Indholdsfortegnelse for February 2025 i Classic Rock

Although best known as a guitarist for Iron Butterfly over several different spells in the 70s, 80s and 90s, and also for being among the first guitarists to use the ‘talk box’ effect, Mike Pinera was also a member of Florida band Blues Image, and went on to work with Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young. During the 80s Pinera played with the Alice Cooper band, appearing on the albums Special Forces and Zipper Catches Skin. Along with the Jimi Hendrix Experience drummer Mitch Mitchell, he formed Ramatam, whose self-titled album was produced by Tom Dowd, but left the band before they recorded the follow-up. Pinera was also a founding member of Cactus spin-off New Cactus, and released the solo albums Isla and Forever in 1977 and ’79. His Top…

Poison seem set to reunite in 2026, with their best-loved line-up of Bret Michaels, Bobby Dall, CC DeVille and Rikki Rockett all on board. The American hair-rockers last toured in 2022. Iron Maiden guitarist Adrian Smith and Winery Dogs guitarist/singer Richie Kotzen release their second collaborative album on March 7. Black Light/White Noise includes 10 all-new Smith/Kotzen tracks and was self-produced, with Jay Ruston (Anthrax, Uriah Heep) handling the mix. Artificial intelligence pioneer ElevenLabs have collaborated with the estate of Jerry Garcia to recreate the late Grateful Dead singer/guitarist’s voice for a series of audio books, articles, poetry, bedtime stories and recipes, delivered in 32 languages. Bruce Springsteen denies speculation, including a report in Forbes in July, that he has a billion dollars in the bank, despite having sold his masters…

The future is unwritten (and questions to Alex Lifeson and Geddy Lee about any plans for Rush are gently and politely batted back at me), although the past is littered with signposts, and unlikely trigger points, especially for two men who grew up playing and performing together for most of their adult lives. Thousands of miles – Lifeson at home in Toronto, Lee in London - and a few days apart, the bond between the two Rush members is as tangible as when they were two young men travelling in the back of a van, going from gig to gig across the Canadian wilds. They both look and sound great, vibrant and healthy, belying the fact they’ve both somehow reached 71. Which seems to come as something of a surprise…

Heads turn as Andy Scott pushes through the saloon doors of The Barley Mow, a mane of long white hair trailing behind him. To commemorate the final album by Scott’s band Sweet, Classic Rock has brought the guitarist back to the pub in London’s Paddington frequented by the original group throughout the 70s. This is the watering hole in which Sweet came to relax over a pint or three following the recording of their biggest hits, including Hellraiser, Blockbuster! and The Ballroom Blitz. According to Sweet folklore, a section of Fox On The Run may even have been written within these walls. Scott isn’t entirely sure whether he visited The Barley Mow since those heady days. “I may have done,” he says, grinning, “but that would be when I lived…

Stay Hungry – 40th Anniversary Edition ATLANTIC/RHINO The very difficult third album. fter 10 years paying dues in New York/New Jersey, Twisted Sister became an ‘overnight sensation’ upon trying their luck in England, where a larger-than-life stage act – based almost entirely on their motormouth frontman Dee Snider – won many friends including Lemmy, and Pete Way of UFO who, in title at least, co-produced their 1982 independent debut album Under The Blade. The groundswell of support, and an unforgettable set on Channel 4’s The Tube, secured them a deal with Atlantic Records and led to the album You Can’t Stop Rock ’N’ Roll, released in 1983. The following year they took a shot at the big time with Stay Hungry, produced by Tom Werman (fresh from Mötley Crüe’s Shout…

Tom Morello He’s best known as the guitarist with Rage Against The Machine, but there’s much more of his playing to marvel at than that. You tend to hear Tom Morello before you see him. One of the best compliments you could pay the inimitable guitarist is that you can’t always say whether you’re listening to someone playing a guitar, or some computerised trickery creating otherworldly sounds. His towering, iconic riffs are perfectly weighted with whammy-bar wizardry, dazzling divebombs and unmistakable lead breaks – all of it inherently Morello. Born in Harlem, New York City in 1964, Thomas Baptist Morello is best known for his time with game-changing, politically motivated rap-rockers Rage Against The Machine, but his storied career and contributions to rock at large are huge. Together with vocalist…

With one of rock music’s most iconic power ballads, (I Just) Died In Your Arms, in 1986 Cutting Crew topped the chart in several countries including the US. As they prepare to celebrate their 40th anniversary, we caught up with singer and band leader Nick Van Eede. 2025 marks four decades of Cutting Crew. How does that make you feel? It makes me proud, I suppose. We’ve weathered the storm, experiencing highs and lows, and I’m busier now than I was even during the late eighties. We have seventy-two shows lined-up until next summer. Following 19 headline dates in January and February, Cutting Crew support Kim Wilde for nine gigs. What should we expect? Kim just phoned up, and I figured why the hell not? Our own gigs are performed…

The guitar collection of the late Jeff Beck is set to go under the hammer in January. Ninety of Beck’s instruments, played during his six-decade-long career, along with amps, effects pedals and ‘tools of the trade’ will be auctioned at Christie’s in London on January 22. Beck’s wife Sandra Cash says: “These guitars were his great love, and almost two years after his passing it’s time to part with them, as Jeff wished. After some hard thinking, I decided they needed to be shared, played, and loved again.” Beck’s celebrated 1954 ‘Oxblood’ Les Paul is estimated to fetch up to £500,000. Amelia Walker, head of Private And Iconic Collections at Christie’s, describes the guitar as “a really beautiful instrument, covered in grime and dust and signs of use”. “I think…

Conceived in 2007 as a crackpot dream by two members of the Swedish melodic death metal band Soilwork – frontman Björn ‘Speed’ Strid and guitarist David Andersson – Night Flight Orchestra set out to make music that belonged in an episode of Miami Vice. Previewing their seventh album, Give Us The Moon, Strid explains why the band felt compelled to continue after Andersson’s passing in 2022. At your shows you get audiences joyously spiralling around the venue in a conga line. It’s not something you see very often at a rock concert, is it? It began spontaneously years ago when I talked on stage about a conga train, and now it happens at every show. People really enjoy it. Give Us The Moon is the band’s first record since David…

Metallica and Judas Priest are among the bands nominated for the 2025 Grammy awards. Metallica head things up in the Best Metal Performance category with Screaming Suicide, from 2023’s album 72 Seasons. Priest’s Crown Of Horns, from Invincible Shield, is also nominated in the same category, as are modern metalcore heavyweights Spiritbox and Gojira. Nominees in the Rock categories include The Black Keys, Green Day, Pearl Jam and Idles, with The Beatles, the Rolling Stones, St Vincent and Fontaines D.C. Fontaines D.C. and St. Vincent are also nominees in Best Alternative categories, as are Cage The Elephant, Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds, Kim Gordon, Brittany Howard and Clairo. Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross also received a nomination in the Best Score Soundtrack For Visual Media Category for their thumping…

Dennis DeYoung was watching the sun hit the waves in the sea off Hawaii when the angels appeared. It was April 1977, and his band, Styx, were on the island to play the Crater festival, aka Hawaii’s Woodstock. It was a welcome stop-off on a long and grinding journey. Styx were six albums deep into their career, but they’d managed just a single Top 10 hit a few years earlier, with DeYoung’s proto-power ballad Lady. “We should have been ahead of a plethora of bands – Queen, Kansas, we came before them all,” says the effervescent DeYoung, who was Styx’s keyboard player and co-vocalist from their inception in 1972. “But we were always opening for people - Aerosmith, Kiss, ZZ Top. Always the bridesmaids.” Yet here they were in Hawaii,…

The lizard king is dead, long live The Doors. It’s August 1971, barely a month after Jim Morrison was found dead in a bathtub in Paris, and his surviving bandmates in The Doors are putting the finishing touches to their first album without him. You might politely call this an act of professionalism. In less charitable terms it could easily appear plain cold. Incredible as it might seem, at that time there hadn’t been a whole lot of debate about whether or not to carry on. “Of all the mysteries surrounding The Doors, the one that maybe confounds people the most is why we thought we could still be a band after Jim died,” guitarist Robby Krieger wrote in his 2021 memoir Set The Night On Fire. “It seems so…

Mark Tremonti is bang on time. Well, of course he is. The Detroit-born guitarist doesn’t waste a single beat of his time; he’s released no fewer than 19 albums while leading three bands in the form of Creed, Alter Bridge and his solo project (“Four bands,” he corrects, flagging up his suited ’n’ booted Sings Sinatra sideline). Even on a rare day off from Creed’s Are You Ready? tour, Tremonti is facing a mile-long call sheet of Zoom interviews to promote fiery new solo album The End Will Show Us How. Once he’s done with those, he’s got a dinner appointment with Sevendust’s Lajon Witherspoon. Doesn’t this black-clad, alt. metal Duracell bunny ever stop moving? Tremonti smiles, shrugs and imparts the wisdom that underpins everything else he will offer today.…

Welcome to our first Hot List of 2025! With the festive season pretty much over, the last of the wrapping paper cleared away and the smell of party poppers fading, we could probably all use a bit of rock’n’roll in our lives. Partly it’s a tonic for the soul during the grey, skint, hungover days of January, but it’s also a way of setting an invigorating tone for the year – start as you mean to go on and all that. With that in mind, we’ve brought you a selection of tunes to kickstart your 2025. So dive in and fill your head with sounds to (by turns) soothe, energise and delight. And as ever, check out more new music every week at classicrockmagazine.com The Struts Can’t Stop Talking The…

We Three Kings By Royal Appointment SELF-RELEASED A few weeks ago I went to see Cirith Ungol, and realised I forgot to turn on the porch light on the way home. I backed into the driveway and accidentally smashed into the porch, obliterating a brake light (and some of the porch). Then I went to bed like the kid in Hereditary who accidentally decapitated his sister. When I woke up, Stacey was pissed and told me to “fucking get it together, man”. But there is no getting it together in 2024, which I tried to explain to her. It’s just a cursed year. We tried our best, and it just didn’t work. We just have to ride this shit out. Anyway, I slept in the shed and listened to this record…

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Placebo: This Search For Meaning Dir: Oscar Sansom Star-studded documentary gets deep and meaningful with Molko and Olsen. There are some big subjects being thrown about in this film exploring the legacy and history of Placebo: the nature of fame, addiction, sexuality, the lot. Director Oscar Sansom has assembled an all-star cast including Robbie Williams, Yungblud, Shirley Manson and, incongruously, Benedict Cumberbatch to wax lyrical about the impact the band had on them, all under the conceit that they’re being “secretly” recorded via surveillance camera. They’re eloquent and reverential. Brian Molko and Stefan Olsen take a long, sober look at their own legacy, and some of the archive footage is a beautiful reminder of just how much Placebo shook up the blokey Britpop landscape and made their otherness their superpower.…

BECOMING LED ZEPPELIN IS ON THE WAY! Reports coming out of the US suggest that Becoming Led Zeppelin, the feature-length documentary about the origins of the band, will finally be released on IMAX screens in the US and Canada on February 7. With a run time of over two hours, it has a teaser trailer out now. IRON MAIDEN KICK OFF THEIR RUN FOR YOUR LIVES TOUR! Few bands do anniversaries quite as brilliantly as Iron Maiden, and with them celebrating their half-century it’s no wonder they’re promising their “most spectacular and elaborate show” to date for a run of arena nights in Birmingham, Manchester and Glasgow, plus outdoor shows in Dublin and London. The tour will be the first without drummer Nicko McBrain, who announced his retirement from the…

It’s been a long break since his last album, bluesy garage rocker Witness, but Benjamin Booker is back with Lower, this time experimenting in noise rock and contemporary indie hip-hop – and some weighty subject matter. Now the proud head of his own label, he’s enjoying a new level of artistic freedom. It’s seven years since your last record. What have you been doing? I was just working on music. I had a specific idea of what I wanted to do for this record, so it was really just about following through and getting there. I spent a couple years trying to figure out what I wanted to do. It was different to other things that I’ve done, because there was a clear vision of what I wanted, and it…

For Metallica, the 90s were just like the 80s – only in reverse. The 10 years it took them to go from unloved New Wave Of British Heavy Metal copyists, when they formed in LA in 1981, to globe-straddling multi-platinum-selling rock titans on a sales-par with Michael Jackson and U2, with the release of their fifth album, Metallica, aka the Black Album, in 1991, saw them evolve faster than a speeding bullet. The move from hair-metal LA to anything-goes San Francisco, occasioned by bringing in SF natives, bassist Cliff Burton and guitarist Kirk Hammett; the sparking of a whole new genre in rock – thrash metal – and in its wake close-but-no-cigar imitators such as Megadeth and Slayer; the ability to fit comfortably onto the front covers Kerrang!, NME,…

Muscle Shoals MASCOT Soul power: Dutch rockers tap into the musical ley lines on tenth studio album. Maybe put it down to the fact that it was recorded at the world-famous FAME and Muscle Shoals Sound Studio (used by Aretha Franklin and the Stones, among other major names) but this album, the follow-up to 2023’s Love, Death & In Between, comes filled with ghosts from rock’n’soul’s illustrious past. Opener In Love sets the tone. A gorgeous blue-eyed soul ballad, it finds Pablo van de Poel channelling his inner Marvin Gaye, his charged emotional state (‘It’s turning my world upside down, all my senses inside out’) mirrored by a backdrop of shimmering Hammond organ and Isley Brothers-esque fuzz guitars. The euphoric mood continues into the Lynyrd Skynyrd-style groove of Natural Woman.…

Red 50th Anniversary Edition PANEGYRIC Spectacular 50th-anniversary edition upgrades behemoth first-phase-curtailing album, along with untold extras. In the five years after In the Court Of The Crimson King announced their progstorming arrival in 1969, King Crimson went through myriad line-up changes, leaving Robert Fripp the sole original member when he unexpectedly guillotined the band after recording 1974’s career-peaking Red. Essentially a power trio after violinist David Cross’s departure, Fripp, singer/bassist John Wetton and drummer Bill Bruford were joined by past brass guests Ian McDonald, Mel Collins, Robin Miller and Mark Charig, in retrospect coming full circle making an unholy glorious noise at various times throughout. Cranking up some magnificently evil riffs, Fripp stopped giving orders and let the musicians fly. Harnessing his dazzling virtuosity to Fripp’s eruption-prone mean machine, Bruford’s…

Allan Kozinn and Adrian Sinclair HARPER COLLINS/DEY STREET Listen to what the man said. Excluding Bob Dylan, there have been more books about Paul McCartney than any other rock star. Which is understandable, given that both have changed rock’n’roll irrevocably, and the world beyond. This 715-page tome covers six years and chronicles McCartney’s life on an almost day-to-day basis. That’s because McCartney does something virtually every day. He works. Constantly. Songs pour out of him like water out of a tap, although it can take forever to record them to his satisfaction. The hundreds of sessions are described in exacting detail. He’s not short of ideas, either. But he is not good at listening to other opinions. When Aubrey Powell and Storm Thorgerson of the legendary Hipgnosis design company –…

“We often hear: ‘I don’t like country music but I do like you guys.’ I think the reason it works is that there’s something there for everyone.” Brothers TJ and John Osborne were born in Maryland but relocated to Nashville in 2012. Brothers Osborne have received a dozen Grammy nominations, one of which became a win in 2022 for Best Country Duo/Group Performance. With four full-length albums to their name, they have become leading lights of the burgeoning outlaw country movement. Younger sibling TJ previews their return to the UK, having appeared at this year’s Country 2 Country Festival. You kind of remind us of that famous song by Donny and Marie Osmond, A Little Bit Country -A Little Bit Rock ‘N’ Roll. [Laughs but sounding mildly aghast] That’s maybe…

“I still get nervous before going on stage. I never thought we’d play the O2 Arena, so I’m super-nervous but super excited as well.” Frequently lambasted for deviating from – and sometimes returning to – an original metalcore blueprint, Welsh four-piece Bullet For My Valentine have nevertheless become extremely popular, and since forming in 1998 the ’bangers from Bridgend have notched more than a billion Spotify streams in the US. Guitarist Michael ‘Padge’ Paget checks in on the eve of a co-headlining UK arena tour with Floridian metalheads Trivium. Bullet For My Valentine and Trivium’s five-date arena tour concludes at the 20,000-capacity O2 Arena in London. [Laughing] That’s not too shabby, is it? No pressure, though. How does it make you feel? It’ll be emotional for both bands because of…

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