Innholdsfortegnelse for November 2025 i Classic Rock

“Phoebe Jane was like a caged animal let loose. She’s too good to be doing BVs for ever.” When guitarist/singer Kris Barras set out to reconnect with his blues-rock roots, he didn’t just retrace old steps, he lit a fresh fuse. The result is Hollow Souls, with a new line-up fronted by rising star Phoebe Jane and featuring supercharged guest performances, and built to be a band as spontaneous as it is soulful. The idea for the Devon-based group took hold when Barras and his long-time producer (“and best friend”) Josiah J Manning gathered with musician friends for a jam at Momentum Studios in Plymouth. “I’ve been edging towards heavier territory with the Kris Barras Band,” says Barras, “but I missed the rawness of the early bluesier material. I didn’t…

Credited with coining the term ‘gothic metal’ with 1991’s Gothic, Paradise Lost have enjoyed three decades as a beloved – if somewhat cult – metal sensation. In that time they’ve explored everything from death-doom (a genre they also helped pioneer) to synth-driven goth with an enduring sense of adventure that has seen them consistently reinvent themselves without losing sight of what made them magic in the first place. New album Ascension continues a stellar run of form that began with 2015’s The Plague Within. But in a rare spot of optimism from chief miserabilist and vocalist Nick Holmes, he assures us the best is yet to come. It’s five years since the last Paradise Lost record. What was the hold-up? We got sidetracked. We decided to do Host [Nick and…

Eric Gales has been the name on guitar connoisseurs’ lips for three decades now. Famed as a 90s blues-rock prodigy, but then seemingly throwing it all away with a 2009 jail stretch for drugs and firearms possession, it’s been heartening to watch the Memphis guitarist rise again with redemptive Grammy-nominated records such as 2022’s Crown. Today, however, Gales wants to swing the spotlight onto his beloved elder brother. A fiery bluesman billed professionally as Little Jimmy King, who also used Eric’s unfathomable ‘upside-down’ guitar technique, Manuel Gales was a hero to those who knew of him, but he died in 2002 of a heart attack before he became a bona fide superstar. Eric aims to change that, he explains, with a star-studded new tribute album that powerfully reignites his late…

Winter, 1975, somewhere in the US heartland. Ann and Nancy Wilson are rumbling along in the back seat of a rental car. The view outside is flat and grey as they pass one truck-stop diner and petrol station after another. Behind the wheel is Shelly Siegel, their satin-jacketed promo guy from Mushroom Records. Earlier that year, the tiny Vancouver label released Heart’s debut album Dreamboat Annie. Two singles from it, Crazy On You and Magic Man, are getting decent airplay on Canadian radio. The band have been gigging non-stop in clubs, and the album has already sold a respectable 30,000 copies. But across the border, the US has been slow to succumb to Heart’s charms. “We had to physically go to the radio stations, Coal Miners Daughter-style,” singer Ann says.…

Ad Astra FIERCE PANDA Northern Irish punk-pop trio blast off with a wider perspective of sound and vision. That Ash open this space-themed ninth album with a lark-about synth-rock take on Also Sprach Zarathustra is more fitting than they probably know. Just when Northern Ireland’s premier punk-pop trio should be withering their way through their third decade together, by some sci-fi space-odyssey magic they sound reborn on each new album. Since 2018’s Islands at least, they’ve been on a tear of futuristic rock brilliance and Brit-Weezer ballast. You’d call it a revitalisation if they’d ever actually lost any of the youthful vigour of 1977. When an excitable young woman introduces the hook-laden Hallion by hyping Ash like they’re the next big thing, they don’t disappoint. Prone to perking up the…

Shiraz Lane In Vertigo FRONTIERS Recently on a whistles-top jaunt around the UK’s clubs, pubs and festivals, Shiraz Lane are among the younger and more determined bands doing their damndest to keep the flame of melodic hard rock burning. In keeping with current industry practises, the Finns teased their fans with three singles before unveiling this fourth full-length album, and if Dangerous, Bullshit and Plastic Heart pushed your buttons then oh boy are you in for a treat. In Vertigo continues the quartet’s impressive evolution from formulaic big-haired wannabes to something with more substance and staying power. The super-groovy Stone Cold Lover is an attention-grabbing way to begin the album, while The Ray Of Light, Live A Little More and especially Come Alive – which drew unlikely comparisons to Michael Jackson…

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Ringo: A Fab Life Tom Doyle NEW MODERN Starr turn. The recent news that there will be four film biopics of each Beatle has caused some wags to remark that the shortest of those films would be the one about Ringo Starr, as he had not had an interesting life compared to the other Fabs. In fact, as Tom Doyle’s superb new biography of the artist formerly known as Richard Starkey demonstrates amply, Ringo’s life is full of drama, emotion, comedy, tragedy and incident. From a childhood of illness to his early musical career as the most admired drummer on Merseyside, via the Beatlemania years, his work on the greatest albums of all time, and his subsequent 1970s lost weekend (which also became his 1980s lost weekend), all the way…

Most of us know New Jersey native Zakk Wylde as Ozzy Osbourne’s former axeman, then as the force of nature behind badass heavy metallers Black Label Society, but his impressive and deceptively broad catalogue is one that demands a proper examination. Born Jeffrey Phillip Wielandt in January 1967, Wylde’s music career skyrocketed following a successful audition to replace lead guitarist Jake E Lee in Ozzy’s band. The story goes that a friend of a friend of Wylde, who at the time was playing on the local circuit with a Bon Jovi-aping band called Zyris, managed to deliver his demo tape to Ozzy’s people. When Sharon Osbourne called to arrange a meeting, Wylde assumed it was one of his buddies taking the piss. While No Rest For The Wicked – Wylde’s…

Back in March, the New Yorkers released a tenth studio album, titled Vaxis – Act III: The Father Of Make Believe. Vocalist, guitarist, primary lyricist and driving force Claudio Sanchez previews five British appearances that follow a headline spot at the 2000trees Festival in July. How did you enjoy playing at 2000trees? It was nice to co-headline a festival. It isn’t something we get to do a lot. With the concept [CAC’s lyrics are predominantly based on Sanchez’s sci-fi saga The Amory Wars] we are a slightly bizarre band. But put us in front of a sea of people and we really surprise them – in a good way [laughs]. In Classic Rock, Vaxis – Act III was described as a “remarkable evolutionary step forward”. Were you pleased with the…

Supertramp’s keyboard player and vocalist Rick Davies has died at the age of 81 after battling multiple myeloma for more than a decade. As well as contributing soulful vocals, and his unmistakable touch on the Wurlitzer electric piano, Davies wrote several of the group’s best-loved songs, including Bloody Well Right and Goodbye Stranger. Swindon-born Davies co-founded Supertramp along with bassist, guitarist and vocalist Roger Hodgson in London in 1970. The band broke through with third album Crime Of The Century in ’74, and Bloody Well Right was their first single to make the US Top 40. Five years later the album Breakfast In America, which included hit singles The Logical Song, the title track and Goodbye Stranger, sold 30 million copies worldwide. However, Davies’s contributions were often overshadowed by those…

Radiohead have announced their first live dates for seven years. The band will play a run of 20 shows which will take place in five cities across Europe in November and December. The dates include four in the UK, all of them at London’s O2 Arena, on November 21, 22, 24 and 25, as well as shows in Madrid, Bologna, Copenhagen and Berlin. Radiohead’s last live performance was on August 1, 2018, in Philadelphia, concluding their A Moon Shaped Pool tour. “Last year we got together to rehearse, just for the hell of it,” explains drummer Philip Selway. “After a seven-year pause it felt really good to play the songs again and reconnect with a musical identity that has become lodged deep inside all five of us. It also made…

Years ago, Will Gould stood on the side of a motorway dressed as a giant pizza box and honking a clown horn. With no plans beyond putting on shows and surviving in whatever bands they were in at the time, the singer and his Southampton rocker circle took shifts in call centres, bars and food joints. They shared houses, slept on floors and mucked in with each other’s artistic efforts. By night they played gigs all over town. Bands including Phoenix Down, Little Girl Lost, Tight Like Strings and Our Time Down Here came and went. From these foundations Creeper would be born, and then reborn multiple times, moving through punk, emo and glam incarnations before arriving at their current cocktail of rock and metal theatre; vampire rock’n’roll with Rocky…

UFO stood poised on the precipice of the big time as the 1970s drew to a close, their tough-kernelled, irresistible melodies and a seemingly unquenchable appetite for hedonism placing them among the decade’s most fascinating and entertaining bands. Things had grown incrementally for the Londonbased quintet over the course of five studio albums that featured the German wunderkind Michael Schenker on guitar – an artistic and commercial evolution that looked set to establish UFO among the biggest rock groups in the world. But for all of his undisputed genius as a musician, Schenker was temperamental. He and his party-animal bandmates clashed violently on a number of levels, and Schenker – still only 23 years old – had quit the band and been talked back on board on a number of…

Gwyn Ashton Grease Bucket SELF-RELEASED However big he gets – and by this point the word has spread far beyond the South Australia circuit where he earned his spurs– Gwyn Ashton still comes up with the kind of hooks that would turn heads (or dissuade bottlers) in a roughneck watering hole. Opening with Something That The Cat Dragged In – a groove so filthy you’ll want to wipe down your speakers afterwards – Grease Bucket is full of them. Evil Child rattles along like a malevolent Smokestack Lightning. Howlin’ At The Moon is all whispered threats and hammer-fingered pluck. When The Well Runs Dry packs a guitar tone like a glitching nuclear reactor, Ashton spitting a diss-track diatribe that would make gangster rappers blanch (‘There ain’t no way this test of…

Power To The People UMG Live, studio and demo tracks and an almost album from Lennon’s NYC years, collected. Before there was the Lost Weekend, there was the Political Year. When John Lennon arrived in New York, home of radical politics, art statements and Yoko Ono, he found himself plunged into an environment very different from the relative calm of life at his Tittinghurst country house, where his home was open house to everyone from the radical Yippies to folkie Phil Ochs. Defying the authorities, Lennon allied himself with every cause going, from the jailing of White Panther John Sinclair to the Bloody Sunday shootings. And where once his songs had been vague musings about mind games and having no possessions, now he was singing slogan songs even more specific…

Fearless: The Anthology 1965-2025 BMG Honest Ron’s finest moments. Its release coincident to Wood’s half-century as a Rolling Stone, this 38-track two-CD/vinyl chronicles an auspicious career that was already significantly storied prior to its subject becoming the ever-present, invariably good-natured Sooty to Keith Richards’s reliably mischievous Sweep. From the garage swagger of The Birds’ You’re On My Mind (’64) and grinding hedonistic freakbeat of The Creation’s The Girls Are Naked (’68), through a game-changing, bass-toting stint with the Jeff Beck Group (its surface barely scraped by the solitary Rod-propelled, bottom-heavy Zepprecursor Plynth) to a run of tracks from what many consider his career’s zenith, as Rod Stewart’s mirror image/foil (again), both with and without the Faces. Flying captures the tight-but-loose, R&B/country blues-based barroom alchemy of the Faces, and while it’s…

“We always try to do something different every year. I suspect one or two less-played tunes will make the setlist this time.” Formed as Yesterday & Today back in 1974, California band Y&T long ago set the benchmark for mixing power with melody, which they topped with the vocal class of guitarist Dave Meniketti. Now their final surviving original member, Meniketti is looking forward to the band’s latest British tour. This will be Y&T’s second UK tour since you received the all-clear for testicular cancer. Everything’s been back to normal for a couple of years now. I got it treated really early and there’s a very good prognosis for that. Want to remind Classic Rock’s male readers, many of whom are of a certain age, to undergo regular checks? Absolutely.…

“I’m happy, I’m good, I’m doing the thing every night,” says Evan I Dando of The Lemonheads, on tour in advance of Love Chant, his band’s first album of new material in 19 years. A maelstrom of melody and marauding guitars, it sounds both adolescent and grown-up – a lot like Dando himself. Now happily remarried and residing in Brazil, the rumpled and jovial 58-year-old acknowledges that the ghosts - and addictions - of his wild youth hover nearby. Or as he sings on In The Margin: ‘If periphery is what you give, I’ll leave you in the margin where I live.’ Zooming from a hotel room in Dublin, he says: “I have some rules I gotta abide by, and everything’s gonna be cool.” The Lemonheads have 70 dates between…

Adecade after a supposedly ‘final’ show in Monterrey, Mexico, on the A US group’s Forty And Fuck It tour, Twisted Sister will tour the world again in 2026. Three members of their best-known line-up – frontman Dee Snider and guitarists Jay Jay French and Eddie ‘Fingers’ Ojeda – will be joined by bassist Russell Pzütto, who has played in Snider’s solo band, and Joey ‘Seven’ Franco, their drummer between 1986 and ’87. The absence of long-serving bassist Mark ‘The Animal’ Mendoza is, according to Snider, due to “irreconcilable differences”. Given that Snider has criticised other bands for reactivating again after farewell tours, the announcement attracted some cynicism. However, Snider insists the move is not about money. “It really isn’t. It’s because we want to do it one more time, and…

In the years before Counting Crows became one of the biggest success stories of the mid-90s, frontman and chief songwriter Adam Duritz was a man of many bands. The Baltimore-born and California-raised singer was into all sorts of music, so he played all sorts of music. There was The Mod-L Society, who specialised in jangly power-pop, a psychedelic rock crew called The Himalayans, and the atmospheric new wave of Sordid Humor, for whom he provided backing vocals. There were even a few different versions of Counting Crows before the one that he hit the jackpot via their 1993 debut album August And Everything After. An album that sounds like Automatic For The People-era R.E.M. in confession, its stirring mix of emotive ballads, contemplative alt. rock and hook after melodic hook…

Summer’s very much over, days are getting shorter, the kids are back at school, Christmas is still a couple of months off (although the words ‘End Of Year Issue’ did just crop up at Classic Rock HQ, which shocked us all a bit). Happily it’s also a bountiful season for new music releases. New faces, old veterans, returning favourites – they’re all at it, and all represented in this month’s Hot List. We’ve got a French brother duo giving Deep Purple a run for their money, four girls from Austin meshing riffy metal and doom haze, welcome returns from Foxy Shazan and Tyler Bryant, an incisive, rocked-up riposte to heartbreak from Amanda Shires, and much more besides. Something for all your autumnal music needs, we like to think. Plus lots…

The End BMG Third dynamic, highly polished album from the former wunderkind. It still comes as something of a surprise to realise that Wolfgang Van Halen is approaching his mid-thirties. It seems like only yesterday that the child prodigy was touring as the bassist with Van Halen at the tender age of 16, making a record, A Different Kind Of Truth, with the band as he approached his twenties, and going on to become a vital component of the turbocharged group Tremonti at 22. It’s a remarkable résumé. Admittedly the family genes and reputation helped, but he’s been standing on his own two feet since his 2021 album Mammoth WVH, which reportedly he started working on at the tail end of 2013’s A Different Kind Of Truth tour. He’s been…

Killer Hearts Unchained And Bloodstained SCREAMING CROW Killer Hearts are what was supposed to happen to rock’n’roll: all the old guys retire, and the new blood hits the scene, strutting their black leather stuff. Nobody expected the Stones to still be playing at 80 years old, for the various members of GN’R to actually survive, for Johnny Thunders to become the world’s forgotten boy, so the new wave of the new wave of skinny rockers in mascara piffed right out. Killer Hearts don’t care, though. They continue to operate like rock’n’roll is king, like it’s the only thing that could possibly matter, like they’d gladly lay down their souls for the stuff. Unchained is almost religious in its devotion to the good times, a searing, sneering heat-blast of sleazy, midnight-is-right punk’n’roll, a…

Slipknot SK25 (Deluxe) ROADRUNNER Debut from nu metal’s noisiest gets revamped and remastered. Even within nu metal’s menagerie of misfits and mavericks, Slipknot stood out. An 18-legged behemoth wearing masks and boiler suits, screaming ‘Fuck it all, fuck this world, fuck everything you stand for’, they seemed less like metal’s next big thing and more like harbingers of the apocalypse. Turns out they were both. In a scene that now includes chart-toppers like Sleep Token and Ghost, it’s impossible to overstate how much impact Slipknot – and indeed Slipknot – had on 21st-century metal. But the dated production has left it at times more millstone than milestone. This 25th-anniversary reissue goes some way to redressing that. With 78 tracks of cut songs, demos, remixes and live performances, as well as…

Director: Rob Reiner While this sequel was never going to match the original, there’s still plenty to amuse. Abeloved part of rock folklore for the last four decades, Rob Reiner’s acutely well-observed 1984 spoof documentary This Is Spinal ¨ Tap, about a mediocre British heavy metal band touring America, is rightly regarded as an immortal comedy classic. The chances of this belated sequel equalling the original were always slim, so it deserves to be judged on its own merits. Even so, The End Continues still feels disappointingly patchy, more low-energy encore than full-blooded comeback album. Returning as co-writers and co-stars, Christopher Guest, Michael McKean and Harry Shearer still share an easy comic chemistry as the core members of Spinal ¨ Tap, improvising most of their deadpan dialogue. But the quick-fire…

Charlie Harper EARTH ISLAND Life and times of the UK Subs’ elder statesman of punk. Being knocked out of his cot from destruction wrought by one of Hitler’s V-1 flying bombs in 1944 was an appropriate beginning to life for punk rock’s most enduring survivor. Like Joe Strummer, Charlie Harper quickly abandoned his R&B pub rock band as soon as he first saw some punk gigs. But in contrast to the Clash boomer, he was already an industry veteran by the time he formed UK Subs in 1976. It’s that pre-Subs era which makes for a fascinating insight into what motivated Harper’s career and life. This memoir begins with an unconventional upbringing and a fondly remembered childhood spent at Tylehurst, a progressive school in the idyllic East Sussex countryside. The…

“I don’t play one particular style of music. With between thirty and thirty-five albums by now, there’s a lot of ground to cover.” As his latest tour titled Me/We continues, the iconic singer, songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, producer and industry maverick previews three rare British shows, at the Sub Rooms in Stroud, The Alexandra in Birmingham and the Palladium in London. Two summers ago you played London’s Hammersmith Apollo on a bill with the newly solo Daryl Hall. Was that a good combination? Yeah. Even before getting to London I had done quite a few months of touring with Daryl in a stint that also took us to Asia. Afterwards I think Elvis Costello took over as Daryl’s opener. Were the two of you a match stylistically, though? Oh yeah, we’re both…

Extreme/Massive Wagons Birmingham O2 Academy The headlining funk rockers are as reliable as the rising sun. It doesn’t matter if it’s Birmingham on a Wednesday or a Friday night in Las Vegas, Extreme play every gig with the same sense of gleeful panache. That spirit is clearly shared by Massive Wagons, the Lancastrian rockers getting stuck into a short but oh-so-sweet set that packs in AC/DC stomp (Missing On TV), percussive bounding (Fuck The Haters) and even Leppard balladry (Night Skies) in front of a packed Academy. “It doesn’t matter if we’re playing a tiny club or a giant stadium, I always feel the same excitement,” guitarist Nuno Bettencourt says from the stage. It carries over into their set – early hits It (‘s A Monster) and Decadence Dance are…