s, it seemed that Mama’s Boys had it made. The McManus brothers – Pat on guitar, John on bass and vocals, Tommy on drums – were as tight as a power trio could be, having honed their hard rock sound as kids in rural County Fermanagh. And as a powerful live act they held their own on the big stages, opening for Thin Lizzy, Scorpions, Bon Jovi and Iron Maiden. What these boys never had was that one great album or hit single that could lift them into rock’s upper tier. But as this five-CD box set illustrates, there was genuine potential in the music they made early on. From 1980, their independently released debut Official Album, aka Official…

                                                                                                                 Scandinavian sleaze rockers’ 1999 album gets touched up. Whenever you hear of an artist going back to re-record their best-loved albums from back in the day, there’s a strong temptation to doubt the wisdom behind it. Sure, sometimes there’s a laudable motivation to ‘improve’ on the original, iron out all those glitches and creases that have been bugging them for decades. Sometimes there’s an unspoken but even more pressing spur at work: to release a…

Power-metal pioneers ditch the power. Is Escape To Nowhere Omen’s Cold Lake? It certainly seemed that way in 1988. Along with bands like Manowar, Savage Grace and Jag Panzer, Omen essentially put American power metal on the map. While most of LA’s guitar army stuffed themselves into zebra-skin spandex and wrote mawkish power ballads, Omen released their 1984 debut Battle Cry, a pulverising epic of thrown horns and banged heads. They spent the next few years developing a solid fan base of true metal warriors, but in ’88 they acquired a new singer (future Annhilator Coburn Pharr) and took a decidedly sideways turn into a more melodic, radio-ready sound. You can see teenagers in 1988 really hating it, right? Now that we’re all adults with nuanced tastes, we can revisit the…

UK punk’s DIY parish magazine gets anthologised. Bored 19-year-old Lewisham bank clerk and music fan Mark Perry, weaned on glam and currently favouring Zappa and the Blue Öyster Cult, voraciously consumed the ‘big four’ music papers in 1976. Alerted to the existence of a nascent scene revolving around NYC clubs CBGB and Max’s by NME, he found himself in thrall of the Ramones. Catching the band at London’s Roundhouse, he hooked up with like-minded fans Shane MacGowan and Brian James, who told him about his own band, The Damned. There was clearly something happening, and happening fast. As a veritable plague of new bands, all as urgent and undeniable as the Ramones, spread across grass-roots venues, the established, hippie-heavy music press couldn’t keep up. Visiting Soho’s Rock On record stall,…

Drummer with the Seattle grunge geniuses looks back on their highs and lows. Belly laughs certainly aren’t the first thing that spring to mind when you think of Screaming Trees, particularly for anyone who has read late frontman Mark Lanegan’s extraordinary memoir Sing Backwards And Weep, with its horrifying but compelling portrait of addiction and selfdestruction. And yet, here, Trees drummer Barrett Martin subtitles his own look back at the band’s rise and fall a “comedy/tragedy in three acts”, highlighting some of the their more ridiculous times. It’s a very drummerish approach to try to find the levity in a situation, and you can imagine some of the tales here going down a treat at a barbecue – particularly one in which an intra-band brawl backstage ended up with the…

Psyching up the stars. Jenny Boyd’s gentle quest into the rock musician’s mind includes two Beatles and Eric Clapton (via sister Pattie), Fleetwood Mac (via twicehusband Mick) and others of similar pedigree, but not Donovan, who wrote Jennifer Juniper about her. This book was first published in 1992 with the title Musicians In Tune, and inevitably a number of the interviewees have since passed away, including George Harrison, David Crosby and Christine McVie. This edition includes the original interviews, with the addition of a few more current names. Female artists are well represented by Heart’s Nancy Wilson and Joni Mitchell, among others. On the blues side we have Willie Dixon, Buddy Guy and a snippet of John Lee Hooker. Her subjects answer roughly the same questions about the creative process…

Iggy Pop remembers a night more than 55 years ago when he and the other Stooges stood on a street in downtown Detroit listening to Wayne Kramer and the MC5 rehearse Kick Out The Jams, “which was coming right through a huge, reinforced warehouse door”. “It was very, very powerful and sonic,” Pop says of the future classic from his Michigan rock brethren. “We had come for a visit, and had to wait for them to break so they could hear us knocking.” Few, and perhaps nobody, kicked out the jams like the 5, and certainly nobody continued to wave that flag with the unapologetic, relentless passion of Kramer –who passed away on February 2 at the age of 75 in Los Angeles, shortly after being diagnosed with pancreatic cancer.…

The Scorpions are mourning the loss of their former drummer, who has died at the age of 61. Kottak joined the German band in 1996, and played on all their albums from 1999’s Eye II Eye to 2016’s Return Forever. He was also a co-founder of another German band, Kingdom Come. “James was a wonderful human being, a great musician and a loving family man,” said a Scorpions statement. “Our ‘brother from another mother’ will be truly missed.” Louisville, Kentucky-born Kottak also played with Montrose, Warrant, Dio, the McAuley Schenker Group, Buster Brown, Black Sheep and the US group Wild Horses. After Kottack joined the Scorpions, replacing Herman Rarebell, his playing prompted guitarist Matthias Jabs to tell Classic Rock: “I don’t know how we made it this far without being…

Last month, Joni Mitchell brought the Grammys to its feet with a show-stopping rendition of her 1966 hit Both Sides, Now at a celebrity-studded ceremony in Los Angeles. The veteran Canadian singersongwriter had to learn how to walk, talk and sing again after suffering a brain aneurysm in 2015. Earlier in the evening she collected a tenth Grammy award for Best Folk Album for her live record Joni Mitchell At Newport. Other winners included Metallica, for Best Metal Performance for their album 72 Seasons, Paramore, for Best Rock Album and Alternative Music Performance for This Is Why, Larkin Poe (Contemporary Blues Album), Bobby Rush (Traditional Blues Album) and Jason Isbell And The 400 Unit (Americana Album and American Roots Song). Director Brett Morgen won the Music Film award for his…

An auction of a huge collection of 122 guitars owned by Mark Knopfler has raised £8,840,160. Twenty-five per cent of the proceeds are being divided equally and donated to charities supported by the former Dire Straits leader, including the British Red Cross, Tusk and Brave Hearts Of The North-East. The Wildhearts have announced their latest line-up, which sees Ginger Wildheart accompanied by returning bassist Jon Poole, plus new members Ben Marsden (ex-Grand Theft Audio) on guitar and former Bonafide drummer Pontus Snibb. The band play Shepherd’s Bush Empire in London on June 6. Mötley Crüe have launched a new online museum that they are calling – obviously – The Crüseum. Celebrating the group’s “past, present, and future”, it promises to provide access to all sorts of previously unseen Mötley Mëmorabilia.…

While Ozzy Osbourne officially announced his retirement from touring last year, his wife and manager Sharon says plans are being made for a pair of farewell shows in Birmingham at some point in the future, probably in the summer of 2025. Twenty years after his last live full appearance with Yes, Jon Anderson says he is open to the idea of playing with Steve Howe and Rick Wakeman again, stating: “When I’m out there singing on my own I still think I’m part of Yes. They still feel like my songs.” However, Howe is unlikely to want such a reunion, having told Classic Rock: “It’s something I’m absolutely resistant to, because I remember the fiasco of the Union tour.” Classic Rock sends its condolences to former Deep Purple guitarist Steve…

THE STORIES BEHIND THE SONGS SWISS CHEESE There was another instrumental John Bonham drum track recorded by Zeppelin, but it wasn’t released until after his death: Bonzo’s Montreux. Put together in the control room by Jimmy Page during sessions at Mountain Studios in Montreux, Switzerland in September 1976, Bonzo’s Montreux was never performed live, although parts of it were incorporated into Moby Dick on their aborted 1977 US tour. Why Page felt it necessary to record a second – and, frankly, inferior – Bonham drum showcase remains unknown. Perhaps Page, the “weaver of sonic tapestries” simply wanted to play around with the then-new Eventied Harmonizer, which he used on the track to create a steel drum sound ,and the final “gliss-phrases” were developed during mixing with the Harmonizer’s keyboard controller.…

This week in late January 2024, brothers Chris and Rich Robinson are as far apart as they ever were. Geographically speaking at least – 2,000 miles to be precise. Chris, the elder Robinson, sits in the winter sun-dappled backyard of his home in Laurel Canyon, Los Angeles, Rich in the music room of his place in Nashville, Tennessee. Their most obvious common bond just now is intermittent dog trouble. Chris bolts from his seat at one point to stop his dog, Benny, from escaping through his garden gate and onto the road. Rich begs pause to scurry away his seven-month-old puppy. Differences between the two brothers are as immediately apparent as they have been since they first stepped out at the forefront of The Black Crowes. Chris has his Zoom…

It was a big year for the UK, 1951. Winston Churchill was ushered in as PM at the eyebrow-raising age of 77; the UK got its first National Park, the Peak District; Russian spy Guy Burgess hotfooted it to Moscow after being rumbled by British intelligence. This, however, would all pale into insignificance come August of that year, when Mrs Halford delivered a son, one Robert John Arthur, who, we must assume, came screaming (for vengeance) into the world. Some 72 years later (read that and shake your head ruefully as you remember watching the video for Breaking The Law on Top Of The Pops), Halford and the latest incarnation of Judas Priest are still rattling rafters with this new album of pristine and dauntingly powerful heavy metal. So pure…

Shoegaze veterans’ gloomy reveries recovered. While they have explored different influences at times across 15 previous albums since their emergence on the late-80s shoegazing scene, it’s hard to imagine a more archetypal album from Stephen Lawrie’s mob than Growing Eyes Becoming String (although their titles improve with age). As it turns out, it’s a set of songs recovered from sessions in 2013, but its colours could hardly be more firmly nailed to the traditional psych-rock mast; the sleeve even has the thirdeye pyramid symbol beloved of the 13th Floor Elevators and all who have travelled with them. Nonetheless, as comfort food for the winklepicker-wearing classes, it does a tidy job. Dead Head Lights is Spacemen 3 on a hospital drip at 4am. (In The) Hidden Fields is the Jesus And…

Prog maestro extends solo catalogue. In between tours revisiting his seven years with Genesis, guitarist Steve Hackett has made time to complete his first solo release since 2021. The Circus And The Nightwhale is a quasi-autobiographical tale, on which Hackett also sings most of the lead vocals. His thirtieth studio album outside of Genesis, it’s as wide-ranging as the catalogue that precedes it. It’s short on tunes to whistle, but generous in genres. Those expecting Genesis-like prog will delight in Ghost Moon And Living Lover and Into The Nightwhale, and perhaps the flute-adorned Enter The Ring. But there’s so much more. Opener People Of The Smoke mixes show tuneage with heavy-metal interludes; Get Me Out delivers blues with a swing; Circo Inferno features Arabic instruments; Breakout (dominated by Hackett’s guitar…

The party presses on, but the Grape sound blacker than ever. As with all spangled 24-hour fancydress funk raves, things have taken a turn for the dark and introverted almost 30 years on since Reverend Black Grape declared Black Grape the wildest party band of the 90s. Despite wryly aping Gorillaz on Losers, the beats on this fourth album – the first since 2017’s comeback Pop Voodoo – largely play on 90s rave-pop nostalgia, unafraid of sounding dated, though the themes have matured since Tramazi Parti. The genuinely moving In The Ground, laced with surf-noir guitar, Morricone choirs and compulsive click-beats, finds Kermit and Shaun Ryder lamenting loved ones lost and the loneliness left in their wake (‘Why won’t anyone love me when I am so sad?’). Milk dissects a…

Punky British indie gets exactly the shot in the arm it needs in 2024. Now here’s something that’s been notably absent from British indie rock over the past few years: a sheer, unadulterated sense of being out for a great time, all the time. The title, obviously, is a hit back at the po-faced social agenda, and this spiky, punky firework of a record is a pro-fun manifesto written in massive neon letters. That’s not to call it mindless; Gen And The Degenerates smartly take on gender politics, grief and the vicious piousness of the internet, but vocalist Genevieve Glynn-Reeves has such a sardonic, no-nonsense, eye-rolling way with words (‘You’re a dickhead, you’re a dickhead, you’re a dickhead too,’ she drawls, quite excellently, on That’s Enough Internet For Today) that…

Manchester’s most promising band come of age on their primal, adventurous third. This writer once witnessed Nick Cave and Arctic Monkeys’ Alex Turner sharing cigarettes outside a Poland hotel. If one could distil the smoke from that encounter into music, it would sound like Beholder, the third album from Manchester’s Blinders. From coarse, guttural garage beginnings, via a recent line-up expansion, they’ve grown into a sophisticated beast of a band whose amalgam of Monkeys, Bad Seeds and Bunnymen has evolved magnificently on this compulsive diary of teenage angst gradually giving way to self-assured adulthood. Amid the record’s lashings of primal psych-rock menace, Always and While I’m Still Young (‘Do I wanna die while I’m still young? Uh-huh’) take on a dank, Cult-like enormity, the latter including an interlude resembling a…

Prog-leaning art-rockers selfedit in style on punchy return. While they’re often considered to be cardcarrying members of the UK prog fraternity, Bruce Soord’s quartet have always cherry-picked styles from that genre while also drawing on grunge (particularly in their early, turn-of-themillennium output), metal, electronica and Radiohead-esque angst-rock. Their penchant for a multi-segment meander through a 20-minute song cycle has been a recurring feature up until now, though, and while the addition of King Crimson and Porcupine Tree percussion virtuoso Gavin Harrison has seemed to boost their creative juices in recent years, this album is a pronounced turn towards more tightly constructed, concise songs – said to be the result of Soord and Harrison writing together in the same room. The results rock with dynamic, dramatic vigour on Put It Right…

Blues-rock based return from unlikely 70s pop combo. The duo Medicine Head – John Fiddler and Peter Hope-Evans – registered a welcome but improbable hit in the midst of the glam 70s with One And One Is One, and followed up with the similarly idiosyncratic Rising Sun, dissimilar from any of their pop peers in their concentrated, minimal strain of blues/rock. Today Medicine Head comprise, with Hope-Evans’s blessing, Fiddler only. Heartwork makes no secret of the human organ around which it is based thematically, with song titles such as Love Is Not A Dream, Makin’ Up For Lost Love and, for those not paying attention, It’s All About The Love. One could be forgiven for having low expectations of a Medicine Head album in 2024, but this one is…

Four CDs revisiting classic concept and Yes work. When agreeing to perform his best-loved solo albums (released 1973- 75) once more, Rick Wakeman insisted on rearranging and updating them – again. That he did so for intended one-off performances was a colossal undertaking. No orchestras, but a choir when needed, and he’s backed by his latest English Rock Ensemble, including stalwarts Dave Colquhoun (guitar) and Lee Pomeroy (bass), with lead vocals by Hayley Sanderson. Disc one features Six Wives Of Henry VIII, ending with an urgent Catherine Parr rocked up by new drummer Adam Falkner, and Sanderson dazzles on disc two’s The Myths And Legends Of King Arthur And The Knights Of The Round Table and also on Journey To The Centre Of The Earth (alongside Peter Egan’s 2012 narration),…

Welcome to Walter’s world of damaged goods. Known primarily as a blues-rock shredder, Walter Trout is also a prolific songwriter, with an eye for lyrical detail, and his Broken album embraces an impressive sprawl of Americana and melodic-rock genres. He sings and blows a pretty cool harmonica too. With tracks ranging from the fire-and-brimstone narrative of Heaven Or Hell to the gentle romantic ballad I Wanna Stay, co-written with his wife Marie, Trout testifies about the life and times of a 72-year-old rock’n’roll delinquent with a righteous touch. ‘I’ve been sanctified and terrified, I’ve been denied and thrown aside,’ he yells (along with Dee Snider) on I’ve Had Enough. Best of all is the title track, a heroic, punch-the-air powerduet with Beth Hart – another of rock’s messed-up-soul survivors –…

L.A. Guns and Great White mainstays join forces.  You’d think Tracii Guns would have enough to occupy himself with the line-up merry-goround, legal kerfuffles and name changes that have characterised the various incarnations of L.A. Guns since the early 90s. Yet the guitarist continues to pursue sidelines aplenty, and now he hooks up with fellow Sunset Strip survivor Jack Russell, of the lesser-spotted Great White, for this comfortingly familiarsounding collection of hard-rock crowd pleasers. The first invitation to shout along pops up on the instantly infectious chorus of opener Next In Line, and Coming Down brings similarly sharp hooks, carried in on Russell’s reliably ageless vocal delivery. The prairie-echoing guitar that introduces the stirring power balladry of Living A Lie is a rare unorthodox moment on a straight-ahead hard…

An Anglo-Italian job. It was always going to be impossible to listen to Big Big Train’s first album with new singer Alberto Bravin (from Italian prog stalwarts PFM) without looking for clues as to how the sudden and traumatic death of previous vocalist David Longdon has affected them. The immediate impression is that Bravin is a very good fit for the band. He has the same thoughtful approach, and makes his mark as a team player. But there are occasional moments when you can detect that a more individual approach will emerge in due course. The music remains the same beguiling mixture of 70s Genesis and English classical music, spiced up with some Van Der Graaf Generator, but the lyrics have taken on a more personal touch, best exemplified by…

Swedish multi-instrumentalist luxuriates in a sea of fuzz. Like a night drive through a psychedeliaflecked desert, Per Wiberg’s second solo record offers starkness and beauty, an odyssey with no fixed end. The journey begins with the driving Dead Sky Lullaby, its steady rhythm giving way to a Sabbath-like roaring mono-riff on the title track, while Blackguards Stand Silent starts out like Dave Wyndorf channelling Jim Morrison, only to bring in gorgeous, twinkling melodies that undercut the darkness. This House Is Someone Else’s Now evokes Opeth at their most melancholic, a reminder of Wiberg’s impressive CV and his capacity for luscious, layered compositions. Where 2019’s Head Without Eyes felt like Wiberg was teetering on a prog precipice with a sense of dawning dread, The Serpent’s Here takes those prog tones and…

Tide rises again on wax. Geordie guitarist Tony Hill had come from playing with fabled Californian psych band The Misunderstood on their ill-fated UK sojourn when he hooked up with electric violinist Simon House, bassist Peter Pavli and drummer Roger Hadden to form High Tide, who joined the underground Clearwater agency and signed a publishing deal with Apple. Bludgeoning dynamics and screaming guitar-violin dogfights rinsed in gothic folk made them most genuinely heavy band on the late-60s gig circuit, if too brutal for prog and too complex for metal. As often happens, High Tide’s two albums became cult classics. Following 2023’s The Complete Liberty Recordings box set, their Sea Shanties debut is reissued in the format it was born in after being recorded at Olympic studios in London. While unsurprisingly…

Macca’s mega-selling third post-Beatles album gets throroughly de-belled and de-whistled. Reissued on vinyl and in Dolby Atmos, with the usual interference from Giles Martin, the most famous Wings album is also available unharmed for the cognoscenti, and for the curious with an ‘underdubbed’ disc. “This is Band On The Run in a way you’ve never heard before,” McCartney says, accurately. And it’s true that nobody at the time thought: “You know what would be good? We should take all those extra bits and those orchestral overdubs off this album we’ve spent months making, so it sounds like a load of demos, and we should put it out like that.” But these are the end times when even records with all the Beatles on can be fiddled about and tinkered with…

Twenty years on, Deluxe and Super Deluxe editions flesh out the picture. From the beginning, Evanescence were too canny to allow themselves to be defined by debut single Bring Me To Life. Its parent album spawned other hits and, more crucially in the long term, other styles, such as the piano ballad My Immortal. Longevity followed. Two decades on, Fallen is dated by its Linkin Park-esque production, but the songs still stand tall and two new editions flesh out the picture. The Deluxe set adds a smattering of B-sides, live versions and demos, most notably a stripped-down (to piano and vocals) Bring Me To Life for Australian radio. Meanwhile, the limited-edition Super Deluxe Box Set adds an additional cassette (of all things) of demos, featuring all the Fallen tracks bar…

Monsieur Mayall sur la TV. The seven French TV appearances by John Mayall collected on this two-CD/DVD set include almost as many different lineups as he relocated to California during the period covered. Guitarist Mick Taylor is on the first two sessions alongside Keef Hartley on drums – the second of which is at London’s Marquee, rather than France, in early ’69 – but Taylor is somewhat subdued at the latter, and there are few clues as to why the Rolling Stones would come calling a few months later. Mayall, meanwhile, is in full-on blues-wailin’ harp mode. The next two shows, in 1970, feature Mayall’s drummer-less quartet with no lead guitar either, although Jon Mark plays fine acoustic. One-man band Duster Bennet makes a guest appearance playing a couple of…

Orange vinyl reissue of 00s existential psych/prog hardcore punk classic. Following their 2006 debut Hidden World, Fucked Up dismissed the curse of the second album on The Chemistry Of Common Life by evolving their experimental hardcore. Abandoning standard punk-rock time signatures, the Toronto six-piece might have featured in Prog magazine if they had a more polite band name. From the flute intro to the Enoesque instrumentals Looking For God and Golden Seal (with its Kraftwerkian synth wash), the French horn of Royal Swan and guest vocals of classically trained soprano Katie Stelmanis, to the exhilarating, Leatherfaceinspired melody of Black Albino Bones, TCOCL pushed the envelope of conceptual punk. Its ambitious genre-defying sensibility made it a Zen Arcade for the 00s, the influence of both prog and psych absorbed into their…

Astonishing archives that birthed the third album. The Whole Of The Moon was such a visionary moment from 1985, touched by the rapture of Prince and the studio fever of The Beatles circa 1967. The comet explosion that hurtles into a trumpet solo is a sequence that causes delight, always. Directed by founder Mike Scott, The Waterboys were taking chances and inviting surprise. Their 1985 album This Is The Sea was a perfect realisation of scale, heart and ambition, from the petulance of Be My Enemy to the minimalist call of Trumpets and the summitcresting title track. Now there’s a six-CD set that follows the album’s transcendent curve, starting with a radio session and home-studio whimsy, leading to that vast reveal at the end of the year. Riffs and…

Triumphant 1981 performance gets a massive IMAX glow-up. Originally released on VHS in 1982 as We Will Rock You, this concert film, recorded over two nights at the 18,000-capacity Montreal Forum in November 1981, has long been a flawed document of the Queen live experience, not least due to some poorly synced sound and visuals. This extensive IMAX restoration turns it into something else. The syncing issues, once glaring, have been fixed. Visually, too, it’s beyond impressive: colours pop and the details are incredible, from the beads of sweat forming on Freddie Mercury’s brow as he plays Somebody To Love, to the period-piece clothing and facial hair in the audience shots. Queen were well into their second act by this point, and the set-list reflects it. Ornate staples Bohemian Rhapsody…

Big-budget book about lowbudget rock’n’roll. Estrus is/was a one-man record label out of Bellingham, Washington formed by Dave Crider in the late 80s. Its heyday was the 90s when it spearheaded the American garage-rock revival, releasing seminal singles and albums by certified legends like The Mummies, The Makers, Satan’s Pilgrims, Mono Men and many other bands you are intimately familiar with if you were young and drunk in 1993. This is the whole sordid story, laid out in a presentation that is gorgeous and glossy. Shoveling is a five-pound brick that looks like a million bucks and costs about half of that. Which is kind of a riot when we’re dealing with a label and a scene that prided themselves on living the low life. It’s a coffee-table book…

Neu! architect gets the motorik massive moving. ★ Once the yin to Klaus Dinger’s yang in 1970s experimental German duo Neu!, nowadays Michael Rother is afforded the respect denied him in the group’s turbulent, commercially unsuccessful heyday. But tonight is about more than mere attentiveness to a Krautrock master repolishing the silverware of his back catalogue. There’s a dynamism, a crackle in the room, from the players – including Rother, sometime Neu! collaborator Hans Lampe and Vittoria Maccabruni – and also the audience. Following an excellent, appetite-whetting electronic set from James Holden, Rother revisits solo works, old Neu! material such as Isi and Hallogallo, and also works from his period with Harmonia, in which he teamed up with Dieter Moebius and Hans-Joachim Roedelius. They maintain a motorik velocity throughout, the sound…

A high-quality evening with the Thunder tunesmith. ★Traversing the UK for the first time, and during the winter, it was inevitable that Oklahomabased southern rockers Hillbilly Vegas would succumb to the good old British lurgy. With songs full of power and melody, delivered by a thoroughly magnetic frontman in Steve Harris (not him), frankly, if the Hillbillies are this darned enjoyable with two members sufficiently hindered for the following day’s show to be cancelled, it’s almost scary to think how satisfying the band should be on their own headline dates and with everyone in full health. Backed by an accomplished group that includes Thunder bandmate Chris Childs on bass, and with former T’Pau and current Cats In Space man Dean Howard doing much of the heavy lifting on lead guitar,…

Singer-songwriter Melanie, one of the stars of the Woodstock Festival in 1969, has passed away peacefully at the age of 76. Born Melanie Saf ka in Queens, New York, she grew up in a musical household – her father was a jazz guitarist – and developed an early interest in folk music amid the burgeoning counterculture scene of New York City. Melanie later claimed to have had an out-of-body experience at Woodstock (“I watched myself sit down, and it wasn’t until I sang the first note that I was back. I believe all 500,000 people got to witness this without knowing what had happened” ), and went on to write the song Lay Down (Candles In The Rain). In 1971, Melanie achieved international success with the release of her single…

“It’s our mission to keep the rock alive. It’s important to keep the torch burning.” Until last spring, trio The Gems – vocalist Guernica Mancini, drummer Emlee Johansson and bassist Mona Lindgren – were close to a breakthrough with Swedish classic rockers Thundermother, having toured with Scorpions and Whitesnake and built up a solid fan base. But in an act of extraordinary solidarity, when Mancini was fired, Johansson and Lindgren followed her out of the door. Now the three of them are back as The Gems, brandishing their debut album Phoenix, a defiant, riff-stuffed stomper that acknowledges the hard times and celebrates true friendship and determination. “Filippa [Nässil, Thundermother guitarist and founder member] decided that she wanted to fire me, from out of the blue,” Mancini explains. “We’ve had issues…

ack in the late 90s, as partner to guitarist Mark Tremonti in post-grunge behemoth Creed, Florida-born singer Scott Stapp enjoyed the best things that fate can throw at a rock star. But across the millennial boundary line, the headlines grew darker: public intoxication, prescription drugs, sex tapes, hallucinations, homelessness. Now, having stared into the abyss and retreated, Stapp, who returns with the alt.rock anthemics of new solo album Higher Power, is a generous interviewee. You must be pleased with your new album. Very much. It was probably one of the most difficult album processes of my career, in terms of everything that life was throwing at me. I think ‘life-saving’ would be too melodramatic, but you know how music can be there during difficult times. This album provided me with…

The vast majority of people would do anything for an easy life. Bruce Soord, frontman and founder of progressive rock powerhouse The Pineapple Thief, is not one of them. The band recently completed their fourteenth studio album, It Leads To This, a wonderfully complex, thought-provoking and atmospheric work. And while drummer Gavin Harrison’s response to finishing it is to be simply “relieved”, it’s dawning on Soord that he now needs to learn how to play these intricate songs live for The Pineapple Thief’s upcoming shows. “I’m normally the least rehearsed one and I get into a lot of trouble,” he says. “Especially with the guitars, because I tune them into weird tunings, and I play them once. Then a year or two years later I’m like: ‘How did I do…

Bush frontman Gavin Rossdale has always been of the opinion that ‘best of’ compilations are the death knell for a band. But, checking in with Classic Rock midway through a run of US dates to support Bush’s Loaded: The Greatest Hits 1994-2023 album, he says he has revised his opinion. “I didn’t expect it, I thought ‘greatest hits’ were like, sayonara, swan-song records,” he says, “but it’s been really powerful. It’s been a celebration.” Over the course of a career spanning three decades, Londoner Rossdale has rubbed shoulders with some of the world’s biggest stars. But the one tale missing from his collection is an encounter with Lemmy. “I never did meet Lemmy,” he sighs. “Maybe in passing, in a hallway? Does that count? Not really.” No matter, Rossdale has…

Legendary Scottish noiseniks prove they’re not done roughing up rock’n’roll yet. Almost 40 years on from Psychocandy, and seven since their revitalising last album Damage And Joy, the Mary Chain remain one of few genuinely subversive forces in alternative rock. Leaning hard into their Suicide and Velvets roots, this eighth album sees Jim Reid bring his withering scowl to bear on further catalogues of loves (rebel rock’n’roll from the Stones to the Pistols, classic American culture, Churchill) and hates (drugs, club music, poverty, political elites). Meanwhile, between moments of melodic art-rock serenity or tension, brother William conjures some of his most abrasive and corroded sonics, often through radioactive guitars or screaming electronic wires. Chemical Animal is not so much a wall as an electrified fence of sound, Pure Poor is…

The Rattlesnakes shed another skin to show their most sensitive side on album five. Frank Carter is certainly in a reflective frame of mind on this, the Rattlesnakes’ fifth album. On lead single Man Of The Hour, the person once named by NME as the coolest man in rock questions the whole notion of stardom, of putting human beings on a pedestal, all set to swooning, theatrical power-pop that sits a million miles away from his days with punk firebrands Gallows. They’ve been dabbling with crooning over screaming for some time now, and here the dusky but polished alt.rock comes fully to the fore, the likes of Can I Take You Home having much in common with Arctic Monkeys at their horniest, with a little QOTSA swagger thrown in for…

The triumphant return of metal machine music. Maybe it’s because we no longer live in a world where everybody from Danzig to Limp Bizkit is actively ripping off Ministry’s signature clang, but this record sounds fresh and invigorating, like thrash-metal riffs and chopped political samples are some wild new thing. Hopium is an almost surgicalprecision suture of Psalm 9’s power-saw dynamics and Twitch’s electro-groove. There are even a few pleasant B-side curve balls, like the Thrill Kill Kult-ish disco-sleaze of Cult Of Suffering or the synth-pop flashback of Ricky’s Hand. I don’t know how a goddamn senior citizen who opened his auto-bio with a story about shitting a gallon of blood into an old army helmet is even alive, never mind capable of making a record with this kind…

Former brink dwellers caper on its apex. Run Run Run, the opening track of this long-awaited fourth album (it’s been nine years since their Anthems For Doomed Youth resurrection) from Carl Barât and Pete Doherty’s notoriously unstable Libertines – was a band ever better or more appropriately named? – is exactly the sort of timeless, joyous pop-rock ejaculation that in previous decades would have set the entire nation’s toes a-tapping. In the latter part of the last century they’d have owned Top Of The Pops for weeks, and even had the word ‘mania’ appended to their name. But in these EDM-encumbered borin’ twenties? Probably not. Anyway, Run Run Run’s got to be a fluke, surely? Unless sobriety is actually a help to a songwriter rather than a hindrance. Well,…

Commercially reticent transgressive hardcore punks’ sixth album. Let’s check in on punk in 2024. Has it actually moved on despite Green Day delivering the same album for the past 30 years? Yes. Yes, it has. Now in their tenth year of actively avoiding airplay or record sales, the hardcore punks who toyed with the idea of originally naming their band Unrequited Hard-On (which arguably makes things slightly better) are an antihipster foursome that Gen-Z kids won’t like. Immediately drop-kicking your gran’s ashes into oblivion with Killing All The Wrong People, they perform Poison Idea-meets-MDC psychotic psych punk with a wry, knowing humour. Helicopter Parent is redolent of battling that irritating nag-bot of an ex who is literally incapable of self-awareness – in the sense that it has a beat that sounds…

Timeless-sounding, pigeonhole-defying debut. Being top-flight sidemen has its advantages. For singer and multiinstrumentalist Angelo Barbera and drummer Ty Dennis, one of those would be snagging some very special guests for this debut – namely guitarists Robby Krieger and Alex Lifeson, the latter contributing to six of the 10 tracks. Largely defying genres, Barbera and Dennis give their muse free rein, the tracks built upon intricate layers of sound, bringing to mind artists as diverse as Led Zep on opener Grace, and (somewhat bizarrely) Wang Chung on the rhythmically propulsive I Take All, which feels like a distant cousin of WC’s Dance Hall Days. Elsewhere Rukus and My Dog Is My God showcase the riffier side of Barbera’s songwriting, while Faceless Faraway Song and If I Fall (Silly Games) –…

Marauding live recording of the Essex noiseniks’ comeback gig. On October 7, 2022, Headswim came back from the dead for a one-off performance to celebrate the reissue of their debut album Flood. Blessed with a sound so crystal-clear the listener could be halfway back in the audience at the London’s Underworld, pint in hand, and packaged with equal magnificence – the doublegatefold red vinyl edition is a thing of joy – this live album captures the excitement of the night beautifully. So strong are the individual performances, nobody would guess that the Essex psychrockers had been apart for more than two decades. Gone To Pot begins with a taut, energised bolt of lightning, while Crawl starts out plaintively before bubbling over into a Soundgarden-esque roar. Later on, the hit Tourniquet drips…

Sublime and spectacular Helsinki club show. It seems absurd that the Von Hertzen Brothers are playing just clubs anywhere in the world – this tour took in a pulsing and packed Underworld when it stopped off in London – but, given that Helsinki is where they call home, the legendary and long-standing venue Tavastia was likely more choice than necessity. While the band were exemplary at the Underworld, they’re spitting fire here. Very live, raw but real, precise but passionate, it’s a near-perfect set-list, including Peace Patrol, You Don’t Know My Name, and a version of Sunday Child that elicits goosebumps from the opening note and typifies the Von Hertzens’ intense yet nuanced performance. ■■■■■■■▢▢▢ Philip Wilding…

Bold return for Iron Maiden frontman. When Bruce Dickinson quit Iron Maiden in 1993 to pursue a full-time solo career, it was a catastrophe for the fans. As the charismatic frontman was comically wrestled into an Iron Maiden and killed off theatrically at the end of his final concert with the band on the BBC that year, it felt like the death of Maiden‘s golden years as we knew it. In hindsight, exiting off the back of the success of the Fear Of The Dark album wasn’t a bad way to go. More importantly, it enabled Dickinson to maximise his solo potential as he hammered out four impressive records in the space of as many years, while also managing to sneak into an under-siege Sarajevo to perform a now legendary…

Raucous yet soulful second album makes good on band’s promising debut. Nothing tells you that an artist is on the up more than them suddenly writing a song about having to pay tax. Which is not to say that Florence Black have changed tax brackets and are looking at Bon Jovi-like ticket sales, or that they won’t – Bed Of Nails is filled with great songs that could easily make any arena rock – but they have written a tune called Taxman, which puts them up there with The Beatles, sort of. That musical tirade aside, and the band’s second album is very good indeed. Think Alter Bridge with a grudge; dense, layered, pulsing with melody, but quite likely to crack you in the face if you say the wrong…

Merseypop diehards rock hard enough to pick up the melodic slack. Cast’s John Power, more than most, has the weight of history upon him. Alumnus of the majestic La’s and crafter of some of the 90s’ most freewheeling guitar pop anthems in Finetime and Alright, he has become the prime torch bearer for guitarbased retro Mersey pop. This seventh album, and third since their 2010 reunion, also exposes his long-standing flaws: lyrics with the depth and insight of an astrology column, and songwriting that flashes on brilliance – here, the stirring Tomorrow Calls My Name, the catchy title track and the Lennon-esque twist to Time Is Like A River – but regularly feels more Marsden than McCartney. Such tracks (Forever And A Day, I Have Been Waiting, Starry Eyes)…

The Canadian melodic rockers are back after 16 years. Don’t be fooled by the title, Alive is a new studio album from enduring Niagara Falls-based melodic rockers Honeymoon Suite, the group’s first new full-length record since Clifton Hill in 2008. It includes two very fine singles – Tell Me What You Want and Find What You’re Looking For – that were released domestically over the past few years. Honeymoon Suite were among Canada’s prime exports during the 80s, and with three of the line-up responsible for the Bruce Fairbairn-helmed The Big Prize remaining on board they still pack plenty of clout. Having worked with chart-friendly artists such as Steven Tyler, Theory Of A Dead Man and Meghan Trainor, new producer Mike Krompass has the clever tricks and flicks to…

Neat, Neat, Neat. Singles, not albums, defined the New Wave Of British Heavy Metal. Working on music weekly Sounds at the NWOBHM’s pinnacle, we even created a special reviews column (notso-subtly titled ‘Wooargh!’) to cope with the influx of 45s by the UK’s noize-crazed upstarts. The seven-inchers released via Neat Records were a nearfailsafe guarantee of excellence. Based in Wallsend, Tyne and Wear, the label had its finger on the NWOBHM’s pounding pulse – and then some. Pristine original copies of the most sought-after singles in this set can now sell for £100s, so this four-CD, 82-track caboodle is a steal at £28.99. The focal tracks come from Neat’s ‘big names’: Tygers Of Pan Tang’s unflinching Don’t Touch Me There, Venom’s blackmetal-defining In League With Satan, Raven’s hell-for-leather Don’t Need…

Latest in live series, first with frontman Damo Suzuki. Just occasionally, there is the sense that Can are a little over-dominated, flooded by the at times orthodox noodlings of guitarist Michael Karoli. No such problems on this album, however. Recording in May 1973 at L’Olympia in Paris, this gig captures Can at their airborne finest, with the group’s elders Jaki Liebezeit on drums, Holger Czukay on bass and keyboard player Irmin Schmidt not so much jamming as creating a space, a context for the younger band members to flow, for frontman Damo Suzuki to flutter like a butterfly buffeted by the North, South and East winds of sound. The lengthy Eins, which feels like a warm up for the forthcoming recording of Future Days, is a case in point –…

Rise and fall of rock’s golden neighbourhood. The bohemian enclave of Laurel Canyon, up above Hollywood, is the stuff of musical legend as home to the likes of The Byrds, The Doors, Love, the Mamas And The Papas and assorted offspring groups. From these hills came a wave of psychedelic pop, folk and country rock, followed by singer-songwriters, presented in chronological order in this three-CD set. Selections from Buffalo Springfield, Captain Beefheart and Frank Zappa’s Peaches En Regalia evoke visions of Neil Young zooming up Sunset Strip in his Pontiac hearse. Along the boulevard, petty jealousies lurk beneath the Nudie suits in the Flying Burrito Brothers’ put-down ditty Devil In Disguise/Christine’s Song, about a Byrds super-groupie, which the band later regretted after the young lady in question was killed in…

Large ballads, sugar and strings. For a short time, The Dream Academy seemed like a swooning rival to Prefab Sprout, Roddy Frame or even Tears For Fears. Their choruses were sweet and precious, and there was no scrimping on the studio budget. On their 1985 hit Life In A Northern Town they paid homage to Nick Drake and his pastoral vision. They were Top 10 in the US, and a feature on John Hughes soundtracks. Pink Floyd’s David Gilmour was helping out, and the three-way aesthetic between the band’s Nick Laird-Clowes, Kate St. John and Gilbert Gabriel was an appealing one, especially Kate’s cor anglais and string scores. Their first, self-titled album was fine, the second (Remembrance Days) sagged, and on album three (A Different Kind Of Weather) the euphoria of…

First time on vinyl for selftitled debut and 2002 collection of demos. Long regarded as some kind of idiot siblings compared with the majesty of Pixies, Frank Black And The Catholics are worthy of re-appraisal. Granted, they may not have scaled the heights of Frank Black’s predecessors, but evaluating the two bands together is as fruitful as contrasting the careers of say, Gary Lineker the player against his later tenure as Match Of The Day’s long-term anchor. Although Frank Black And The Catholics lacked the unsettling weirdness of Pixies, they sure knew how to kick up a storm. Recording live direct to twotrack tape, with no overdubs or editing, the rawness of their sound was palpable from the off. Indeed, it was precisely this stance that saw the band butt…

ou Reed Hudson River Meditation LITA Those unimpressed by Lou Reed having been introduced to his work by Lulu should probably steer clear of this droning ambient (new to vinyl) ’07 swansong. It may offer inoffensive accompaniment to clips of crashing waves, but it’s no Metal Machine Music. 4/10 Various You Can Walk Across It On The Grass GRAPEFRUIT Subtitled The Boutique Sounds Of Swinging London, here’s another beautifully curated compendium of 60s-based yesterpop from the tireless Cherry Red stable. Three ace CDs of the kitsch, klassic and Kinks, it perfectly captures its era and more than does its job. 8/10 Various Strength Thru Oi! CAPTAIN OI The second collection showcasing the emerging Sounds-encouraged working-class street punk movement of ’81 was the most controversial. Its provocative cover, offensive title and…

Won’t get fooled. This attempt to draw a connection between the two occasions that The Who played San Francisco’s Winterland, in February 1968 and March 1976, fails because there isn’t one. But that doesn’t stop Edoardo Genzolini from trying desperately to prove otherwise. At one point he even claims that the two shows “represent the alpha and omega of The Who”, which is palpably untrue. Early on there are red flags alerting you that the author may be prone to flights of fancy. In the preface he finds it “particularly meaningful and symbolic… that the passing of Keith Moon, on September 7, 1978 and the closing of Winterland, on December 31, 1978 are just a little more than three months apart”. Really? He has amassed heaps of information about the…

Updated memoir of former PiL bassist turned global underground star. With the exception of a couple of brief post-PiL stints working for a haulage company and London Underground, Jah Wobble and his booming, elastic bass have been a musical constant since 1978 and PiL’s debut single Public Image, an inaugural moment for post-punk. Wobble’s story is a turbulent one. Raised in London’s old East End, he recognised that he was of the last generation whose life was not blighted by Thatcherism and its attendant policies. He didn’t appear to have been victim of any major childhood trauma, yet he developed a loathing of all forms of authority, be they institutional or religious, and invited and meted out violence. He fell in with both good and bad crowds, from sublime musicians…

★ Synth-rock pioneers stage breathtaking show for the ages. It’s been nearly two years since the sad loss of Depeche Mode keyboard mastermind Andrew ‘Fletch’ Fletcher, and even now, as his boyish face fills the screen tonight during a poignant rendition of World In My Eyes, his shock passing still feels painfully raw. Tonight’s show is a befitting tribute to the late keyboard-punching professor, as surviving Mode members Dave Gahan and Martin Gore put on a performance that is both moody and magnificent in equal parts. From the swirling emotive synth chimes of Ghosts Again to the monolithic sound of Black Celebration, the Basildon band serve up tune after tune with outstanding aplomb. As Gahan spins and writhes across the stage like a gothic ballerina, Gore’s ‘angelic’ backing vocals and…

★ ★ Maiden bassist goes tight-fit clubbing. Steve Harris reckons he tours with British Lion because “it’s fantastic to see the whites of people’s eyes”. He certainly looks to be enjoying the experience as he moves to take station stage right, necessitating a mirrored reshuffle for guitarist Grahame Leslie, because the Blackbox stage is so narrow that any movement of personnel requires reorganisation as in one of those tile-square puzzles. It’s all a far cry from bassist Harris rockin’ stadiums with Iron Maiden. So good on British Lion – an oddball bunch comprising Harris, singer Richard Taylor, Leslie’s fellow guitarist David Hawkins and drummer Simon Dawson – who are clearly undertaking this 18-date club tour just for the hell of it. The band have made two albums in 12 years and have…