Indholdsfortegnelse for June 2022 i Classic Rock

MOTOR SISTER: TRAVIS SHINN/PRESS CONCEIVED INITIALLY BY Anthrax guitarist Scott Ian and his wife Pearl Aday as a love letter to guitarist Jim Wilson’s underrated bluesy hard rock band Mother Superior, Motor Sister debuted in 2015 with the album Ride, a collection of Mother Superior covers. With album two, Get Off, the LA quintet – completed by Armored Saint bassist Joey Vera and The Cult drummer John Tempesta – are emerging as an excellent band in their own right, with 12 songs that draw from their shared love of Thin Lizzy, AC/DC, Kiss and the best classic rock. It’s been seven years between the first Motor Sister album and the new one. Was there always a plan to record a second album? Scott Ian: Yes, we knew that we’d eventually…

GEDDY LEE: KEVIN NIXON “ARE YOU READY to rock and rooooollllll?!” Edgar Winter shouts down the phone. The multi-instrumentalist and multi-genre legend is in good spirits and ready to talk about Brother Johnny, his new tribute album to his late brother, blues great Johnny Winter. Featuring a starstudded cast including Joe Walsh, Billy Gibbons, Ringo Starr and Derek Trucks, it’s Edgar’s way of celebrating Johnny’s legacy. And processing some grief too. “Someone once asked me to define the blues in ten words or less,” he says, “and I said: ‘It’s music that transforms suffering into joy’. That’s what this record helped me do.” You’ve You’ve said Johnny is your all-time musical hero. Growing up, Johnny was Daddy Cool with the pompadour and shades, the guitar and the girls. And…

LITTLE OL’ WINE DRINKER ME The 2011 ‘Immersion’ box set of Wish You Were Here includes a two-and-a-quarterminute recording of the tuned wine glasses used on Shine On You Crazy Diamond. In 2006, David Gilmour revisited the idea on his On An Island solo tour. In July that year, keyboard player Richard Wright began ‘playing’ a wine glass during his birthday meal in a hotel restaurant in Munich. This was Gilmour’s cue to use wine glasses during the following night’s performance of Shine On at the Königsplatz in the city. Sax player Dick Parry, drummer Steve DiStanislao, bassist Guy Pratt and guitarist Phil Manzanera were tasked with the job. In Gilmour’s subsequent Remember That Night DVD, he can be seen explaining the sequence of notes – G-minor, D-minor, C-minor…

Photos: Jon Davison was 10 years old when a family from Fort Worth, Texas moved into his neighbourhood in Laguna Beach, Orange County in 1981. The new arrivals had a kid a year younger than him, with a stack of blond hair and a big toothy smile. The kid’s name was Taylor. Taylor Hawkins. The two youngsters quickly became glued at the hip. Star Wars was their first obsession, but that was soon forgotten about when Taylor excitedly called his buddy one day to tell him about a new record he’d got called The Game, by a band named Queen. “I can remember it so distinctly,” Davison says now. “He was very much taken by the drummer, Roger Taylor. Taylor would go on about how he admired him because he…

A small, pretty market town in Dorset, Bridport makes an unlikely muso’s haven. People walk leisurely in pairs, often with dogs. If you follow the languid caws of the seagulls you reach the Jurassic coastline, along with the fish and chip huts, pubs and ice cream parlours of West Bay. Life slows down. And today, at least, the sky is very blue. But beneath the bucolic exterior lies an artistic soul that goes back decades. Local 1920s theatre the Electric Palace is so called because it was the first place in town to have electricity. Sheet music and easels pop up in the windows we pass. The sound of buskers fills the air. Tables sell records, toy cars and other knickknacks. On one street we find a stall laden with…

The Clash Combat Rock SONY Apocalypse again! Classic line-up’s surreal last statement, now expanded with rarities. Created tortuously against internal pressures, The Clash’s fifth album ironically proved to be their most successful, flying biggest hits amid its post-Vietnam fever-dream tone poems and New York street clamour. The intra-band cracks showing while recording Sandinista! had widened by rehearsals for its follow-up at London’s Ear studios. Joe Strummer urged returning to basics, against Mick Jones’s continuing hip-hop obsession when sessions commenced at NY’s Electric Lady, Topper Headon sinking deeper into heroin addiction. The state of The Clash then glowers from Pennie Smith’s cover shot: Jones and Simonon distracted, Headon wasted, Strummer part-covering his face. Yet magic still happened in the studio, luminescent mini-movies Straight To Hell and Sean Flynn reflecting their Vietnam…

DAVE BLASS/PRESS “I’m only about the music. I have no great aspirations. Success for me is being able to keep on doing this.” With estimated record sales of more than a 100 million, it seems that Bryan Adams is everybody’s favourite Canadian. Featured in the movie Robin Hood: Prince Of Thieves, his 1991 ballad Everything I Do (I Do It For You) topped the charts in close to 20 countries, and in the UK it spent a record 16 consecutive weeks at No.1. Today, the media-shy superstar sets the scene for a tour to promote his fifteenth studio album, So Happy It Hurts. Last year you caught covid twice and you were hospitalised while in Italy. That sounds very nasty indeed. I wasn’t hospitalised, and it was no big deal.…

★ A tangible sense of occasion hangs over this packed show, the opening night of Royal Blood’s first tour in six months and also the buzzy inauguration of Swansea’s spanking new harbourside Arena. Perched on a stunning high-tech set that wraps a raised platform stage inside a towering video screen, the drums-and-bass duo give full vent to their recently revamped sound, sprucing up clobbering garage-blues brutalism with rhythmic nods to disco, funk and even synth-pop. Latest album Typhoons dominates the set, from the title song’s piledriver funk-metal blast to the rampaging Boilermaker and roaring electro-rocker Million And One. Mike Kerr and Ben Thatcher remain a fairly conservative prospect live, sticking firmly within earbashing blues-rock convention on Zeppelin-sized riff monsters such as Figure It Out. No wonder Jimmy Page rates these…

PINK FLOYD HAVE released the track Hey Hey Rise Up and a companion video, with all proceeds going to Ukraine Humanitarian Relief. It’s the band’s first newly created music since their 1994 album The Division Bell. For the recording of the single David Gilmour – who has a Ukrainian daughterin-law and grandchildren – and Nick Mason were joined by long-time Pink Floyd bass player Guy Pratt and Nitin Sawhney on keyboards. The track also features vocals by Andriy Khlyvnyuk of Ukrainian band Boombox, from an Instagram post of him singing Ukrainian WWI protest song The Red Viburnum In The Meadow in an empty Sofiyskaya Square in the capital Kyiv. The title of the Pink Floyd track is taken from the last line of that song, which translates as ‘Hey Hey…

CHRISTINE MCVIE: ALAMY A NEW RECORD deal has begun a new era for British blues and rock vocalist Deborah Bonham, bringing her Belfast-born partner, guitarist Pete Bullick, into the spotlight with the Bonham-Bullick moniker. It has also brought about a selfproduced, self-titled covers album featuring some of their favourite songs, all realised by their “arse-kicking” group: drummer Rich Newman (Rory Gallagher/ Steve Marriott), bassist Ian Rowley and keyboard player Gerard G Louis, all of who were members of Paul Rodgers’s Free Spirit band. Tell us about the new record, Bonham- Bullick. The band’s been together for so long, and I’ve been with the guitarist, Pete, for thirty-one years, so it was time to have that acknowledged, the team effort. For the record, I wanted blues, soul, rock and prog in…

It was in the summer of 2005 that Phil Collen said what every member of Def Leppard was thinking: enough is enough.“Fuck it!” the guitarist snapped. “We’re better than this.” The band were in America’s Deep South, performing at a state fair in a dusty field on the banks of the Mississippi River. And, as they knew only too well, the state fair circuit was where rock stars go to die. As singer Joe Elliott explains it now: “In one sense, state fairs are like every other gig – big stage, big audience. But there’s a stigma that comes with it. It’s the difference between an eighties artist like Madonna doing six nights at Wembley and an eighties package tour featuring Marc Almond and the Thompson Twins at Butlin’s. And…

The Hellacopters, now firmly back in the saddle with Eyes Of Oblivion – their first album since 2008 – have teetered on the brink of making it big for more than a quarter of a century. Consider their time-honoured stock in trade (an incendiary, soul-infused combination of Stooges, Ramones, Kiss and MC5), and that they arrived at the vanguard of the widely touted, media-supported Swederock movement of the mid-90s, and their lack of mainstream success borders on baffling. Examine all available evidence closer, however, and all becomes clear. Hellacopters co-founders Nicke ‘Nick Royale’ Andersson and Andreas ‘Dregen’ Svensson have never, ever accepted that when it comes to the business of making rock’n’roll, you can’t have your cake and eat it. And since the pair originally hooked up as teenage “Kiss…

Long after Yelawolf and Shooter Jennings finished making the album Sometimes Y with their band, the rapper and the songwriter-producer know they’ve made something special. Because they’re still listening to it. “I normally never listen to records when we’re done with them,” Jennings tells Classic Rock. “I’m moving on to the next thing. It’s in the past. But I’m still listening to this one.” We suspect you might want to live with it a while too. Because with Sometimes Y this unorthodox pairing has turned out one of 2022’s most unexpected debuts. At heart it’s a classic, southern-accented rock record, but in detail it’s a more original affair, laced with diverse influences, quirky touches and trenchant lyrics. Despite Jennings’s name being closely associated with Americana (when you’re the son of…

Why Patti Smith Matters Caryn Rose FABER In celebration of a true rock’n’roll one-off There have been biographies of Patti Smith written in the past, but, especially in terms of the poet and singer’s early days, most of them were made entirely redundant by her magnificent memoir Just Kids, a master class in the art of rock autobiography. It read more like a novel, and in it she painted a picture of downtown New York City in the 1970s so vivid that the reader could almost smell CBGB from the comfort of their own living room. With this in mind, music journalist Caryn Rose has made the smart move of telling Smith’s story by looking at her wider importance, not only to the punk scene, but also to poets, rebels…

Having quit Queensrÿche acrimoniously a decade ago, singer Geoff Tate prepares for a belated, in-their-entirety celebration of that group’s albums Empire and Rage For Order. These British dates are taking place at the third attempt. How does it feel now the time has come? The third time is the charm, so they say. Getting us back on the road has been an incredible balancing act for my management and booking agent. During an ‘average’ year you perform in more than sixty countries, so quarantine must have been a hammer blow. I could never imagine live music not returning, though I did have some rough moments deciding what to do with those blocks of spare time I found myself presented with. I had defined myself as this travelling guy, and waking…

★ With their debut album Reeling making it into the UK Top 10, The Mysterines are clearly in a celebratory mood as they bound onto the stage to the strains of Velvet Underground’s Venus In Furs. But make no mistake, this is no simple exercise in airpunching celebration, rather it’s a consolidation of the music thus far that’s brought them here. Less than six months ago, the Liverpudlian quartet were headlining the comparatively modest-sized Garage just up the road. Tonight they’ve sold out the 1,100-capacity Electric Ballroom. The menacing grind of The Bad Thing whets the appetite as its initial slow pace switches up in tempo and intensity as the guitars snarl and growl. Lea Metcalfe’s plangent vocals beat at the band’s heart and, with her cohorts launching into an explosive…

ROXY MUSIC ARE to celebrate their 50th anniversary (albeit a tad overdue) with the group’s first live shows in more than a decade. Vocalist Bryan Ferry, guitarist Phil Manzanera, saxophonist/keyboard player Andy Mackay and drummer Paul Thompson are to reunite for the first time since the band’s sold-out and critically acclaimed For Your Pleasure tour in 2011. They will play 10 arena dates across the US and Canada before playing UK shows in October (see page 102 for dates). The move comes as something of a shock. Three years after the group’s tour in 2011, Manzanera told Rolling Stone that he considered it unlikely that they would ever perform together again. “I don’t think we’re going to do any more shows,” he said. “I think our job is done. When…

The singer on a Genesis and 70s-prog classic. “I got hooked on Genesis at an early age. I was very aware of previous albums such as Trespass and Foxtrot, it was Selling England By The Pound that defined my journey as a singer and a lyricist. I bought it during a family holiday in 1973, the year it was released. “It was Genesis’s fifth album, and they’d really begun to tighten up. Keyboard player Tony Banks was making his mark, using a lot more synthesiser. Steve Hackett’s guitar contribution to songs like Firth Of Fifth was just sublime. “With its Arthurian-style vibe there are few better ways to open an album than Dancing With The Moonlit Knight, which was a big influence on me when it came to writing Marillion’s…

SHE’S THE LOUISIANA livewire with hair like a pilot light. He’s the hermit-bearded Cornish guitarist who founded Brit-blues could-havebeens The Hoax. It’s tempting to call Greta Valenti and Robin Davey the archetypal odd couple, but their yin/yang as Beaux Gris Gris & The Apocalypse is the perfect fit. Back in 2019 the alt.blues duo pricked up our ears with their debut release Love & Murder (which ranked at No.13 in Classic Rock’s Albums Of The Year countdown, no less). Now, follow-up Good Times End Times is here to play us out as the world burns. They predicted the apocalypse. Long before the first PCR test, when lockdown was a term reserved for unruly prisons, Beaux Gris Gris & The Apocalypse foresaw judgement day. “We were already writing Good Times End…

When Bill Ward was a young kid growing up in post-war Birmingham, he used to walk past the factories where they stamped the edges of sheets of metal, and make up rhymes and rhythms in his head. Back then he never dreamed, of course, that the noises he was imagining would eventually lead him into a career as a successful musician and one of the founding fathers of an entire genre. As the original drummer with Black Sabbath, Ward was there at heavy metal’s Big Bang moment. His drumming – powerful yet jazzy, like Gene Krupa in a patchouli-soaked denim shirt – is embedded in the DNA of so many people who came along after him. His friend and contemporary John Bonham had the volume, but Bill Ward had…

RICHARD SIBBALD/PRESS In August 2015, Rush played the last show of their R40 Live Tour (which turned out to be their final tour) at The Forum in LA. After the dust had settled, back home in Toronto Alex Lifeson played some golf, but soon found himself kicking his heels and wondering what was next for him. “Geddy [Lee] and I played together for forty-five years before the end of that last tour,” Lifeson tells Classic Rock, sitting in his guitar-lined home studio. “The transition from doing something for that long to just playing golf was not that easy. After a while I thought: ‘Is that it? After all these years learning all this stuff, and having this ability and building these skills, I’m just gonna try to get my handicap…

Image: Their third album, Toys In The Attic, had changed everything for Aerosmith in 1975, going Gold and rising to No. 11 in the Billboard chart. In 1976, with the follow-up, Rocks, the band would take things to yet another level. While the Toys album has subsequently outsold it two to one, notching up eight million sales thanks in a large part to it containing Sweet Emotion and Walk This Way, Rocks actually charted higher, peaking at No.3, and highlighted a year when the band had five hit singles. With hindsight, the albums used the same template and play like twins. Rocks, though, is lyrically darker and musically heavier. Its songs chronicle the band’s growing stature as a touring act as well as an unhealthy level of drug abuse. After…

Def Leppard Diamond Star Halos UME Studio album number 12 is a sparkling set that proves there’s life in these old cats yet. The title of this seventh album by the current Def Leppard line-up – founder members vocalist Joe Elliott and bassist Rick Savage, along with drummer Rick Allen and guitarists Phil Collen and Vivian Campbell, together now for 30 years – comes from a line in T.Rex’s Get It On. It’s a choice, Leppard suggest, that reflects the influence of the glam-rock era on the album. That is particularly noticeable on first single Kick and Fire It Up. It’s also largely true of every Def Leppard album to date. As on 2015’s self-titled predecessor, Collen and Elliott provide the lion’s share of the material. Savage is the only…

Monster Magnet Throwing space-rock proto-metal, acid-rock and a lot more into the swirling pot, they had gift not for invention, but reinvention. Rising from the ashes of ’Namthemed CBGB also-rans Shrapnel,New Jersey’s Monster Magnet arrived on the scene like low-budget psychedelic cartoon supervillains, spewing a thoroughly ancient form of acid rock but somehow sounding like something from seven hundred years in the future. Led by David Wyndorf –a creepymustachioed culture vulture with an encyclopedic knowledge of everything cool, from underground comics to Z-grade splatter flicks and dungeon-dwelling metal acts from the dawn of time – Monster Magnet presented an alternative world far away from anything else in the ether at the dawn of the 90s. Most of the street-rock dirtbags who first heard Monster Magnet had no idea who Hawkwind,…

“Blondie has benefitted from being inducted [into the HOF]. We are looked at with more legitimate eyes.” Blondie haven’t played in the UK for a while, but midway through recording their twelfth studio album Debbie Harry and co. are back and are already a few dates into their tour. This is Blondie’s first UK tour in five years. Are you excited to be back? Yes, I’ve really missed you guys. It seems unreal to me that five years have passed. It was supposed to have happened back in November, but of course got mothballed. How did you fill your lockdown? Well, I did paint the bedroom. And it took eighteen months? [Laughs] Well, the way I do it, yeah. In fact I painted two rooms. I’m not a painter, and…