Innehållsförteckning för February 2023 från Classic Rock

BORN IN THE Midwest but having made his name in Nashville, with his early material Jared James Nichols established himself as a blues-rock force to be reckoned with. Now, the 33-year-old’s self-titled third album is both heavier and more vulnerable – the result, he tells us, of a potentially career-ending injury, the death of his father and the freedom to follow his muse for the first time. By self-titling this album, are you basically saying: “This is me”? Yeah, that’s the exact reasoning. This record just feels like me. I wanted it to be my benchmark. So when someone is wondering: “Jared James Nichols? Who is this ugly, longhaired shithead? ” they’re gonna listen to this record. It might be your heaviest album yet. These songs were written on acoustic.…

It’s quiet out here. Or it was. Canadian country singer Ronnie Hawkins’s estate looks out on to Stoney Lake, a geographical idyll in Peterborough County in central Ontario. The surface of the lake is glassy and dark and so flat it looks like you could step on to it and walk to the furthest shore. A dark wooden barn sits back on the property, away from the main house with its bay window looking out towards the serrated edges of fir trees that sit jaggedly against the sky. The barn rattles and hums at all hours of the day, and sometimes night. The frenetic writing sessions taking place inside fizz and fade as the orange burns out of the August afternoons. Although the keening guitars, rumbling bass and headspinning drum…

Thin Lizzy Live And Dangerous – Eight-CD Super Deluxe edition UMC MERCURY The Greatest Live Album Of All Time – along with the seven gigs recorded to make it. Since June 1978 we’ve debated whether Deep Purple, UFO, Status Quo or even Kiss released a better double live album than Live And Dangerous. We’ve also fretted about the impact of studio overdubs. Now we can answer the second conundrum. Like UFO’s 2020’s box set containing all six gigs recorded to create Strangers In The Night, this Super Deluxe version of Live And Dangerous delivers again Lizzy’s original masterpiece, plus seven live sets. There are three Johnny The Fox tour nights at Hammersmith Odeon in November ’76; two from Philadelphia and one in Toronto in October ’77 when Bad Reputation was…

“There will be no jamming or anything like that. It Bites didn’t jam; we were a reflection of the progressive bands that we listened to.” Francis Dunnery was the lead singer and guitarist with Cumbrian proggers It Bites, who he co-founded in ’82. After early hits including Calling All The Heroes and some critically acclaimed albums, he left the band in 1990. He was on the way to the debut gig by his blues-based project Tombstone Dunnery when Classic Rock caught up with him to get the lowdown on the upcoming tour with his own incarnation of It Bites. You’ve lived in America for decades now. How does it feel to return to your homeland? Getting off the plane after living with mad Americans, the place feels incredibly polite. I…

“In The Court Of The Dragon’s a year old but there’s still a lot more touring to do.” The band have released 10 studio albums, the most recent being 2021’s In the Court Of The Dragon, and have sold more than a million records worldwide. Ahead of seven shows over here we caught up with guitarist Corey Beaulieu. Trivium were still in their late teens when they were first interviewed for Classic Rock back in 2005. In it you mentioned driving through Hurricane Charlie to play a gig, saying: “We just live to play heavy metal.” Attitude-wise, eighteen years later the statement still rings true. Possibly it’s truer than ever. Just look at what we did during the pandemic. Instead of staying at home we used that extra time by…

A FIXTURE OF the Sunset Strip scene of the late 80s, Faster Pussycat have had a chequered history: from heavy rotation on MTV, to an eight-year hiatus, and now being run on a shoestring by their final remaining original member, vocalist Taime Downe. The newly cleaned-up frontman insists that the ’Cat won’t be creeping away any time soon. Faster Pussycat have released a new double-A-side single, Like A Ghost and Pirate Love, the latter a cover of a Johnny Thunders song. Like A Ghost was the first song I attempted to write sober. I did it without a drink, a pile of cocaine and a pack of cigarettes. Nowadays I don’t listen so much to what I did the night before and go: “What the fuck was I thinking?” What’s…

And the songbirds are singing, like they know the score Mick Fleetwood once called her “the steadying presence” of Fleetwood Mac. And in the days following her death at age 79, tributes to Christine McVie often reached for similar phrases – the hidden strength, the cornerstone, the heart and soul – to describe the role she played for more than 50 years in rock’s most tempestuous soap opera. “I don’t like being centre stage, I never have,” she told Uncut in 2022. “I like to be part of a group.” Watching her in concert, whether during the band’s heady late-70s era or what would be their final tour, in 2019, she was all business, more serious musician than rock star. Blue-grey eyes peering out from behind blonde fringe, swaying and…

The Philosophy Of Modern Song Bob Dylan SIMON AND SCHUSTER Dylan’s engaging singular observations of a selection of other people’s songs. Of all the many, many delights that have come from late-period Bob Dylan, his sideline as an up-andcoming author is up there with the best. 2004’s Chronicles Volume One (don’t even think about asking where volume two has got to) was a mischief-drenched autobiography that managed to say both everything and nothing. Some of it might have even been true. Ten years in the writing, the heroically bonkers The Philosophy Of Modern Song is a collection of beautifully illustrated miniessays, loosely (or tightly; it’s difficult to predict) bound to 60 songs of varying provenance by other people. Because he’s Bob Dylan, he can do precisely what he pleases. Because…

The Midlands-based singer continues her quest for the perfect balance between blues and hard rock. The CD version of The Space Between Us, your latest and fourth studio album, begins with a needle dropping onto vinyl, followed by a crackly opening number Beccs Blues. It’s a nice, oldschool touch. With blues you can get into the roots of appropriation, and that’s us saying: “It’s still there, folks, and this is us trying to take things forward.” I still prefer physical product to streaming, and thank god that rock audiences still want that. The album presents a nice mix of tuneful blues and guitar-oriented hard rock, with some darker, atmospheric moments. You’re talking about Not On My Knees with the moodiness. Somebody called that ‘apocalyptic’, which I really loved. It has…

“More than anything, Wilko wanted to be a poet. I was lucky to have known him and have him as a friend. His music lives on.” ICONIC GUITARIST WILKO Johnson passed away at home in Westcliff-on-Sea, Essex, of unknown cause at the age of 75. Famous as a member of Dr. Feelgood, then alongside Ian Dury in the Blockheads, then as a solo artist, Johnson was among the most charmingly eccentric and popular musicians Britain has produced. A decade ago he became successful in a different field, playing the mute executioner Ser Ilyn Payne in the first two series of the hugely popular fantasy drama Game Of Thrones. In 2013 Johnson was diagnosed with terminal pancreatic cancer, but won the hearts of the world with his bravery in the face…

GET YOUR WINGS Talking about UKJ’s latest album Rad Wings Of Destiny, Whitfield Crane says: “I wrote the riff to That Ain’t Livin’ in honour of Powerage and Bon Scott. Dead Friends Play is a tip of the hat to our heroes, from Eddie Van Halen to Lemmy to Hendrix. Drinkin’ And Drivin’ is saying keep an eye on yourself if you’re living a toxic life. “If you look at our album titles, we’re poking fun at the universe. I’m a Priest historian. I remember listening to Sad Wings Of Destiny as a teenager, taking bong hits, so blown away. And us Californians say ‘rad’ every fifth word. So if you amalgamate our Californian linguistics with our love for Priest, there you go – Rad Wings Of Destiny.” It was…

‘ Wah… wah-wah-wahwah-waaah… I wonder how you’re feeling, there’s ringing in my ears…’ Another day in spring 1976, another strip mall in the American Midwest, and another blast of Peter Frampton’s Show Me The Way. Thin Lizzy were touring the US and had stopped to buy cigarettes. Show Me The Way, and its chart-topping album Frampton Comes Alive!, were inescapable. Every time Lizzy got near a radio they heard that ‘wah-wahwah…’ talk-box intro and then Frampton’s audience screaming when he sang the song’s opening line: ‘I wonder how you’re feeling…’ Bass-playing Lizzy frontman Phil Lynott was well schooled in wowing an audience, but Frampton’s noisy reception annoyed him. “It’s a good song,” says Lizzy’s gatekeeper, guitarist Scott Gorham. “But after hearing it for the millionth time, Phil said: ‘What the…

"You’ve got to remember this is forty years ago, one has to file back…” warns Dr. Feelgood manager Chris ‘Whitey’ Fenwick as I prepare to pick his brain about the band’s debut album, Down By The Jetty, that raw, sharp slice of R&B that came spinning out of the Thames Delta in January 1975 like a freshly flung chakram. But Fenwick has had the album on the turntable again in preparation for our conversation and, “it’s been fun to revisit it. It’s brought back the excitement of the early gigging period – we were gaining altitude by the month… This album’s been a very strong part of my life. Forty years…” he muses. “It’s got bloody long legs.” The definitive line-up of Dr. Feelgood consisted of guitarist Wilko Johnson, the…

Iggy Pop Every Loser GOLD TOOTH/ATLANTIC Former Stooges firebrand finds dazzling late-career form. Before we get to the nitty-gritty of what makes it so, let’s get straight to the point: this is a great Iggy Pop album, probably the best he could have made at this particular moment in time. Teaming up with producer du jour Andrew Watt (who’s previously done the business for Justin Bieber, Miley Cyrus and Ozzy Osbourne, and is in the process of completing the next Pearl Jam and Morrissey records) was a genius move. Watt (an ex-member of California Breed alongside Glenn Hughes and Jason Bonham, and a current member of Eddie Vedder’s touring band Earthlings), who doubles on guitar and keyboards, indubitably knows his rock and clearly had a vision for Every Loser. When…

The Band were a paradox. Fourfifths Canadian, they nevertheless managed to embody a rural American mythos like no one before or since, their evocation of an imagined past rooted in a narrative tradition of country, blues, R&B, gospel, soul and rockabilly. Equally contradictory was the fact that they were an intensely private bunch, driven primarily by the need to create, who became unwitting superstars in their adopted US, bowing out with one of the starriest rock shows of all time. “It was a crazy ride, an unbelievable ride,” chief songwriter and guitarist Robbie Robertson told Classic Rock in 2019, reflecting on The Band’s sometimes troubled journey. “And a dangerous ride.” That journey began in the early 60s, when the young quintet – Robertson, Helm, guitarist Rick Danko, piano player Richard…