Innehållsförteckning för Summer 2024 från Classic Rock

John Barbata April 1, 1945 – May 8, 2024 Former Jefferson Starship and Jefferson Airplane drummer John Barbata has died of unknown cause, aged 79. Barbata also played with Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, The Turtles, Linda Ronstadt, Ry Cooder and others, and hadan estimated 60 uncredited appearances on albums. Barbata once said: “I was very fortunate, most drummers only go around once. I went around three times and played with the best musicians in the world.” David Sanborn July 30, 1945 – May 12, 2024 Florida-born David Sanborn became ago-to alto saxophonist for artists including Stevie Wonder, David Bowie, the Rolling Stones, Roger Waters, Eric Clapton, Elton John, and Carly Simon, earning him six Grammys. A statement from Sanborn’s publicist said his he “put the saxophone back into rock‘n’roll”.…

Nick Zammit can remember the exact moment he knew he wanted to become a member of Battlesnake. “I got a text message saying: ‘We’re starting a rock band that’s going to be about wizards and dragons’,” says the drummer. “I saw that and I was like: ‘Yes!’” That was seven years ago, and the Sydney-based seven-piece Battlesnake have just released their second album, The Rise And Demise Of The Motorsteeple. These days the words ‘magnum’ and ‘opus’ are thrown around with abandon, but this album is about as magnum and as opus as one can possibly get, with titles like A Blessing Of Fire And Speed and Pterodactyl Firehawk dovetailing gleefully with the kind of willful disregard for fashion norms that suggests the band might not be taken seriously were…

Back in 2017, if you’d asked Joe Bonamassa about the likelihood of a fifth Black Country Communion album, he’d have been far from certain. At that time, the band had just released their fourth album, IV, and ostensibly all was going well. Critics loved it. Fans loved it. The band were proud of it. But they still had ‘day jobs’, outside commitments – other lives, in other words – that had always stood between them and the ‘supergroup’ they all loved so much. How much longer could a side project be viable? “That was fifty-fifty,” Bonamassa says now, looking back on the aftermath of IV. “And after [third album] Afterglow, that was when I would probably have given it a twenty per cent chance of ever firing up again. But…

The Allman Brothers Band’s 1971 double album At Fillmore East is often, and rightly, proclaimed rock’s greatest live release. More than 50 years on, it still sounds fresh, inspired and utterly original. It is the gold standard of blues-based rock’n’roll, but it’s easy to lose sight of what a radical album it really was. It took a lot of guts for the Allmans and their record label to release a two-LP live album as their third release. After all, at the time it came out the band were something of a commercial flop. Although they drew raves for their marathon live shows that combined the Grateful Dead’s go-anywhere jam ethos with a far superior musical precision, their first two releases caused barely a ripple. The band’s self-titled 1969 debut sold…

Redd Kross IN THE RED First album in five years from LA’s power-pop titans. It’s been 45 years since Jeff and Steve McDonald – then aged 15 and 11 respectively – decided to throw their floppy hat into the rock’n’roll ring. However, despite influencing countless bands along the way – from Nirvana to The Lemon Twigs – their back catalogue is frustratingly sporadic, the power-pop brilliance of late-80s/early-90s albums Neurotica, Third Eye and Phaseshifter submerged in the grunge tsunami. While the intervening years have been filled with all manner of intriguing side projects, the sense that the mainstream was missing out on the brothers’ melodic genius became clear with 2019’s Beyond The Door. Their self-titled ninth studio album finds them, if anything, in even finer fettle. ‘No more distractions, I…

Membrains Membrains SELF-RELEASED Spoiler alert: this is the best album of the year. I’ve probably said that about something else in the past six or so months, but I was lying. This is it, the sleaziest, wildest, head-boppingest brain melter of 2024. Membrains sound like literal lizards, encased in black leather skin, belting out party anthems for people who’ve ruined every party they’ve ever been to. Despite their name, there’s not a lot of brain work here; this is all groin thunder. And of course the best thing about it is that the Membrains could not care less what I think. Antisocial and gleefully confrontational, Membrains hits the ground running with chugging opener Genie In A Bottle and doesn’t let go of your throat until slithery closer The Hunt. Along the…

David Bowie: Rock’N’ Roll Star! PARLOPHONE Mothership of Bowie boxes covers Ziggy Stardust’s conception, birth and lift-off. For punk-presaging impact and shapeshifting socio-cultural resonance, The Rise And Fall Of Ziggy Stardust And The Spiders From Mars felt like the first truly significant rock album of the seismic 70s, precipitating David Bowie manifesting as the first modern superstar. It’s taken 52 years for the album to get its box set, and the glittering gold mine of previously unheard song doodles, demos and out-takes doesn’t disappoint. From February 1971’s hotel-room sketch So Long 60s prototyping Moonage Daydream, to Starman’s landmark Top Of The Pops performance 18 months later, this five-CD and Blu-ray disc set feels more like a heavyweight set of bonus tracks (29 previously unreleased) than the standard reissue plus out-takes.…

A crowdfunding campaign has been launched to support the recovery of Jeff ‘Mantas’ Dunne. The former Venom and current Venom Inc guitarist, 63, is currently recuperating at home in Portugal after a heart attack. Swedish pop-rockers Roxette have reunited, with singer Lena Philipsson in place of Marie Fredriksson, who succumbed to cancer five years ago. “Marie will always be irreplaceable,” says guitarist, vocalist and songwriter Per Gessle. “However, I’m lucky to have found an amazing voice and a brilliant performer in Lena.” The Quireboys release a new album, Wardour Street, on September 13 via Cadiz Music. The Spike-led version of the band includes Thunder’s Luke Morley on guitar. Joe Elliott has “an issue with the term heavy metal”, which he describes as “silly”. In fact, Def Leppard’s frontman doesn’t think…

Lindisfarne’s 1972 smash Lady Eleanor was an unlikely hit, not least because it was about snuffing it. “It’s a very mystical song, but I know it’s about death,” the Geordie band’s frontman Alan Hull recalled around the time of its first flush of success. “I wrote it almost in a trance.” Partly inspired by Edgar Allan Poe’s 1839 gothic short story The Fall Of The House Of Usher, Lady Eleanor was one of some 300 compositions Hull had amassed prior to hooking up with his gifted folk-rock bandmates. The story goes that it was while he was still working as a psychiatric nurse in Newcastle, that Hull wrote Lady Eleanor and two more Lindisfarne gems (Winter Song and Clear White Light) in a single sitting during one fateful overnight shift…

You want new rock? Oh we’ll give you new rock. Once again confirming that our portion of the musical world is a fruitful place (so fruitful, in fact, that it can be difficult to know where to begin) Classic Rock’s Hot List returns to flag up some of our favourite new tracks and on-the-rise artists worth watching out for. We’ve got everything this month: bands, solo artists, 80s vibes, prog-tastic flutes, Struts-meets-Bangles poprock, soulful troubadour stuff, the hottest new teenage guitar star in Nashville, ‘yacht doom’… (yes ‘yacht doom’ is real, and, as Bill Fisher proves on the page on the right, it’s much more than just a funny name). Check them out, and if you like what you hear there’s a good chance they’ll be playing live near you…

=1 EARMUSIC They’re getting older and, remarkably, they’re getting better again. Deep Purple’s lacklustre covers album Turning To Crime, in 2021, seemed to suggest that the band were finally a spent force. Then it got worse. Soon afterwards, long-term guitarist Steve Morse’s noble departure to care for his ill wife meant another Purple pillar had fallen. With Ian Gillan, Roger Glover, Ian Paice and Don Airey in their 70s, nobody could have forgiven them catching up on a few Midsomer Murders afternoon repeats. Instead they doubled down and knuckled down. Morse was replaced by a young pup: 45-year-old Ulsterman Simon McBride, once of Sweet Savage (who also once included Def Leppard’s Vivian Campbell). They retained producer Bob Ezrin, and with their twenty-third album they’ve restated what made them great half…

Mdou Moctar Funeral For Justice MATADOR On his seventh album, Niger guitarist Moctar holds no truck with such first-world blues concerns as cheating women and fictional hellhounds. Always a political animal, his themes on Funeral For Justice are larger and his treatments fierier than ever; the twisty riff of the title track coruscates over lyrics about the trampling of African rights; the trash-can stomp of Oh France demands satisfaction from his country’s former colonial overlords (the vocals are in Tamasheq, but the message gets through). Heavy as that sounds, the guitarist – who came up playing local weddings – remembers he is an entertainer first, and these tracks pulse with a momentum that suggests dancing – try the manic Sousoume Tamacheq, with its Morello-worthy feedback squall, or Imouhar, featuring an early…

Electrified RATTLE SHAKE RECORDS Eleven great songs on album number six. Will the numbers add up for them this time? A superb sixth studio album from Tyler Bryant & The Shakedown as the band reach a stage in their career where some of their heroes had already peaked and collapsed into a mess of their own creation. With Aerosmith it was drug-fuelled, with The Black Crowes sibling rivalry was chiefly to blame. On the upside, Blackberry Smoke’s sixth album Find A Light reached No.1 in the UK rock chart (and 31 on the Billboard list), while Led Zep’s sixth was called Physical Graffiti. But as good as Electrified is, will it catapult Tyler Bryant & The Shakedown into the arena-packing bracket? Probably not, even though less talented bands have enjoyed far…

Nige Tassell NINE EIGHT Entertaining roll call of former Midnight Runners. With a titular nod to Dexys’ Searching For The Young Soul Rebels album (a similarly punk-adjacent, West Midlands-spawned debut to Specials, that saw passionate visionary Kevin Rowland doing for brass-driven soul exactly what Jerry Dammers had done for Jamaican ska), Searching For Dexys Midnight Runners chronicles long-time fan and investigative author of Whatever Happened To The C86 Kids? Nige Tassell’s avowed quest to track down and interview literally dozens of former band members. Each protagonist gets a chapter wherein they tell their tale, from birth through Dexys years (sometimes only months) and subsequent careers to benefit-of-hindsight (if rarely rose-tinting) date. It was a man’s life in Dexys Midnight Runners, a collective that might have been sold as a gang…

Johnny Echols, co-founding guitarist of the group Love, returns with the members of Baby Lemonade, the longest-serving band of late, great Love vocalist Arthur Lee. Expect to hear Love’s classic 1967 album Forever Changes in its entirety. The last time you spoke to Classic Rock, back in 2019, was in promotion of what was being billed as a ‘farewell tour’. You explained that on the band’s previous visit, a third of the proceeds had “vanished into a hole” – and this was before Brexit. We’ve been back a couple of time since then, and the band is now playing larger Academy venues, which makes things much easier business-wise. There’s such demand, we have decided to keep on playing until people don’t want to see us any more. Could that sentiment…

“The [Springsteen] inspiration I guess comes from the energy in his music.” “The first time I put ‘freedom’ into a search engine was around the time of the 2016 US election,” recalls Magne Monroe, frontman and songwriter with up-and-coming Swedish heartland rockers Freedom. “I got so many pictures of Trump it almost put me off.” So why choose such a profoundly un-Googleable name? “It looks good on a T-shirt,” he reasons. “I just wanted something short that would work well on merchandise.” Listening to Freedom’s raw but big-hearted second album Stay Free!, you suspect it won’t be long before we start to see a proliferation of Freedom merch. The band describe themselves as ‘working-class rock for the twenty-first century’. A friend, Hellacopters frontman Nicke Andersson, came up with a more…

Remedy Pleasure Beats The Pain ESCAPE MUSIC Along with Nestor and Streetlight, Stockholm’s Remedy are among the most exciting melodic rock acts to break out of Sweden over the past couple of years. Classic Rock fell head over heels for the “big hooks, cool vocals, crunching guitars and killer production” that made the quintet’s debut so special, and had Something That Your Eyes Won’t See surfaced earlier in 2022 it would almost certainly have ranked among that year’s genre-defining releases. Crammed to the brim with glacial-smooth yet unapologetically muscular anthems, Pleasure Beats The Pain offers further proof that you can’t keep a good band down – especially a Scandinavian one. The sound is to die for, and Crying Heart and Moon Has The Night administer a powerful one-two punch. But unlike…

Focus 12 SPIRIT OF UNICORN MUSIC Old Dutch masters return. There’s a magnificent YouTube clip of Focus on BBC TV’s The Old Grey Whistle Test from December 1972 launching into what was fast becoming their calling card: Hocus Pocus, a glorious piece of musical madness that jerks between frantic heavy metal riffs, a yodelling and warbling wordless falsetto voice that rises higher and higher until it turns into a scream, and a series of insane drum breaks. You could dismiss it as a slice of novelty nonsense, except that it’s obvious that behind the frippery is a complex arrangement that requires considerable skill to perform live. To cap it all, singer and keyboard player Thijs van Leer suddenly departs from his wordless script to wish us all a Merry Christmas…

Creatures Of The Night 40th Anniversary Super Deluxe Edition UMR Brash 80s hard rock behaviour revisited in a most lavish fashion. Kiss are nobody sensible’s idea of a great albums band, but their catalogue is littered with records that are much better than generally advertised. Creatures Of The Night is a case in point. Originally released in 1982, it was the New Yorkers’ final album for Casablanca Records, and the last chance fans had to observe these handsome devils in full make-up. The following year they released Lick It Up, which had guitarist Vinnie Vincent wearing a cardigan on the cover. For that alone, Creatures Of The Night is the better deal, and this lavish 40th-anniversary (out by two years, but who’s counting?) Super Deluxe Edition does little to argue…

There was a time when British prog rock trio Emerson, Lake & Palmer were heralded, rightly, as one of the all-time prog-rock greats. There were also the times they were derided as a “waste of electricity” and the “definition of masturbatory excess and self-aggrandisement”. Ah, success can be such a fickle mistress. Success certainly found ELP. Even before the band formed, keyboard maestro Keith Emerson was a noted star in The Nice, bassist/vocalist Greg Lake the voice of King Crimson, and drummer Carl Palmer no slouch in either The Crazy World Of Arthur Brown or Atomic Rooster. But the combination of the three made for an explosively prodigious mix. Quite literally when it came to their second-ever live performance, at the 1970 Isle of Wight Festival, when the band set…