Innholdsfortegnelse for January 2025 i Classic Rock

Prior to 2024, you’d always find the words ‘Peter Perrett’ appended with the apparently obligatory description ‘from The Only Ones’, the band he originally split from in ’81. You’d also find his name bandied about in circles debating the subject of unfulfilled potential. But not now. Perrett’s latest, deeply personal (double) album, The Cleansing, realises every iota of Perrett brilliance, addressing decades lost to drug addiction, and the inevitable approach to life’s conclusion. The finest record yet to address the ever-more/never-more-pertinent issue of septuagenarian angst, it’s a late-career masterpiece. What stimulated you into writing the particular set of songs that make up The Cleansing? My songs are always personal, but they’ve become even more exposed on this album, feelings that I might not have expressed previously. I feel more capable…

In the speech he sent along with his daughter Annabelle to Foreigner’s belated induction into the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame, Mick Jones described his band’s near-50-year journey as an odyssey. That notion was hardly dispelled by the optics and brouhaha attending the HOF bash in Cleveland on October 19. Just two original members made it along on the night: former frontman Lou Gramm and ex-keyboard player Al Greenwood. They were joined by former bassist Rick Wills, a 1979 replacement for the late Ed Gagliardi. Like Gagliardi, multi-instrumentalist Ian McDonald is no longer with us. Jones, who’d announced his Parkinson’s diagnosis the previous February, excused himself. Which left drummer Dennis Elliott to deliver the slice of rancour all too familiar to Foreigner watchers through the decades. In a post…

When at the end of 2023 Jane’s Addiction announced a UK and European headline tour featuring the band’s original members, frontman Perry Farrell looked forward to the run of dates in his usual charismatic, ringleader-ish style. “It has been far too long, my Jane’s Addiction family,” he said. “We can’t wait to see your faces again… Togetherness – roll on 2024!” The problem with families is that some really don’t get on. For Farrell, guitarist Dave Navarro, bassist Eric Avery and drummer Stephen Perkins, their much-anticipated reunion (14 years since they’d last been on stage together) turned into a world of fighting, sniping and emotional tug-of-wars with a central character who thought everyone else was plotting against them. Togetherness? Not so much. Footage from their show at the Leader Bank…

By 1988, rude dudeness (tattoos included) was an established fact of life on Sunset Strip. What had begun a few years before as the scum also rising in sleazy Hollywood flea havens like the Starwood and Gazzarri’s was now the mainstream. Millions were being made out of what these days is called hair-metal. Living a block away, at the time, from where the twin meccas of the scene – the Rainbow and the Roxy – sat side-by-side on the boulevard, I assure you, ‘hair-metal’ was not a term used by anyone back then. We simply revelled in it as shameless LA-style rock with a capital ‘R’, into which the terms glam-metal, pop-metal, punk-metal and – much later – hair-metal, fitted snugly. This was make-up and metal, built on the gleefully…

TONY CLARKIN November 24, 1946 – January 7, 2024 Magnum guitarist and songwriter CHRIS KARRER January 20, 1947 – January 2, 2024 Former violinist, guitarist, saxophonist and singer with Amon Düül 2 DAVID SOUL August 28, 1943 – January 4, 2024 Actor and soft-rock crooner  DEL PALMER November 3, 1952 – January 5, 2024 Bassist and former partner of Kate Bush JAMES KOTTAK December 26, 1962 – January 9, 2024 Drummer with Kingdom Come, Scorpions and more MARY WEISS December 28, 1948 – January 19, 2024 Lead singer with vocal group the Shangri-Las MELANIE February 3, 1947 – January 23, 2024 American singer-songwriter FRANK FARIAN  July 18, 1941 – January 23, 2024 Founder of the Far Corporation and Boney M PAUL BRETT June 20, 1947 – January 31, 2024 Guitarists…

Bambies Snotty Angels SPAGHETTY TOWN Montreal’s Bambies have been hangin’ around since 2014 but somehow this is only their second record. I suppose it’s because they spend most of their time bumming cigarettes and collecting cans for beer. Snotty Angels is easily the dumbest album title I’ve heard this year, so I’d hoped the band lived up to it. And I am happy to say they do. Glue-sniffing garage punk with slap-happy hooks and lyrics about real-world problems like getting your teeth knocked out and sleeping on the sidewalk. If I had to pick a fave I’d go with Teenage Night, because Teenage Night/What A Mess summed up the 80s for me nicely. Most of the tracks are, like, 90 seconds long and are played with all the finesse of a…

From The Depths INDEPENDENT Album number four strikes gold. It’s been quite the slog for SKAM. They’ve toiled away in the middle of England since 2011’s It’s Come To This introduced a highly competent power trio, albeit one with little to distinguish them from the herd. Three years later Peacemaker – particularly the standout The Wire – was a wall of sound. Just when they seemed set fair for meat-’n’-potatoes success, in 2017 they jettisoned the template and chanced their arm with The Amazing Memoirs Of Geoffrey Goddard, a concept album about a time-travelling Spitfire pilot. It rocked, but differently. Seven years on (why it’s been seven years is far from clear), what now? They’ve doubled down, built on the best of their past, added a contemporary twist and gone…

Fear Of A Blank Planet Deluxe TRANSMISSION A modern-prog classic given a robust polish. An almost unassailable contender for Porcupine Tree’s greatest album, Fear Of A Blank Planet took the world by surprise back in 2007. It heralded the band’s wholesale transformation from oddball bedroom project to arena-filling prog-metal heroes, while also spinning a dystopian yarn about the tyranny of screens and the rise of the terminally doped up and desensitised. Guest appearances from Rush’s Alex Lifeson and actual Robert Fripp certainly did no harm to Steven Wilson’s classic-prog credentials, and the deft assimilation of churning metal riffs into these still artful and elegant songs won over countless Opeth and Meshuggah fans into the bargain. Most importantly, these were the finest songs that Porcupine Tree had ever conjured. The title…

Brad Tolinski, Jaan Uhelszki, Ben Edmonds OMNIBUS PRESS Definitive account of inestimably influential Detroit demons, drawn from confidant’s revealing interviews. More than half a century after MC5’s galaxy mangling supernova paved the way for punk, the story of Detroit’s late high-energy legends has passed into rock’n’roll mythology. It will always make jaw-dropping reading how the band hooked up with firebrand activist John Sinclair to soundtrack the 60s counterculture revolution with the incendiary live album Kick Out The Jams, and nosedived in the fallout. Jettisoning Sinclair, MC5 cleaned up their attack, and succumbed to addictions in disarray before splitting in late ’72. While that account is much told, this oral history built on interviews conducted by veteran Detroit journalist Ben Edmonds brings the band to life as five disparately dysfunctional guys…

Formed in Bridgend, Wales, a decade ago, Those Damn Crows have grown slowly yet steadily to the point that their third album, 2023’s Inhale/Exhale, reached No.3 in the UK chart. Frontman Shane Greenhall checks in as the band prepare for their biggest headline show to date. 2024 was quite a year for Those Damn Crows. Opening for ZZ Top at Wembley must have been a massive highlight? We’ve also played with the Hollywood Vampires and the Goo Goo Dolls recently, but that was an unbelievable moment, the high point of our year. Afterwards we watched their show, which was so cool because there was no production, it was all about the songs. Did you get to hang with Billy Gibbons? We saw him backstage and there was a very brief…

Roger Taylor believes that Queen “might” release new music. Notwithstanding their 2008 record The Cosmos Rocks – made with singer Paul Rodgers, which technically speaking wasn’t a Queen release – the group’s last album of new music was 1995’s Made In Heaven, following the death of Freddie Mercury four years earlier. In a recent interview with Uncut, when Taylor was asked whether Queen plan to release any new original material in the future, he replied: “I think we might,” adding: “Brian and myself talked the other day, and we both said that if we feel we have some good material, why not? We can still play. We can still sing. I don’t see why not.” Last year, talking on US Radio, May revealed that Queen had “dabbled a little” in…

Alex Van Halen has dropped some gargantuan bombshells during the promotion of his new book, Brothers. In conversation with Rolling Stone, the former Van Halen drummer revealed that not only did he and his now late guitar-playing brother Edward consider getting Ozzy Osbourne to front a new line-up of their group Van Halen–something that could seriously have happened were it not for the runaway success of Ozzy’s reality TV series The Osbournes – but also that he’s considering the completion of some unreleased Van Halen material, using artificial intelligence to generate new guitar solos. Even more mind-boggling, Robert Plant is top of his wish list to provide vocals. Alex reveals that at the turn of the millennium he and Eddie sat down with Sharon Osbourne to discuss an Ozzy-fronted Van…

The gestation period of Stories From Time And Space goes back almost a year, when founder and leader Dave Brock told Prog magazine that work was already under way – just as 2023’s The Future Never Waits was about to be released. “We haven’t actually done anything about space for ages,” guitarist Magnus Martin says of Stories’ origins. “So we thought let’s actually do some space rock. There’s also this amazing book that [music impresario] Rob Godwin has written about space rock and Hawkwind as well, so that’s what got us thinking about just doing a space rock album.” Brock says of the band’s process: “We constantly write stuff as we go along. We turf out tracks that we don’t think are very good, and then put new ones in…

I’m a whiskey drinkin’, beer swiggin’, hell raisin’, the Quireboys singer – like it or not!” Spike roars defiantly on the new Quireboys album Wardour Street. From their formation in 1984, many have tried–and failed – to change Spike, including the bandmates who sacked him so controversially in 2022. Now the Geordie singer fronts a line-up that includes former members Nigel Mogg on bass and keyboard player Chris Johnstone, with the Thunder pair of guitarist Luke Morley and drummer Gary ‘Harry’ James gatecrashing during Thunder singer Danny Bowes’s ongoing recuperation. We got together with them for a pint. Or two. Do you recall the first ever meeting between The Quireboys and Thunder? Luke Morley: Oh blimey. It was a long time ago. Back in the eighties. Probably in the Marquee,…

Just as James Brown liked to call himself The Hardest Working Man In Show Business, so Bruce Dickinson is the hardest working man in heavy metal. In 2024 the singer released his seventh solo album, The Mandrake Project, and embarked on an accompanying tour, after which he returned to Iron Maiden to complete the band’s Future Past tour. Amid all of this, Dickinson has also been overseeing a reissue programme of his solo back catalogue. And he’s already looking forward to a busy schedule in 2025. Classic Rock described The Mandrake Project as “a grandiose vision”. Did the album turn out exactly how you’d envisaged, and were you surprised by the overwhelmingly positive reaction to it? In sequence, no and yes! It didn’t turn out the way I thought. It…

When AC/DC performed at the massive Power Trip Festival at the Empire Polo Club in Indio, California in October 2023, it was the band’s first live show for a little over eight years. For singer Brian Johnson it was even longer, having had to withdraw on doctor’s orders from 2016’s Rock Or Bust tour in March, to be replaced by Axl Rose for the final 22 shows. The rock world waited with bated breath in hope that a full tour would be announced. As usual the notoriously uncommunicative AC/DC kept schtum, and it was left to Munich mayor Dieter Reiter to spill the beans that the band were booked to play his city in June. Finally a short European run of dates were announced, and tickets sold out in record…

The biggest news of 2024 for punk rockers of a certain age came in June, when it was announced that the Sex Pistols were to re-form – well, 75 five per cent of the Pistols, to be exact – initially to play a series of concerts in drummer Paul Cook and guitarist Steve Jones’s native Shepherd’s Bush to benefit beloved-but-struggling local London venue Bush Hall. Relations being what they are between ex-vocalist John Lydon and the remainder of the band, putting a replacement behind the microphone was the only viable option. Cook and Jones had formerly taken to the road with Billy Idol and Tony James of Generation X, as Generation Sex, but with Idol unavailable a second option had to be explored. It was Pistols’ bassist Glen Matlock’s son…

In less than three months, Jesse Malin went from standing on the back bar of the Garage in London to being in a bed in a hospital in New York. That night at The Garage, his elongated mic lead stretched out over the heads of the sold-out audience, and conducting a singalong to The Replacements’ Bastards Of Young, Malin was his own archetype: parts broken-down folk singer and brawling, cocky rock’n’roller. There was nothing quite like him live. Then, on May 4 last year, Malin suffered an exceedingly rare spinal-cord infarction – a stroke in his back – while having dinner in the East Village. Gathered with friends to mark the one-year anniversary of the death of Howie Pyro, Malin’s former D Generation bandmate and best friend, he felt a…

Onism KICKSTARTER Yorkshire quartet’s third is a gutsy, freewheeling joy. When your band forms at a music college, it’s understandable that the members’ grounding in a range of different styles comes through in a reluctance to stick to a single musical identity. And so it has proved to an extent with Koyo. Since forming at Leeds Conservatoire in the mid-2010s, the quartet have leaned into a psychedelia, prog and shoegaze-tinged variety of grungy rock on their self-titled 2017 debut, echoing Rush and Swervedriver as often as they have Soundgarden and Hawkwind, before 2020’s You Said It found them exploring more widescreen melodic rock and prog-metal territory. After the pandemic saw their natural habitat of the live arena reduced and their continuing existence under threat, they had to regroup and rethink,…

Obsession Deluxe CHRYSALIS The one with the balls. Schenker’s last stand. A master class from all five of them. By placing Michael Schenker front and centre on the front cover, the only member of the band wearing his hair long and with features free of ball bearings, sleeve designers Hipgnosis highlighted the guitarist but also made him look troubled and isolated. How apt. Obsession, UFO’s seventh studio album and their fifth with Schenker, was produced superbly by Ron Nevison, as was its startling predecessor Lights Out. Released in 1978, Obsession cemented UFO in the American market, but its tour (recordings from some of the shows were immortalised on the double live album Strangers In The Night) proved too much for Schenker’s mental state. Plagued by stagefright, a quest for perfection…

“I had the idea when Willie started posting his brilliant new songs. They’re like Cats In Space, only with several hundred extra chords added.” Known for a distinctive amalgam of classic rock, power-pop, pomp and glam, Cats In Space are touring their latest album Time Machine, the band’s first for Cherry Red. With Willie Dowling, the instrumentalist and singer known for his exploits with The Grip, The Wildhearts, Honeycrack, Jackdaw 4 and many more, as special guest, we thought a chinwag between Cats leader Greg Hart and Dowling might be fun. We were right. You two had scarcely met before this tour, now here you are fans of one another’s music. Greg Hart: I had the idea when Willie started posting his brilliant new songs. They’re like Cats In Space,…

Ozzy Osbourne, Foreigner and Peter Frampton were among the stars inducted to the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame as part of a televised, five-hour ceremony that took place in Cleveland, Ohio, on October 19. The MC5, Cher and Dave Matthews Band were also welcomed into the Class Of 2024. Already recognised since 2006 for Black Sabbath, Osbourne was honoured a second time for his successful solo career. Prevented from performing by Parkinson’s and other health issues, Ozzy took the opportunity to praise Randy Rhoads, the guitarist who rocketed to fame by playing on the first two Blizzard Of Ozz albums before perishing in a plane crash in 1992. “If I’d hadn’t have met Randy Rhoads, I don’t think I’d be sitting here now,” Osbourne stated in what turned out…

The bassist with the Grateful Dead has died of unconfirmed cause, aged 84. Phil Lesh co-founded the legendary US band in the early 60s, who helped define the psychedelic movement, and played with them until they split in 1995. California-born Lesh was brought in by his friend Jerry Garcia to play bass in The Warlocks in 1964, despite never having played the instrument before. The Warlocks became the Grateful Dead the following year, assuming a place at the centre of the Bay Area’s burgeoning counter-culture scene. They played shows for LSD guru Ken Kesey at his so-called Acid Tests. “It was a dollar to get in,” Lesh recalled in Classic Rock back in 2017. “We weren’t famous and we weren’t even required to play, but we played a few tunes…

50 BON JOVI Forever ISLAND While this sixteenth Bon Jovi album conjures memories of the band’s late-80s/early-90s heyday, it succeeds by adopting a mature perspective on old glories rather than trying to recreate them. Its lasting strength is its mature air of restraint. NJ Killer track: The People’s House 49 NICK CAVE & THE BAD SEEDS Wild God PIAS For his past couple of albums, doused in grief after the death of his son, Nick Cave retreated into a world of gossamer soundscapes sculpted alongside his creative twin Warren Ellis. Now reunited with the Bad Seeds, here Cave searches out joy and meaning in a life that has changed but continues to provide a sense of magic. Although the meandering, gentle sounds remain, they build to moments of pure rapture, of wonderment at…

When Danny Dolan was 16 he received some life-changing advice from one of the world’s biggest bands. His dad, the larger-than-life owner of Old Trafford institution ‘Tommy’s House Of Fires’ (it sold fireplaces), rocked up at Manchester’s Midland Hotel one night, where he approached a striking gang in the bar. They ended up drinking together, the gang turned out to be The Prodigy, and Dolan Sr later found himself “seeing black cats” all over his hotel room. At home the next day he handed his son, an aspiring drummer, a napkin. On it was written the message: “To Danny, hit ’em hard, Liam Howlett”. “I’ve always wanted to meet him. I’d love to say: ‘My dad reckons you spiked him in the Midland,’” Danny grins as his best mate Ally…

Slash has fashioned some of the most memorable guitar riffs and solos in modern rock. But few people would have had him down as a born-again bluesman. For his latest project the Guns N’ Roses star dived deep into a world of music that had its first flowering 60, 70 and even 80 years ago. “I’m a hard-rock guy at heart,” he explains. “But this kind of blues guitar playing for me has always been the basis for everything.” It turns out that old songs such as Hoochie Coochie Man, Stormy Monday, Key To The Highway and Born Under A Bad Sign were foundational in Slash’s initial mastery of his instrument. “When I first picked up the guitar, the guys that I was inspired by at that time were all…

Morecambe and Wise. Pete and Dud. Smith and Jones. All great British comedy duos. Another is Baz Mills and Adam Thistlethwaite of Massive Wagons. A decade after gaining notoriety beyond the city limits of their native Lancaster, the co-founding singer and guitarist are still reliably daft. But after a hard-touring 12 months, the Wagons’ final move for 2024 is the release of seventh album Earth To Grace, its socially charged songs ranging from greedy politicians to male mental health. You’ve been hitting Europe hard this year. What was the most memorable gig? Baz: We played the Mystic Festival in Poland, and we were the only band on the line-up where you could actually read the logo. Because it was, like, the heaviest of heavy music. We turned up and everybody…

You wouldn’t use the word ‘prolific’ to describe David Gilmour, at least not when it comes to putting out music. His new album, Luck And Strange, comes nearly nine years after its predecessor, Rattle That Lock, which itself ended a nine-year wait (although to be fair, he had been working on the posthumous Pink Floyd record The Endless River, which came out the year before). Gilmour has never been one to ‘crank ’em out’, of course, and since Floyd’s final tour, in 1994, he’s released just three studio albums. “I don’t have a huge ambition any more,” Gilmour, now 78, told us during the Rattle That Lock campaign. “In past years there was a lot of thinking about the career and wanting to achieve success. It’s sort of turned into…

ICONS & A-LISTERS Top tunes from the big guns. THE BLACK CROWES Rats And Clowns This crunch-rocker from Happiness Bastards finds the Robinsons saluting the Youngs as only superfans can. “If the record is a love letter to rock‘n’roll,” says Rich Robinson, “then Rats And Clowns is a love letter to AC/DC.” SMASHING PUMPKINS Sighommi “I think the old-school fans will be happy, for once,” Billy Corgan snarked of Smashing Pumpkins’ thirteenth album, Aghori Mhori Mei, and lead-off single Sighommi is most evocative of the 90s-era Pumpkins’ way with a hook. Savage and wistful in equal measure. MICK MARS Right Side Of Wrong When the guitarist split from Mötley Crüe in 2022, the script had him melting into obscurity. Mars didn’t read it, and while his ex-bandmates unleashed the Dogs…

QUEEN Queen I (50th Anniversary) UNIVERSAL What we said: “It’s taken Queen years to do what pretty much every other major band has done and crack open the door to their archives. They dipped a toe in the water with 2017’s 40th-anniversary News Of The World reissue, but this six-CD, one-LP deluxe box is on another level entirely. Queen I – no, the numeral isn’t a typo, it’s a new addition to the original title – is a thing of beauty on a musical, physical and historical level. Genuinely special. More than just a celebration of an album, Queen I provides a vivid snapshot of a moment in time.” BLACK SABBATH Anno Domini 1989 – 1995 BMG What we said: “In contrast to later victory-lap reunions with Ozzy and Dio, the four…

Few acts in modern rock and metal do spectacle quite like Ghost. Tobias Forge’s snappily dressed band of (mostly nameless) ghouls have spent almost 15 years subverting expectations, building a legacy as one of the most unique and riotously entertaining forces in rock’n’roll – their merging of extreme metal aesthetics and camp, classic rock-indebted bangers unlike anything else out there. Over the course of five studio albums and increasingly ambitious live shows, the Swedes have undergone the unlikeliest of evolutions, from underground metal curios to arena-filling party-rock staples. Their most recent album, 2022’s Impera, crystallised their journey so far: a grandiose rock’n’roll opera; Jim Steinman by way of Def Leppard, like ABBA writing songs for Iron Maiden. It showed just how fun the ‘devil’s music’ can be, their cheekily subversive,…

From Zero WARNER Nu-metal giants return after tragedy, rebooted and reborn. New album From Zero might be a statement of intent from Linkin Park, but it’s also wishful thinking. After all, the band’s first 17 years and seven albums established them as one of rock and metal’s biggest success stories in the 21st century, breakout stars from a nu-metal scene that was already on the wane by the time they released their landmark debut in 2000. That they not only survived but also thrived after nu metal’s fall from grace speaks of the heavy investment fans around the world had in the group; even their evolution towards more pop-rock territories never diminished their cultural relevance. The death of frontman Chester Bennington in 2017 had a huge impact on both the…

Lonerider Down In The Dust ESCAPE MUSIC Back in the early 80s, future FM singer Steve Overland and former Free and Bad Company drummer Simon Kirke were in a band called Wildlife. Although signed to Led Zeppelin’s label Swan Song and produced by Bad Co guitarist Mick Ralphs, a self-titled album sank without trace, even after a nationwide tour with the Michael Schenker Group. Some things are just not meant to be. In 2019, 36 years later, with both men at a time in life when such things can happen for fun, the Overland-Kirke alliance was rekindled. Accompanied by guitarist and keyboard player Steve Morris and Thunder bassist Chris Childs, Lonerider settled back into wonderfully relaxed Bad Company-style vibes with the well-named Attitude. Having pushed things on – just a little…

“The further we got into rehearsals, I began to realise that I was more deeply influenced by Rory than by Clapton.” Not even 50 years old, Joe Bonamassa is arguably the most important white blues guitarist of the modern era. Although the New Yorker often cites English guitar heroes Jimmy Page, Jeff Beck, Eric Clapton, Paul Kossoff and Peter Green as key influences, their Irish counterparts Rory Gallagher and Gary Moore were equally vital to his development. Next summer, during a typically busy 12 months, Bonamassa pays tribute to Gallagher with three shows in Cork. Here he explains to Classic Rock why. What’s the story behind these tribute shows to Rory Gallagher? The idea came from the Gallagher family – Dónal [Rory’s younger brother and manager] and Daniel [his nephew…