Innehållsförteckning för February 2026 från Classic Rock

As guitarist with the Nick Lowe-fronted band that bore his name, Brinsley Schwarz was a crucial figure in the emergence of 70s pub rock. He then formed The Rumour, who soon became Graham Parker’s backing band. In recent years Schwarz has followed a solo career. His latest album – all rich acoustics and mellow grooves – is Shouting At The Moon, the final instalment of a trilogy that began with 2016’s Unexpected. How did Shouting At The Moon come together? Some of these songs were partially recorded a while ago, but there was never an intention to make a trilogy. It’s just that we had songs spare and it felt like they belonged together. They’re a little less poppy this time around. “I’m terrified of people hearing my lyrics.” It…

AC/DC’s first Australian show in 10 years is reported to have caused earthquake-level vibrations in Melbourne when the band performed at the massive 100,000-capacity Melbourne Cricket Ground on November 12 as they opened the latest leg of their PWR UP tour. The noise, coupled with vibrations caused by the huge crowd bouncing in unison, triggered earthquake-measuring equipment in the city. The Australian Broadcasting Corporation reported that chief scientist at Melbourne’s Seismology Research Centre, Adam Pascale, said: “The sound waves that people were experiencing nearby and feeling something through their bodies, that’s the equivalent to what our seismographs feel. We’re picking up the ground motion, we’re not picking up the sound from the air. “So you’ve got speakers on the ground pumping out vibrations and that gets transmitted through the ground,…

“Everybody wants a song in a Martin Scorsese movie, right?” says Lemonheads frontman Evan Dando. He’s talking about The Lemonheads’ fuzzed-out, full-tilt cover of Simon & Garfunkel’s 1968 hit Mrs. Robinson, which was used in Scorsese’s 2013 film The Wolf Of Wall Street, behind a climactic scene of the lead character’s financial downfall. “Hearing our record in that movie put the whole experience in the positive column for me. It redeemed itself with Scorsese. So now I’m completely pro the whole thing of Mrs. Robinson.” It wasn’t always so. In the past, Dando said he hated the song, along with its author Paul Simon (word was that Simon hated The Lemonheads’ cover, while Art Garfunkel liked it). And despite it being a ubiquitous early-90s hit for The Lemonheads, the band…

“It’s unbelievable to think that I’ve known Phil and Brian Downey since they were members of Orphanage [back in 1969]. Along with Eric Wrixon, keyboard player of the band Them [who were fronted by Van Morrison], I first saw Orphanage completely by accident at a club called The Countdown in Dublin during my first ever acid trip. As we stood at the bar drinking this horrible cheap sherry, Eric and I didn’t even know a band would be playing. I was pretty ‘out there’, and it was the drummer, Brian, who would only have been around seventeen back then, that impressed me. Phil was out at the front – he didn’t play the bass back then – and he was wearing a white Indian kaftan. He sang Bob Dylan’s It…

“It was John Sykes who introduced me to Phil. We stayed friends after my band Magnum had toured with the Tygers Of Pan Tang, and when John joined Lizzy he invited me to see them in Manchester on the Thunder And Lightning tour. I had something on me that Phil enjoyed – nothing top-shelf, mind – and instantly we hit it off. And then he found out I was a keyboard player. John and Phil said they were going up to Nottingham Rock City to jam with Mama’s Boys and invited me along, and we did that. “After Lizzy finished, Phil and I became very close. He said: ‘Come to my place for the weekend’, and I ended up staying for nearly a year. Phil also visited me in the…

“Phil was always incredibly supportive of Mama’s Boys, the band that featured my brothers John, Tommy and me. Our paths crossed for the first time at one of Mama’s Boys’ first festival appearances, the Lisdoonvarna in County Clare in 1982. Unbeknown to us, Phil had been booked as part of a solo tour and was playing right after us. So he rolled in backstage in a limousine just as we were about to begin. “We lost our minds when, two or three songs into our set, we looked around and Philip was watching us play. That was surreal. Phil knew our manager, Joe Wynne, who was also tour manager for Horslips, and afterwards Phil told Joe: ‘Call the Thin Lizzy office on Monday’ but wouldn’t explain why. When he did…

Honesty Is No Excuse (Thin Lizzy, 1971) I love Thin Lizzy. I love their hits like Don’t Believe A Word and Jailbreak. Black Rose is another great song of theirs, also Emerald. I expect other people will have picked those songs, so I’m going to say something completely different. Let’s go all the way back to the very first [self-titled] Thin Lizzy record for Honesty Is No Excuse. It’s so great. It starts as an acoustic number and it even has Mellotron on it. What an awesome song. Mikael Åkerfeldt, Opeth Whiskey In The Jar (Non-album single, 1972) There are several others that I could have chosen, I liked Sarah and stuff, but my favourite is probably Whiskey In The Jar. I liked it because we had just met them…

BBC1 chat show Wogan wasn’t often home to bacchanalian excess. But when guests Heavy Pettin performed their Song For Europe entry Romeo on it in April 1987, things got wild. “Terry Wogan walked into our dressing room and lost his mind,” the band’s frontman Stephen ‘Hamie’ Hayman tells Classic Rock today, laughing. “It was just women and bottles of Jack Daniel’s everywhere.” As the show’s avuncular host baulked at ongoing scenes of degeneracy, Hayman took another swig of Jack and asked the show’s host: “Terry! Does this mean I can’t get your autograph for my mum?” Primetime TV or not, Heavy Pettin were appearing under duress that night. In fact they were irked and partying hard to compensate, as youths enjoying the spoils of rock’n’roll sometimes do. In the end…

Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds Live God PIAS Expansive rock’n’soul concert album elevates its studio blueprint. Arriving midway through Nick Cave’s marathon, arena-filling world tour for his 2024 album Wild God, this double-length collection inevitably falls short of the transcendent Bad Seeds concert experience, but still feels more useful than most live albums. While the album itself was an idiosyncratic and unusually sedate entry in Cave’s late-career canon, newer songs like Conversion and Bright Horses really breathe on stage, soaring aloft on Warren Ellis’s violin, moonlighting Radiohead member Colin Greenwood’s supple bass lines, and the surging blended vocals of a gospel-rock mini-choir. Indeed, these widescreen arrangements lend even punchy, snarly vintage songs like Tupelo a lavish, Elvisin-Vegas, rock’n’soul richness. Cave’s achingly tender tribute to his late ex-lover Anita Lane,…

Brian Wilson Live At The Roxy! Theatre OGLIO Unlikely comeback remastered and expanded for its 25th anniversary. Over two nights in April 2000, Brian Wilson and his incredible band performed at the intimate 500-seater Roxy Theatre in Hollywood. The accompanying live album, recorded for posterity at the end of Wilson’s first ever solo tour, confirmed something that no one saw coming: after all the personal trauma he’d endured throughout the preceding decades, the Beach Boys’ resident genius was actually back on stage and enjoying himself. He’d also founda talented group of musicians/fans who were entirely simpatico with the wide-ranging breadth of his work. The Roxy set includes all the big Beach Boys hits, and also finds room for cherished deep-cuts such as This Whole World and a stunning version of…

Jim Steinman was one of rock’n’roll’s great visionaries, a raging maniac with a head full of noise, romance and death. As a composer and producer, he brought the drama of Broadway and the scale of opera to almost everything he touched. He was Richard Wagner in a leather jacket, Phil Spector without the homicidal tendencies, the power behind the throne who refused to stay hidden. Born in New York in 1947, Steinman was weaned on rock’n’roll, girl groups and musical theatre. By the late 1960s he had summoned up his own creative touchstone in the shape of The Dream Engine, a fantastical dystopian sci-fi musical written as a college project, that would provide source material for many of his later songs. It was another musical, More Than You Deserve, that…

Billy Squier Signs Of Life CAPITOL, 1984 Big-in-the-80s rocker Billy Squier originally wanted Midas man Mutt Lange to produce his fourth album, but settled on Steinman when Lange was unavailable. It was, in hindsight, a shonky fit – the headstrong musician wrote all the songs on the record himself, with Steinman effectively relegated to the role of hired gun. His fingerprints are barely detectable on the processed pop-rock of Take A Look Behind Ya and the infamous Rock Me Tonite, and only the oddball (Another) 1984 comes even close to really capturing that Steinman-esque wizardry. A decent Billy Squier album, perhaps, but an inconsequential Jim Steinman one. Bonnie Tyler Faster Than The Speed Of Night COLUMBIA, 1983 Tyler was stuck in bouffanted country-pop purgatory before Steinman parachuted in to produce…

Paul Rodgers believes he “dodged a bullet” by not attending Bad Company’s induction to the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame last November. “My doctor absolutely forbid me to get on a plane,” he explains. “I am in the Zen phase of my life. I can sing again and play daily to a crowd of one.” The celebrated bass line to Queen’s 1980 hit Another One Bites The Dust has been voted the greatest of all time in a poll conducted by Sky Arts. The seven-note run, played by John Deacon, who wrote the song, is from one of four Queen songs recognised, with Under Pressure, Radio Gaga and Killer Queen also making the top ten. Iron Maiden bassist Steve Harris has admitted having had reservations over bringing Bruce Dickinson…

One night in 1998, Myles Kennedy was almost killed in Lordsburg, New Mexico. At the time, he was on tour fronting The Mayfield Four, supporting Creed at the start of their ascent to superstardom. Darkness fell over the bare desert town as they hurtled onwards in their 15-passenger Ford Club Wagon. Suddenly there were flames behind them. It was a dramatic turn for Kennedy, a guitar teacher back home in Spokane until he joined The Mayfield Four in ’96. His thirtieth birthday was still a year or so away. “Our tour manager, who was driving, you hear him just yell: ‘Hold on boys!’” Kennedy recalls today. “He’s holding the steering wheel for dear life. I turn around, and I see the trailer, and I see sparks and fire in the…

Welcome, Classic Rock friends old and new, to our first Hot List of 2026! For any first-timers, this is our regular space for celebrating the best new tracks to watch out for in the rockosphere – highlighting a bunch of cool new, rising and some established bands in the process. The people you want to have on your rock radar, and the tracks you need to hear. Happily, 2026 kicks off on a strong note, as we found when collating this month’s selection platter. We’ve got (among other tasty things) psychedelic delights, stoner riffs, party tunes, retro Swedes, and the buzzy teenagers picked by Iggy Pop to open for his last US tour. Enjoy! Lovehoney Star New York rock beatniks Lovehoney return after a couple of quiet years on the…

Bastard Cross Cross Ripper MORBID AND MISERABLE Venom didn’t invent black metal (Bathory did), but they sure as fuck invented black thrash, which has made an incredible comeback in the past few years. Philly’s Bastard Cross are the rip-ridingest of this new wave, a blood-gargling explosion of leather, spikes, chains, boots, (inverted) crosses, runny mascara, Satan worship, old porno mags, abedbug-infestedcouchortwo, bullet belts, poorly rendered drawings of skeletons riding tanks, teenage drug use, vomit, switchblades, cloaks, Judas Priest ticket stubs, Ghostrider comics, that one bootleg where the crowd wants to kill Discharge, cemetery photo-shoots, the cigarette case version of No Remorse, zombie movies on VHS, sweat, ragged old posters of Lita Ford from 1984, well-worn HP Lovecraft paperbacks, punk credibility, crackly Slayer albums inherited from alcoholic dads, and plenty of reckless,…

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Alexander Larman NEW MODERN Commendable account of how Bowie bounced back from ridicule to reverence. Adecade on from Bowie’s death, the common remark that the world went to pot after he passed seems less a quip and more a fact every day. By way of solace, however, the books about him keep coming. It’s a crowded market, and the USP of Alexander Larman’s admirable entry is that it focuses almost exclusively on the second half of Bowie’s career, from the derided Tin Machine to the eulogised Blackstar album. It asks and answers how he climbed back from critical opprobrium to being recognised again as the thin white nonpareil. (We tend to forget how low his stock had fallen after his late-80s missteps. If you tell people now that you saw…

Meat Loaf Bat Out Of Hell CLEVELAND INTERNATIONAL/EPIC, 1977 The voice belonged to Meat Loaf, the technical sorcery was producer Todd Rundgren’s, but the songs and the mad vision were very much Steinman’s. Bat Out Of Hell’s seven songs are gloriously overwrought and overblown – this is Springsteen’s Born To Run reimagined by Richard Wagner, sung by a sweat-drenched quarterback in a frilly shirt while Dr Frankenstein hammers a grand piano to dust. From the immortal title track to For Crying Out Loud’s cry to the heavens, Steinman’s opera of sex and death remains the ultimate benchmark by which rock’n’roll’s grand, ridiculous ambition should forever be judged. Meat Loaf Bat Out Of Hell II: Back Into Hell VIRGIN, 1993 It’s one of rock’s great redemption stories: two old friends repair…

Meat Loaf Braver Than We Are CAROLINE INTERNATIONAL, 2016 It was touted as Meat Loaf and Steinman’s first album together since Bat Out Of Hell II more than 20 years earlier. In truth, Steinman wasn’t awell man and Meat Loaf’s voice was shot. Braver Than We Are pulls together a bunch of old Steinman songs in an attempt to recapture past glories, but the two main dudes are shadows of the men they once were, and producer Pauk Crook is no Todd Rundgren. All the good will in the world can’t mask the fact it’s a stinker. Poignantly, it would be the final album that either man was involved in – Steinman died in April 2020 and Meat Loaf just 10 months later.…

West Midlands band Fury have self-released four albums since 2014. Frontman and guitarist Julian Jenkins and bassist Becky Baldwin preview Interceptor, their best record to date, which they hope will bring their long overdue break. Fury are unashamedly a heavy metal band. Julian Jenkins: Yeah. Heavy metal, rock‘n’roll… whatever you want to call it. We are very much inspired by the classic metal of Iron Maiden, Metallica and Motörhead, but we take those influences and put our own spin on them. Interceptor stands head and shoulders above what Fury have done before. The occasional keyboards and an imaginative production really enhance the many melodic elements. JJ: We see Interceptor as a bit of a new start for Fury. Nyah [Ifill] has been on previous albums, but this is the first…

MAIDEN’S HALF-CENTURY PARTY CONTINUES AT KNEBWORTH Iron Maiden’s gig at the London Stadium was among the very finest shows of 2025. So why not do it all again, this time at a stately home in Hertfordshire on July 11, with hand-picked special guests The Darkness, The Hu, Airbourne and The Almighty? Why not indeed. METALLICA HIT STADIUMS IN THE UK Metallica extend their record-breaking M72 world tour into its fourth year with in-the-round performances at stadiums in Dublin, Glasgow, Cardiff and London. Support comes from Gojira, Pantera, Knocked Loose and Avatar. These will be very special shows indeed. THE RETURN OF BON JOVI Following the vocal problems then the much-publicised vocal-cord surgeries Jon Bon Jovi underwent, Bon Jovi (the band) have lined up a summer of festival appearances on both…

Aerosmith have scored their first ever UK No.1 album thanks to a collaborative EP with Yungblud, One More Time. Its five tracks included the singles My Only Angel and Wild Woman, plus a 2025 mix of the band’s golden oldie Back In The Saddle. The project marks Aerosmith’s first new music in more than a decade. Steven Wilson is backing ongoing plans for Hand. Cannot. Erase, his fourth solo album, to be adapted for the stage. Released in 2015, it tells the tragic tale of a young woman found in her apartment, in front of the television, having lain there for three years after her death. “I’m following the development with great interest, and writer and director Oliver Britten has my full support,” says the Porcupine Tree singer. Red Hot…

Lorraine Lewis is proud to have been one of the few female hard rock singers on the late-80s Sunset Strip scene. “I wanted to be the female David Lee Roth – I wanted to be in-your-face,” says the Femme Fatale singer, whose band released one self-titled album in 1988 before splitting up. Thirty-eight years later, Lewis has resurrected the band name and put together a new line-up, and in 2025 released the singles Living Like There’s No Tomorrow and Bad Love (the latter featuring guest guitarist Bumblefoot), with an album to follow some time this year. Why did you decide to relaunch Femme Fatale now? It’s who I am. Femme Fatale was the path I always set out to do. I was in Vixen [from 2019 to 2024] and I…

On August 23, 2024, at an open-air arena in Taunton, Status Quo played what’s likely to be their final concert. Afterwards the group sold their gear and the individual members went their separate ways. In the aftermath, having put more than six decades of his life into Quo (and its various forerunners), final original and principal Francis Rossi was left in a quandary. The singer and lead guitarist had come to an arrangement with Rick Parfitt that in the event of one of them dying, the other could continue as Quo. Stung by criticism of him electing to do so following rhythm guitarist and singer Parfitt’s passing in 2016, and also for the studio set Backbone three years later, even before the Taunton swansong Rossi had devised a new business…

We’ve been talking for half an hour when the California sun finally gets too much for Sammy Hagar. “Don’t get me wrong, I love it,” he says, squinting as the light hits his face. “But my eyes don’t.” He leans back in his chair and grabs a pair of sunglasses, which he pops on. “Now this is what you were expecting, right?” he booms, beaming a million-watt rock-star smile It is. Shades or not, the Red Rocker is the good life made flesh. The 78-year-old has lived the life us mere mortals can only dream of. He’s had wild success both as a solo artist and as a member of Montrose, Van Halen and Chickenfoot. Then there’s his insanely lucrative side-gig as a tequila magnate. But as far as super-rich,…

Alter Bridge NAPALM More of the same, but who’s complaining when their same is this good? It might all be down to their everyman persona, but the greatest trick Alter Bridge have ever pulled off is how easy they make all this look and sound, even though their timeless take on classic rock is often as complex, technically, as it gets. It takes a lot of skill and talent to make it seem so effortless. And it remains true on this new record – the blood, sweat and tears that undoubtedly went into it have vanished under the sheen of a collection of songs that sound like they’ve always been there. Wisely, they haven’t messed with the Alter Bridge formula on their eighth album. Going down the self-titled route is,…

Same Drug New High STEAMHAMMER Bringing Scandinavian action rock (back) to the Man. Gluecifer are like that one friend you had 25 years ago who pops over on a Friday afternoon just to see what’s up, and by Sunday morning you’re missing an eye and dying of alcohol poisoning in a field somewhere. They are the ultimate bad influence, the wayward punk creeps lurking in every dark alley, ready to stab your guts with a flick knife just for kicks. Since their inception in ’94, the Oslo bruisers have delivered some of the most incendiary rock’n’roll ever produced in the goddamn world, never mind Scandinavia, with legendary albums like Soaring With The Eagles At Night, Ridin’ The Tiger, and the evergreen Dick Disguised As Pussy that enflamed loins and made…

The Studio Albums 1970-1977 DEMON Three chords and the truth with a cloak full of eagles. Dumping hippie-folk and going electric with an unprecedented intensity of hip-flipping boogaloo, T.Rex made eight albums (collected here). Generally, two of these – Electric Warrior and The Slider – are universally acclaimed. Two more – Tanx and Zinc Alloy And The Hidden Riders Of Tomorrow – are heinously underrated works of genius. The others, the debut (as a duo) and the last three before Marc Bolan’s death, are okay. Don’t worry, we’re not about to claim Dandy In The Underworld was any kind of Blackstar. But while, yes, T.Rex were one of the greatest singles groups of all time, these albums – even the sketchy ones – contain riches that bands higher up the…

Mr Bad Guy UNIVERSAL On its 40thanniversary, Freddie’s solo debut remains flawed but sporadically glorious. Recorded between Queen commitments and released three months before Live Aid, Freddie Mercury’s uneven 1985 debut solo album arrived to mostly lukewarm reviews and had only modest commercial success. Four decades later, this new deluxe vinyl repressing of the 2019 remastered mix does not make a case for Lost Classic status, but it is a pleasing reminder that even in flippant, throwaway, disco-jazz cabaret mode Mercury could still muster flashes of pop-rock genius. He claimed at the time that he made Mr Bad Guy to explore musical territory unavailable to his hard-rocking day-job band. But with hindsight the apple did not fall too far from the tree. Apart from dialling down the Wagnerian guitar solos,…

The Tremolo Diaries: Life On The Road And Other Diseases Justin Currie NEW MODERN You think you’ve got it tough? “I am dead inside,” Justin Currie sighs during Del Amitri’s 2023 US tour with Semisonic and Barenaked Ladies. A typical rock star whine? Hardly. As this relentlessly downbeat diary of those dates and a subsequent European jaunt with Simple Minds details, Currie has too much to ponder. Not only is he afflicted with the awful Parkinson’s disease, where merely shaving is “less ablution, more act of humiliation”, but also his once vivacious partner, Emma, is marooned in a care home following a severe stroke. And his band are fading: “end-of-the-pier entertainment driven by dribs and drabs of money, milking it one last turn around the block. Of course, it’s not…

Jim Steinman Bad For Good EPIC, 1981 Tired of waiting for a burnt out Meat Loaf to recover from the considerable excesses of Bat Out Of Hell, Steinman decided to record the songs he’d written for the proposed follow-up himself. At its best, his lone solo album is even more outrageous than its predecessor – the title track palpitates, Stark Raving Love exhorts, and Love And Death And An American Guitar almost implodes under the weight of its own spoken-word insanity. The vocals are the weak spot, as Steinman and studio ringer Rory Dodd try and fail to out-Meat Loaf Meat Loaf. The definition of a flawed masterpiece. Meat Loaf Dead Ringer EPIC, 1981 Following up the insane success of Bat Out Of Hell was tough, especially after four long…