Innehållsförteckning för September 2019 från Classic Rock

WELCOME BACK Redd Kross The rocky, melodic, groovy psych-poppers have a new album out, but Courtney Love won’t be buying a copy. REDD KROSS: JULIAN FORT/PRESS CALIFORNIAN BROTHERS Jeff and Steve McDonald formed Redd Kross when the latter was yet to enter his teens. Taking their name from that scene in The Exorcist, the late-night movie-obsessed siblings went on to release six albums which combined the energy of punk rock with the melodic sensibilities of The Beatles, the insistent power of rock and the incense-and-peppermint grooviness of psych-pop. As the band prepare to release Beyond The Door, their seventh album, bassist Steve McDonald – who spent five years of a post-millennial Kross hiatus working with Sparks, and is currently a member of The Melvins – reveals (among other things) the…

WELCOME BACK Robert Randolph Meet the go-to pedal-steel player keeping it in the family, with his mum writing his breakthrough song. ROBERT RANDOLPH: JIM ARBOGAST/PRESS IT WAS 2002’S sizzling Live At The Wetlands album that introduced a young Robert Randolph And The Family Band to the world. Since then the pedal-steel guitarist and singer has spent most of his adult life on the road. Earning his spurs through gospel music – and the House Of God church he and his family frequented – it’s little wonder that his music is a mix of blues, gospel, soul and rock. Today, although jet-lagged, sporting heart-shaped sunglasses to cover his tired eyes, he can’t help but sound inspired when he talks about music and the history he’s making, including the latest album with…

MY FIRST LOVE The guitar hero looks back on first hearing Immigrant Song and learning Since I’ve Been Loving You. Led Zeppelin Led Zeppelin III By Michael Schenker “I was lying in bed one morning, aged fifteen, alone in my room, listening to our family’s old vintage radio. Led Zeppelin III had just come out, and it was being introduced on a programme that I always listened to. When I heard the drums of Immigrant Song I just went, ‘Oh, this is life…’ Then I’d hear it in clubs. I’d hear it everywhere. There was something about III that was more snappy than the first two albums. I learnt the whole guitar part from Since I’ve Been Loving You, because [Scorpions singer] Klaus Meine and I performed it. It was…

THE STORIES BEHIND THE SONGS Stone Temple Pilots It started out as a bossa nova tune written in minutes, had a country riff added, along with lyrics concerning lies and deceit, and ended up as a hit single on STP’s multimillion-selling Purple album. Words: Dave Ling Interstate Love Song By the spring of 1994, Stone Temple Pilots had notched four million sales of their debut album Core yet found themselves dismissed as the grunge scene’s arch opportunists; lambasted for claiming a place alongside the kingpins of the Seattle explosion, but coming from San Diego. In the eyes of their detractors – and there were many – this was all too convenient. Although the band tried to draw the positives from the situation, being hailed as the Best New Band of…

STATUS QUO THE ODD COUPLE We collar Francis Rossi and Bob Young, once the ‘fifth member’ of Status Quo, to discuss early days, reunions, the ‘no Parfitt, no Quo’ debate and more. Words: Dave Ling Photos: Will Ireland “The cocaine and arguments had made things horrible, so I told everybody what a bunch of dicks they were.”Bob Young “Iwas a pretty hopeless roadie,” Bob Young admits, before sheepishly recounting the tale of his first ever unaccompanied chaperoning of The Status Quo (as they were then known) during a concert at the Top Rank in Bristol. On the night concerned, June 4, 1968, the new boy received an electric shock after unwittingly linking everything – lights, PA, equipment – to a basic five-amp plugboard. “I was knocked right out,” he says,…

50 Things You Never Knew About woodstock Fifty years ago, on the weekend of August 15-18, 1969, nearly half a million people descended on Max Yasgur’s farm in Bethel, upstate New York to attend the Aquarian Exposition that was the Woodstock Music & Art Fair, with a heaven-sent line-up that included Jimi Hendrix, The Who, Santana, Janis Joplin, Creedence Clearwater Revival, Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young and Jefferson Airplane. It was the decade’s ultimate counterculture love-in. Some events, such as Hendrix’s iconic bastardisation of The Star Spangled Banner, or The Who uncorking See Me, Feel Me just as the sun rose on the third morning, are firmly etched in rock lore. But, half a century after the fact, how much do you really know about the mother of all festivals?…

THE HARD STUFF ALBUMS Tool Fear Inoculum MUSIC FOR NATIONS After well over a decade’s wait, Tool spiral out and keep going further than ever. ‘Fear Inoculum’ indicates vaccinating yourself against fear, and Tool have said it’s a message to themselves to ignore critics, especially given the weight of expectation that’s built up around this record – their first in 13 years. Rabid fans have long been hounding the band about whether new music would ever come at all The LA quartet wrote the album over a period of three years, but the origins go back to scraps jammed on the 10,000 Days tour over a decade ago, and there’s a meticulous complexity born of this gestation period. Clocking in at more than 80 minutes across nine songs, three of…

ROUND-UP: BLUES By Henry Yates Henry’s Funeral Shoe Smart Phone Rabbit Hole SELF-RELEASED You’ll see Henry’s Funeral Shoe plugging in in a South Wales tap room and think to yourself: “For fuck’s sake. Another sub-Stripes garage-blues duo. Two more troglodytes thumping away like it’s 2003.” Those who stick around, though, will find that Aled and Brennig Clifford have bigger ideas, the brothers spinning jet-black tales like The League Of Gentlemen being egged on by Spike Milligan, set to a musical palette shaped by roots-mode Primal Scream, Stooges spit and the horn lines of Exile On Main St. It’s kept them unsigned – possibly by choice – but ensures Smart Phone Rabbit Hole is as engaging as the album title (a dig at phone-swiping zombies). Everybody Says Hi and High Shoulders Everywhere…

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THE HARD STUFF STUFF BOOKS & DVD Revenge Of The She-Punks REX/SHUTTERSTOCK Vivien Goldman OMNIBUS A feminist music history, by someone who has the background and skills to do it properly. The full title of this fascinating, detailed book is Revenge Of The She-Punks: A Feminist Music History From Poly Styrene To Pussy Riot. This is what it is. Do not expect to read the same faces venerated as have been venerated countless times before, although some (Bikini Kill, The Slits, ESG, Au Pairs) will be familiar to anyone who has been paying attention. What you have here is an examination of between-the-lines, gaps that previously have gone unexplained or unexplored, acknowledged and filled in (The Bags, Skinned Teen, Big Joanie, ace Chinese punk band Hang On The Box). Maybe…

INTERVIEWS Stiff Little Fingers Vocalist/guitarist Jake Burns checks in as the Northern Irish band get ready to play the Putting The Fast In Belfast Festival. ED FIELDING/PRESS People might be surprised to know you were inspired to pick up a guitar by Rory Gallagher. Yeah. I was about twelve years old and he appeared on the TV. I froze. I remember thinking: “I want to be that guy.” In this fortieth year of the band will you be performing your debut album Inflammable Material in its entirety? We did Inflammable Material on its thirtieth anniversary around the UK and Ireland, and we’re doing it on what by our standards is a stupidly long tour of the US. But as flattering as the demand might be, it also brings problems; I…

End Of The Road For Iggy “I wanted to be free,” says Pop. IGGY POP IS close to announcing a decision to retire from touring. The singer, 72, admits that he “wanted to be free” while out on the road for his 2016 album Post Pop Depression, and even considered performing “behind a screen” due to being tired of people looking at him, but changed his mind. “I wanted to be free,” Pop says. “I know that’s an illusion, and that freedom is only something you feel, but I have lived my life thus far in the belief that that feeling is all that is worth pursuing.” Free is the title of Pop’s eighteenth studio album, which apparently has “virtually nothing in common with any other Iggy Pop album”. It’s…

the DIRT ★ HIGH HOPES Dead Shed Jokers The enigmatic Welsh rockers who are all about creating, not recreating. “One of our biggest complaints is how loud we are. We’ve broken decibel meters in venues.” A FERAL HOWL is building in the depths of the Welsh Valleys, familiar and yet strangely distinct. “That question is the bane of my existence because it’s so difficult to answer,” laughs Hywel Davies, the frontman of enigmatic rockers Dead Shed Jokers, when asked to describe where the band sits on the sonic spectrum. “It’s the best thing about the band, but probably the hardest as well. We don’t tend to fit into simple boxes. People hear different things.” Since they formed 11 years ago – and on their latest album, All The Seasons –…

WELCOME BACK New Model Army Despite having shot themselves in the foot more than once, the Army marches on – and to their own tune. NEW MODEL ARMY: MARK ISLAM/PRESS NEW MODEL ARMY celebrate their 40th anniversary next year, but frontman Justin Sullivan isn’t planning on hanging out the bunting. “It would be awful to be stuck in the past,” says the man who has led the band since they formed in Bradford in 1980. “And impending dementia means I can’t remember half of what happened anyway. This aversion to nostalgia has served NMA well – their windswept new album From Here, their fifteenth, is a world away from the strident post-punk with which they made their name. Why did you choose to record the new album on an island…

BEFORE SUNSET For his gorgeous new album Jesse Malin teamed up with southern heroine Lucinda Williams in his native New York. Words: Richard Purden Wedged between a 99-cent pizza joint and a cash-only Italian restaurant in New York’s East Village is an unassuming blacked-out building, its facade strewn with graffiti. At first (and second) glance, you might think it’s abandoned. In reality, it’s the entrance to Flux Studios, and it’s here that at various points of the day and night Jesse Malin, Lucinda Williams and bass player Catherine Popper will turn up to work. It’s a frigid March morning in 2018, and the project in hand is Malin’s eighth studio album, Sunset Kids. Williams, here as producer, is a good fit. While Malin’s breakthrough album The Fine Art Of Self…

ROUND-UP: SLEAZE By Sleazegrinder The Vicious Cycles Motorcycho SELF-RELEASED Not since Fu Manchu has a band so obsessively detailed the pleasures and terrors of a life lived on the asphalt. Vancouver’s Vicious Cycles dole out hardcore garage-punk action and chugging 70s boogie-rock with devastating hooks and punchy lyrics about avoiding cops, making out with truck stop nuns, and impressing girls with the size of your engine. There’s elements of surf and snotty ‘77 punk and there’s even some roller-rink Farfisa in there and it all sounds like the best party you ever snuck into. Highlights come fast and furious and certainly include the fez-shaking title track, the fast fucked and furious Don’t Need No Dynamite and the heads-down action rock ripper Hot Dogs In The City. A fair warning, if you…

THE HARD STUFF ALBUMS Status Quo TINA KORHONEN/PRESS Backbone EARMUSIC/EDEL Rossi and co return to the studio after losing Rick Parfitt. But does it stand up? A month before he passed away in December 2016, Rick Parfitt, who was forced to sit out Status Quo’s proposed final electric shows due to failing health, graciously stated in an interview with Classic Rock that if the band should decide to continue without him in the long term, “it’ll be with my blessing”. With a rhythm guitar attack that sounded capable of slicing through granite, and charisma that could light up a venue with a flash of that grin, Parfitt is in many ways irreplaceable, and to some, a Status Quo line-up without him is unthinkable. For those still listening, there’s the question…

THE HARD STUFF REISSUES Iron Maiden 4 Reissues PARLOPHONE Four slabs of prime Maiden from a tricky, transitional period. The third instalment in Iron Maiden’s studio album remaster series takes us through the 90s, that tumultuous decade when, as legend has it, heavy metal’s wheels fell off. The advent of grunge and a downturn in commercial fortunes certainly made the 90s a tricky period for Maiden, but the music they were making continued to resonate with the diehards, precipitating a somewhat inevitable comeback and the frankly ludicrous triumphs of the last 20 years. Bruce Dickinson’s supposed last hurrah, Fear Of The Dark (8/10) has maintained its allure since 1992, largely thanks to the singalong brilliance of its title track. The rest of it ranges from the swashbuckling fury of Be…

LIVE! Dan Baird & Homemade Sin/Jason & The Scorchers/Kentucky Headhunters With the three bands about to tour the UK together, taking it in turns to go on last, it’s shaping up to be quite a party. DAN BAIRD & HOMEMADE SIN: TRUDI KNIGHT/PRESS; JASON & THE SCORCHERS: TONY MOTTRAM/PRESS You guys must know all one another pretty well, right? Richard Young (Kentucky Headhunters): A few of us have met before, but this will be the first time any of us have played together except when Dan [Baird] and I were out on a Rock Legends cruise. I want to make it clear that without Dan and the Georgia Satellites and Jason & The Scorchers, the Kentucky Headhunters would have had no chance in hell of signing a record deal. So…

LIVE! Quireboys Expect special guests at the band’s 35th-anniversary show. Spike checks in ahead of the London Forum show at which they’ll be playing their debut album in full. It’s pretty hard to believe that 2019 marks the thirty-fifth anniversary of the Quireboys. Well, I left Newcastle when I was fifteen and I met Guy [Bailey, former QBs guitarist] at seventeen, so that sounds right. There was a lot of hard work – it took six years to get a record deal. People always forget that now, because we have a beautiful bus, but I still remember those days of sleeping on the amps. Guitarist Paul Guerin believes that the band’s current album, Amazing Disgrace, is your most diverse so far. The situation we were in… We went to Rockfield…

LIVE! REVIEWS Ramblin’ Man Fair Maidstone Mote Park Roll up, roll up, for this year’s instalment of what has become Britain’s best and most enjoyable broad-reach rock festival. FRIDAY ★ It’s grey and drizzling overhead but the ale is flowing, the fairground swings are lit, everyone’s being terribly nice to each other, and our mate’s just squeaked: “I’ve got an espresso martini!” This year’s Ramblin’ Man – the ultimate annual classic rock mini-break – hath begunneth. Aussie shitkickers The Lazys open the festival with Thin Lizzy-via-AC/DC (Bon Scott era) rock’n’roll, delivered with tearaway gusto. The Kris Barras Band bring a welcome combination of blues, soul and hard rock. Led by Barras, who’s now a guitarist and vocalist with an increasingly individual style, they catch the imagination of a sizeable crowd.…

INSIDE THE WORLD OF ROCK the DIRT The Cult set to open the Sonic Temple in October 30th anniversary tour and big reissue imminent. HARD TO BELIEVE, but 2019 marks the 30th anniversary of The Cult’s classic album Sonic Temple. To celebrate, the band will release a deluxe 30th anniversary box set on September 13 through Beggars Arkive. The set includes three vinyl LPs plus a cassette, featuring previously unreleased tracks, demo versions and a show recorded live at Wembley Arena, plus replica laminate, backstage pass, original press releases and more. It will be limited to 3000 copies, with each box set numbered. “We wanted to retain our core DNA as we went deeper into psych and hard rock influences,” says frontman Ian Astbury of the band’s transformation from post-punks…

Kinks Reunion Likely Dave Davies reveals “good demos” now exist. GETTY THE POSSIBILITY of a reunion of The Kinks now seems more likely than at any point in recent years. Last summer, in an interview with Channel 4, singer and songwriter Ray Davies hinted that a new Kinks album with his guitarist brother Dave and drummer Mick Avory could be on the cards. “The trouble is, the two remaining members, my brother Dave and Mick, never really got along very well,” he said. “But I made that work in the studio – it fired me up to make them play harder and with fire. So if I can recapture those moments… I’ve got some great Kinks tunes in my head.” Now, in a new interview with Rolling Stone, Dave has…

FROM FAKE TO FAB How the Japanese guitar industry went legit. PG BRUNELLI/ICONICPIX The mid-70s was a murky period for Far Eastern guitar manufacture, with Japanese companies producing instruments that were unadulterated rip-offs of established American designs. Compare the Ibanez 2350 from 1975 with a Gibson Les Paul from the same time and you’ll see how brazen this practice was. Gibson ultimately sued Hoshino Ibanez in 1977, but many of these so-called ‘lawsuit guitars’ can still be found on today’s second-hand market. Ibanez went on to produce some notable – and legal – instruments, emblemised by the lauded Destroyer II which was introduced in 1980. Iron Maiden’s Adrian Smith often rocked a fire-red Destroyer DT-300 during the Number Of The Beast days, while Def Leppard’s Phil Collen (pictured) wielded a…

the DIRT ★ HIGH HOPES Empyre The intensity of Pearl Jam. The mishaps of Spinal Tap. Meet the next great Midlands rock band… “I remember playing in an abandoned zoo in Ibiza. That was pretty surreal.” ALL SIGNS SUGGEST that Empyre take this rock‘n’roll business pretty seriously. At shows, fans are encouraged to stand in focused silence, neither clapping nor singing along. At photoshoots, the Northampton four-piece project a stony-faced, funeral-ready image. And on their dazzling debut album, Self Aware, the closest musical reference point is Pearl Jam at their most glowering and emotionally intense. The curious flipside is that Empyre are also one of the least serious bands you could wish to interview. Formed just three years ago by frontman Henrik Steenholdt and lead guitarist Did Coles, with drummer…

6 THINGS YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT… Henry’s Funeral Shoe You don’t meet many Welsh noiseniks who are dodging aliens and taking on the Nazis. Words: Henry Yates SOUTH WALES ISN’T exactly known as a hotbed for dirty-blues duos. But then Henry’s Funeral Shoe have always gone against the grain. Citing everyone from the Stones to Spike Milligan as key influences, and taking their name from a short story about a shoe-stealing murderer, Aled and Brennig Clifford are a darker, funnier, spikier and more surreal proposition than most two-people operations. And with brass-bolstered new album Smart Phone Rabbit Hole giving this much-tipped duo their best shot at the title, it’s high time you tried the Shoe on for size. They got together by accident. Back in 2008, Aled was an…

CROBOT WILD ONES After a change of scene, a change of personnel and a challenging couple of years, Crobot are back in business with their heaviest record yet. You could even say it’s out of this world. Words: Polly Glass Photos: David McClister Marietta, Georgia, in the quiet, school-time heat of the Deep South spring, isn’t the most obvious place for a rock’n’roll comeback. Chris and Rich Robinson of the Black Crowes were born here, but otherwise it feels rather like the low-rent cousin of Atlanta ‘proper’. Our hosts Crobot have spent the past month in this patch of American suburbia with producer/Seether guitarist Corey Lowery, recording their third album, Motherbrain. Although technically the band have never split, the word ‘comeback’ seems appropriate. Based chiefly in Pottsville, Pennsylvania, Crobot first…

GEDDY LEE Is Reading The New Rock′N′Roll? Attracting huge crowds is nothing new to Rush’s Geddy Lee, but the numbers who are turning up to his book signings have genuinely surprised him. Classic Rock joined him on the road. Words: Philip Wilding Photos: Kevin Nixon “I’ve come down from Manchester. I’ve been into Rush for about forty years. I’ve no idea what I’ll say to him – I certainly won’t ask him when Rush will re-form.” Paul Chapman Saturday, June 8, 3pm It’s a balmy Saturday afternoon in London’s Piccadilly, and the queue snaking out of the door of Waterstones bookshop goes around the corner, then disappears into an alleyway and doubles back on itself. It’s like a slowly moving tableau of the history of Rush; every album cover represented…

THE HARD STUFF ALBUMS Black Star Riders Another State Of Grace NUCLEAR BLAST BSR continue to show there’s life for them beyond Lizzy, and life is good. Goodwill goes a long way in rock’n’roll. It certainly helped get Black Star Riders off the ground after ex-Thin Lizzy guitarist Scott Gorham discovered he could use his old band’s hallowed name only for purposes of nostalgia and not as a vehicle for a second shot at the big(ish) time. Not that there was a whole lot of difference between the two bands to start with. Enlisting Celtic soul brother Ricky Warwick as singer helped – the Almighty frontman grew up devouring those old Lizzy records as a kid, and nailed The Blessed Phil Lynott’s voice and phrasing in a turn that would…

THE HARD STUFF BUYER’S GUIDE Walter Trout Here’s the best of the indestructible bluesman’s studio catalogue to catch in your net – and one to throw back. AUSTIN HARGAVE/PRESS Back in 2014, I was co-writing Walter Trout’s official biography, and watching my subject die of liver failure. Even when he was facing death, Trout took comfort from the studio catalogue he would leave behind, aware of the irony that the excesses that were killing him had also made his life’s work utterly compelling. “My liver is fried by heroin and alcohol,” he noted. “But I feel like I’m able to put some feeling, emotion and experience into my music that wouldn’t be there if I’d lived a Disneyland life.” Trout had done his share of living. Born in 1951, and…

Geoff Tate’s Operation: Mindcrime The ex-Queensrÿche singer returns with his current band. You’re also part of the touring line-up of the all-star metal opera project Avantasia. With each show running for more than three hours, it’s overblown and really shouldn’t work, but it does. I sing two songs, and there’s an hour before I go back on, so it’s hard to stay sober [laughs]. But Avantasia is a wonderful situation for me. I really enjoy their music and I’ve become good friends with all the band. Avantasia leader Tobias Sammet is quite a character. He is. He’s like a guy out of a different time. Tobi really connects with people. I have so much respect for him as a performer. Performed a cast of Italians led by Simone Mularoni of…

IQ The veteran proggers play an album-launch show in London. Now into their thirty-eighth year, the Southampton band prepare to release their twelfth studio album. Co-founding guitarist Michael Holmes sets the scene. Resistance is IQ’s first new album in five years and, ambitiously, it’s a double. With [predecessor] Road Of Bones we had a load of leftovers, so we did a secondary disc, and the same thing happened this time. But the material is so strong it felt right to make it a double album. That’s not an indulgence that Phonogram Records would have allowed when the band was signed for a pair of albums (via subsidiary Squawk) in the 80s, is it? No. That was an odd time in our history. Phonogram did us a lot of good –…