Innholdsfortegnelse for Classic Rock Annual (2024) i Classic Rock

It’s that time of year again! Yep, it’s time for the annual Classic Rock magazine ‘Best Of’ to make an appearance. Thankfully, it’s been yet another brilliant year of rock’n’roll reading, as the 140-odd pages that you’re holding in your hand testify. This is our chance to collate some of our favourite stories and interviews that we ran in the mag over the last twelve months in one handy volume. We’ve got the inside stories on the making of classic albums such as Thin Lizzy’s Live And Dangerous, Led Zeppelin’s Houses Of The Holy, Deep Purple’s Machine Head, Neil Young’s Harvest, and Black Sabbath’s Sabbath Bloody Sabbath… We collared Ian Hunter, Joe Perry and Andy Summers for the in-depth Classic Rock Interview. In the year we lost Tina Turner we…

“I wouldn’t be doing what I’m doing now had it not been for Johnny Rotten.” Years before nu metal ate the world, Benji Webbe was melding hip-hop, metal, punk and reggae into a startlingly original concoction, first in the sorely underrated Dub War and then in the more successful Skindred. During their quarter-century together the latter have released seven albums (an eighth, Smile, is out now), forged a global reputation as a ferocious live act and carved out a niche that is uniquely theirs. Certainly, few figures who have featured on this page have claimed influences as diverse as the Sex Pistols, Nat King Cole and Aswad. Oh, and The Banana Splits. THE FIRST MUSIC I REMEMBER HEARING My mum and dad’s record collection played a big part in my…

“I just saw Muse for the first time and that show was unbelievable. It was just unreal.” “She looks like a model and plays like Eddie Van Halen,” was Alice Cooper’s assessment of Nita Strauss when she joined his live band on guitar in 2014 – but the Californian virtuoso has always made sure it was her fretwork that opened doors. Beyond Alice, Strauss has lent her blazing licks to projects spanning from tribute band the Iron Maidens to this year’s star-studded second solo album The Call Of The Void, while her eclectic listening tastes suggest there isn’t a gig in the world she couldn’t handle. THE FIRST MUSIC I REMEMBER HEARING My sister and I grew up doing ballet, so we listened to a lot of classical, and Bizet’s…

WHAT DID JIMI HENDRIX MEAN TO YOU AS A PLAYER? “Jimi’s heart and soul were evident on everything he played. This had the most profound effect on me as a young player. I still get the feeling that he surrendered himself to the music every time he performed. For Jimi, every song was a unique opportunity for expression, exploration and exposition. His skills as an improvisor were spellbinding, and convinced me as a young musician that that very skill had to be part of my life’s pursuit.” WHAT DO YOU THINK HENDRIX BROUGHT TO THE GUITAR? “He showed us that the electric guitar could be played with far more expressiveness than previously attempted. He innovated with his fingers, hands, and his whole mind and body on every song he played.”…

FIRST IMPRESSIONS “I first heard about Jimi in 1966 from Chas Chandler, who had left The Animals and was now in a managerial position with Mike Jeffreys. Chas had been telling everyone about this amazing guitarist he’d seen in New York. He told me he was so good that he was going to bring him to England and make a star of him. “The show on November 25 at the Bag O’Nails club was more than a revelation. I was just glad that I wasn’t a lead guitarist, because all the hotshots – Eric Clapton, Jimmy Page, Jeff Beck, Pete Townshend and so on – were in a state of shock. The world now knows what Jimi sounds like, so you can only imagine what it was like to hear…

DISCOVERING HENDRIX “We all know the story: Chas brings him to London, they search for musicians, and it’s Mitch and Noel. Then they go to Paris and do their first gigs there, and it’s brilliant, of course. And we’d look at Melody Maker or NME, and we’d hear about this new guy. You’d hear the rumours through the industry: ‘You gotta hear him.’ The stories were legion. This guy turned the whole guitar playing world on its ear.” PERSONAL MEMORIES “Olympic Studios had moved to Hammersmith, and in late-January of 1967, I got the call from front desk. Anna Menzies, who ran the studio, said: ‘Eddie, there’s this American chappy with the big hair. You do all that weird shit anyway, so why don’t you do him?’ So that’s how…

“Watching King’s X they just blew me away. What an incredible band.” Andy Powell is the last remaining co-founding member of the current line-up of Wishbone Ash, whose fiery yet inherently melodic signature twin-guitar sound (forged originally with Ted Turner) left an indelible stamp bands such as Thin Lizzy, Iron Maiden and even the Eagles. Londoner Powell, now a long-term resident of the United States, has a diverse musical taste. Here he talks about being “a child of the fifties” and what makes him tick. THE FIRST MUSIC I REMEMBER HEARING Because my family didn’t have a record player it would have been on a radio show called Uncle Mac’s Children’s Favourites. It played a really eclectic mix. That’s where I would have heard [US folk artist] Woody Guthrie for…

One of the greatest album openers ever, Welcome To The Jungle compresses Guns N’ Roses’ entire essence into one ferocious four-minute mission statement. Danger, sex, violence, unhinged guitar riffs and siren-screaming vocals, all amid a clash of metal and pop. And that’s just the first verse. As Slash said in an interview with Guitar Center: “This represents to me probably the first real Guns N’ Roses song, with Izzy, Axl, Duff, Steven and myself. The first real song we wrote together as a band. That was the product of the five of us taking an idea and making it our own. You can almost hear everybody’s input.” The initial idea was Slash’s. He’d been playing the stuttering intro riff around the house for weeks, and even when he did it…

In drab, recession-hit Britain, 1973 paradoxically was the year of glam rock. Of boys who would be girls who would be boys cavorting on Top Of The Pops in tin-foil costumes, 12-inch stack-heels and trowelled-on make-up. All that glitter had come early for Led Zeppelin, however. Already the most glamourous rock group in the world, the astonishing planet-devouring success of their famously untitled fourth album, aka Led Zep IV, meant Zeppelin were also now the biggest. They had already been Number One in Britain and America simultaneously long before Bowie had acquired his lightning flash or Bolan had begun sticking stars on his funky little boat race. And it was Zeppelin who would release the most fabulously outré album of the year, one that perfectly summed up the joyous anything-goes…

Jimi Hendrix is rightfully acclaimed as one of the most inventive, influential and creative electric guitarists in history. In his tragically short career he greatly expanded the possibilities of the instrument and left an indelible print on how the guitar – and its technologies – is played to this day. However, despite this almost mythological aura around his playing, there is relatively little deep analysis of his musical mechanics. Which is a wasted opportunity, as he is a supremely interesting guitarist in terms of harmony, fretboard strategies, articulation, timbre and rhythm. He was also deeply interested in all types of music. He adored and drew influence from blues, funk, folk, Western classical music, jazz, Indian classical music and soul, as well as his contemporaries in the rock sphere. Ironically Hendrix’s…

WHAT DID JIMI MEAN TO YOU AS A PLAYER? “Initially I thought he came across with a rare animal power. But when you look more closely, his lyrics are full of poetry. Sometimes the words are very dark, with lots of references to imminent death and allusions to the next world. His showmanship seemed to come naturally to him. No one ever moved as gracefully with the guitar in hand. I feel it was his fluidity, as well as his innovation and risk-taking, that impressed and influenced me. His playing was heady stuff for me as an aspiring teenage rocker.” WHAT DO YOU THINK HENDRIX BROUGHT TO THE GUITAR? “Hendrix was a bluesman with a very big difference. I knew his guitar tech, Eric Barrett, who said that Jimi played…

“I’m so saddened by the passing of my wonderful friend. She was truly an enormously talented performer and singer. She was inspiring, warm, funny and generous. She helped me so much when I was young and I will never forget her.”Mick Jagger “God bless you, the Queen Of Rock And Soul and a dear friend to our family.”Ronnie Wood “I saw Tina on her first major tour, supporting The Rolling Stones at Birmingham Odeon on 1966 and became an instant fan. RIP.”Geezer Butler “I was a benefactor of her energy, creativity and talents. A woman who started in rural Nutbush, TN cotton fields and worked her way to the very top. Tina was great inspiration to me when I was starting out and remains so to this day. Love you,…

“Head and shoulders above all rock singers for me is Lou Gramm.” T first Jethro Tull studio album for nearly 20 years, The Zealot Gene landed high in our Albums Of 2022 list. Mainman Ian Anderson may be 75, but his talents as a songwriter, flautist and frontman remain undimmed. With the follow-up album done and due next year, we asked this prog god for his Soundtrack selections. THE FIRST MUSIC I REMEMBER HEARING In The Mood by Glenn Miller and his orchestra. I was about six. My father had a few treasured wartime records, mostly big-band stuff. I remember having an epiphany, because In The Mood introduces you to the elements of blues, effectively. That was my first moment of thinking: “Hmm, this music is something special…” THE FIRST…

“Sir, are you married?” asked Marianne, a pupil in Mr May’s mathematics class. “Sir, if you’re married, why doesn’t your wife iron your shirts?” she added, giggling. Marianne Elliott-Said attended Stockwell Manor School in Brixton. It was spring 1972. Queen were making slow progress, so Brian May took a student teacher’s job while he worked on his PhD. Marianne and her friends liked Mr May. He looked a bit like Mick Robertson from children’s TV show Magpie, and sometimes brought his guitar to class. He lived with his future wife, Chrissie, in a bedsit with limited space for ironing clothes. “Brian was a very good teacher,” Marianne recalled, decades later. “But he used to come in with his long hair and holes in his shoes, and we used to tease…

FIRST IMPRESSIONS “I had a girlfriend from Texas who found herself on holiday in London, and she had the foresight to pick up a copy of the first Jimi Hendrix Experience record [Are You Experienced, ’67] and forward it to the States. I had my hands on it early on, certainly before its US release. And I remember standing at the turntable with eyes wide and jaw dropped. I was seventeen when that record landed in my lap and I was ready to just soak it up. There was hours spent just listening to the way he phrased his stuff. “It was operating on a number of levels. The technique stood out immediately, and it was bolstered by some tone that had not become commonplace. I can almost bet that…

HENDRIX AS A PLAYER? “Jimi Hendrix meant the world to generations. He was the total package: player, showman and writer. As innovative and revolutionary as his playing was, it’s the songs that stand the test of time. Great guitar playing needs a vehicle for it to do that. Jimi has great songs, period.” WHAT HE BROUGHT TO THE GUITAR? “Jimi brought fire… He used his guitar as a weapon. Up until that point only Buddy Guy had weaponised the electric guitar. It was visceral and almost terrifying to listen to and watch as a young kid in his formative years. Beautiful tone, phrasing and use of chords. Game changer.” WHAT’S YOUR FAVORITE HENDRIX MOMENT, AND WHY? “Jimi at Monterey. Black 1965 Fender Strat, a Marshall stack and a black-face Fender…

WHAT DID JIMI HENDRIX MEAN TO YOU AS A PLAYER? “It was the aftershock of The Beatles changing the world, then an alien landed on our planet to give, those that understood, the truth. All that before he was twenty-seven years old.” WHAT DO YOU THINK HENDRIX BROUGHT TO THE GUITAR? “A total reinvention of the possibilities. He could make a statement with his use of feedback, and amazing use of chords and R&B stylings which he made his own. Very loudly! It’s like nothing else. I’m not sure anyone could make an impact like that afterwards. EVH did but he was not on a cultural level, because Jimi was part of the sixties anti-establishment scene. Black man with a white band, accepted by everyone. But I never saw colour,…

“Dio could scream, but also had this really delicate voice that was just beautiful.” On their 2009 debut album Feel The Steel, LA parody-metallers Steel Panther prowled into contention with a fistful of Sunset Strip riffs and #MeToo-baiting tales of Asian hookers and oral sex. Six albums later, the joke still hasn’t worn thin, thanks to the band’s deadly serious musicianship and, as guitarist Satchel reminds us, an appreciation for the giants of metal. THE FIRST MUSIC I REMEMBER HEARING My parents didn’t crank up music around the house. I got turned on to music by friends who had older brothers that were not afraid to smoke pot in front of them. They would say: “Hey, go into the closet, turn all the lights off and listen to Sabbath Bloody…

50 Shadow Of Your Love Single B-side, 1987 Written by Axl Rose and Izzy Stradlin during their Hollywood Rose days, along with Rose’s friend and Stradlin’s future sometime replacement in GN’R Paul Tobias, this is the fastest song in the GN’R canon. Originally slated for the Live ?!*@Suicide EP (hence the faux crowd noise mixed onto the track) and introduced by Rose’s ‘1-2-3-4’ count-off, it proceeds over a breakneck 3:05. Rose claimed Thin Lizzy as its influence, but really Shadow Of Your Love owes a much greater debt to Motörhead. In fact Slash’s bottleneck-guitar contortions recall ex-Lizzy man Brian Robertson’s standout contributions to his solitary album with Lemmy’s troops, 1983’s Another Perfect Day. PR 49 You Ain’t The First Use Your Illusion I, 1991 Guns’ hit the back porch with this whisky-soaked…

“The whole thing’s been a fluke,” says Ian Hunter, “a lovely fluke.” Back in 2019, even Ian Hunter thought that he was finished. He had released his last solo album, Fingers Crossed, in 2016. That same year saw the release of Stranded In Reality, a 30-CD boxset of his solo material that felt like a whopping great full stop to an amazing career. UK and US tours with Mott The Hoople in 2019 seemed to take things full circle. To mark his 80th birthday, he did five nights at The Winery in New York City, playing through his back catalogue. “I thought that was it,” he admits. But Ian Hunter underestimated himself. Def Leppard manager Mike Kobayashi came to The Winery shows and offered to manage him. So there he…

“Eddi Reader can break your heart. That’s the voice that most women would want.” As a teenager he’d been involved in newspaper journalism, but by 1970 Deptford lad Steve Harley was taking a guitar around London folk clubs, going from a “weekend mod” phase to being a “weekend hippie”. The troubadour side mixed with the emerging glam and art-rock scenes, and Harley found fame with the wonderfully arch and flamboyant Cockney Rebel. Currently on the road with his Acoustic Band, he tells CR about some of the sparks that lit his imagination. THE FIRST MUSIC I REMEMBER HEARING Before Radio 1 existed we had The Light Programme on the airwaves. My mother was a jazz singer, and on Sundays there’d be big-band music and she’d sing along in the kitchen.…

By his own judgement, Andy Summers does not like to be idle. Isn’t suited to a life of leisure. The late-March morning when we talk is a case in point. Only just returned to his home in Los Angeles from playing a run of shows in Brazil with his Police tribute band Call The Police, he was up early editing the file of photographs he took on the trip. Photography is Summers’s other great passion, seriously so. His black-and-white portraits are handsome and enigmatic. Rumpled hotel rooms and nocturnal ephemera are a speciality, the locations the exotic preserve of the globe-trotting rock superstar. Now a spry 80-year-old, Summers has been famous for six decades as one third of The Police alongside Sting and Stewart Copeland. The band have sold 80…