Indholdsfortegnelse for August 2018 i Classic Rock

the DiRT HIGH HOPES Florence Black Blending heavy-rock swagger with melody, the Welsh trio’s brew is no-nonsence rock’n’roll. “I don’t think we have a plan yet, except to write a bloody great big masterpiece.” ROCK’N’ROLL has been a cultural pillar of the Welsh valleys for more than 50 years. Take that away and you might as well ban curry sauce on chips while you’re at it. Having emerged from the industrially scarred Aberfan landscape, riff-crunchers Florence Black are an unrestrained force of skull-pounding groove that has bypassed the traditional Welsh male voice choir hymns laid down by their forefathers. Drummer Perry Davie, vocalist/guitarist Tristan Thomas and bassist Jordan Evans have been friends since they could crawl, and formed the band in 2012. Having learned from their peers, including local drumming legend…

the DiRT RAW POWER Heavy Rotation If you’re looking for a top-end turntable with style that matches function, the VPI Prime Signature puts the competition in a spin. UNLESS YOU’VE BEEN living in some backwater speck on the world map where even the cassette is new-fangled, you’ve probably noticed that the vinyl LP is not only back from the dead, but also groovelicious again. Its popularity is accelerating fast; in fact pressing plants are apparently struggling to keep up with demand. Which means you want some. Which also means, of course, that you need a turntable to play them on. But how much to spend, given the budget-to-megabucks range competing for your money? The short answer is: as much as you can afford. If, however, cost is secondary to having, as…

WELCOME BACK Doro The queen of metal returns with a new album that sees her reunite with Warlock bandmate Tommy Bolan. THIS AUGUST, METAL’S reigning queen Doro Pesch releases a new doublelength album, Forever Warriors, Forever United, her first studio album since Raise Your Fist in 2012. A brief period of stylistic experimentation in the 90s notwithstanding, the former Warlock vocalist has been a reliable purveyor of melodic metal for almost 35 years, and the new record takes her customary combination of headbangers and ballads to an enjoyably indulgent extreme across 25 tracks. The old-school vibe is enhanced by the return of former Warlock guitarist Tommy Bolan. You reunited with Tommy Bolan last year for some live shows to celebrate the thirtieth anniversary of Warlock’s breakthrough album Triumph And Agony.…

BLOWING UP THE OUTSIDE WORD Nobody captured the sound and spirit of Seattle quite like Soundgarden. From superunknowns to grunge godfathers, from their acrimonious split to their imperious re-formation, to their sudden, tragic end, this is the inside story of a band apart. Words: Philip Wilding GLEN LA FERMAN Night’s falling over the Rimini coastline and it’s been a long few days for Soundgarden. The band have been snaking their way across Europe, playing their Louder Than Love shows in a mixture of clubs and small theatres, which will eventually culminate in a sold out show at London’s Astoria. Two nights ago, the brakes on the tour bus gave out as they were descending a steep mountain road. By the time they’d reached the bottom, the handbrake was a smoking…

BADMOTORFINGER (1991, A&M) CAMERA PRESS/ROBERT MATHEU Later, Superunknown would be the knockout punch, but it was Badmotorfinger that established Soundgarden as contenders. With the media spotlight roving Seattle for grunge’s crown princes, the band’s classic third album was in the right place, at the right time – whether they liked it or not. “We were making music for nothing more than the impact of having a bunch of beer-soaked people jump around,” Thayil told Noisey a quartercentury later, while promoting the superdeluxe reissue, Perhaps that’s an oversimplification. In 1991, Soundgarden had big ideas and vital new blood, Thayil telling The Music Paper that incoming bassist Ben Shepherd’s writing had made the new material “faster” and “weirder”. Cornell arrived with demos of Rusty Cage and Searching With My Good Eye Closed,…

SOUNDGARDEN KING ANIMAL (2012, Vertigo) JUSTIN BORUCKI/ATLASICONS.COM Soundgarden’s sixth album was a miracle late birth. Few had seen the reunion coming, due to Cornell often telling journalists that 1996’s Down On The Upside was the perfect full-stop (“and then we walked away”), and that “for us to do anything else would risk tarnishing the legacy”. Even then, new material seemed a dream too far. But King Animal crept up on the band by degrees. “If you get the four of us in a room together,” Thayil told Guitar World, “we’re not just going to whip out Outshined, we’re more inclined to plug in and start pulling out some new riffs.” King Animal could not be the work of any other band. The slippery meters. The scrawls of heavily processed guitar.…

NO EXCUSES Drugs and death couldn’t stop them, and for their new album Alice In Chains headed back to Seattle for the first time in more than two decades, where they faced their old ghosts head-on. Words: Nick Hasted Photos: Justin Borucki “There’s just as dark shit on this record, lyrically, as on any record that we ever did.”Jerry Cantrell The afternoon sun glints brightly off the candelabra of the grand London hotel where Alice In Chains are discussing Rainier Fog, the band’s third album since William DuVall replaced their late frontman Layne Staley in 2005. It’s as confidently optimistic-sounding as you could possibly conceive from the band who once seemed to soundtrack Seattle’s decline. Their mood as lunch is served discretely is as bullish and buoyant as lead-off single…

THE HARD STUFF ALBUMS The Magpie Salute Sublime studio debut from former Black Crowe Rich Robinson’s rock‘n’roll classicists. High Water I PRO VOGUE/MASCOT Considering their messy demise, it’s heartening to know that there’s plenty of life after The Black Crowes for some former members. Feuding brothers Chris and Rich Robinson vowed to carry on with their respective projects after breaking up the band on the eve of a proposed tour three years ago, the former immersing himself in the Chris Robinson Brotherhood, his younger sibling returning to his solo career. You get the impression, though, that guitarist Rich has been waiting for something more substantial to come along. Something like The Magpie Salute, in fact. High Water I arrives on the heels of last summer’s promising self-titled album recorded live…

ROUND-UP: MELODIC By Dave Ling Airrace Untold Stories FRONTIERS Founded in 1982, the original Airrace included ex-More guitarist Laurie Mansworth, former Virginia Wolf drummer Jason Bonham and gifted singer Keith Murrell. Much was expected of Shaft Of Light, their Beau Hill-produced debut crammed with AOR - meets-pomp-rock goodness, but, despite gigging with Queen, AC/DC, Leppard, Meat Loaf and more, it failed to take off. Mansworth has led a number of lineups since a reunion tour in 2009, and Airrace’s third record is their first without Murrell. Those were big shoes to fill, more so since Mansworth has broadened things out a little, incorporating references to his heroes Led Zeppelin and ELO, but 34-year-old newcomer Adam Payne’s performance on the record is one of confidence and maturity. Previewed on tour last year,…

THE HARD STUFF REISSUES Public Image Ltd Rotten’s classics freshened up in a massive multimedia box set. The Public Image Is Rotten (Songs From The Heart) UMC Here’s what you need to know. The public image may be rotten, but the product most certainly is not. In the main, the product is scouring, challenging, invigorating – a cool 40 years after the band formed. The product this time comes in the shape of a colossal five-CD/two-DVD, six-LP set. Let’s put this in perspective: PiL’s still untouchable second album, the deformed and brutal motorik beatinspired Metal Box (1979) merited a fouralbum reissue on its own a few years back, and not a second felt wasted. This set contains some wastage, but more than enough demented brilliance to merit serious consideration. The…

THE HARD STUFF BOOKS & DVDs There’s No Bones In Ice Cream: Sylvain Sylvain’s Story Of The New York Dolls More than just happy-daze tales, rock-musician autobiographies don’t come much better than this. Sylvain Sylvain & Dave Thompson OMNIBUS PRESS It seems incredible both that New York Dolls guitarist Sylvain Sylvain is still alive – there are probably more members of the 1930s-founded Count Basie Orchestra alive than there are New York Dolls – and that it has taken him so long to get round to writing his autobiography. Co-written with the excellent Dave Thompson, There’s No Bones In Ice Cream turns out to be one of the best books of its kind. Unlike some of his former bandmates, Sylvain has an excellent memory and the kind of articulacy that…

INTERVIEWS Fishbone Expect physical shows, sharp political comment and funky tunes. Keyboard player/trombonist/singer Christopher Dowd brings us up to date as the US ska-funk band’s most popular line-up prepares to visit the UK for the first time in more than 20 years. A co-founding member, you left Fishbone in 1994 at the height of the band’s fame. Why was that? Going straight for the jugular, right? I was so angry. I felt I was not being heard within the band and I blamed that on certain individuals. The whole thing had turned weird. Did the heavier style of Fishbone’s 1993 album Give A Monkey A Brain And He’ll Swear He’s The Center Of The Universe influence your decision? No. Kendall [Jones, guitarist] and I wrote that heavier shit, man. If…

PLASTIC FANTASTIC The vinyl LP – currency of the future? As regular Classic Rock readers will know from our regular Buried Treasure feature, there are many vinyl LPs out there that are very collectable and worth a lot of money – and in some cases we mean a lot. So much, in fact, that with the amount you sold a copy for you’d be able to buy the VPI Prime Signature turntable to play the rest of your collection on, fit the tone arm with a stylus/cartridge costing what only very serious audiophiles, Russian oligarchs, Saudi oil barons and the like wouldn’t flinch at (say, a Clearaudio Goldfinger Statement or a Koetsu Coralstone Platinum at around £15k) and still have enough money left over for a whole strip of VIP…

the DiRT HIGH HOPES Black Coffee Wired on caffeine and dressed to thrill, these Ohio rockers are your wake-up call. “The album is raw, unfiltered rock. No click track, no pitch correction, no copy-and-paste.” EHAB OMRAN IS a raging drug addict. Fortunately, that drug is caffeine – not only his band’s daily rocket fuel, but also the inspiration behind their name and best songs. “You get up in the morning and you’re all nice and soft,” says the frontman/bassist. “Then you take a sip of that black coffee and – pow! – away you go. We chose the name after we were all confined to the house one day on a very cold February. We drank coffee and jammed the entire night. That’s how Hurricane was written – it’s a very…

SOUNDGARDEN ULTRAMEGA OK (1988, SST) CHARLES PETERSON If grunge was the bastard child of Led Zeppelin and The Stooges, then Soundgarden were the midwives who delivered it, kicking and sneering, into the world. The four-piece were marrying the bombast of metal with the kick of punk while Kurt Cobain was still scrawling Iron Maiden logos in his schoolbooks. They had signaled their intent with an appearance on the influential Deep Six compilation and a handful of singles and EPs. But it would be their debut album, Ultramega OK, that crystallised their sound and drew up the road map that grunge would follow. What’s astonishing about Ultramega OK 30 years on is how fully formed the band that made it sound. All the pieces were already in place: Kim Thayil’s protean…

SOUNDGARDEN SUPERUNKNOWN (1994, A&M) ROSS HALFIN X2 A scrawl of burning trees turned on their heads. A mouth opened freakishly wide in a silent scream. If someone had told you Soundgarden’s fourth album was a slasher movie, then based on the sleeve, you’d have believed it. “The cover kind of suggests the dark side of the unknown,” said bassist Ben Shepherd. “Like, when you look at a forest, you don’t know what’s in there, but it’s somehow appealing to go in.” The band, too, were in uncharted waters as they recorded at Seattle’s Bad Animals studio over the summer of 1993. With early producer Terry Date gone, Michael Beinhorn brought bold ideas, flavouring the material with a techno influence, urging Cornell to study Frank Sinatra’s honeyed phrasing for Black Hole…

No Laughing Matter At the start of the 90s, with his stock falling and the war of words with his former band Pink Floyd still raging, Roger Waters was up against it. An epic concert of The Wall in Berlin was the first brick in rebuilding his career, followed by his third solo album, Amused To Death. Words: Dave Everley REX In the end it was Sinéad O’Connor who drove Roger Waters to distraction. It was the summer of 1990, and the former Pink Floyd vocalist and bassist was putting together a one-off live staging of his magnum opus The Wall to mark the fall of the real Berlin Wall. The album’s themes of alienation, isolation and the futility of war couldn’t have been more timely. To stage it in…

BALLROOM BLITZERS The main players in the birth of glam rock. ROXY MUSIC, DAVID BOWIE, SUZIE QUATRO, MICK RONSON: GETTY; DAVE HILL: REX David Bowie Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust alter ego, androgynous and alien, took his first name from a tailor’s shop because “this whole thing is going to be about clothes”. Marc Bolan The elfin prince of the glamrock glitterati and its major heart-throb, no one grabbed glam quite like the T.Rex man did. Steve Harley The Cockney Rebel frontman made two of the era’s late-entry classics with The Human Menagerie and The Psychomodo. Dave Hill Slade’s ‘superyob’ guitarist and his distinctive hairstyle took one look at glam and got down and got with it. Phil Manzanera The guitarist replaced David O’List (ex-The Nice) in Roxy Music in ’72. He…

THE HARD STUFF ALBUMS Alice In Chains The magnificent and the mundane on grunge lifers’ sixth album. Rainier Fog BMG The second half of Alice In Chains’ 30-plus-year career has been a lot less choppy than the first. Their dignified 2006 reunion, three years after the death of original singer Layne Staley, showed they could do it without the man who gave them their grim charisma or the drug-related arse-ache that came with it. But they’ve lost something along the way, too. It’s not that Staley’s replacement, William Duvall, hasn’t filled the void at the band’s heart. He has, admirably. Which is kind of the problem: Alice In Chains need a void at their heart. Their third post-Staley album, Rainier Fog lives up to the age-old adage: if it looks…

REVIEWS ROUND-UP: BLUES By Henry Yates GravelRoad Mississippi Time KNICK KNACK It probably didn’t feel that way at the time, but backing up the irascible deep south blues-bastard T-Model Ford at the start of the decade was the best thing that ever happened to GravelRoad. Ford might have gone to the great scrapyard in the sky five years ago, but his renegade spirit still looms over his former charges – and it’s palpable on this latest release Recorded in spit-and-shit fashion at Mississippi’s Dial Back Sound, this is the Seattle outfit’s strongest record yet. Opener My Baby’s Tryin’ sets the frazzled pace, Stefan Zillioux howling like the Wolf on Smokestack Lightnin’. Roll Me Like AStone is jittery and wired, all caffeine and stomach cramps, betraying the band’s all-night sessions. Get It…

The Pretty Things British R&B trailblazers’ dark pychedelic classic album gets 50th-anniversary repackaging. SF Sorrow MADFISH By 1966 The Pretty Things had been evolving at an amazing rate. They’d begun their career as the scariest garage-punk band in the world, long before the idea of garage-punk had been invented, and had released a stream of R&B singles and hard-nosed rockers which out-Stonesed the Stones. But, like a teenager whose spots and hormones are finally calming down, The Pretty Things were reaching a kind of maturity. They were still the most frightening band in the world, but they had, perhaps through drug consumption, somehow found themselves in the cream-twee world of English psychedelia. But while the darkness at the heart of Syd Barrett and the cynicism of John Lennon were both…

THE HARD STUFF BUYER’S GUIDE Richard Thompson With Fairport Convention, his then-wife Linda and solo, the songwriter/guitarist has a catalogue with a unique character. The unique appeal of Richard Thompson is twofold. Firstly, there’s his prowess as a guitarist, forgoing any flashy histrionics for a sophisticated style rooted in both American rock’n’roll and traditional British folk, but driven by a sense of invention that reaches into jazz, country and beyond. Then there’s his songwriting, more often than not dark and imagistic, tackling spiritual, romantic and political concerns with a biting lyricism and dry wit. Thompson’s songs have been covered by a range of artists including Robert Plant, Dinosaur Jr., Emmylou Harris and David Gilmour, yet he remains something of a cult figure. Despite a 50-year career that has yielded more…

Jon Hiseman June 21, 1944 – June 12, 2018 ONE OF THE most influential drummers in rock music has died at the age of 73. Jon Hiseman, best known for his work with Colosseum and Colosseum II, succumbed after a short battle with brain cancer. Hiseman first got noticed during the 1960s after taking over from Ginger Baker in the Graham Bond Organization. He went on to join John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers before he co-founded the pioneering jazz-rock band Colosseum in April 1968. After they disbanded in 1971, he formed the short-lived Tempest, before bringing in Gary Moore and Don Airey for the more jazz-fusion Colosseum II in 1975. Hiseman also worked closely with his saxophonist/flautist wife Barbara Thompson. In 1994 Colosseum re-formed, and recorded the albums Bread And Circuses and…

WELCOME BACK Glass Tiger The Canadian rockers return with a new album, and tour the UK for the first time in 27 years. THE KINKS: GETTY AT THE END of the 80s and into the early 90s, Canadian melodic rockers Glass Tiger were bothering the lower reaches of the UK Top 40, recording with the likes of the then-cool Bryan Adams and Rod Stewart, and touring with Journey and Tina Turner, among others. But then on the back of their finest album, 1991’s Simple Mission, and a UK tour with Roxette things went rather quiet. Now the band are back to play their first UK shows in 27 years, following on from a new album, 31, which lends a Celtic dash to songs from their catalogue. “It’s more a re-imagining,…

WELCOME BACK Ultraphonix All-star band do it the old way: jamming in a garage and throwing all their influences into the melting pot. FAT MIKE: GETTY WHAT DO YOU get when you put Living Colour frontman Corey Glover, Dokken guitarist George Lynch, War bassist Pancho Tomaselli and ace session drummer Chris Moore in a garage together? The answer is: hard rock band Ultraphonix – and a debut album of scorching funk, rock and metal missives titled Original Human Music. “I’d never met George,” Glover tells us. “There was a ‘getting to know one another’ part to this thing, and once we did we got along very well and it was off to the races.” How did you all get together? It was through a mutual friend of ours, Lisa Balfour,…

THE STORIES BEHIND THE SONGS Garbage I Think I’m Paranoid A song about “out-thinking and outmanoeuvring your opponent” – the opponent here being sections of the music industry – it gave the band a Top Ten hit and a push towards a Grammy. Words: Richard Purden Shirley Manson knew that the follow-up to Garbage’s self-titled debut album would involve a different approach. “I am going to be directing this in terms of what we touch on lyrically,” the flame-haired Scot would soon inform drummer Butch Vig and guitarists Steve Marker and Duke Erikson when it came to making what became Version 2.0. “It was an arrogant move on my part but it was also necessary,” she admits now. “I tried to please the band, but in the back of my…

6 THINGS YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT… Lucero They’re punks at heart, with rock’n’roll, blues, country soul and more running through their veins. Interview: Rob Hughes DAN BALL/PRESS LUCERO HAVE COME a long way in the 20 years they’ve been together. Since playing their first gig – to six people in a Memphis warehouse – the quintet have become one of America’s big live draws. Meanwhile, their ass-whupping rock’n’roll, laced with liberal helpings of blues, punk, country and southern soul, has fed into nine studio albums. For an idea of their style, picture a ruck between Bruce Springsteen, Jerry Lee Lewis and The Replacements – but you’re still only halfway there. Their latest album, Among The Ghosts, finds the band – Ben Nichols (vocals) Brian Venable (guitar), Roy Berry (drums),…

LOUDER THAN LOVE (1989, A&M) CHARLES PETERSON After finally giving in to the major-label advances of A&M, at a time when A&R men were crawling all over Seattle like the undead coming over the hill in a George Romero film, Soundgarden were beginning to truly broker their legend. Ultramega OK was brimming with life, but undone by its reedy production. On follow-up Louder Than Love, the dense and dry production by Terry Date (who had worked with Metal Church, Dream Theater and Sir-Mix-A Lot) brought Soundgarden’s gargantuan riffs and caterwauling to thrilling life. Lazy journalism (guilty) might have labelled the band and their whole town as ‘grunge’, but as drummer Matt Cameron recalls: “We’re more of an avant-garde metal band. I think that set us apart.” He wasn’t wrong. While…

SOUNDGARDEN DOWN ON THE UPSIDE (1996, A&M) CAMERA PRESS/ED SIRRS Listening to Down On The Upside back in May 1996, you knew the end was nigh. By then the grunge scene’s playing field was already depleted, with Pearl Jam gone weird, Nirvana in the ground and Alice In Chains headed for hiatus. Back then this fifth album felt like a coda for Soundgarden themselves, its scattershot material hinting at the growing gulf between the members, and the relative lack of heaviosity belying the tensions that would break the band’s back. Thayil would later admit: “It was pretty obvious there was some dissatisfaction”. You heard it here first. Two years after Superunknown’s accidental global smash, Soundgarden felt their perennial itch to “let listeners know they’re not getting the same album over…

WEST WORLD West Country four-piece Reef exploded in the 90s, imploded in the noughties, and have now fired back with a rule-breaking fifth album that’ll keep them well away from the nostalgia circuit. Words: Henry Yates JENNY HANDS/PRESS “If you’d told me that our new album was gonna chart, I wouldn’t have believed you.”Gary Stringer Britrock veterans never die, they just hit the nostalgia circuit. It’s May, and somewhere in the British provinces a fleet of tour buses is carrying four 90s survivors with plenty of lead left in their pencils. If the title of this package tour – Britpop Must Be Destroyed – sounds like a last gasp, that doesn’t square with the glorious, life-affirming racket made by a line-up comprised of The Wildhearts, Terrorvision, Dodgy and Reef. “We…

DOES THE WORLD NEED ANOTHER BLUES ROCK BAND? When it’s Grammy-nominated trio The Record Company, who are making some of the most commanding new noises in blues rock, with fiery live shows to match, then yes. Words: Polly Glass Photos: Justin Borucki Indianapolis is known for car racing, being the birthplace of writer Kurt Vonnegut and… well, not much else. Being something of a cultural vacuum sitting between the Midwest and the American South, one thing it’s not famous for is rock’n’roll. Yet today, a hot, humid afternoon in June, the city’s White River State Park will fill with more than 6,000 people who will come here to watch two bands. One is R&B chart toppers Nathaniel Rateliff And The Night Sweats, the other is The Record Company. Chris Vos,…

REVIEWS ROUND-UP: SLEAZE By Sleazegrinder Sex-Ray Vision Buckle Up HTTPS://SEX-RAYVISION.BANDCAMP.COM Listen, there may have been a time when nuance and experimentation counted for something in rock’n’roll, but look out the window, man. There’s no time for that bullshit at this point. These are desperate times, and we need solid, confident, louder-than-God rock bands who write songs about cocaine and sex and throttling engines. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is what Toronto’s Sex-Ray Vision are all about. I mean there’s some clever twists to the lyrics (‘Ivory woman, you’re illegal to me’), but believe me, it’s all reckless sex and violence, mindless or not. From the snaky opener Pinballer to the chugging, freewheel burnin’ headbanger Blood Sweat And Beers, to the climactic riff’n’roll of Apprentice – which works as both a handy…

THE HARD STUFF ALBUMS Halestorm Lzzy Hale channels her inner Joan Jett on US band’s ass-kicking fourth album. Vicious ATLANTIC Probably the closest thing we have to a 21st-century Joan Jett figure, Halestorm’s Lzzy Hale is a sexy-tough frontwoman fully in charge of her band, image and career. Because the hard rock landscape is depressingly low on such female icons right now, the perma-touring Pennsylvania four-piece arguably enjoy more prominence than their fairly conventional, increasingly chart-friendly music merits. Their previous album, Into The Wild Life, was widely criticised for sounding overly polished and poppy. This time around they cover a broad spectrum ranging from super-heavy grind to unashamedly tender balladry. Hardly groundbreaking stuff, but it’s punchy and catchy and generally excellent. Sounding at times like a fire-breathing she-dragon, Hale has…

THE HARD STUFF REISSUES U.K. Subs Charlie Harper’s street-punk heroes boxed, signed, complete. The Albums Vols 1 & 2 EDSEL In a few moments, John Lydon is to take the stage at the 100 Club, site of the mythical Sex Pistols-topped punk festival of ’76. But the focus of attention, posing for selfies at the back, is a squat, 74-year-old with green hair and an infectious grin. This is Charlie Harper, original Stones fan, ex-R&B belter, busker, King’s Road glam hairdresser and the U.K. Subs incarnate. Written off by the inkies in ’77 for arriving at the punk party a couple of months late, he’s now revered and embraced globally as the patron saint of streetpunk. Lydon’s respected, but Charlie’s loved. Since debuting on Farewell To The Roxy, the Subs…