Indholdsfortegnelse for May 2023 i Classic Rock

May 1983: Metallica relocate to a near-derelict rehearsal space in Queens, New York to make their debut album, Kill ’Em All. “Snow outside the window. The glass in the window was broken, too. We were up on the fifth floor of the building. I had a piece of foam on the floor for a mattress, with my sleeping bag laid out on top of it and my leather jacket for a pillow. I was set up right next to Cliff and he was reading a dungeons and dragons book, The Call Of Cthulhu.” September-December 1985: recording Master Of Puppets at Sweet Silence studio in Copenhagen, Denmark. “Cliff and I playing poker for matchsticks, waiting for Lars to finish the drums. Having a running commentary on anything and everything in life,…

From the woods of West Virginia to the north of England (via Denmark, Leicester, Nashville, the Middle East…), our selection of the best new rock draws from far and wide this month – curated, as ever, from the considerable volume of new music that reaches our ears every day. In these pages you’ll find catchy curveballs from familiar names, 21st-century glam, southern rock, blues, grunge, and plain ol’ riff-tastic bangers that never get old. Full disclosure: right now, a lot of things aren’t easy for bands like these: touring logistics in a post-Covid/post-Brexit world; the prospect of soaring costs for US tours (as we went to press the Department Of Homeland Security was proposing to increase artist visa fees by 260%, threatening all but the Rolling Stones and Ed Sheerans…

Kerrang! Living Loud: Four Decades On The Frontline Of Rock, Metal, Punk, And Alternative Music Nick Ruskell DK A lovingly crafted history of the onomatopoeic rock weekly. In his acknowledgements page, the author of this beautifully presented, weighty coffee-table celebration of the magazine he has called home for the past 20 years renames his job title of Senior Commissioning Editor as ‘Full-Time Metal Fan’. This small detail tells you all you need to know about the magazine’s appeal and its place at the heart of 40 years of rock history. While other – desperate to be cooler – music weeklies sneered at and patronised the metal community, Kerrang! was written by those who loved the music and used their position to champion and nurture the bands, creating a sense of…

Co-founding drummer Michel ‘Away’ Langevin sets the scene for an anniversary trek from the ground-breaking, veteran French-Canadian metal crew. Congratulations on 40 years of Voivod! How does it feel to reach that milestone? It feels absolutely fantastic. I still remember telling my parents that I was quitting university to be in a heavy metal band. Four decades later, we are still here, it’s pretty unbelievable. How would you describe the journey? It’s been a complete rollercoaster. If Voivod are remembered for anything, it will be for perseverance [laughs]. There were quite a few big obstacles along the way, including the [tour bus] crash in Germany in 1998 [in which bassist/ vocalist Eric Forrest was badly injured] and the unfortunate passing of Piggy D’Amour [guitarist] in 2005. But we still have…

It doesn’t happen very often with Joe Elliott, but for a brief moment, Def Leppard’s singer is lost for words. He and the other four members of the band – guitarists Phil Collen and Vivian Campbell, drummer Rick Allen and bassist Rick ‘Sav’ Savage – are standing on hallowed ground, inside Studio 1 at Abbey Road, where The Beatles created some of their greatest music. But this is not a regular recording session for Def Leppard. They are here not to play, but to observe. They are positioned on a balcony high above the studio floor. Below, arranged in neat rows, are the musicians of the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra. And as the orchestra plays the melody to one of Leppard’s biggest hit songs, Love Bites, Joe Elliott mouths a silent…

Metallica 72 Seasons BLACKENED RECORDINGS Musical intensity meets personal tumult on 2023’s most anticipated metal album. The release of a new Metallica album is a huge event these days. With it comes anticipation and expectation from a demanding fanbase, some of whom perversely seem to relish the possibility of being disappointed. The 11th studio album won’t disappoint anyone but the most truculent fan. 72 Seasons follows the road map drawn up by 2008’s knotty Death Magnetic and 2016’s Hardwired…: titanium-plated modern metal fuelled by a relentless intent to be better, louder and sharper than anyone else. Stellar lead single Lux Aeterna was greeted like a long-lost son by the faithful. With its turbo-charged, old school thrash feel and NWOBHM-referencing lyrics (‘Lightning the nation’ indeed), it felt like a deliberate callback…

“I do like British theatres, and it makes a difference to what we do with Genesis. After that last tour of arenas, it feels like doing the right thing.” Bassist and guitarist Mike Rutherford formed Mike + The Mechanics during a hiatus from Genesis in 1985. Initially a side-project, the success of hits such as The Living Years, All I Need Is A Miracle and Over My Shoulder made them a bona fide group. As Rutherford launches a first tour since the dissolution of Genesis last year, he explains why a side-order of songs by his former band will feature in their set-list. The Mechanics are about to begin a 34-date UK tour, something that not too many bands do anymore. I’m not quite sure why it’s that many. I…

“We’re not entirely comfortable with being called apure blues band. We’re pretty rock-y.” Husband and wife bands are fascinating. For the sake of people who may be new to the band, did When Rivers Meet come along first or did things begin with the relationship? Grace Bond: We were together for a good ten years, in separate projects. It was quite a bit later when we decided to make music together. Aaron Bond: It just didn’t occur to us at all. Grace: We weren’t even songwriters in those other projects. That didn’t begin until we came together. What happens when one partner rejects an idea from the other? Aaron: We scrap the song and move onto the next one. That’s not a problem. We’re very together in everything we do.…

BY VIVIAN CAMPBELL’S admission, Last In Line’s career has been “a bit haphazard”. Founded in 2012 by Def Leppard guitarist Campbell, his former-Dio bandmates Jimmy Bain (bass) and Vinnie Appice (drums), and vocalist Andrew Freeman as a Dio covers band, the LA-based group became a more serious concern when Italian hard rock label Frontiers reached out with the offer of a deal. Bain’s death in January 2016, less than a month before the release of the group’s debut album Heavy Crown, was “a major kick in the nuts”, Campbell recalls. But seven years on, with album number three, Jericho, primed for release, he’s determined that Last In Line (now including former Ozzy Osbourne bassist Phil Soussan) should be given a fair hearing, and not dismissed as an inconsequential hobby. “It’s…

Since emerging in the mid-90s, Belgian rockers dEUS have embarked on a career of sonic shape shifting, somehow never repeating what went before while always sounding like themselves. Along the way the quintet’s music has taken in muscular riffing, delicate balladry, jazz-tinged experimentation, orchestral epics and barbed grooves, and it all melds together perfectly on new album How To Replace It. It’s an adventurous, panoramic rock record that shows dEUS to be in fine creative fettle. Frontman and band leader Tom Barman talked to us about its creation. How To Replace It is the band’s first record in ten years. What was the spark for getting back in the saddle? Well, it was never an intention not to make it. We’d played live a lot and I think we started…

THE STORIES BEHIND THE SONGS RICHARD MARX: “I DIDN’T MURDER MARY!” Because Marx featured so centrally in its video, doing an accomplished job of inserting the listener into the drama of his ‘small Nebraska town’, that to this day he still encounters fans who presume Hazard to be autobiographical. “There are people who really think I actually murdered a girl and ended up writing a song about it, I swear that to be true,” he says. “When they say that, I just stare at them.” More than a decade ago, as a precursor to performing the song concerned live, Richard Marx astonished a sold-out audience at his London’s Royal Albert Hall show by describing the 1992 worldwide chart-topper Hazard as “the dumbest, lamest thing” that he’d ever written. He then…

Ablue-skied mid-morning in Lisbon. It’s Carnival Tuesday, February 21, in the Portuguese capital and a national holiday across the country. A marching band are already striking up an imploring samba rhythm from the grand riverfront plaza, the Praca do Comercio. Lines of Mardi Gras revellers in brightly coloured costumes snake along the length of the Rua Serpa Pinto. This vaulting thoroughfare spears off the from the plaza and up the steep hill leading to the skeletal remains of the Convento do Carmo, its Gothic pillars and arches looming over the city like the carcass of a great, gutted whale. There’s a crowd gathered at the head of the road, in the shadow of the ruined convent. In their midst a solitary musician, a busker, is picking out a weeping melody…

“Nobody raises an eyebrow in rock’n’roll if you’re drugged, gay or sleeping with twenty-five people a night, but mention Christianity and you’re treated like a pariah.” From the moment they started playing music together half a century ago in Topeka, Kansas were always a square peg in a round hole. They were founded in the capital city of the state after which they were named, and their sound represented a colourful, boogie-laden twist on themes formulated by the English art-rock set, often defying those complexities with radiofriendly hooks and the violin of the classically trained Robby Steinhardt. But while the popular AOR bands of the era dressed like peacocks, none of the members of Kansas displayed pin-up potential. Some were bulky, others skinny, some had enormous tumbleweed coiffures, and one…

Pink Floyd The Dark Side Of The Moon 50th Anniversary Edition Box Set WARNER Ticking away the moments… With over 50 million copies sold worldwide, The Dark Side Of The Moon was one of the first albums to join the select club of Records More Famous That The People Who Made Them: and like The Who’s Tommy and Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours, it’s a record that both crystallised the group’s image for ever but was also not entirely representative of their past. Before The Dark Side Of The Moon, Pink Floyd (who also once sported a now-forgotten “The”) had been pop, psychedelic, and experimental: after it, they were a hugely popular yet strangely faceless stadium mega band and everything they did, from Wish You Were Here to The Wall, was measured…

‘Pat Benatar sings like a champion and rocks with considerable force.’ ZZ Top / Pat Benatar & Neil Geraldo / Stone Temple Pilots / The Angels Gibbston Valley, New Zealand Love in a pinot field: rock legends assemble in the southern hemisphere. ★ On paper, this year’s edition of New Zealand’s annual Summer Concert Series reads a little bit past its expiry date. The Angels and Stone Temple Pilots are both continuing to operate without the vocalists most associated with their success. Pat Benatar – or, as she’s billed these days, Pat Benatar and Neil Geraldo – hasn’t had a US hit since 1986. And ZZ Top, who barely paused for breath after the death of bassist Dusty Hill last July, have promoted his backline tech to frontline duty. Rock…