Indholdsfortegnelse for April 2019 i Classic Rock

WELCOME That opening riff is just brilliant. Three big staccato A chord stabs and we’re off to the races… Yep, I’m talking about AC/DC’s inimitable Highway To Hell. Many years ago, we established that AC/DC was probably the single band that could unite the entire Classic Rock office, and despite many comings and goings since, it’s still the truth. And in 2019, Highway To Hell – the album that would sadly also prove to be Bon Scott’s final hurrah – celebrates its fortieth birthday. So this month we take a look at the making and the impact of the record that gave AC/DC their first million-seller, and us so many brilliant songs. Elsewhere, Status Quo’s Francis Rossi sits down for the Classic Rock Interview, while we also look back at…

IT’S A WRAP! More rock on celluloid that’s on the way. OZZY AND SHARON – THEIR STORY An as-yet untitled film has been commissioned about the romance between Ozzy Osbourne and his manager. Sharon has someone in mind to portray herself, but favours “a complete unknown” for her eventual husband. “It’s everything before we get married,” Sharon tells Variety. “It’s the madness of my childhood, growing up in the industry with a powerful father [Don Arden] who was somewhat violent, and it’s Ozzy at twenty.” DAVID BOWIE: STARDUST With filming due to commence in June, British actor Johnny Flynn has been cast as the iconic singer, who died three years ago. To be directed by Gabriel Range (Death Of A President, I Am Slave), Stardust co-stars Jena Malone and Marc…

Jonno Back In AC/DC? And has bassist Cliff Williams joined him? THE AC/DC RUMOUR mill has stepped up a gear with vocalist Brian Johnson appearing to confirm his return to the group, along with speculation that bass player Cliff Williams may also be back on board. Although Jonno was forced to sit out the conclusion of the group’s Rock Or Bust world tour due to hearing-related issues, he was with them during a recent recording session in Vancouver. The existence of a new AC/DC album is the worst kept secret in rock and when the members of metal band Terrorizer bumped into their hero at an airport and asked about the gossip Johnson replied that “yes” he is on the record, also that he is “sick of denying it”. Meanwhile,…

MY FIRST LOVE Les Paul The Legend And The Legacy By Richard Thompson The Fairport Convention guitarist on American electric guitar pioneer Les Paul (who you can read more about on page 50). “My dad had a set of Les Paul records, seventy-eights he’d bought in the late forties when they came out, and I always remember hearing this weird music. “A lot of the early records are multi-tracked, he’s using double-speed effects, he’s inventing tape echo, all these amazing special effects. It just sounded like music from Mars to me. “On the records you heard the beginnings of rock’n’roll; he’s playing a lot of licks that became Chuck Berry licks, that became standard stuff. You hear that filtering through into rock‘n’roll music – in a lot of ways he was…

the DIRT HIGH HOPES Dorothy How LA’s ‘next big thing’ pulled a breakthrough album from the world’s worst hangover. SKYLAR BARBERIO/PRESS “I had to make a lot of sacrifices to get here. It was very dark sometimes.” DOROTHY MARTIN HAD waited her whole life for this shot. But as the singer stood in the vocal booth, flanked by crack-squad musicians and producer Linda Perry, tracking second album 28 Days In The Valley (released last year), the cracks were showing. In her own words, Martin “looked like shit, felt like shit, sounded like shit”: quite a feat given her head-turning pipes and the calibre of her classy, melodic California-rock material. “I was hungover and Linda yelled at me,” she recalls of the fateful day in summer 2017 when she was frogmarched…

Rock’s ‘Man Zero’ Visionary, inventor, guitar wizard and inspiration to generations of musicians, Les Paul didn’t only invent the electric guitar, he also drew the blueprint for contemporary music as we know it. Words: Bill DeMain REX/SHUTTERSTOCK Everything in the pages of this magazine can be traced back to Les Paul. First, consider that he invented the solid-body electric guitar. The Gibson model that has carried his name since the 1950s is one of the most iconic instruments in rock and has been favoured by guitar greats including Jimmy Page, Pete Townshend, Mick Ronson, Slash, Paul Kossoff… the list goes on. A virtuoso player himself, Paul helped push the boundaries of the guitar with flash and finesse. In his hands it became a powerful new instrument, essentially taking it from…

MUSIC WITHOUT BORDERS Keeping all avenues open, German blues-rock duo The Picturebooks make music the same way they build bikes and the way they skate: “Until it’s the way we want it to be.” Words: Polly Glass Duos have a way of coming back again and again. The latest wave (in Classic Rock’s lifetime) kicked off in the early 00s when the White Stripes and The Black Keys dominated playlists and made blues rock sexy again. The Kills added indie-chic shades to the mix, while Drenge came bearing heavier matter, before Royal Blood crashed in and went massive in what seemed like a heartbeat. Now there’s The Picturebooks. You may have come across the German blues-rock duo before, photographed sitting astride motorcycles somewhere rugged, beards and biker bling in check.…

Stars Pay Tribute To Chris Cornell Photographer Ross Halfin with just a few of his photos and observations from an evening celebrating his friend Chris… I Am The Highway: A Tribute To Chris Cornell. Did I like it? Yes and no. It was bittersweet to photograph and hear bands playing Chris’s music. Backstage was like rush hour at Victoria Station, you couldn’t move. Which was amusing as most of the acts normally wouldn’t let anyone near them. I met Lily Cornell, Chris’s eldest daughter. I took Dave Grohl to meet her and photographed them together [1]. Tom Morello and Toni Cornell hanging out together in Audioslave’s dressing room was another nice moment, as was Toni Cornell with Ziggy Marley. Dave Grohl doing Everlong with tears in his eyes [6] summed…

LIVE! INTERVIEWS Bob Mould Expect Hüsker Dü, Sugar and solo-career songs, including “plenty of older, deeper cuts”. “Rock music is guitar, bass and drums, and I don’t see too many people doing that [right now].” With Pete Townshend and Dave Grohl among his biggest fans, Bob Mould spent the 1980s co-fronting the highly influential Hüsker Dü, before forming his own group, Sugar. Now into a second spell as a solo artist, the 58-year-old performs four UK shows this month. Why did you relocate from San Francisco to Berlin in 2017? It’s a wonderful city that I had visited many times as a touring musician. I have a lot of friends here and I love its culture. Did the new environment inspire the apparent optimism of your new album, Sunshine Rock?…

LIVE! Cats In Space Our melodious feline friends are back with a new album and shows. After a comparatively quiet 2018 the British retro-rockers are back with a third album, Daytrip To Narnia, and a string of live dates. Guitarist Greg Hart sets the scene. With opening slots for Thunder, Deep Purple and Status Quo, 2017 was quite a year for the Cats. Did any of those bands offer feedback or advice? All three were very complimentary and gave us fantastic welcomes. [Purple’s] Roger Glover and Steve Morse shook our hands and told us how amazing we were, and Francis Rossi [from Quo] stormed off playfully because we had longer hair than him. He was great. [Thunder singer] Danny Bowes used to manage the band. Were you disappointed when the…

LIVE! Rival Sons / The Sheepdogs London The Roundhouse After The Sheepdogs’ impressive trip back to the 70s, the headliners deliver quality, class and great promise. ‘Six albums in, Rival Sons are finally getting started.’ The Sheepdogs look good. Real good. Dressed as if by the prop department from the dismal Martin Scorcese series Vinyl, they channel the sound and spirit of the 1970s so accurately it’s almost a surprise that the Roundhouse doesn’t smell of fondue and Hai Karate. Guitarists Ewan Currie and Jimmy Bowskill are resplendent in dazzling rhinestone suits, bassist Ryan Gullen is a medley in tasselled suede and leather, and keyboard player Shamus Currie sports a tie with a pattern that would look at home adorning the walls of a Rusholme balti house circa 1973, and…

Inglorious London Shepherd’s Bush Empire The ego has landed. First the good news. In spite of Nathan James’s recent foot-in-mouth YouTube moment, a potentially career-threatening gaffe that had even A-listers Def Leppard lampooning it after it went viral, Inglorious have pulled a large and appreciative audience at their biggest London headline show yet. For the most part the band tick all the right boxes. A goosebump-raising rendition of Glory Days reminds us that James is an outstanding vocal talent in the Coverdale style, and his largely reconstituted Inglorious line-up boasts a new star in Danny Dela Cruz, the 19-year-old guitarist who lights up an inspired cover of Alanis Morissette’s Uninvited. There are couple of fillers during the hour-and-a-half set, but it’s hard to imagine any lover of 70s-inspired hard rock…

The Avengers / Alice Bag Long Beach Alex’s Bar California punk legends’ genius double play. Outside of California, the significance of this punk rock pairing might go somewhat unnoticed. But there’s a reason why a couple of old-school scenesters filled a club for a Sunday matinee show. After all, San Fran’s Avengers formed in 1977, a year before the Dead Kennedys came together in the same city. Led by the super-charismatic Penelope Houston, The Avengers opened for the Sex Pistols in ’77 and then had Steve Jones produce their debut EP, We Are The One. Two short but intense years later, they split. Almost simultaneously, The Bags formed in Los Angeles in ’77 and released their only record, the Survive single, a year later before splitting in 1980. So both…

This month’s contributors ROSS HAL FIN This month, legend of the lens, Ross ‘The Master’ Halfin documented the I Am The Highway concert. It was a star-studded evening with the greats of rock (and a few Hollywood pals) paying tribute to Ross’s long-time friend Chris Cornell. Ross takes us through some of his favourite shots of the evening on p76, then we review the show itself on p108. PAUL ELLIOTT Blimey, Gooner’s been busy this issue – he has written our AC/DC cover story (p28), plus The Classic Rock Interview with Status Quo’s Francis Rossi (p42) and a feature on the original black metal band, Venom (p72). Paul is pictured here with his friend Julian Cundiff, a legend in the sport of angling. Together, they like to ‘carp on’ about…

the DIRT RIP Thank you and good night. Paul Whaley January 14, 1946 - January 28, 2019 The Blue Cheer drummer has died at the age of 72. Eric Clapton once referred to the San Franciscan trio as the “the originators of heavy metal.” Whaley, who performed in numerous line-ups of the group and was a part of their 1968 debut Vincebus Eruptum, succumbed to heart failure. Reggie Young December 12, 1936 – January 17, 2019 The session guitarist with a seven-decade career has died of heart failure aged 82. Raised in Missouri, he played on records by artists as varied as Bob Dylan, B.B. King, Elvis Presley, Paul Simon, Joe Cocker, Willie Nelson and more. Young’s first ever solo album, Forever Young, was released in 2017. Lorna Doom January…

Ozzy Cancels Tour “Everything I touch turns to shit,” says singer. AS THIS ISSUE went to press, Ozzy Osbourne was out of intensive care following the dose of flu and bronchitis that caused him to cancel the European leg of his No More Tours trek which was due to run from January 30 to February 11. “Ozzy’s doing great [and] he’s breathing on his own,” his manager and wife Sharon told viewers during an appearance on the US chat show The Talk. Fearing that the condition might develop into pneumonia, doctors had admitted Ozzy, 70, to Keck Hospital in Los Angeles. At first it was thought that Osbourne would miss the first four shows of his itinerary of 79 dates. However, after he was diagnosed with a severe upper-respiratory infection…

the DIRT HIGH HOPES Crypt Trip The Texan trio found their heavy, psychedelic mojo after moving out to live on a cow farm… “We all look up to The James Gang, but we also like jazz and The Byrds and The Flying Burrito Brothers.” THE CULTURAL HERITAGE of Texas is impossible to ignore, especially if you happen to call it home. “There’s a cowboy fantasy that everybody has here,” muses Sam Bryant, bassist with Austin trio, Crypt Trip. “It’s such an easy thing to latch onto, because there’s such a broad group of people who claim that aesthetic. We see ourselves in that too, because it’s what we’ve been surrounded by. A lot of people are really proud of being from Texas, not least for its musical history.” Formed in Dallas…

NEWS Lindsey Buckingham’s wife Kristen has revealed that her husband’s vocal cords were affected during the former Fleetwood Mac guitarist’s recent open heart surgery. “While it is unclear whether this damage is permanent, we are hopeful it is not,” she says. Twisted Sister are embroiled in a legal battle with Australian politician Clive Palmer, who adapted the words to their hit We’re Not Gonna Take It without permission and against their wishes. The affair caused frontman Dee Snider to dismiss Palmer as “a lowlife, piece of kangaroo dung, criminal without an ounce of dignity”. Black Stone Cherry have added some intimate indoor shows to complement their festival appearances at Caerphilly Castle and Ramblin’ Man Fair. They can be seen at: Aberdeen Music Hall July 14, Glasgow Barrowland 16, Dublin Academy…

NEWS Sammy Hagar & The Circle, which also includes bassist Michael Anthony, drummer Jason Bonham and guitarist Vic Johnson, release Space Between, their debut album of original material, on May 10. Pearl Jam are Record Store Day Ambassadors for this year’s celebration of all things vinyl on April 13. “Support every independent record store that you can,” says guitarist Mike McCready. “They’re really a good part of society.” Stay Around, an album of previously unheard material by JJ Cale, the influential American songwriter, guitarist and singer who died in 2013, is released on April 26 via Because Music. Canadian company Sunrise Records stepped in to save HMV Music after the UK chain called in the administrators for the second time in six years. The rescue will bring 100 stores out…

REBEL WITH A CAUSE And that cause is music. Gary Clark Jr. may have learned his chops with veterans of the blues scene in Austin, Texas. But whatever you do, please don’t call him The Saviour Of The Blues. Words: Dave Everley “We are citizens. We should all have the right to make a living and not be bothered.” Gary Clark Jr. is a calm man in a furious world. Kicking back on a leather sofa in a dressing room in the Revention Music Centre in downtown Houston, Texas, he’s the picture of zen: six-feet-something of effortless cool in skinny jeans, slouchy beanie hat and defiantly non-hipster beard. A beaker holding a couple of fingers of Jameson’s whiskey sits on the table next to him–blues medicine to help get him…

BACK TO BASICS They’ve built a enormous global following (and divided opinion) with dazzling progressive metal and dizzying live displays. But at heart, Dream Theater are still a rock’n’roll band… Words: Polly Glass ALAMY Dream Theater and good old fashioned rock’n’roll: not the most obvious bedfellows, you may think. This is understandable. Over 34 years and various line-up changes (ex-drummer Mike Portnoy being the most routinely shouted about) the East Coast cohort of Berklee College Of Music alumni and friends have built a reputation for progressive metal. Dizzying, fiddly, unashamedly ambitious progressive metal, to be precise, crammed with majestic guitar lines, weird time signatures and terrifyingly huge drum kits (a Google Images search for ‘Dream Theater drums’ reveals something that would fill a decent-sized bungalow). It’s imaginative yet colossal stuff,…

BLUES FROM THE BLACK COUNTRY She’s gone from teen prodigy to industry veteran. Now, blues-rock leading light Joanne Shaw Taylor is gearing up for the release of her major-label debut. Words: Polly Glass OLLY CURTIS For years Joanne Shaw Taylor was the ‘new face of the blues’. A girl from the Black Country who wanted to play guitar, she moved from bluesy jams with her dad and brother to being scooped up by Eurythmics star Dave Stewart when she was 16, and left school to pursue music full-time. And she hasn’t looked back. As a teenager she was already an impressive guitarist, and with a singing voice informed by her mother’s northern soul and Motown records, but she didn’t write her own songs. Prospective collaborators tried to turn her into…

BEST OF THE REST Other new releases out this month. Overkill The Wings Of War NUCLEAR BLAST With new drummer Jason Bittner in place, Overkill prove that their old-school thrash is still peerless. A cracker, the band blazing with intensity and humour. 8/10 Altitudes And Attitude Get It Out MEGAFORCE Frank Bello (Anthrax) and David Ellefson (Megadeth) team up for an album veering towards the hard rock mainstream, but which is too inconsistent. There’s potential, though. 6/10 The Flesh Eaters I Used To Be Pretty REDEYE WORLDWIDE The enigmatic Hollywood punks’ first album in 35 years (including beefed-up old tracks) is an atmospheric yet strutting cocktail of dark romance, louche sax lines and bluesy grit. 7/10 Mark Morton Anesthetic SPINEFARM Lamb Of God guitarist Morton teams up with a selection…

Essential Playlist Demolition Boys Demolition Race With The Devil Demolition Emergency Demolition Please Don’t Touch St. Valentine’s Day Massacre E.P. Hit And Run Hit And Run C’mon Let’s Go Hit And Run Yeah Right Hit And Run Screaming Blue Murder Screaming Blue Murder Take It From Me Screaming Blue Murder Don’t Call It Love Screaming Blue Murder Play Dirty Play Dirty Going Under Play Dirty All Day, All Night Nightmare At Maple Cross Back For More Nightmare At Maple Cross Knife 21st Anniversary: Not That Innocent A Love Too Far 21st Anniversary: Not That Innocent We All Love To (Rock ‘N’ Roll) Believe…

LIVE! Mastodon London Brixton 02 Academy Experimental metallers prompt flying beer and syncopated air-guitar. Exit sandman, enter light… Mastodon are tidying up the loose ends of their elongated Emperor Of Sand world tour. Playing in front of a backdrop of tall video screens, they’re an industrious set of noodling, headbanging silhouettes caught against a lattice of hard white lights and splashes of racing, psychedelic animation that makes you think someone’s spiked your drink. Which is probably the point. People talk about long, strange trips. Well Mastodon are still on theirs. But while their latter albums (the aforementioned Emperor and 2014’s Once More ‘Round The Sun) showcased a band with a more commercial ear (in a way not dissimilar to how Rush made the leap from the conceptual Hemispheres album to…

Grave Digger/Burning Witches London Tufnell Park The Dome Euro power metal – with power! Switzerland’s all-girl Burning Witch are definitely connected to 80s power metal. The all-girl band are lively, punchy and anthemic. Grave Digger have never achieved the stature of fellow Germans Accept, Helloween and Warlock, but nobody in this decent-sized audience cares about that. They sing along to everything, and there’s a great rapport between band and fans. The four-piece do drop something of a clanger during The Bruce (The Lion King) when a figure dressed as The Reaper comes on stage waving not a scythe but the flag of Scotland – not a sensible thing to do in front of an English audience. The Reaper reappears during main set closer Rebellion (The Clans Are Marching), this time…

The Residents London Union Chapel Who are they? What do they still want? Forty-five years after their debut album Meet The Residents, precious few have knowingly met The Residents. The quartet remain anonymous, although (possible) founder and (possible) leader Hardy Fox died last year. In 2019 their search for constant re-invention means a keyboard player, electro drummer and guitarist dressed in matching hats, sky-blue dogtooth suits and beak masks; a singer with a cow’s nose, horns and hoof slippers, and a stripped down approach. There are no eyeball helmets, there’s an unusual lack of mischief beyond a de-schmaltzed take on Elvis Presley’s (Let Me Be Your) Teddy Bear and there’s nothing from The Commercial Album. Yet their world is so self-contained and so full of twists and turns that it’s…

Spielbergs London Shacklewell Arms Nordic grungers bring meat and melody. Judging by their tangled locks and smattering of devil beards, Spielbergs are probably considered the grunge pussies of the Oslo metal scene. In a Britain flooded with pop bands in alt.rock clothing, on the other hand, they’re tantamount to saviours. In a tiny, rammed Shacklewell Arms, the Nordic Sugar - the brilliantly named Mads Baklien, Christian Løvhaugand and Stian Brennskag – smash through a set of gold-encrusted grit built for far bigger rooms. Few new bands boast songs with the meat and melody of Distant Star, Five On It and hi-octane pop-metal jackhammer Bad Friend; Spielbergs have a whole albumful (This Is Not The End). While many US noise-mongers rely on burying their chronic hook deficiency beneath the scree, Spielbergs…

NEWS Despite the fact that Deep Purple undertook a farewell tour for their 2017 album InFinite, guitarist Steve Morse reveals that work on a new recording is under way. “And I know there’s more Purple gigs that they haven’t announced yet – so don’t tell them that I told you so!” quips the guitarist, who is also recording with prog supergroup Flying Colors. Deadland Ritual, the band featuring Black Sabbath bassist Geezer Butler, Billy Idol guitarist Steve Stevens, ex-Guns N’ Roses drummer Matt Sorum and Scars On Broadway frontman Franky Perez, have been added to this year’s Download bill. Sontaag (pictured), a “cross-generic space rock grand opera” project featuring Classic Rock’s own Ian Fortnam, release a cover of Hawkwind’s Silver Machine through Cleopatra Records this month. It features cameos from…

the DIRT Ted McKenna Martin Kielty looks back at the life and times of the drummer best remembered for his time with the Sensational Alex Harvey Band. March 10, 1950 – January 19, 2019 GETTY ‘He was a fascinating balance of loud and quiet, and brilliant at being both.’ Ted McKenna, drummer with the Sensational Alex Harvey Band, Rory Gallagher, Michael Schenker and others has died at the age of 68 after a routine hernia operation went wrong. Fortunately the last eight years or so of his life were some of his happiest. Born in 1950, he explored various musical instruments at school in Coatbridge, near Glasgow, before following the call of an old snare drum given to him by a family member and settling on percussion. After learning his…

NEWS Neal Schon has reached out to Steve Perry ahead of the former’s Journey Through Time shows, which focus on the band’s earliest catalogue, to propose the idea of a guest appearance. Joined onstage by keyboardist Gregg Rolie, drummer Deen Castronovo, multi-instrumentalist Marti Frederiksen, bassist Marco Mendoza and Chris Collins on guitar/keys, Schon tweeted: “Here’s an open invitation to Steve Perry to come out [and play]. I would love to see you, Steve.” Having ended a three-year hiatus Heart say that this summer’s Love Alive shows will “look, feel and sound bigger than other Heart tours so far”. With a selection of support acts including Joan Jett And The Blackhearts, Sheryl Crow, Elle King and Lucie Silvas, the Wilson sisters tour North America from July to September. PledgeMusic is no…

BURIED TREASURE Riches from the rock underground ‘One of the most genuinely progressive krautrock-era bands.’ OUT OF FOCUS Wake Up!, Kuckuck, Germany, 1971. £275+ Out Of Focus (named after a Blue Cheer track) were a hard-working band, building up a strong local following before signing to cult label Kuckuck (‘cuckoo’ in English). Formed in Munich in 1968, they were amongst the most genuinely progressive bands to evolve from the krautrock era, combining rock, folk, jazz and blues with a strong psychedelic presence. Their lyrical content was often satirical and anarchic, yet always entertaining. Releasing three studio albums during the 70s, their style became steadily more improvisational. For underground hard rock fans, debut, Wake Up! is OOF’s most appealing release. Recorded over two long weekends and housed in a suitably surreal…

the DIRT RAW POWER Star Of 45s Bring a taste of 50s rock’n’roll to your home with an eye-popping music player that just oozes fun-filled nostalgia. GETTY ALONG WITH THE pinball machine and the black leather biker jacket, the jukebox is a timeless icon from the early days of rock’n’roll that has never lost its attraction, fascination and strange magic. Back in the 50s, standing against the wall in the corner of a coffee bar, glowing brightly or dimly lit, chrome shining, engine humming as the 45s were selected, lowered on to the turntable and spun, it was a portal to music you rarely or never heard on the radio; the only way you could listen, thrilled, to early rock’n’rollers such as Del Shannon, Ricky Nelson, Little Richard, Chuck Berry, Ritchie…

Q&A Skin The Skunk Anansie singer on the band’s 25 years, playing for Nelson Mandela, and a “super-creepy” Michael Jackson. Interview: Ian Fortnam Instantly recognisable Skunk Anansie frontwoman Skin–who, perhaps unbelievably, was once a painfully shy church warden’s daughter called Deborah Dyer–is looking back on a quarter-century at the epicentre of one of rock’s most tumultuous live bands. “After twenty-five years I’m just happy to have music as my main source of income,” she says with a smile, while cradling an insistently yowling Siamese cat. “That’s what I call success.” She’s modelled, DJ-ed and judged Italian X-Factor, but in June she gets back on the road to do what she does best: accentuate the searing soul in Skunk Anansie’s rock’n’roll. Skunk Anansie are celebrating their quarter-century with the band’s first…

"SEX, DRUGS, ROCK'N'ROLL, SATANISM AND ALIENS…" NWOBHM cohorts Iron Maiden and Def Leppard were bigger, but Venom were the heaviest, scariest and perhaps the most influential. Conrad ‘Cronos’ Lant tells their story (warning: contains Satanism and other adult content). Words: Paul Elliott ESTER SEGARRA/PRESS “I grabbed the bull by the horns. Live the dream. Who wants a life of regrets? I ain’t gonna regret shit.” Conrad ‘Cronos’ Lant He was just a spotty schoolboy, his balls barely dropped, when he decided he could do better than Black Sabbath. In the early 70s, the young Conrad Lant loved heavy rock – Sabbath and Status Quo most of all. But as much as he dug the sinister sound in the song Black Sabbath, and the visions of Satan and hellfire in its lyrics,…

ROUND-UP: BLUES By Henry Yates AUSTIN HARGAVE/PRESS Walter Trout Survivor Blues PROVOGUE/MASCOT By rights, Survivor Blues should be a posthumous release; between them, Trout and his band can boast rogue livers, triple bypasses and a thousand booze-sodden brushes with oblivion. And that talent for escapology not only gives Survivor Blues its title, it also lifts a potentially workaday covers album above its station, flooding every track with hard-won soul. Trout charts a canny tracklisting, illuminating his own history with cult gems. There’s a bruised take on his teenage favourite, Jimmy Dawkins’s Me, My Guitar And The Blues; a spacey, sotto voce salute to his Bluesbreakers tenure with the Mayall-penned Nature’s Disappearing. Critically, Trout knows when to doff his cap and when to deface his heroes – so Luther Johnson’s Woman Don’t…

LIVE! I Am The Highway: A Tribute To Chris Cornell Los Angeles The Forum Stars celebrate the life of the late Temple Of The Dog/Soundgarden/Audioslave man. ‘The overall vibe is one of humility, of paying respects.’ There won’t be many opportunities to see the Melvins and Miley Cyrus on the same bill, as they are tonight. Indeed there hasn’t been any demand for such a collision of worlds, ever. But that’s how far the influence of Chris Cornell spread. In this context it doesn’t even seem weird. Perhaps the most appropriate reference point would be the Freddie Mercury Tribute Concert in 1992. Back then, many Queen fans nodded in approval as the likes of David Bowie, Robert Plant and Roger Daltrey fronted their beloved band, but were a little more…

Saint Agnes London Camden The Monarch The new generation is here to keep rock’s flame burning. Having chipped away relentlessly at the rock’n’roll coal face, Saint Agnes have at last begun to carve their name into the hearts of an increasing number of converts welcomed into their coven, and their gruelling touring schedule has tightened the band into formidable practitioners of blues-inflected heavy rock. The net result is an electrifying show that finds Saint Agnes at a tipping point as they prove themselves ready for the next level. Built on the foundations of Andy Head’s powerhouse drumming and the frequently fuzzed-up rumblings of bassist Ben Chernett, the heart of Saint Agnes beats to the pulse of the smouldering chemistry between singer/guitarist/keyboard player Kitty Arabella Austen and guitarist/singer Jon Tufnell. The…

REVIEWS Uncle Acid & The Deadbeats London Brixton The Electric The garage-inspired Sabbath disciples triumph. GETTY IMAGES ‘Uncle Acid are downer-infused rock at its very best.’ As they take the stage at this, their biggest headlining date in the capital yet, it’s difficult to shake the feeling that the black-clad, long-haired and thickly bearded Uncle Acid & The Deadbeats could easily be a University Challenge team as dreamt up by the twisted minds of Amicus Productions, those fine purveyors of 70s horror movies. Harking back to the days of biker parties, Watney’s Party Seven cans and cack-handed attempts at black magic, the music they deliver tonight is a forceful manifestation of downer-infused rock at its very best. Crucially, Uncle Acid & The Deadbeats roll as much as they rock, thus…

The Soundtrack Of My Life Shinedown singer Brent Smith on the records, artists and gigs that are of lasting significance to him. Interview: Polly Glass There’s a list of AMRAP (as many reps as possible) exercises taped to Shinedown’s room backstage at London’s Brixton Academy, listing things like crunches, push-ups and something scary sounding called wall slams. It all makes sense when Brent Smith arrives, making sharp, swift strides. What he lacks in height he makes up for in brawn and precision movement. In conversation he’s similarly disciplined; slick and earnest but likeable with it, his voice carrying the broad inflection of his native Knoxville, Tennessee. It’s like talking to a friendly punk trapped in a marine’s body. Accordingly, the defining records and musicians in his life are an interesting…