WOW - WHAT A RUSH
It's
amazing how some people expect you to make something
out of nothing. I mean, I'm always here to plug a good band,
but it would be nice to have something to go on.
When you have nothing to say it really is
difficult to make a news item. But I remember what good ol'
Tommy Vance said many rockin' moons ago - "I
just let the music do the talkin'". (I think Aerosmith
had a similar idea). And
no amount of chat is gonna make a bad
band sound good. But if you have a
good band booked,
and punters are few on the ground, it
does make good sense
to at least shout about it. Then, if
the punters don't turn up and it was a
crackin'
gig; you may be out of pocket
but you can get a massive banner printed
reading "TOLD
YOU SO". [For fuck's
sake, Nige, get to the
bloody point]. Well it's THIS
SATURDAY
at
The Three Tuns -
yes, that hot, sweaty
but oh so
atmospheric venue,
hosting a
brilliant RUSH
Tribute - RUSHED.
Rushed
had the honour of
headling the
Rush Eucon 2020
which took place
over
two days in
October 2020
at Langtry’s –
The Royal
Hotel, Crewe.
[So
how much to
get in then
Nige?] I
hear you all
say (I've got
really good
ears).
As
if you don't
know Paul
by now - it's
TOTALLY
FREE. Let's
make this a
gig that
Paul doesn't
lose money
on....... so
get along and
have a few
drinks.
It's
this Saturday
(the 26th)
RUSHED, on
around 9. You
know you'll
regret not
going.........
That
okay for you
Paul?
Did me best
mate, no pics,
no blurb -
just "give us
a push for Rushed
this
Saturday". I
mean, c'mon...
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Just heard from Karen at The Magnesia Bank in North
Shields. The Stevestock
Sunday
on September 12 managed to raise
over £1,000 for the McMillans Cancer
charity. Loadsa
pics on their Facebook page.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
As only one (that's just one!) band has asked for
their video to be added to our "LOCAL ROCK BAND
VIDEOS" then I have the option of either leaving the UK/DC video filmed at Trillians linked for ever -
or scrapping the idea completely and going back to
various videos under the title "CELEBRATING ROCK AND
METAL". er . . . wonder what I should do.
I'm quite happy to help bands
who want to help themselves.....
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Sunday morning shout goes out to 'Brummy'
for pointing out that the ticket prices shown for Trillians ticketed gigs on
our (normally trustworthy) Gig Listings page do not show the full price. So I have painstakingly checked every price
and added the fees so what is shown is
exactly what you pay. Cheers Brummy. A full 20/20 for
you then.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I know it has been only a few days but
I was beginning
to think our
local bands just didn't want any publicity. The
new 'LOCAL ROCK BAND VIDEOS' link [over to the
right] garnered absolutely no attention. I
thought it would be a good place for local Rock
bands
to show off what they can do - and was just
about to admit the idea was another turkey;
then just last night (Wed)
Bon from UK/DC sent
in a link to a live video taken at their
recent Trillians
gig. Also won't do any harm to build up
some more interest for The Tynedale Beer
Festival where they are headlining. So
(and I'm sure Bon and the lads will be
pleased to hear) it will stay there until
some other bunch of publicity-seeking
Rockers take the opportunity to showcase
their wares.
So c'mon guys, I'm
trying me best to help
out 'ere
.............................
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The Tynedale
Beer Festival gig with headliners UK/DC and hard on their
heels Deep Purple In Rock doesn't look like
there will be door entry. Tickets are still available - but only
for the next 24 hours. And the time now . . .
beep beep beep . . . is 12.33pm on Thursday 2nd.
And if you're interested in watching the progress
being made at the festival site then click here.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
It's always sad when a quality
local rockin' band decides to call it a day. Even more so when
it seems there are not many (if any, dare we say?)
bands able or willing to step into those
aforementioned shoes.
But on a
totally unrelated note: make the most of ROCK SOLID in the
next few
months..............
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The advert says it
all but . . . well, you'd be
surprised, so we repeat
the deets here:
Blackhall
Community Centre Hesleden Road TS27
4LG
Saturday 13th November 2021
Doors
6-45 curfew
11-30
Tickets
£10 from Centre or £11
online from
Ents24..
And
please note that this is a ticketed
event only - there will be NO walk ups for
this gig.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Sunday Sep 5 - £14.45
https://www.tynedalebeerfestival.org.uk/tickets
1.45pm Blues Jam
3.15pm Ma Kelly's Boys
5.30pm Deep Purple in Rock
7.45pm UK/DC
Tynedale Beer Festival, Tynedale Park,
Corbridge
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
UPDATE ON THE UPDATE: All positions now filled [8.58pm]
UPDATE: The Crook Hotel for Sunday has just been
sorted. [5.40]
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
GIGS HERE IF YOU WANT 'EM
Didn't realise that all the North-East bands
had all the bookings they need! There are three pubs
that are still wanting bands for this weekend - one for
tonight, one for tomorrow and one for Monday. Keep
checking our Stop Press page for gigs.........
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Life is just choc full
of disappointment and I'm afraid we have more
for people who hold tickets and are looking
forward to the Mercury and May concert at Boldon on
Friday September 3. This gig has been cancelled
and rescheduled for January of next year. Riffs
understands that full refunds will be given and
the duo are most apologetic for any
inconvenience the cancellation has caused. [pic is from a previous Boldon
gig]
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
FREE
CONVENTION FRIDAY NOVEMBER 19
 This year's event
will see all three very
fine bands covering FREE's
material in depth. WALK
IN MY SHADOW is
dedicating their whole set to
tracks from the 'Fire & water'
and 'Highway' albums as a belated
50th Anniversary tribute. The
night should make for a very fine
fitting tribute to our favourite
band: Free.
This year the event is taking
place at The Cullercoats Club; this is
a smaller venue than both the Park
Hotel and The Wallsend Memorial
Hall, but it was
decided to change venues this year
to create a more
intimate atmosphere
with a great
sound and a good view from all
seats. The club has
a limited capacity of 200 and
there are just 76 tickets
remaining to be sold, so early booking is
advisable.
Tickets are £15 from
club, £20 door, or £16.50 via the
following link Ents24 https://www.ents24.com/.../the-annual-free.../6227692.
There are a few tickets available
from the club itself and anyone
who can't pay by card or visit the
club can contact Bill by
telephone 07948017380
or 01282868352.
Door open 6.45 PM all
times are approximate
7.15 THE STEALER
Excellent Band making their first
Convention appearance performing
rarer Free material
from all the albums.
8.15
Raffle collection during Film
show.
8.40
WALK IN MY SHADOW -
Guitarist Dave Morris performed
with Rabbit at the 1991 Free
Convention. The
band is excellent and will be
performing tracks from the Fire
& water, Highway and My
Brother Jake sessions as a
belated 50th Anniversary tribute.
9,30
Charity raffle drawn and Auction
with some prizes donated by Paul
Rodgers.
10.00
ABSOLUTE FREE -
Covering classic Free from all the
albums (the band went down a storm
in 2019)
11.30
Finish.
freeconvention@aol.com
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Watts, who has been with the band
since the early 1960s heyday, pulled
out of their US tour just weeks ago
following an unspecified medical
procedure.
It was initially reported that he
was taking time to recover with the
band saying they hoped to reunite
with him again soon.
However his publicist confirmed
today that Charlie had passed away
"peacefully" surrounded by his loved
ones.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
FORGET TICKETS - EVERYONE
IN FREE!
 For
any Bon Jovi
fans
out there (I'm saying nowt) if you want to see
Bon
Jovi Forever in December in
Middlesbrough it will cost you £11.75 for
a ticket; if you were in a
mind to travel to Shildon it would
cost you £13.95 a ticket. But Paul Tuns
has wangled for them to play tonight
(Friday 20) and the entrance
fee is . . . wait for it . .
ABSOLUTELY
NOTHING!.Just waltz straight
in with a beaming smile
that says "Wow,
I've just saved a
shitload of cash".
But, as good a
deal as this is, Paul
has gone even one
better, classic
Rock afficianados
The
Kill is
support
band. So,
both fans should set
their sights
on The Three Tuns,
Sheriffs Hill, Gateshead and, well, as much as you can I suppose, enjoy
the sounds of
Bon
Jovi.......
I,
of course,
will be
enjoying
myself much,
much more as I
will be banging
myself on the
head
with a hammer,
interspersed
with bouts of
watching some
paint dry. OVER - YOU MISSED IT!!!
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
UPDATE: Final
total for the Stan Morson charity night is a
very respectable £3277.50
Wow, just WOW.
‘Morning
Nige,
Last Friday night was Stan Morson’s brain
cancer charity gig with the Sneaky Blinders playing
in Dubmire club. I’d hoped to be able to give you a
total raised for the evening, but on Saturday the total
hadn’t been finalised, it was standing at £2815.00 when
I last heard and the organisers confidently expected it
to be over 3 grand by the end. The band played their
usual blinder, but the set was definitely geared more
toward the less Rock inclined audience than us
metalheads. The gig had been sold out for months and it
did my heart good to see so many friends from gigs in
both the old Buffs days and the Kepier hall. Stan was
there, larger than life despite his illness, and loving
being back in the heart of his community again.
Unless the asteroid of doom falls in the interim, I’ll
be in the Glendale on Friday...
Dave.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
RIFFS BECOMES TRANSPARENT
Don't think I need
to state how annoyingly frustrating it is to see
"Tickets £xx" and to think
what a good value gig this is - only to log
on to a ticket site to find that all
sorts of 'fees' are added that brings the
price way way higher.
[Ah, no, well, you ordered on a weekday so
that's an extra £1, and you ordered via a
mobile
phone, so that's another £1,
and it's so expensive and
time consuming for me to click this
button to send out the ticket so
. . . ] Now, Riffs can
do sod all about the price - but
we at least can be honest about it.
I've done a bit of
checking and (head bowed low) our
Listings page (and indeed
adverts below) are prime examples of
this anomaly. So, from this
second on, any gigs where tickets
are available MUST show
the FULL price
for purchase. I will
personally check and
make sure
that the
price stated
on our
Listings page
is the price
you pay. Any
readers
spot a price
I've missed
then
email me
immediately on
riffsonline@gmail.com.
And
talking
of honesty,
heaven knows
why this
age-old joke
sprung to
mind:
"Hey, John, you'll never believe what happened to me last night. I
was in the pub
and got
talking to this
gorgeous girl with a stunning hourglass figure and after a few drinks we went back
to my
place. She
couldn't
wait to show
me her
stocking-clad
body
and lacy bra,
it was then she let slip she was under age. After a few
seconds of
deliberation I
told her to get dressed, called her a taxi and she left"
"That's some story, strange ending though."
"Why, what would you have done?"
"Exactly
the same as
you, except I
wouldn't have
lied about it"
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
As things have been very
ballooney of late it may be worth a mensh
that the August
28th gig at Shildon Civic Hall is not only going
ahead but even though tickets are still
available, you can pay on door for 15
smackers. Here is a reminder of
what's on offer . . .
SHILDON
ROCKS 2021!
August Bank holiday weekend sees 3
of the best rock tribute bands in
the country arrive at the Civic Hall
in Shildon (Saturday 28th).
Kicking the night off in style is MA KELLYS
BOYS,
tribute to the mighty Status Quo.
These guys play the Quo boogie from
the golden years of '70 to '76 when
the band were true Rockers.
including the classics Roll Over Lay Down, Down Down, Caroline,
etc.
Next up it’s
I’M MAIDEN
from Hull, tribute to the rock metal
gods Iron Maiden. Playing tracks
from the early days of Di’Anno right
through to the present day this band
have been electrifying audiences
with their sound, energy and
attention to detail in recreating
the very essence of a true Maiden
gig!
And bringing the night to its
dramatic conclusion is ACDC GB.
Well established now on the tribute
circuit these lads are back by
popular demand at the Civic Hall.
After their last sell out show here
they once more take to the stage to
deliver their breathtaking Brian
Johnson era performance in tribute
to the legendary Aussie rockers.
Expect nothing less than a full on,
hard hitting, non-stop Rock n Roll
train on the Highway to Hell!
Get your tickets from
http://skiddle.com/e/35813050 (+ fees it's £14.50),
or the venue box office 01388
772902. £15 door.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
A PUNTER'S EYE
VIEW - WITCHKRAFT AT THE GLENDALE
‘Morning Nige,
I walked down to the Glendale last night (so
good to be able to just nip round the corner
to hear live music!) to see Witchkraft.
3 out of the 4 guys on the stage last night
were deps as far as I could make out, the
drummer & bassist are out of Sticky
Fingers and the singer was out of the Codgers.
I’d reckon the place was about 75% full,
guessing 70 – 80 punters; no masks, no social
distancing or capacity limits. There was hand
jell everywhere and standing at the bar was
prohibited, although queuing to get served was
okay. I’d hazard a guess that all the punters
in there were of an age to be eligible for
both jabs should they so desire and I didn’t
feel vulnerable or uncomfortable at any time.
I was especially pleased that the club got a
good turnout. The Buffs and the Comms
Rock nights in August was always a struggle to
get bums on seats what with holidays and folk
staying at home to have a few cans in the
garden with a BBQ. The folk I spoke to last
night were happy to be out listening to live
Rock and it was good to meet up with friends
you hadn’t seen for getting on for 18 months.
When the band started their sound check with
Purple’s “Perfect Strangers” there seemed to
be a collective intake of breath to drink in
that which sustains so many of us. It was
magnificent.'
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Have had more than a handful of emails from
punters referencing the 'Where Have All the
People Gone?' And a few of these have lambasted
me for not mentioning their views on this News
page. So here we go: The bottom line is they do
not intend to be at a gig where people who are
fully or partially vaccinated rub shoulders with
those who are not, and therefore could be
harbouring the virus. Most of the email senders
are in favour of a 'pass' or 'Covid certificate'
to prove full virus protection. "If
someone can guarantee me that everyone in the
pub has had two injections,
then I will attend a gig like a shot" said
one. "Why should I go to my local pub if
anyone there could have Covid?" said
another.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
WHERE HAVE ALL THE PEOPLE
GONE?: A reply
Judging by the reply from Paul
Smith from The Three Tuns
and The Schooner in
Gateshead, it's not just St
Peter's Social Bar in Newcastle that suffers
from poor attendances. Here's what Paul has to say:
"I’m afraid it’s just what it is. We had the Bryan
Adams Experience for £550 - we got 18 in; we had a
60s tribute from Glasgow paid £550 - got 9 in.
People say they missed live music but they’ve not
come back." Worrying times indeed.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
HARTLEPOOL
HOSTS NWOBHM NIGHT
  
[l to r: Battleaxe,
Troyen, Rhabstallion]
For those interested in the classic bands of
NWOBHM (and I would wager the majority
of you reading this) then circle
this date in your calendar: Saturday September 25 as no less
than BATTLEAXE,
TROYEN and RHABSTALLION
are sharing the same stage for an evening of Classic Rock and
Metal courtesy of Hartlepool
Steelies.
In the early 1980s Sunderland band
Battleaxe
toured with Saxon and also
played with bands such as Twisted
Sister, Anvil, Madam X, Girlschool and
many more. http://nwobhm.com/battleaxe/
Troyen first graced the
NWOBHM scene in 1981. Despite a
promising arrival the band were
sadly to part ways late on in 1982
due to financial issues and related rock and roll stuff, even
though they had played approximately
130 gigs and supported Spider,
Girlschool, Rhabstallion and Diamond
Head amongst others. They
re-formed in 2014 after 32 years
apart. https://www.podomatic.com/podcasts/molten-metal-show/episodes/2021-07-21T14_52_01-07_00
Halifax based
Rhabstallion shared the stage
with bands such as Hanoi
Rocks, Diamond Head, Stampede,
Saxon and French band Trust.
These guys dominated the scene by
pumping out their rock -
honest, hard and fast...
http://rhabstallion.com
If
this
night is
a
succes there
could just be
more in the pipeline.
7.30pm start
tickets are £8.80 on
Ents24 or £10 door.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
WHERE HAVE ALL
THE PEOPLE GONE?
Just got an interesting
email from Tony from St
Peter's Social Bar in Newcastle.
He's asking why, when he provides "top class
bands - free, with cheap beer, yet we still
have plenty available seating and space!".
His venue has plenty of great bands and lots of
seating with no chance of rubbing shoulders with
strangers yet still people are wary. He
continued: "Despite bands crying out for
venues and seemingly punters wanting to go
see/listen we are still not usually getting
anticipated numbers."
He asks if other venues are in the same boat. Be
interesting to hear of any other venues who are
struggling . . .
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
A shout out
to those who have been affected
by the pandemic in such a way that their
self-esteem has been shot, they suffer
from anxiety, and find it difficult to
socialise.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
 Well, if this poster hasn't got
your Rock
buds tingling then I don't know what will - this
is a helluva line up. I took some pics of Ma Kelly's Boys
when they appeared at the Crook
Hotel before 'the bad times',
and I was most impressed by their performance.
No spring chickens and they played all
the better for it. But after that dose
of 3-bar Blues, be
knocked
metaphorically
unconscious
by the
timeless Deep Purple in Rock. Then
hang on to
your horned
hats for
a
tribute to the best era of AC/DC
performed by UK/DC. But there's more ["surely
not Nige" I hear you cry as one] as the
whole kit and kaboodle (not
exactly sure what a kaboodle
is - must look that one up)
is in support of local
charities and community
sport. Organiser Chris
told Riffs: "Our Sunday
special is themed NHS
Day where we will be
inviting over 500 NHS
staff to be our guests."
I'm not quite sure how it
would be possible to make
this day any better.
Yes, I know what you're
saying "only to have
you there, Nige".
I'm
just so embarrassed by
your kindness.
 
[Ma Kelly's Boys left,
UK/DC right]
So get along - Sunday Sep 5 - £14.45
https://www.tynedalebeerfestival.org.uk/tickets
1.45pm Blues Jam
3.15pm Ma Kelly's Boys
5.30pm Deep Purple in Rock
7.45pm UK/DC
Tynedale Beer Festival, Tynedale Park,
Corbridge
/----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Thurs 22; Just heard via Lenny Tube that the Crook Hotel is
shut due to staff having to isolate . . .
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
I'm sure I don't need to mention how volatile gigs
are at the moment, so please check our Listings
page right up until your hour of departure because . . . well,
you just never know.............
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Just been informed today - Friday 9.55am (25th) - that
the Philadelphia Music and Beer Festival
has been moved to September.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Not only did I not have any decent pics of the
band who
are due to play at Stan
Morson's charity event on August
13, but they have apparently had a slight line-up
change (correct me if I'm wrong here Neil). So I was
unable to include any pics
of those cheeky
little Sneaky
Blinders on the earlier
article. But, as is always the case .
. . y'know; feast, famine,
buses, etc. thanks to Neil I now have a few to
choose from. So here are just
three. I'll admit, visually they may not
set the pixels alight, but if
they can get not one
favourable review from the Seaham
Silverback -
but two, then that'll do for
me. And may I remind you
this is a charity event so
no-one will be walking away
with full pockets - it's all
going to cancer charities.
You don't even need to give
generously on the night -
just turn the fuck up!
Which, incidentally, is what
I have been known to shout at many
rock gigs.
  
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
DYING JUST FOR
YOU
  Well, it feels good
(just like I knew it would) to have some News coming
in - and even better as it's good news.
Hands up all those who would like a Sabbath
tribute? Wow - that's a lot of hands. Hands up who
wants a North-East rock legend on lead guitar and
vocals? Again, lotsa hands. But not just that, to join
him we have another two of our very own highly
talented and experience musicians. (Ffs Nige, just
tell us who the fuck the band is) Okay, okay, it's Guitar/Vocs
- Russ Tippins,
Bass - Kev Laverty,
Drums - Tom Atkinson,
and together they are gigging as SAB3. They are all set to play the entire Master Of
Reality (to celebrate the 50th anniversary), plus more
classic Sabbath tracks. They have gigs in for July and,
to save you the hassle and hard work of moving your
cursor all the way up to 'gig listings' I'll add them
here:.
Tyne Bank Brewery,
Newcastle - Sunday 18th July - Tickets £10 from sab3tickets.com or
the band's Facebook page
The Forum, Darlington -
Wednesday 21st July - Tickets £10 from The Forum (01325
363135) or ticketweb.uk
Hartlepool Steelies
(with Twister) - Saturday
24th July - Ticket details tba.
You can actually catch drummer Tom around the
region doing his solo acoustic set - in fact he's on at
The Schooner this Friday (25th).
Check for updates on their Facebook page: www.facebook.com/sab3official
I'm hoping the band will let Riffs know of any
updates and I'll announce them here too. Hope they do
better than Sneaky Blinders from whom I'm still
awaiting a pic....(pics just in. Will get
them added to this page later today).
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
YOU SNEAKY LITTLE
BLINDER
  Regular
readers (hey, and I'm talking to both of you) will know that I
have great admiration and respect for venues and
bands who not only go out of their way, but
also expend time, effort and expense on putting on
a charity event. How many of us really
can say that we have given
what we can, with absolutely no expectation
of gaining anything in return?
So without further ado (yeah, c'mon
Nige, get to the point) I mention
Friday August 13 when the Sneaky
Blinders
intend to belt out what they do best
in honour of the founder
and runner of Buffalos
Rock Club - STAN MORSON. Earlier on this year
he was diagnosed with a brain
tumour and a lot of
well-wishers from the music
fraternity wanted to help
but . . .
well, I'll let Dave Fulton
explain:
"with the
Covid restrictions it
proved all but
impossible to get a
venue."
He continued; "Local
guys, The Sneaky
Blinders, who've
been reviewed a
couple of times on
Riffs, are
putting on a gig 13th
August with proceeds
going to charities
that have helped,
and continue to help
people with brain
cancers."
Just
to underline, here are
details:
Dubmire
Club, Wynyard
St, Fence
Houses, Houghton
le Spring DH4
6LS.
Friday, 13th
August, The
Sneaky Blinders.
Tickets £5.00
Nice pic of Sneaky Blinders on the way - hopefully!
--------------------------------------------------------------------
DISASTER AT THE THREE TUNS
Riffs is cock-a-hoop (well, with age creeping up it's
more hoop than cock) to hear from
Paul Tuns
who,
despite running
one of the leading Rock venues in
the region, Riffs has heard very little from recently.
All venues have had their ups and down and The Three
Tuns in Gateshead has been no exception. It was Alan from
Fizzyfish who
mentioned to me not so long back that the band had taken their
wacky rockiness all over Teesside and the
North-East but "d'y'know Nige, I'm not gonna
rest till I've played The Tuns". I'm
pleased to say they did and the band are all
the better for it. But back to the Tuns, and
last Saturday (19th) they had Punk Pop Disaster
(no, I haven't either),
so I popped on to Youtube where I
found them playing at 2019s Christmas Rocks at
the 02 in Newcastle...... but
that's history
now, but pop on
to the
Listings page and
check out the Tuns
for future
gigs...........
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
 A
socially-distanced
Qween member
donates a "He Will
Rock You" t-shirt to
Hartlepool Hospice recently to mark
the release of the afore-mentioned single
penned by members Billy West and Rob
Javan.
"It's the 30th anniversary of
Freddie's passing this year, so we
thought it fitting that 50% of all
sales money go to
fundraising - in particular Alice
House Hospice in Hartlepool" said Rob.
"Billy has been a professional
entertainer and a Freddie Mercury
tribute artist for over 30 years,
and I think that speaks for
itself. The feedback so far has
been positive and we hope it's gonna be
a big success. We have some
major concerts coming up and
look forward to people's
reaction when we play it live."
The track is available on
Spotify here.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
MONDAY JUNE 14: The lifting of lockdown restrictions
has officially been delayed for at least one month. Gigs are unaffected
and, if you are sensible and adhere to precautions
arranged by the venues, there will be nothing
stopping you enjoying a great evening's
entertainment.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Metallica are suing
London-based insurance market
Lloyd's of London
for damages from their postponed 2020 tour dates.
There were a handful of shows they had booked in South
America that were canceled due to the COVID-19
pandemic.
According to NBC Los Angeles, Lloyd's of London has
refused to compensate Metallica for the monetary
losses they've endured as a result of having to
postpone the tour.
The six-date run was set to take place in April of
2020 in Chile, Argentina and Brazil, and would have
served as Metallica's first set of shows since James
Hetfield's rehab stint in late 2019. Greta
Van Fleet were set to be
the opening act.
Prior to the tour, Metallica purchased a
"cancellation, abandonment and non-appearance
insurance" policy in case of any potential
postponement or cancelations. Due to the worldwide
lockdowns, the tour was postponed.
However, Lloyd's of London cited the policy's
communicable disease exclusion and refused to
reimburse the band for their losses "based on an
unreasonably restrictive interpretation of the
policy," the suit reads.
The band filed the lawsuit Monday (June 7) at the Los
Angeles Superior Court, claiming that Lloyd's of
London committed a breach of contract by denying them
compensation, and they are seeking unspecified damages
as a result.
Metallica have not yet announced the rescheduled dates
for the South American tour. As of now, the only shows
they have announced for 2021 are a few appearances at
festivals in the fall.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Can't say it's much of a surprise
(given the numpties not adhering to the simple rules) but it's
now looking more than likely that restrictions will
NOT be lifted this month. Gigs will be going ahead
but Covid rules will apply. Just be sensible.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Sobering fact: There has been more
deaths due to Covid in the first five
months
of this year than in the whole of 2020.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
BOXED AD PRICES AT ROCK BOTTOM
I don't even need to mention what a
difficult time this is, and I know I've bleated on
about everyone doing their bit. Riffs has always had
ultra-cheap advertising at just a tenner for a boxed
advert on the Home page, and just £15 for the same
on the Listings page - for one whole month; and this
includes design. We have had this running for years.
An absolute steal you must agree. Well, I can't play
a musical instrument and would undoubtedly get stage
fright anyway. Running a venue is way beyond my
capabilities too (about now you'll be thinking
"bit of a useless twat then really"). Ah, but,
there is something I can do to help bands and
venues, the price has just been lowered to just a tenner for one whole month on
the Listings page (and yes, that includes design!) PLUS
inclusion on the Home page AT NO EXTRA COST. Any
cheaper and we'll be paying you!! So grab those ads
now before they go back up to the dizzy heights of
£15!!! We're here to help. Oh, that's Asda
isn't it. Well, every little helps . . . erm....
bugga.
And please don't think "I don't know how to go
about it, it may be complicated." Well, it
isn't. I'll make it as easy and painless as
possible. Just email me and before you know it
you'll be looking at a copy of your ad . . .
riffsonline@gmail.com
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
READY TO ROCK?
 It's
totally understandable why people are still wary about
going to gigs. But the bands are up for it, the venues
are bending over backwards to accommodate all the
restrictions
- but it's all for nought if the region's punters
aren't piling through the doors. Newcastle is known to
have some of the best support in the region so
it did come as quite a surprise to
hear from Robert from PTE Social Club
to
say that turnout to gigs is less than
satisfactory. Forget that it's a club,
he says, it's a pub atmosphere with
a club advantage. "We
have a large concert room that holds 100
people under covid restrictions. The
band play on a stage, so you get a good
view no matter where you sit. We operate
a table service and accept cash or card.
We do charge £3 cover charge, but you
can buy a pint from as little as £2.24."
So you can see the venue is doing
all it can. But that's not all,
Robert continues: "You
don't have to be a member and you
don't have to sign in (except Track
& Trace) we try and make things
as "pub like" as possible." If
you have four or more coming
along you can reserve a table in advance,
contact the
club via Facebook. Coming up is Dog In
A Box, The Beer
Monkeys and
The
Force. I'll
let Robert have the last
say: "We really
hope people will come
and support live music
and have a safe night
and a great night."
PTE
Social Club,
Millers Rd,
Newcastle upon
Tyne NE6 2XP
----------------------------------------------------------------------
JUNE THREE-DAYER: FULL
DETAILS
Paul from the Philadelphia Cricket
Club in Houghton le Spring has been in touch with
further details of their Music Festival in
June. All info is now on the Listings page
but, with a nod to the old adage of
'You Can't Have Too Much Of
a Good Thing', here is the info. For
those who miss the ambience, the
natter, the tune up, the feedback
(oh I do miss feedback), this is
surely a gig to dust off the denims,
search out that old air guitar and
get that Philly
feeling....
Thursday 24th June doors
5pm, £10 door: SADISTIC SLOBS,
THE
CARPETTES, THE PROLES,
in aid of meningitis appeal.
Friday
25th June
doors 5pm £5
BEEFY LA SLAP
TRIO, THE GRUMPIES.
pay on door or tickets available at
club house
0191 5841348
Saturday
26th June
doors noon, £12 F.A.B.,
THE CODGERS, ALEXANDERS
PALACE,
pay on door or tickets available at
club house 0191 5841348.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Just how much would you pay now
for this gig line-up? . . .
The Doors, Pink Floyd, the
Faces, Family, Curved Air, Atomic Rooster, The
Kinks, Rory Gallagher, Uriah Heep, Country Joe
McDonald, Buddy Miles, Status Quo, Brinsley Schwarz,
Spencer Davis, The Strawbs and Humble Pie.
This was the line-up for 'The 2nd British Rock
Meeting' in 1972.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Hiya Nige,
Saw your bit
on wanting
bands to get
in touch.
Truth is mate,
there's just
nowt happening
at the mo'.
Our drummer's
broken his
foot so he's
no good to man
nor beast -
although
saying that
there was a
bright side
while he was
in hospital
when a fan
actually came
to see him
and, noticing
he was a bit
down in the
dumps, said
'These may
cheer you up a
bit' and then
whipped up her
blouse to
reveal a
couple of reet
sweet terties.
Oh yeah, how
is Val keeping
these days?
Little birdie
told me she's
sort of
settled down
with a fella
down in
Bradders. Miss
her, man. She
was fun and
put the bands
at ease. Good
times.
Drummer's foot
break happened
at the end of
a gruelling
rehearsal a
few weeks back
(he reckons an
amp fell on it
but I suspect
it was his
wallet!). I
say gruelling
cos we (the
band) must
have checked
in our mojos
at the
rehearsal
rooms door;
nothing
gelled.
Y'know, the
result should
always be more
than the sum
of its parts,
well the
result was
shite. We were
just bemoaning
this when we
heard the band
next door
playing Stay
With Me (the
Stewart
classic, not
that new
rubbish). Not
just that, but
we could all
tell it was a
bit 'off'. So
we scooted
next door and
I don't know
what hit me
first - the
fact that it
was the guys
that I played
with years
ago, or the
cans in the
corner (that's
lager, not
headphones).
After a few
slugs of the
amber nectar
and some chit
chat: 'God,
you look so
much older',
and 'Have you
been sleeping
rough?' we
nailed that
Stay With Me
to the bone,
man. Would've
put a smile on
the Faces.
Talking of
sleeping
rough, our
bassist
actually is,
well, next
worst thing -
he's sleeping
in a sleeping
bag in my
garden shed.
He was caught
shagging his
wife's sister.
Bloody fool.
Mind you, she
is hot totty.
So after that
rehearsal
fiasco, us and
the other band
are doing a
double header
when things
get sorted
with this
Covid thing.
If that
doesn't go
down a storm I
think I may
give up,
feeling a bit
too old, mate.
Sorry about
that break,
oh, you can't
tell. Just got
a call from a
bandmate
saying that we
have a stand
in gig tonight
cos a band
cancelled last
minute at our
local. If we
can get our
gear together
and get there
to open at 9,
the landlord
will not only
pay us the
full rate but
throw in mucho
drinkos. Hey,
get yerself
down and snap
some pics of
the band, then
that'll give
ya something
for your mag.
So all hands
on deck to get
our gear
loaded. Must
rush then
Nige. Mind
you, as I play
the kazoo, all
I have to do
is pop it into
its little
plastic case
and I'm good
to go!
But, like I
said at the
outset, what's
the point of
getting in
touch, there's
just nowt
happening at
the mo'......"
See,
you read that
right till the
end.
Dincha?
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Well, while I'm waiting for the
bands due to play at
the Philadelphia on that three-day extravaganza in June to get in touch (I know, breath not held), here's a brief article
on Rock censorship.....
A great
philosopher once said, “If you want to feel useless,
remember that they put parental advisory stickers on
Cannibal Corpse albums.”
In 1965, “Satisfaction” by the Rolling
Stones was banned by many radio stations
and, in 1968, more stations banned “Unknown Solider” by
the Doors because
of its anti-war message. Even songs by the Beatles were banned by
the BBC, when “Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds” and “A Day
in the Life” were forbidden for 'supposedly' promoting
drug use. Yep, Sgt. Pepper himself wasn’t safe.
However, censorship had a real boom in the 1980s when
heavy metal, primarily, was targeted by four wives of
powerful Washington D.C. types when they founded the
Parents Music Resource Center (PMRC). The idea came to
Tipper Gore, the wife of then-Senator Al Gore, after she
bought a copy of Prince’s
Purple Rain for her 11-year-old daughter. She
immediately regretted the purchase after overhearing
some of the lyrics to the song “Darling Nikki.”
Eventually, the PMRC came up with the Filthy Fifteen, a
list of popular songs that contained references to sex,
violence, drugs or occult themes in its lyrics. Among
the songs were Judas Priest’s
"Eat Me Alive," Motley Crue’s
"Bastard," AC/DC’s
"Let Me Put My Love Into You,"
Twisted Sister’s "We’re Not Gonna Take
It," WASP’s "Animal
(Fuck Like a Beast)," Def
Leppard’s "High n Dry," Mercyful Fate’s "Into
the Coven," Black Sabbath’s
"Trashed" and Venom’s
"Possessed."
The PMRC took their case all the way to United States
Senate. They held a hearing to debate the merits of a
proposed Parental Advisory sticker, which they suggested
should be placed on any record they dubbed to be "Porn
Rock." The PMRC did face its share of opposition during
the Porn Rock Hearings, in the form of Frank Zappa, John Denver
and Twisted Sister
vocalist Dee Snider,
who all testified on national television in protest of
the PMRC.
Censorship didn’t stop with the PMRC. Marilyn Manson was
banned from performing in Salt Lake City, Utah after he
ripped up the Book of Mormon onstage, and Bob Dole, who
was a candidate for President of the United States at
the time, used his platform to attack Cannibal Corpse.
Cannibal Corpse’s
music has been banned in Australia and Germany in the
past, while in 2014, the band’s music was outlawed in
Russia. Lamb of God
were banned in Malaysia for “blasphemous” content, Behemoth were banned in
Russia for five years in 2014, and Singapore banned
Watain in 2019, so the idea of censorship isn't going
anywhere.
These articles, as interesting as I hope
they are, are
only a replacement for local band and venue news
that I'm
just not getting. Surely now more than
ever it's relevant to let people know what
bands are doing, planning, looking
forward to etc. etc. So ffs let me know!
We need to entice punters back into our
Rock pubs rockin' and drinking..........
-------------------------------------------------------------------
THE PHILLY HOSTS THREE-DAY MUSIC FESTIVAL IN JUNE
  Just
getting spits and spots of info regarding a three-day even in
June: Philadelphia
Beer and Music Festival in Houghton
le Spring
starting on Thursday 24th June.
They
must be more interested in the booze than
the bands coz the only info I have at the
mo' is The
Grumpies for
the Friday evening, and on Saturday The Codgers
sometime in the afternoon and Alexanders Palace
headlining the evening session.
If
you
are one
of the bands
on the festival
bill then
get pictures
of your
fizzogs along
to me here at
Riffs and
we'll give you
some
publicity.
Let's
fill the
Philly!
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Whacked-out occultists, scary
séances, and the saga of Uriah Heep's Demons And
Wizards
By Paul Brannigan
Inspired by
mystical dreams, a hectic rock’n’roll lifestyle and a
fucked-up
séance, Uriah Heep's
1972 album Demons And Wizards turned them into
global superstars.
Uriah Heep in 1972
For British rock bands in
the early 1970s, a sneering, patronising review in US
magazine Rolling Stone
was considered something of a badge of honour. In it, Led Zeppelin’s
self-titled debut album was dismissed as “dull”,
“redundant” and “prissy”. The “clubfooted”
riffs on Deep Purple In
Rock were seen as evidence that
these “quiet nonentities” lacked “both
expertise and intuition”. Black
Sabbath’s first album was labelled “inane”,
“wooden” and “plodding”, the band that
became the most influential in the history of heavy
metal written off as “Just like Cream! But worse.”
Rolling Stone’s most
scathing notice, however, was about Uriah Heep’s debut
album, 1970’s Very ’Eavy, Very ’Umble: “If this group
makes it,” wrote one Melissa
Mills, “I’ll have to commit suicide.”
Today Uriah Heep
guitarist Mick Box
can afford to look back and laugh. A candidate for the
most chipper man in rock’n’roll, the 73-year-old
cheerfully admits that he’s “never been one to listen
to critics too much”.
“It’s difficult to care about criticism about what
your band is lacking when you’re being called back on
stage for five encores every night,” he points
out with a hearty chuckle.
Inspired by a love of The
Kinks, the Small Faces, The Who and Johnny Kidd & The Pirates,
Walthamstow-born Box
formed his first band, The
Stalkers, in the mid-60s while still a
teenager. By the time Bobby Moore hoisted the Jules
Rimet Trophy aloft at Wembley Stadium on the evening of
July 30, 1966 when England won the World Cup, The Stalkers had become
Spice.
At some point late in 1969 the band caught the attention
of influential manager/producer/publisher Gerry Bron. It was at Bron’s insistence that
the youngsters changed their name once more, to Uriah Heep, an ’umble,
obsequious character in Charles Dickens’s 1850 novel
David Copperfield.
Bron then installed
the group in Hanwell Community Centre in West London to
assemble songs for their debut album. Through the
facility’s walls they could hear the Mk II line-up of Deep Purple prepping for
what would be their In Rock album.
By their own admission, on their first three albums the
young Uriah Heep
were “just thrashing about trying to find a
direction”. Their unfairly maligned Very ’Eavy,
Very ’Umble album, mixing folk, blues, jazz and hard
rock, was followed by two studio albums in 1971: the
progressive rock-inclined Salisbury – on which
multi-talented keyboard player
Ken Hensley began to eclipse Box and frontman David Byron as the
band’s main songwriter – and Look At Yourself, the first
release on Gerry Bron’s
new record label Bronze Records.
In between the two releases, on March 26, ’71 Uriah Heep played their
first show in the US, supporting Three
Dog Night, in front of 16,000 people at
the State Fairground’s Coliseum in Indianapolis,
Indiana. For the Londoners it was a first glimpse of the
infinite possibilities of rock stardom.
“When we got there, and saw all the limos and
groupies, it was mind-boggling for us,” Hensley said later.
“There was never a feeling of being overawed by it
all,” Box
insisted to Heep
biographer Dave Ling.
“We all felt that this is where we should be. The
American audience loved us from the first minute
onwards. Believe me, lots of champagne was cracked
open on that first night.”
When the group returned to the US for the second time,
in January 1972, they were booked to open for Deep Purple, their
noisy neighbours from Hanwell Community Centre. Their
gregarious guitarist, meanwhile, was taking advantage of
his group’s burgeoning reputation by thumbing through
local phone directories and placing calls to random
young ladies, inviting them along to gigs and parties.
“You’d tell the bird you were in Uriah Heep, and next
minute the hotel was full of women,” Box recalled cheerfully.
But such a lifestyle wasn’t for everyone. On January 31,
upon completing the final date of the Deep Purple tour,
bassist Mark Clarke
quit the band, having joined only four months
previously.
“Mark jumped ship
because he couldn’t deal with the stresses of the
touring we were doing, which were excessive, I have to
say,” Box
says. “It was a mad, mad, mad time for us all. Mark felt that he just
could not keep up with it, that he was going to have a
full-on nervous breakdown if he stuck around any
longer.”
Although Clarke’s
time in the band was short, the ex-Colosseum
bassist did make one lasting and significant
contribution to Uriah Heep,
writing a striking, harmonised middle eight for a new Ken Hensley composition
titled The Wizard, based on a fantastical recurring
dream he’d had every night for a week.
“I remember Ken
playing The Wizard on an acoustic guitar in the back
of our van,” says Box.
“It was the first time I’d heard anyone play guitar
with a drop-D tuning. He couldn’t find a middle eight,
so Mark Clarke
wrote that, and the whole song sounded so good to
everyone. I think we all knew it was something
special."
Gerry Bron, too,
heard potential in Hensley’s
whimsical power ballad. Ahead of their second visit to
the US, Heep were
rushed into Lansdowne Studios in Holland Park where they
tracked the song (and single B-side Why) in a matter of
hours. Before the session ended, The Wizard’s
semiacoustic intro was beefed up with the addition of an
unusual instrument – the studio kettle.
 “We were
making a cup of tea, and had the studio door open, and
as we were listening back to the intro of the song we
heard the whistle, and thought: ‘Hang on!” Mick Box recalls.
“We went into the kitchen, recorded the kettle whistle
two or three times and got it re-tuned to a high C.
That’s the note you hear at the beginning of the
song.”
While Bronze Records readied The Wizard for an
international release, Heep
bedded in Mark Clarke’s
replacement Gary Thain with
a five-night stand at the Whiskey A Go Go club in Los
Angeles in February ’72. New Zealander Thain had come from the
Keef Hartley Band,
and clicked instantly with Heep’s
other new addition, drummer Lee
Kerslake, who had joined just three
months previously. The pair’s obvious chemistry, and
superior musical ability, immediately elevated the whole
band to a new level.
“Now we finally had a real steam engine of a rhythm
section,” Box
says, admiringly. “Having those two powerhouses
behind us provided a wonderful foundation for the
band. Lee was a
fantastic drummer, and Gary
would come up with these great bass lines that never
got in the way of the melody of the song but always
seemed to enhance it. It was an incredible knack. It
was a real pleasure to work with the pair of them.
Everything just clicked into place.”
In mid-March, back in England the quintet returned to
Lansdowne Studios to complete work on their fourth
album.
“Everyone was focused,” says Box. “We were
recording in London, which was nice, and the chemistry
in the band was bar none. There were no personality
clashes, no factions fighting for different things, no
diversions.”
“There was a magic in that combination of people that
created so much energy and enthusiasm,” Ken Hensley later noted.
“We all wanted the same thing, were all willing to
make the same sacrifices to achieve it and we were all
very committed.”
As he had done on Look At Yourself, keyboard player Hensley led the
sessions, bringing five new songs to the table. And, as
with The Wizard, the album’s foundation stone, the songs
largely had fantasy themes. The heavy-grooving Rainbow
Demon spoke of a rider on a crimson horse, ‘possessed
by some distant calling’; the delicate Paradise
told of a heavy-hearted young man’s quest for true love;
its multi-part companion piece, the dramatic hymnal epic
The Spell, featured heavenly choral vocals, a stunning Hensley slide guitar
solo, and gloriously portentous lyrics: ‘You will
never break the spell. I’ll summon all the fires of
hell’. The spooky, organ-driven, Circle Of Hands,
meanwhile, was inspired by a brush with the
supernatural.
“It was born out of a séance we were invited to by
some girls in Italy,” Box
reveals. “It all got a bit out of hand, a bit freaky.
These things start out as a bit of fun, then you start
to get a bit uncomfortable, and then it’s: ‘Bloody
hell, I’m getting out of here!’ That was the first and
last time we tried to summon spirits of the dead. We
were dabbling where we should never have dabbled.”
The down-to-earth guitarist brought rather more grounded
tunes to the studio: the bluesy,
Zeppelin-esque All My Life, the
hard-riffing Poet’s Justice, originally conceived as an
acoustic track, and the driving Traveller In Time. All
three songs were fleshed out in jam sessions with David Byron and Lee Kerslake.
“I’d have riffs knocking around, and maybe a verse,
and when I took them into rehearsals those two would
jump on them and suddenly we’d have another song,”
Box marvels.
“They came together very quickly, as we were very
attuned to one another. It was almost too good to be
true. Someone would nip out to the shop, and come back
to find another song written. It was such an easy
album to record.”
“There was nothing between us and the music,” Hensley told the Classic
Rock Revisited website in 2016. “This liberated my
creativity. And the fact that FM radio in America was
pioneering the musical freedom trend made it even more
inspiring.”
For all five musicians, and
Gerry Bron, Heep’s self-appointed sixth
member, the choice of a single from the album was a
no-brainer: everything about the rollicking Easy Livin’
screamed ‘radio hit’. Written by Hensley
in just 15 minutes, it was a tongue-in-cheek reflection
of outsider perceptions of the band’s lifestyle.
“It had excitement written all over it,” says Box. “I thought the
guitar sound was fantastic, it was so up-front, and
aggressive and pumping like mad. The title came from a
conversation we had in the van. We were in the north
of England, driving down to London to listen to some
recordings in the studio before going to the airport
to fly to America, and someone said: ‘This is easy
living, isn’t it?’ as a joke, a piss-take. But it
resonated with Ken.
It wasn’t a song that we over-thought.”
With a sleeve featuring artwork by the noted fantasy
artist Roger Dean,
Demons And Wizards was released on May 19, 1972, and
peaked at No.20 in the UK chart the following month.
It was the August release of Easy Livin’ – singled
out by Rolling Stone
writer Mike Saunders
as a “flat out fuzz-tone punk rocker” – that
turned the album into a global smash. Although Easy
Livin’ failed to chart in the UK, it became a Top-20 hit
across mainland Europe, and peaked on Billboard’s Hot
100 at No.39 on September 23. By the end of October,
Demons And Wizards had reached No.23 on the Billboard
200 album chart.
“Hearing the song on US radio was immense,” Box says. “But you
had to get out there and work it. We started out
touring in the Midwest, the strongest rock market, and
let the music filter out to the coasts. Then things
started moving very, very fast. A hit single is like a
small boulder rolling down a hill, gathering moss, and
by the time it gets to the bottom it’s huge. It wasn’t
long before we were doing ten-thousand-seaters right
across America, and had Lear jets and limos at every
airport. It was an absolutely amazing time.”
But there was a darker side to the band’s US success.
With tour posters promising that Demons And Wizards
“performs mentalingus on you”, Heep began to encounter
“freaky people” coming out of the woodwork at
their shows. In a 1973 NME interview, David Byron related a
tale of being visited in Detroit, the band’s biggest
market, by the city’s messianic underground leader, Jaggers, a stick-thin, Mick Jagger-obsessed guy
wearing a long black cloak and white face-paint.
“He came in and shut the door and said: ‘Lock it’,”
Byron recalled.
“He said: ‘You see, the thing is, the people think I’m
dead. And that’s why I dress in black. If anybody asks
if you’ve seen me, say you haven’t.’ It turned out he
was a lunatic. And this goes on and on and on in every
major town in America.
"These birds with cherry-red lipstick come up and
say: ‘Hey man, you’re really cosmic. It’s so heavy.
And I really dig it… I always listen to your message.’
Crap. All these weird birds got hold of our old
ladies’ phone numbers and addresses, and they started
doing all these ghostly trips when we’re away. We were
getting so many weird letters that it was driving us
round the bend. It just started to do us in.”
“It got very, very silly,” Box
admits. “We got to the point where we had bodyguards
outside each of our hotel rooms, particularly in the
Midwest. It got heavy, and very hedonistic, totally
decadent. All the stories you hear about being a
successful rock band in America are all true. And I
can’t tell you any of them! Ha ha! I enjoyed it for
what it was, but I never felt like it would last
forever at that level.”
The guitarist’s caution proved prescient. Before
embarking on a two-month US tour scheduled to run from
October 13 to December 17, the band were rushed into
Lansdowne Studios to record a new studio album. Released
in November, The Magician’s Birthday reached No.28 in
the UK and No.31 in the US. But its short-term success
came with long-term costs. Ken
Hensley described the making of the album
as“frustrating” and “the beginning of the
end”, claiming that a number of his songs were
unfinished, rush-released before being properly signed
off. Mick Box too
was unhappy with the pressure exerted on the band.
Looking back, the unassuming guitarist lays the blame
squarely at the feet of management.
“Doing The Magician’s Birthday that quickly was all
about capitalising on the success of Demons And
Wizards,” he reflects. “If you want my honest
opinion, I think that was down to management greed. Gerry Bron was pushing
us so hard that there was no attention to anyone’s
personal life or health. It was ‘Go! Go! Go!’ I can
understand an element of that, because when we first
started off he put a lot of money in, taking out
full-page ads in the music papers, buying us a lot of
equipment, and putting us on a twenty pounds-a-week
wage.
"So he did invest in us. But by the time we
reached Demons And Wizards we’d paid him back tenfold,
and he was still pushing for more, more, more. There
were demands for another hit single, which got
draining, as we always saw ourselves as an albums
band. Also, as Ken was
having great success with his songs, management
singled him out and started only listening to what he
had to say, which created animosity with the rest of
us. And then the wheels started falling off.”
It is perhaps some measure of the high expectations
raised by the success of Demons And Wizards that Uriah Heep are sometimes
considered to be the ‘nearly men’ of British hard rock.
It’s true that they never threatened to match the
success of Led Zeppelin, Deep
Purple, Black Sabbath or Queen, and on a
statistical level never again came as close to cracking
the mainstream as they did with their fourth studio
album. But 45 million worldwide album sales and a
touring presence in 61 countries are hardly indicators
of failure.
 Unfailingly
honest and unpretentious, Box
can concede that, at points in their career, Uriah Heep “didn’t
stay true to their platform”. But having racked up
nine UK Top 40 albums, and been on the Billboard 200 no
fewer than 15 times, his band have enjoyed career highs
that precious few modern rock bands could ever aspire
to. Crucially, Box
is still loving life in the band he began writing for 50
years ago.
“We’ve got a great foundation,” he says
cheerfully, “with a history and songs that have stood
the test of time, and we’re still writing new music
which the fans are enjoying as much as ever.”
However, he’s not unaware of the esteem in which Demons
And Wizards is still held, as was evidenced when Uriah Heep performed the
album in full in the US for its fortieth anniversary.
But it’s an album holding bitter-sweet memories for the
guitarist, not least because four of the musicians who
played on it – David Byron,
Gary Thain, Lee Kerslake and Ken Hensley – are no
longer alive. Singer Bryon
passed away in 1985 due to alcohol-related health
issues, bassist Thain
succumbed to a heroin overdose 10 years earlier. In
September 2020 Kerslake
lost his battle with prostate cancer, and most recently
Hensley passed away
(in November 2020) following a short illness.
Roger Dean’s cover
artwork still hangs in the front room of Box’s London home, and
he’s signed enough copies of the album over the years to
be aware of its significance to fans.
“There’s something on every Uriah
Heep album that I can look back on with
fondness,” he says, “but Demons And Wizards
means a lot to me. Where we were as a unit,
creatively, it was the band at its height, with that
line-up. Listening back to the album through the
speakers at Lansdowne back in 1972, we felt like we
had something special, but that was just within our
inner circle. After that you just hope that it might
take on a life of its own and become successful.
Which, to our immense gratitude, it did."
“I know how much that music means so much to so many
different people, and it’s humbling,” the
guitarist continues. “With the Roger Dean cover, it
was the first time that the music and the lyrics and
the artwork were intrinsically linked, and I think
that contributed to its success. But then, funnily
enough, it was Easy Livin’, with no mythical lyrics
whatsoever, which was the hit that opened up the world
stage to us.
"If that song taught us anything, it’s that
sometimes in this business it’s best not to
over-think."
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Gun-raids,
back-stabbings, bust-ups and bitterness:
The madness of late-70s HAWKWIND
By Rob Hughes
If you
thought all Hawkwind’s freaky stuff belonged to the
early 70s, well
think again.
Hawkwind, Live Seventy Nine
line-up: Tim Blake, Harvey Bainbridge, Dave Brock,
Simon King and Huw Lloyd-Langton
It's October 1977 and Hawkwind
are playing the Palais Des Sports, a cavernous dome in
the Porte de Versailles sector of Paris. They’re on the
European leg of the Spirit Of The Age tour, having
already blown through the UK, and frontman Robert Calvert is
sinking deep into rock theatre.
This is the new Hawkwind.
No more Liquid Len and psychedelia, more a cabaret folie
of the absurd. On stage, Calvert
transforms into various characters to suit the songs:
flying helmet, goggles and commando togs for the crazed
military advisor of Master Of The Universe; top hat,
frock-coat and chains for Steppenwolf; Lawrence Of
Arabia gear and a pair of swords for the oriental killer
of Hassan I Sahba.
Calvert has buried
himself so fully into this last persona that nothing
else exists right now. What boundaries there were have
been crossed long ago. Now he is that murderous assassin
of Allah, singing: ‘Death unto all infidels, in
oil/Guide us o thou genie of the smoke.’ His bandmates
have sensed things have taken a sudden turn for the
macabre as he sidles over to bassist Adrian Shaw.
“Bob freaked out really badly in Paris,” recalls
Hawkwind perennial Dave Brock. “He tried
to cut Adrian Shaw’s
head off with that sword on stage, right in the middle
of the song. He’d really gone nutty by then and we saw
what was going on. I mean, he nearly actually did it.
He put the sword right across Adrian’s
throat.”
Jeff Dexter, then Hawkwind’s road manager,
saw it coming too. “Robert
got carried away with the idea of urban guerrillas,” he
explains. “At that Paris gig he was totally convinced
that the whole first row was full of the heads of the
Red Brigades, Baader-Meinhof and everybody. He got
completely carried away with that fantasy.”
It all came to a head, luckily not Shaw’s, after the show.
“Backstage there were all these people Calvert thought were
the leaders of every terrorist organisation in the
world,” Dexter
continues. “They didn’t have a clue what he was
saying, but they were all enjoying it because he was
making such a fuss of them. The rest of the band had
already run away. They couldn’t handle it at all.
"When I eventually said to him:
‘Look, we’ve got to get out of here and all these
people have got to go’, he went completely nuts,
pulled out his sword and ran for me. Fortunately I
found a piece of four-by-two that belonged to the
stagehand and whacked him over the head with it.
That’s when he fell to the ground.”
Punk-era Hawkwind,
which also budged aside for noteworthy offshoot The Hawklords, coughed
up a trove of unusual and unexpected goodies. And some
very real madness. It was a time of upheaval, of
sackings and counter-sackings, of strangeness, quark and
gun-raids. Of bust-ups, bitterness and Ginger Baker.
At the heart of the band’s resurgence in the late 70s
were Calvert and Brock. Calvert, who had
left the band in 1973 for a couple of solo projects,
returned to the fold as frontman at the Reading Festival
in August 1975.
Steeped in the works of Herman Hesse, JG Ballard and
Roger Zelazny, his complex, highly literate sci-fi songs
meshed with the new, leaner sound of Brock’s guitar for the
epic Reefer Madness, Kerb Crawler and the gothic
futurism of Steppenwolf. These were the high spots of
1976’s Astounding Sounds, Amazing Music, Hawkwind’s first album
for new label Charisma and under the management of Tony Howard, whose
other clients included Marc
Bolan. Yet not all liked this fresh
musical turn.
“Paul Rudolph
from the Pink Fairies
came in after Lemmy,”
says Brock. “He
was a good guitarist, much better than me, and my
confidence sank down to my boots. The band ended up
sacking me after having a meeting in London in 1976. I
suppose this was about nine months after they’d got
rid of Lemmy.
They did it in the office of Tony
Howard, who was looking after us with Jeff Dexter.
"I got a phone call from
Bob Calvert saying: ‘We’ve just
had a meeting and the band decided to give you the
sack. But I disagree with it, so I’m coming down to
see you and we’re not going to stand for this.’ So
after Bob came over, I went to Tony’s office and then
we decided to sack all the people who had organised
the cull!”
 Robert Calvert onstage in 1976
One of the casualties was
the freewheeling Nik Turner,
who had been with the band since their first gig in
1969. Others to go were Rudolph
and drummer Alan
Powell. It was a purge that irked
management.
“Hawkwind was the
worst job I ever had,” recalls Dexter, still smarting
at the memory. “Working with Dave
Brock was like being married to the
devil. Calvert
was nuts, but he was a sweetheart. All this
hippie-trippy shit and brotherhood is not in Dave Brock’s
vocabulary."
“When we took on Hawkwind,
we did it at the behest of Nik
Turner. Tony and I really liked him, he
was a lovely character. But within a month or so of us
taking them on, we discovered they had debt left over
from before our time. Brock
fired Nik Turner. Nik
was a major part of the band, the whole sound and the
scope of what they were doing. He was a star and I
don’t think Brock
liked that. I thought they were great friends but I
learnt very fast that wasn’t the case.”
The tours of 1976 and ’77 were a startling spectacle. Calvert’s theatrical
performances played out before the backdrop of
Atomhenge, a huge molecular stage prop made from
fibreglass.
“It was maybe 15ft high with arches all joined up,”
laughs Brock.
“And the whole thing lit up from the inside. Some of
it was actually used for The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The
Galaxy, when it was on at the Rainbow Theatre. It was
a nightmare to transport.”
The music was rich too, nervy new-wave paranoia that
sounded more like the punkier end of Neu! or the mutant
strains of early Roxy Music.
1977’s Quark, Strangeness And Charm, inlaid with Calvert’s thoughts on
genetics, nuclear war and Islamic Fundamentalism, was
hailed by the NME as a triumph of ‘battering ram riffs
and monoplane synthesised drones’. Says Brock: “Our music was
always quite aggressive, with lots of chunky chords.
With punk around, it fitted in. It was almost like
going back to our roots.”
The title track was a killer single, but it also
introduced the classics Damnation Alley and the tour de
force Spirit Of The Age, about a space traveller cursing
his girlfriend’s dad for refusing to deepfreeze her for
his return.
Calvert, diagnosed
with a bipolar condition, was becoming increasingly
unpredictable. On tour he became manic, staying up for
nights on end, devouring books on guerrilla warfare and
how to set up your own private army. He even took to
wearing his combat suit off-stage, replete with gas
pistol at the hip. Paris ’77 was the tipping point.
“There was also the gun incident in the hotel,”
recounts Brock. “Bob
used to do a version of Russian Roulette, where he’d
recite one of his poems, put the blank bullet in the
chamber, spin it and put it to his head. Then, click!
Anyway, he was spouting off about the Baader-Meinhof
gang in the hotel bar at five in the morning.
"The rest of us were all in bed. There just
happened to be a plain clothes policeman in the
bar, listening to Bob,
and he believed what Bob
was saying about being a member of the gang and having
weapons in his room. Bob,
who shared a room with me, had also said my guitar
case had a sub-machine gun in it.
“At six in the morning there was a thumping at my
door. Two police officers came in and had me up
against the wall at gunpoint. I said: ‘What the hell’s
going on?’ Of course they opened my bag and saw the
Russian Roulette pistol and the guitar case. By that
time, with all the commotion, Jeff
Dexter had come along to sort things
out. But then they saw Bob’s
clothes – all commando gear – which wasn’t a great
sign either.”
Jeff Dexter claims
he was left to sort the mess after the Palais Des Sports
debacle. “We were supposed to be going on to Belgium
to do three more gigs but the rest of the band all got
up very early the next morning and were all ready to
split without telling me and Calvert.
They were all packed to go.”
There followed the bizarre sight of Calvert, shaven-haired
and in full commando gear, chasing the band’s silver
Mercedes through the streets of early-morning Paris.
“All the passers-by stopped dead,” he recalled
later. “It was like a scene out of Alphaville… [the
band] were showing me that they were fed up with the
way I was carrying on. We had a big fucking argument.
They were pissed off.”
Brock says the band
had no option. “Bob
was so nutty at the time that we called the rest of
the tour off. He was sent back on the plane with Jeff Dexter, who he
tried to strangle on the flight [incidentally,
Dexter denies this incident]. When they got back, Jeff had to put him in
a sanitarium.”
 Hawkwind onstage at the Reading
Festival in 1977
Calvert
received treatment and rejoined Hawkwind
in the studio in early 1978 for what would become the
semi-live album, PXR 5. Then they headed off to the US
in March. This time he was at the other extreme.
“On the American tour Bob
was completely the other way,” remembers Brock. “He was very
quiet. That tour was the end, really. We felt like
we’d reached the end of one of our trips.”
Dexter agrees:
“He still performed really well but was very subdued
the whole time. He kind of went into his shell. But I
remember them going down very well in the Midwest.
They could really turn it on. There was a gig in
Philadelphia where they were amazing. For an audience
of Midwestern hippie freaks, it was perfect shit.”
The tour ended in acrimonious fashion. It was the end of
the road for Dexter
and Tony Howard.
“It was after the San Francisco gig,” says Dexter. “Tony and
I told them we didn’t want any more to do with them.
So we paid them off, gave them all their airline
tickets and left for LA. Ten days later I was driving
when I saw this guy in the middle of the street,
flagging me down. It was Dave
Brock. He said: ‘I’ve got no money and
no tickets.’ He’d spent his money and sold his
tickets.”
The band had splintered, but
Brock and
Calvert regrouped on their return home.
To side-step any legal issues, they formed The Hawklords, adding Steve Swindells on
keyboards, and bassist Harvey
Bainbridge, both of whom had briefly
gigged with them as The Sonic
Assassins.
The sessions, which took place in a Devon farmhouse in
the summer of 1978, yielded 25 Years On, a conceptual LP
based on the saga of Pan Transcendental Industries, a
global corporation intent on replacing angels’ wings
with car doors. Luckily, it’s way more accessible than
it sounds. Calvert
and Brock were back
to their free-flowing best, and it was as far from the
band’s crusty Ladbroke Grove beginnings as you could
imagine.
“Robert was in a
very rich vein of work at that time,” says Bainbridge. “When we
did the Sonic Assassins gig, we did this piece that was
eventually called Over The Top. Basically it was just a
jam, but then Robert
came out and did this spiel about being in the First
World War trenches. And I think he really was in those
trenches at the time. He sank himself into these
characters.
 "On the Hawklords album I had
this riff and Robert
just sat there and wrote Free Fall, off the top of his
head. Working with Robert and
Dave Brock, who I
think is one of the best rhythm guitarists this
country has ever produced, was fascinating. To me it
was like playing ‘grown-up’ music. I remember reading
a review in Billboard magazine, who described it as Hawkwind like you’ve
never heard before, with four-part harmonies and the
like. They even called it AOR!”
The resulting tour was an elaborate confection of
paint-splattered jump-suits and complex stage rigs,
based on Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, designed by Hawkwind’s artistic
genius, Barney Bubbles.
“There was a huge scaffolding rig with spinning
mirror-wheels and six dancers. It was incredible,” says
Bainbridge. But it was also time for another shake-up.
Drummer Martin Griffin
was fired, Swindells
left and an increasingly paranoid Calvert
quit to concentrate on writing.
“Bob was great to
work with,” asserts Brock,
“but he’d have his freakouts. He was hyperactive and
it was quite stressful when he was over the top
because he just wouldn’t sleep.”
There was time for one last hurrah during this purple
patch of Hawklore. In 1979 Brock
reformed Hawkwind
with Bainbridge, Simon King,
ex-Gong man Tim Blake and
guitarist Huw Lloyd-Langton.
After the Live Seventy Nine album, Ginger Baker joined the
party for 1980’s sorely underrated Levitation.
“It was one of the first digital recordings,”
explains Brock.
“It gave a clearer tone to everything, but we were all
a little in awe of playing with Ginger,
who was this world-famous drummer, of course. He
stayed with us for a year and a half. He was a pretty
easy-going character.”
Bainbridge doesn’t
quite remember it that way. “On the previous tour, Ginger said he wanted
to cut the light show out, so we’d get more money. No
one said anything, so I stuck my neck out and said:
‘Well, I don’t think it’s a good idea. The whole point
of a Hawkwind
show is the lights and spectacle.’”
At sessions for 1981’s Sonic Attack, Baker and keyboardist Keith Hale “told me
I ought to leave. But how it turned out was that Dave and Huw decided it was Ginger who ought to
go, but I had to tell him! Keith
Hale ended up going with Ginger too. A bit of a
grumpy man is our Ginger.
It was a happier camp afterwards.” A seething Baker allegedly quipped:
“The world’s worst bass player sacked the world’s best
drummer.”
Huw Lloyd-Langton
remembers them both playing Glastonbury shortly after
the dismissal: “Ginger
played the night before and made some snide comment
about Hawkwind.
So somebody from the audience threw a brick at him.”
Hawkwind, as is
their DNA, have pressed on ever since. They still
operate in that same punk spirit that gathered them
admirers from John Lydon
and Joe Strummer to Jello Biafra, Henry Rollins and
Primal Scream. Robert Calvert tragically
died of a heart attack in 1988, aged just 43, but Dave Brock is still
there at its core.
“Dave’s influence
has always run through Hawkwind,”
said Lloyd-Langton,
who died in 2012 after a two-year battle with cancer.
“As long as Brocky
exists, there will always be a
Hawkwind. It’s a strange, funny old
band, but it just wouldn’t happen without him. He’s
been the headstone of it all.”
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Revolution:
The story of the lost pioneers of heavy metal
Beyond Black Sabbath and Judas
Priest: The
extraordinary story of heavy metal's originators –
Iron Butterfly, Leaf Hound,
Bloodrock, JPT Scare Band, Bang and more
. . .
In the beginning, there was love, hope and happiness;
there was no ‘heavy’.
It was the Sixties, man – nobody particularly needed
heavy; they had The Beatles,
The Rolling Stones and marijuana. But by
the tail end of the decade things got ugly. Suddenly
there was war, sex, drugs, violence, tension, revolution
and fighting in the streets. And so ‘heavy’ came to
pass.
Heavy metal, that immortal hoary beast of lust, power
and violence, was born in those murky last moments of
the 1960s. The debate over who coined the term ‘heavy
metal’ and which band was the first to bash out the
initial fuzzed-out power chord will likely rage on
forever. But one thing we know for certain is that
metal’s first five years laid the diabolical groundwork
for everything that would come later.
Doom rock, stoner-metal, power-prog, slam-boogie… every
hard, mean, gutbucket form of heavy rock’n’roll you can
think of originated in that brief but fertile period
between 1968 and 1973 when innocence and optimism was
suddenly yesterday’s news, and rock was ready for some
darkness.
 “Cream
[pic right] was the first definable heavy
band,” claims Joe S Harrington, a full-contact
rock journalist from Portland, Maine in the USA and
author of the mammoth, and quite brilliant, Sonic
Cool: The Birth & Death Of Rock’N’Roll,
arguably the most complete and thorough examination of
rock music ever written.
In that book he traced the beginnings of metal back to
the power-blues of Cream’s
Disraeli Gears album: “They had heavy solos, serious
musicianship and Druidic imagery, all things that
would become trademarks of metal years later. And this
was still in 1966. However, metal didn’t start until
two years later. By 1968 you had four bands that could
definably be called heavy metal:
MC5, Steppenwolf, Iron Butterfly and Blue Cheer.”
All four left big footprints on the heavy rock trail.
But only one of them can play the same song for an
entire show.
Formed in San Diego in 1966,
Iron Butterfly began as a psychedelic
band but achieved a quite spectacular metamorphosis just
two years later when bassist Lee Dorman joined the band
and they recorded the now legendary 17-minute
proto-metal classic track In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida, a swirling
acid attack of incessant twin guitars and
gorilla-fingered organ plunking.
Lee remembered its creation well: “That song was
actually only about a minute-and-a-half long when it
started. I’d just joined, and the guitar player had
just joined in August, so we kind of experimented with
that song to kind of get the band together. The song
took on a life of its own, it just kept going and
going. The engineer just left the tape rolling, the
producer wasn’t even there when we recorded it.
“The other miracle was that we played it all the
way through without any mistakes. Except for a couple
of guitar and vocal overdubs, what you hear is what we
played. If we had to do that in pieces, we might still
be there.”
Lee cites free-form FM radio shows for the track’s
inexplicable success. In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida stayed in
American charts for a staggering two years. As for Iron Butterfly’s status
as metal pioneers, Dorman was diplomatic: “I have
heard it said that Iron
Butterfly are the fathers of heavy
metal, but we were certainly not alone in that.”
With the success of Iron
Butterfly, the music industry scrambled
to find similar veins to plunder. “The record
companies were all owned by old men until The Beatles,” Joe
Harrington explains. “As it progressed, they hired
hippies to run the labels. Suddenly, everything goes,
because they have no idea what’s going to hit.
Everybody was caught off-guard by the revolution. It
was a time of wild experimentation. Heavy metal went
into a bunch of directions.”
One of the first offshoots of early metal was ‘downer
rock’, a term coined by Black
Sabbath drummer Bill Ward. Sabbath’s minor chords,
apocalyptic worldview and relentless gloom hit a nerve
in a generation haunted by the draft into the US
military, by the end of the peace and love era, by the
encroaching funk of political and financial instability.
And then, as Joe Harrington explains, there were also
the drugs. “Downer rock was all about Quaaludes. I
mean, they were called downers. The drugs went along
with it. Drink wine, do some Quaaludes, listen to Black Sabbath. The
downer rock movement was the last drug movement based
in some kind of spiritual quest. In this case it was a
dark, satanic quest. It was a dark buzz, fuelled by
Altamont and Manson.”
While Harrington cites Sabbath
as the undisputed pioneers of downer rock, he believes
it is Texan band Bloodrock
who define the genre. “Bloodrock
were the all-time champions of negativity,” he
claims.
 To find out if that’s
true, let’s get it straight from the horse’s mouth. John
Nitzinger is a legend in Texas rock. His long and
storied history includes a brief but eventful solo
career in the early 70s band that spawned the gritty
hits Louisiana Cockfight and LA Texas Boy, as well as
stints with Carl Palmer and
Alice Cooper. But
he’s best-known as the man who orchestrated the career
of Bloodrock [pic left], one of the most
nihilistic proto-metal bands to ever write a
seven-minute song about bleeding to death.
From his home in Lake Worth, Nitzinger explains how he
got blood from the rock: “Jim Rutledge came up to me
when I was playing at the Cellar and asked if I would
write some songs for his band. So I said sure, and I
got with ’em. I tutored them all in how to play the
songs and their instruments.”
Vocalist Rutledge and his band were hand-picked in 1969
by Grand Funk Railroad manager
Terry Knight, who imagined his scruffy young hires as
the meanest, loudest heavy metal band possible, a sort
of Sex Pistols for
the freak generation.
“I taught them how to play the songs, and we went out
to a lake house here in Fort Worth every weekend and
jammed for months and months, putting it all
together,” Nitzinger says.
The band ended up releasing eight albums throughout the
70s and reformed for a reunion show in 2005, but they
are most remembered for DOA, a song from their 1970
album Bloodrock 2, which became an enduring, and highly
unlikely, hit on FM radio. DOA is seven minutes of pure
pain; a doomy, funeral organ-fuelled creepy-crawler
complete with a bleating ambulance siren and hopeless
lyrics like: ‘The sheets are red and moist where I’m
lying/God in Heaven, teach me how to die.’ If
you’re looking for the darkest moment of 70s rock, look
no further.
Nitzinger remembers how the song came to be: “Jim
said to me one day: ‘I’m gonna write the sickest, most
twisted song I can think of.’ And I’ll be damned if he
didn’t write DOA, and it became a hit.”
As to why such a nihilistic song could ever catch on,
Nitzinger has his theories: “It came out on
Halloween, which was good, and it got banned, because
it had the sirens in it. And when you’re driving down
the street and you hear sirens on the radio… well,
cars started pulling over. The song became a traffic
hazard. So they banned it. Which made people want it
all the more.”
As to Bloodrock’s
reputation as the mood killers of early metal, Nitzinger
admits that the band courted the dark side on occasion,
but he’s quick to point out that their mysterious image
was largely just a fan creation. “There is some dark,
tongue-in-cheek stuff in there,” he says about
the early Bloodrock
albums.
“At the time, we were very serious. We wanted to get
down to the nitty gritty and really look at the dark
side of things. We didn’t want to be a sunshine band,”
he laughs. “This band always was mysterious. But
it was the fans that made them that way. The fans
built up this image. We didn’t know we were on the
dark side, we were just young guys doing our thing. It
was the crowd that defined us that way.”
As to chemical influences, well, that’s a story left
untold. “Drugs? Quaaludes?” Nitzinger bristles at
the question. “I don’t talk about drugs. Hell, this
band has been clean and sober for years now.”
Downer rock was not the only direction metal went in. By
1971 it had fractured into dozens of different
micro-genres and had become a worldwide phenomenon.
Suddenly the record bins were filled with wild new
bands. As Joe Harrington put it: “The crazier, the
more controversial, the more off-the-wall the music
was, the better.”
Dorman split from Iron
Butterfly and formed the ground-breaking
psychedelic-boogie band Captain
Beyond. Sir
Lord Baltimore, often cited as the
godfathers of ‘stoner rock’, started up in New York. In
Washington DC, Pentagram
out-Sabbathed Sabbath
and laid the groundwork for American doom metal. From
Germany, Tiger B. Smith
mixed bone-crunching hard rock with psychotic glam.
South Africa spawned the acid-punk metal of Suck. Japan’s Flower Travelin’ Band mixed
Middle Eastern rhythms with crushing, Blue Cheer power rock.
Many bands released a single album or two and then
disappeared into the ether: bands with sinister names
and screaming guitars like Antrobus,
Iron Claw, Josefus, Necromandus, The Firebirds,
Warhorse, Armegeddon, Mourning Sun, Epitath, Jamul,
Primevil, Savage Grace and Black Merder. All these
bands are the forgotten pioneers of heavy metal. With
little label support and spotty distribution, it’s a
wonder they were heard at all.
As Joe Harrington points out: “There was no heavy
metal section at the record store in 1972. You just
had to look at the record and figure it out.”
While most proto-metal bands succumbed to disco, punk,
obscurity or James Taylor
by the mid-70s, a few of them managed to endure. Some
were even rediscovered by new audiences decades later.
Three such bands are JPT Scare
Band, Leaf Hound and
Bang.
 JPT Scare Band was the
death metal of early-70s hard rock. Formed in Kansas
City, Missouri in 1973, their nearly freeform
psyche-metal went further than any band before them.
Aptly named, they constructed towering walls of
terrifying, evocative, druggy guitar noise, but played
mostly for like-minded stoners in their rehearsal space,
leaving them one of the most obscure proto-metal
innovators. As Scare Band
drummer Jeff Litrell recalls: “We played live almost
every night, it was just that we did it down in the
basement with only a few tripped-out freaks in
attendance.”
Like their forebears in Sabbath
and Bloodrock, the Scare Band were not
afraid to explore the dark side in their music. Their
first album, Sleeping Sickness – recorded between 1974
and 1976 but not released until 2000 – sounds like the
death of the American dream at 150 decibels. But as
Litrell tells me, the idea was not to bum the audience
out.
“Nah, we just weren’t eating regularly,” he
laughs. “We lived in a war zone of gunfire and
stake-outs, pimps and hoes. When you had to walk
somewhere you walked with purpose. It was right toward
the end of the Vietnam débâcle and the times were
somewhat oppressed. Believe it or not, we thought we
were really up and just psychedelic. We never
purposely intended to bum people out. We definitely
wanted to scare them, though.”
The JPT Scare Band
reunited in 2001 after 25 years apart, and released Jamm
Vapour in 2007 on Kung Bomar Records.
Peter French is legend in the annals of proto-metal,
having fronted three seminal bands from 1970-74: Cactus, Atomic Rooster
and his own creation, Leaf
Hound. The latter’s sole album, 1970s
Growers Of Mushroom, is now acknowledged as an
undisputed classic of heavy riff’n’roll, and has gone on
to influence countless bands, including nearly every
major player in the stoner rock movement, from Kyuss to Monster Magnet.
But, as French explains, the band’s leafy-green imagery
was more horror show then dope show. “The name Leaf
Hound was not what some people have presumed it to
be,” he says, “the idea of the name coming
from a short horror story by Ray Bradbury called The
Emissary, about a dog that had returned from the dead
covered in mud and leaves.”
Furthermore, French says, the band’s image, like Bloodrock’s, was largely
the figment of revisionist imaginations: “The drug
scene of course was around, but we never really took
to it. The drug-crazed image of Leaf
Hound that some people seem to have
assumed couldn’t be further from the truth. The band
was as straight as a die when we wrote and played and
recorded our album.”
Through a series of murky circumstances, Leaf Hound were dropped
from their label on the eve of their first album’s
release.
“We found out, much to our complete and utter dismay,
that our album was not now going to be released after
all,” French remembers. “The band broke up
after hearing this. Ironically, about a year after the
band had finished, the record appeared, but of course
now there was no band to promote it.”
French, who went on to play in
Big Bertha with
Cozy Powell, as well as Atomic Rooster and Cactus, felt that Leaf Hound never got
their due. Then, in 1993, the band finally got the
recognition they deserved: “Record Collector magazine
rang me out of the blue, to my surprise, to tell me
what a fantastic band they thought Leaf Hound was,”
he says, “and invited me to do what was to become
quite a major interview for their magazine.”
Growers Of Mushroom was re-released in 1994 to critical
acclaim. French re-formed Leaf
Hound with an all-new lineup, and
released a new album, Leaf Hound Unleashed, in 2009,
followed by Live in Japan three years later.
 Meanwhile, what of the
final band in our deadly trio: Bang? [pic left]
We tracked down Tony D’Lorio, drummer for the
Philadelphia metal combo, who immediately told us:
“We had to be the first band to use shotguns on stage.
We had a guy dressed in black shooting a shotgun.
Because we’re named Bang,
see?”
Bang formed two weeks after the Woodstock festival in
1969. “We were basically doing Black Sabbath then,
trying to figure out what we were all about,” Tony
says. “Loud music and smoke, that was the theme of
the band.”
After fitfully trying to get somewhere in their home
town and enduring more than their share of strange
events, including a singer who “went crazy and ended
up in a mental institution”, Tony took Bang and a tent on the
road, travelling to Miami to find a record distributor
to sign his band. Somewhere along the way they ran out
of pot and pulled over in Daytona.
“So we score a bag on the boardwalk, and now we’re
looking for papers,” he remembers. “So we pass
by this record store, and there’s a sign in the window
for a Battle Of The Bands. We go in to talk to the
guy, I tell him we want in. He has a real snotty
attitude and tells us it was last week, we were too
late. And then he says: ‘Hey, Rod
Stewart is playing over in Atlanta, why
don’t you go there and play with him?’
“So we’re sleeping in a tent, and I say: ‘We’re going
to Atlanta to play with Rod
Stewart.’ We get to the place where
he’s playing; it seats 17,000 people. I start knocking
on doors until I find this guy who I think is the
promoter. I tell him: ‘We’re Bang,
from Philly. I’d like you to hear us play. If you like
us, we’ll play on the show, if not we’ll go away.’ So
we set up, we do our set for the guy, and he loves us.
He says: ‘Yeah, okay, you can open up the show.’ That
night it was Rod Stewart
& The Faces, Deep Purple, Southern Comfort
and us. We had like six inches at the front of the
stage to set up.”
After that fateful night, Bang
began opening for major bands such as Steppenwolf and Ike & Tina Turner,
and eventually got signed to Capitol Records. They
released four albums of hard, politically charged rock,
but split in 1974, when heavy metal fell out of favour,
and the label asked if they could write a song like Helen Reddy’s feminist
hit I Am Woman.
“We couldn’t,” Tony shrugs resignedly. “Twenty
five years later we got back together and carried on.”
The official history of heavy metal will probably
continue to put Black Sabbath,
Deep Purple and Led
Zeppelin on page one, but there is a
rich, secret history of the hard stuff out there, buried
under stacks of old, crackly vinyl. These are the
forgotten ghosts of metal. Relics from the dark ages of
rock’n’roll. Ancient astronauts floating soundlessly
into the void. But bands such as
Bloodrock, JPT Scare Band, Leaf Hound and
Bang remember. And
so do a growing cult of fans who are rediscovering the
missing links of metal, one acid-fried memory at a time.
“We had a ton of fun, we made love to beautiful
women, we travelled to the edge of the cosmic universe
and returned semi-intact,” says JPT Scare Band’s Jeff
Litrell. “We experienced interesting times, made
great music and recorded a lot of it. Terry, Paul and
I are still alive, we are still best of friends and we
can still play scary music together. A lot of cool
cats that we met along the way didn’t make it.
Everything has turned out just fine, all things
considered.”
Bang's Tony D'Lorio
concludes as we wind up the Bang story
“Man, I still get emails from people that say: ‘I just
wanted to tell you that you blew Black Sabbath off the
stage that night in Columbia,” And did you? “Oh
yeah, we definitely blew them off the stage. No doubt
about it."
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Tony
Iommi dismisses ‘rock is dead’ talk
as he readies Tony Martin-era Sabbath
box set
'I don't think rock is
going to die' says Black Sabbath riff lord
Tony Iommi, as he promises
new Sabbath retrospective.
Guitarist Tony Iommi
is convinced that rock music is in rude health, and
isn’t about to fade away anytime soon.
Sabbath’s founding guitarist addressed the topic raised
on an annual basis by Kiss
bassist Gene Simmons,
and said, “I don’t think rock is going to die… that’s
been said for years.”
“Good music is not going to go,” Iommi continued.
“There's always going to be a market for it. There are
going to be an amount of bands that fall by the
wayside — as there always is, there always will be.
But there are certain bands that are going to stick
out and going to be there. You've got Metallica up there —
they're not going to go away. They've got a lot of
fans and they've got a great fanbase. There are a lot
of bands out there. No, the music is not going to go
away.”
Iommi revealed that, having reissued Ronnie James Dio-era
Sabbath albums Heaven And Hell and The Mob Rules, he’d
like to dig into his personal vaults in order to compile
a proper retrospective of Tony
Martin’s time in the band, which began
with 1987’s The Eternal Idol album and lasted through to
1995’s Forbidden (save for the period when Dio returned
to the band for 1992’s Dehumanizer).
“I've got a lot of lots and lots and lots of
recordings of stuff we've done in the past that's
never seen the light of day,” he revealed. “I'd
like to sort some of that out and put that on some of
the albums. We are gradually going through these box
sets and then there will be a Tony Martin [era] box
set at some point coming out and stuff with Ian Gillan maybe.”
“It's unfortunate that over the years Tony Martin
has got buried in all this Ozzy and Dio stuff and
everything,” Iommi added. “There will be a
period now where we'll be able to release the box set
with the Tony Martin albums with some good outtakes as
well. I've already mixed [it] here at home, so that's
all ready to go, but we have to wait until the time is
right. We can't put all these things out together — it
would cause confusion.”
“I've got boxes and boxes of stuff that's
probably never been heard,” the guitarist
admitted. “Even I can't remember it all, it's just a
matter of rolling through it and finding it.”
-----------------------------------------------------------------
RESPECTED MUSICIANS
WHO WERE
ACTUALLY TERRIBLE PEOPLE
Some musicians just have a
freakish amount of talent. Most of us learn at a young
age that we are not those people. The realization
probably came as soon as you were old enough to read
social cues and you tried showing off your amazing
talents to anyone except your pet. (Daisy is a very good
dog, but maybe not a very good judge of musical
ability.) Those who do have that freakish amount of
talent are the singer-songwriters, the people who can
play any instrument they pick up, the ones who get lost
in the music of their own making whether they're in the
studio or on stage. There's something almost magical
about listening to a true musical genius, and they've
definitely earned our respect. But it's easy to forget
that behind all that music is a very ordinary person,
and sometimes, that ordinary person is a terrible human
being.
JOHNNY CASH'S TROUBLES WITH
WOMEN
There's a lot of dark stuff in Johnny Cash's life, but
let's talk about how horrible he was to women. Vivian
Cash's book I Walked the Line was a heartbreaking
tell-all detailing how she continued loving her husband
even through the drugs and the affair with his more
famous second partner, June Carter Cash. It was Vivian
who gave him four daughters, raised them, and stuck with
him through the worst of the arrests and the accidental
forest fires (via USA Today), but Johnny gave all the
credit to June.
Behind closed doors, June Carter didn't actually have it
any easier, in spite of the storybook romance performed
for the public. Biographer Robert Hilburn (via Esquire)
says he was stunned when he found out Cash had cheated
on her when she was pregnant with son John Carter. There
were many women, but the most painful was probably
June's own sister, Anita. John Carter has also talked
about his parents' less-than-perfect marriage, and has
said (via Reuters) his mother's drug addictions and
descent into paranoia came from a near-constant fear
Johnny was cheating again. That fear spread to their
son, who grew up well aware that his family could fall
apart at any time.
CHUCK BERRY'S ICKY PAST
Chuck Berry was a legend who helped shape rock and roll,
and when he died in 2017, The New Yorker described him
as "a proud and difficult man" who "was also a genius."
He also once punched Keith Richards in the mouth for
touching his guitar while they were getting together to
organize Berry's 60th birthday party. That's the
attitude that got him into all kinds of trouble, and
Berry even had a name for those incidents: his
"naughties."
It started when, as a teenager, he did three years in a
reform school for stealing cars and armed robbery.
Fast-forward to 1962, when Berry was 36 years old. He
was tossed in the clink for violating the Mann Act, a
law that prohibits taking a woman across state lines
with "immoral" intentions. Oh, and the girl was 14. He
served 20 months of the three years he was originally
sentenced to (via NPR), getting out on appeal after the
judge made racist comments.
And the hits just kept on coming, according to the
Riverfront Times. In December 1989, Berry was accused of
videotaping women in the bathroom of one of his
restaurants. The following June, his property was
raided, with law enforcement finding weapons, pot, and
the videotapes in question, placing him at the center of
a class-action lawsuit. Berry's camp eventually settled,
but that seriously tarnishes any legacy.
ELVIS' UNDERAGE FLINGS
It's impossible to describe the effect Elvis had on
music history, so let's get right to the dirt. He was 21
when he became ridiculously famous with the success of
"Heartbreak Hotel," and after that, all bets were off
when it came to how far he was going to go. Along with
the fame and fortune came the admiration of countless
women, but according to biographer Joel Williamson (via
Broadly), there was a particular type of woman Elvis
liked: the really, really young ones.
The right age to be an Elvis girl was 14, and when the
22-year-old megastar went on those early tours he took
along a little group of 14-year-olds. Williamson says he
was a huge fan of tickling and wrestling, along with
everything else short of actual intercourse. Future wife
Priscilla was 14 when she met 24-year-old Elvis, and
just what went on behind closed doors is debated. What's
not debated is that after Lisa Marie was born he lost
interest in her, instead courting another 14-year-old
named Reeca Smith.
There was a bit of violence in Elvis, too. Years later,
he was engaged to a 21-year-old who claimed he once
pulled out a gun and put a bullet in the headboard of
the bed she was sleeping in, saying it was "an attention
getter." The Guardian says in between those major
relationships there were a ton of others, many with
underage girls who preferably had tiny, tiny feet.
FRANK SINATRA'S DESTRUCTIVE
TEMPER
Frank Sinatra was iconic on stage, but there was a lot
of shady stuff that happened off-stage. Let's talk about
one part of that: his temper. According to The
Telegraph, it was so bad that one of his wives once
described him as a sort of Jekyll-and-Hyde character,
and there's a whole list of physical altercations he was
involved in. First, the ones where someone got seriously
hurt.
He punched a reporter in 1948, eventually settling the
assault and battery charges filed against him. He was
staying at the Beverly Hills Hotel when he threw a phone
at a random businessman who was also there, and cracked
the man's skull. He nearly killed his then-wife Ava
Gardner by throwing a champagne bottle at her so hard it
cracked the bathroom sink.
Sinatra destroyed an insane amount of stuff, too,
usually in fits of rage. He took a knife to a Norman
Rockwell painting and shredded it, threw a
malfunctioning TV out a window at Sands Hotel in Las
Vegas, and smashed a car radio when The Doors' "Light My
Fire" came on. GQ says some of the stuff that met an
untimely end under his boot was pretty priceless, too,
like the Ming vase he destroyed at a Hong Kong hotel
after someone missed a lighting cue. That's what happens
when you get too used to having things your way.
JERRY LEE LEWIS'S RAGE-HATE
Talking about the sins and vices of Jerry Lee Lewis is a
little difficult, for one simple reason: He's got pretty
much all of them. He changed the face of rock and roll,
he helped shape decades of music, and he also has a ton
of shadiness in his past. A lot can be traced back to a
nasty temper and a violent streak, but finding it all is
tricky. The Guardian interviewed him in 2015, and said
it's almost impossible to figure out what's truth and
what's legend, including the circumstances around his
nickname: the Killer. The story Lewis tells is that a
friend just ... called him that one day for no
discernible reason, but it's also possible it came after
he tried to strangle and kill one of his teachers, an
act he fully admits to.
Lewis has had seven wives, and two died mysteriously:
one by drowning and one by overdose. The latter incident
went to court, where Lewis was ultimately cleared of
wrongdoing. But the law was not on his side after he
shot his bass player in the chest and had to pay out
$125,000. Lewis's seventh marriage was to the
ex-sister-in-law of his third wife, the most infamous.
Myra was 13 years old, and the daughter of Lewis'
cousin. Oh and, Medium says, he was still technically
married to his second wife at the time. It's no wonder
Lewis lies awake at night and worries whether he's going
to heaven or hell.
JAMES LEVINE'S PREDATORY
BEHAVIOR
You can't get much bigger than the Metropolitan Opera,
and for more than 40 years, conductor James Levine was
at the head of it. He sported titles like director
emeritus and worked with the company's young artists
program as artistic director. The last one is
particularly creepy, given that the New York Times
announced in March 2018 the Met was officially — and
loudly — ending its association with him amid
accusations of "sexually abusive and harassing conduct."
Not a lot of details were released, but sometimes, just
a few details are enough. The Met's investigation
involved interviews with 70 people, and it ended with an
official statement saying there was "credible evidence
that Mr. Levine engaged in sexually abusive ... conduct
toward vulnerable artists in the early stages of their
careers." Levine didn't comment on the firing — which
came after a December 2017 suspension prompted by four
men who came forward to say they had been targeted by
the conductor when they were still teenagers. Levine
denied the accusations then, but things started looking
very, very bad with the revelation it wasn't the first
time he'd been accused of that sort of thing. There were
rumors of abuse as far back as the 1960s, when Levine
was working at the Meadow Brook School of Music. With
accusations firmly out in the public eye now, one of his
accusers was quoted as saying, "The truth can be very
useful. The truth creates good."
CEE LO GREEN'S VIEWS ON
CONSENT
Cee Lo Green hit something of a rough patch in 2012 and
2013, and it gets a little complicated. According to The
Guardian, his troubles only started when he was accused
of both giving a woman ecstasy and later raping her.
Green ultimately pleaded no contest to the drug felony
and got three years of probation, along with 45 days of
community service. The rape charges simply went away
because Green's lawyer argued there was no proof it
wasn't consensual.
That's skeevy, and it gets worse. Green took to Twitter
to voice his opinions on rape, and saying they're
horrible opinions is a huge understatement. He wrote,
"People who have really been raped REMEMBER!!!" and "If
someone is passed out they're not even WITH you
consciously! So WITH Implies consent."
The Twitterverse's meltdown was immediate, and even
though he deleted the tweets, other Twitterers saved
them to prove that once something's on the internet,
it's definitely not going away. That's true for
everything, and it's especially true when it's a
sentiment like that. Green apologized, saying he'd
"never condone the harm of any women," but he still
became another poster child for proof of just how
healthy modern rape culture is (via Mic).
MILES DAVIS, DRUGS, ABUSE
If there was ever a human being who embodied the spirit
of music, that human was Miles Davis and the spirit was
jazz. But he was also such a horrible human that when
the New York Times reported there was going to be a
movie made about his life, they also said it presented
some problems.
First, let's mention the fact he used to play with his
back to his fans, and God help anyone who was brazen
enough to walk up to him. There was the insane vanity,
to the point where (via The Atlantic) he condemned music
critics for writing pieces that sang the praises of
anyone else, claiming they were just out to take away
his spotlight. Then there were the heroin and cocaine
addictions, stories of pimping, and his abusive
relationships with the women he married.
Ex-wife Frances Davis has claimed she wasn't just
terrified of him, she ran away a few times convinced he
was going to kill her. He admitted to the whole sordid
trend of beating his wives in his autobiography, Miles,
and even admitted he approved of other men hitting their
wives and girlfriends to keep them in line.
BRIAN JONES:
ANTI-ESTABLISHMENT AND ABUSIVE
Brian Jones (at right) died when he was 27, and when
Rolling Stone reported on the mysterious circumstances
of his death, they did it in an article subtitled
Sympathy for the Devil. That's not just a clever play on
one of the Stones' songs — Jones made Keith Richards
look like the one you'd choose to bring home to meet
your parents.
There were, of course, the drugs and the pills that
ultimately led to him parting ways with the rest of the
band not long before his drowning death. His troubles
started long before that, though, and he was kicked out
of his grammar school for inciting rebellion. He held
down a ton of random jobs, got in the face of the
popular press who didn't understand — or particularly
like — what they were doing, and behind closed doors he
had a violent streak a mile long.
Anita Pallenberg was one of the original muses for the
Stones, and she'd eventually go on to have a long-term
relationship with Richards. But she started out with
Jones, says Rolling Stone, and it was an abusive
relationship that ended when Jones hit her so hard he
broke his hand on her face. Sympathy for the devil,
indeed.
PRETTY MUCH EVERYTHING ABOUT
MORRISSEY
If you want to talk about a guy who's been very vocal
about some unpopular opinions, Morrissey is your guy.
In 2007, the Independent picked up an interview he did
lamenting what he saw as the death of British-ness.
While he denied being either xenophobic or racist, he
was still quoted as saying things like, "Although I
don't have anything against people from other countries
... the price (of immigration) is enormous. Travel to
England and you have no idea where you are." (The
Manchester-born Morrissey is the son of Irish
immigrants, and he later immigrated to Los Angeles and
then on to Rome, so ... yeah.) Three years later, The
Guardian ran an interview with the vegetarian, who went
on record condemning the animals rights abuses going on
in China. He then continued, "You can't help but feel
that the Chinese are a subspecies."
When the Harvey Weinstein scandal broke, Morrissey (via
the Independent) had this to say: "I hate sexual
situations that are forced on someone. But in many
cases, one looks at the circumstances and thinks that
the person who is considered a victim is merely
disappointed." He's targeted so many people Rolling
Stone did a round-up of his most controversial opinions,
and it included blaming Kate Middleton for the suicide
of a nurse, shrugging off a massacre that left 77 people
dead as "nothing compared to what happens in McDonald's
... every day," and called for Elton John's head to be
served to him on a plate.
JAMES BROWN AND DOMESTIC
ABUSE
James Brown's daughter, Yamma, released her memoir Cold
Sweat: My Father James Brown and Me in 2016. It was a
heartbreaking, cautionary tale of a girl who grew up in
a family where domestic abuse was the norm, a girl who
ended up in an abusive marriage of her own. She says
even though he never turned on her, she grew up
terrified he would. She described some insane incidents,
including one (via the Independent) where she wrote,
"Blood spurted from my mother's face. She started
thrashing around, kicking her legs, holding up her arms
to ward off the punches and trying to break free, trying
to save herself."
There were other incidents, too. In 2004, Rolling Stone
reported Brown was arrested for shoving then-wife Tomi
Rae Brown and sending her to the hospital. That mean
streak didn't keep him from having an indeterminate
amount of illegitimate — and often unacknowledged —
children, as The Telegraph reported after his death,
forgotten sons and daughters started coming forward with
DNA proof they were Brown's kids.
Brown was also at the heart of a change in legislature.
Jacque Holland came forward in 2005 and accused Brown of
a 1998 rape, but the case was refused because of the
time that elapsed. NME reported the laws were changed to
give victims more time to report a crime, a result
Hollander was happy with.
PETER MCNEAL'S CHILD
MOLESTATION CHARGES
Cake is one of those groups you probably forgot you used
to listen to all the time, but before you go back and
dig out your CDs, let's talk about what drummer Peter
McNeal has been up to. McNeal — who was also the drummer
for Norah Jones — made Rolling Stone headlines in 2014
for one of the most despicable reasons you can imagine.
The verdict of his court case was in, and he was
sentenced to 15 years to life in jail and was a
permanent addition to the sex offender registry.
Noisey said it wasn't just because of a single incident,
either. The details are way, way too terrible to repeat,
so let's just say one incident happened while he was
volunteering at a school in Los Angeles. Another one of
his victims was only 3 years old at the time, and that's
as terrible as it gets.
STEVEN TYLER'S CHILD
GIRLFRIEND
There are two sides to every story, and really, both
sides to this one are uncomfortable. When Aerosmith
front man Steven Tyler wrote his 2011 memoir Does the
Noise in My Head Bother You?, he talked a bit about
early girlfriend Julia Holcomb (and managed to misspell
her name in the book's acknowledgements, notes
the Boston Globe). Tyler wrote he had nicknamed her
Little Bo Peep, said they liked to get it on in public,
and left out a lot of the other details.
Holcomb wanted to clear the air about what she says
really happened, so she took to Life Site to tell her
side of the story. According to her, she was a
16-year-old from a broken family when she met Tyler and
kicked off a relationship with him that really started
when her troubled mother signed documents making Tyler
her legal guardian. Holcomb says she was already
pregnant by the time he asked her to marry him, and
plans for a family started to fall apart when his
grandmother refused to pass on her ring. Five months
into the pregnancy, Holcomb was trapped in a house fire
and sent to the hospital, where she says Tyler convinced
her to have an abortion. (Jezebel notes that he also
talks about it in Walk This Way, Aerosmith's
autobiography.) Holcomb left him — he had already moved
on to other women — and returned to her parents. Tyler
returned to the rock star life.
MICHAEL BREWER: TOTAL
PREDATOR
Chetham's school of music is a prestigious school in
Manchester, and until 1994, the director of music there
was Michael Brewer. Brewer — who was also the director
of the National Youth Choir and was awarded an OBE for
his services to music — was handed a jail sentence in
2013. The charge was sexual abuse, and the story gets
even darker.
According to the BBC, it started for Frances Andrade
when she was 14 years old. Brewer was her teacher, and
repeatedly assaulted her between 1978 and 1982. Brewer's
then-wife, Hilary, was also involved in the assault and
was arrested, charged, and convicted separately. None of
this came to light until years later, and when it did,
law enforcement stumbled into other complaints that had
been covered up, and another affair with a 17-year-old
student.
Andrade testified in court, and several of the charges
against Brewer and his ex-wife were dropped mid-trial.
Only six days after hearing that news, Andrade committed
suicide. The Telegraph reported her son blamed not only
Brewer, but his defense counsel, too, for taking the
route of calling his mother a "liar" and a "fantasist."
Even as the judge declared Brewer to be a "predatory sex
offender," law enforcement was still tracking down
former students and taking more statements about all
that had gone on behind the orchestra curtain.
SPADE COOLEY'S DOMESTIC
SORROWS
Spade Cooley was born in 1910, so you get a pass if
you're not incredibly familiar with his name. He was
huge in the 1950s, declared he was the "King of Western
Swing," led a 30-piece band, hosted his own TV show, and
made appearances in more than 50 movies. He's even got a
star on Hollywood Boulevard, and you may have had a
better chance of remembering him if his career hadn't
been derailed by alcohol, pills, jealousy, and murder.
Weirdly, he was the one who filed for divorce from his
second wife, Ella Mae. According to Taste of Country,
they were on the verge of getting back together when he
killed her on April 3, 1961. It gets worse, believe it
or not. The murder wasn't just incredibly violent (the
LA Times says Cooley choked, beat, and stomped her to
death), but he did it in front of their 14-year-old
daughter, Melody. He also reportedly put a cigarette out
on her to make sure she was dead, then sat around in
bloody clothes for a few hours before finally calling
someone.
Melody's testimony ultimately led to his conviction, and
he was actually up for parole in 1970. He was granted
permission to perform at a charity concert in 1969, but
collapsed and died backstage. It's a weird end to the
tale of the only celebrity with both a Walk of Fame star
and a murder conviction.
LEAD BELLY'S PENCHANT FOR
VIOLENCE
Lead Belly died in 1949, and if you don't remember him,
you should at least be glad groups like Creedence
Clearwater Revival and artists like Bob Dylan didn't
forget him. Even George Harrison once said, "No Lead
Belly, no Beatles." You know the songs he recorded, too
— like "The Midnight Special" and "Goodnight Irene" (via
The Telegraph).
Huddie Ledbetter was born in 1888, and he picked up the
name Lead Belly in prison. He did several stretches in
jail, starting with 30 days on a chain gang in 1915 for
getting in a particularly violent fight. Two years later
he was arrested again, this time for killing his
cousin's husband and nearly killing another. He was
pardoned in 1925 but went back in jail in 1930, this
time for stabbing and what Black History Now says
was "assault with intent to murder." It was during this
stint he was discovered by a pair of musicologists who
were recording songs for the Smithsonian, and Lead Belly
recorded hundreds for them. The rest of his life was a
combination of performing at venues of all sizes across
the country, and more time in jail. There was another
stabbing incident in 1939, but he stayed out of trouble
for the next few years. He was diagnosed with Lou
Gehrig's disease only months before he died from it in
1949, and he left behind an incredible legacy. And some
dead people.
JOHN LENNON: ABSENT FATHER,
WOMAN BEATER
You likely know John Lennon as the guy who sang "imagine
all the people living life in peace." Before trying to
fix the world's problems, the ex-Beatle should have
probably sorted out the not-at-all-peaceful mess that
was his home life. Despite his hippy image, Lennon was a
guy who left a string of broken people in his wake. He
abandoned his first son, Julian, when the poor boy was
only 5. As Julian himself has said, Lennon then
basically blocked the kid from his mind, giving Julian's
mom, Cynthia, just enough money for school and clothes
and not a penny more. Acceptable when you're barely
scraping a living for yourself, maybe, but kinda
unacceptable when you're part of literally the most
famous band on Earth.
Still, in some ways Lennon's abandonment of Julian may
have been a blessing in disguise. Vice reports that
while he was still with Cynthia, Lennon would verbally
abuse the boy over the slightest things and leave piles
of drugs lying around the house. He also had a string of
affairs, a practice he carried over to his marriage with
Yoko Ono, although Ono doesn't seem to have minded.
Perhaps worst of all, though, was Lennon's admission in
a 1980 Playboy interview that he used to sometimes hit
the women in his life. It really doesn't take much
effort to imagine Lennon was a prize jerk.
R. KELLY THE PERVERT CULTIST
In terms of musical significance, no one has had such an
impact on RnB as R. Kelly. In terms of making your lunch
want to exit your body at high velocity, no one has had
as much impact on your stomach as the same man. R. Kelly
is a guy who has taken male privilege and pushed it to
extremes so sickening that even the abstract concept of
toxic masculinity finds him disgusting. For 25 years
now, we've had well-documented instances of Kelly
abusing women, harassing women, grooming teenage girls,
and allegedly even doing utterly screwed up stuff like
peeing on a 14-year-old, according to Variety. The
accusations are now so unrelenting that Lifetime was
able to dedicate six whole hours for its harrowing
documentary series Surviving R. Kelly.
Perhaps one of the worst accusations is that Kelly kept
black teenage girls in a demented sex cult, grooming
them, abusing them, and having them cut off all contact
with friends and family to become his personal slaves. A
2019 BBC documentary found evidence that Kelly kept
14-year-old girls as "pets," a term that probably sums
up all you need to know about his view of women.
Still, we happily now live in a world where being rich
and famous is no longer a guaranteed
get-out-of-jail-free card. Following the broadcast
of Surviving R. Kelly, Chicago and Atlanta
prosecutors opened new investigations into the singer
(via Guardian).
IAN DURY WAS AN ALCOHOLIC
BULLY
There's an old anecdote about British musician Ian
Dury's drunken antics that kind of sums up everything
about him. Disabled in one arm and one leg by a
childhood battle with polio, the alcoholic Dury
nonetheless liked to get drunk and insult the biggest,
meanest, nastiest guy in any given pub, just to see if
they would try and fight a disabled person. Sometimes
they would, and Dury's bandmates would step in and
finish the fight for him. Since it often ended in a
beating for the band members, sticking up for drunken
Dury became known as "Dury Duty."
Dury's acid tongue wounded more than just random
bruisers in various London pubs. According to his son,
Baxter, Dury was like a "Polaris missile," able to lock
onto anyone's weakness in seconds and verbally destroy
them. This violence was dished out basically whenever
he'd been drinking; he would hurt family, friends,
children, or whoever happened to wander into sight.
Speaking of Baxter, Dury was also kind of an ... unusual
father to him. By which we mean that he once left
teenage Baxter in the care of a violent drug addict
known as the "Sulphate Strangler" for three whole years.
The two bonded and became friends, but that doesn't
change the fact that this was basically a terrible idea.
IKE TURNER'S SHOCKING RECORD
OF DOMESTIC VIOLENCE
Before he became famous as Tina Turner's husband, Ike
Turner was famous for being one of the handful of people
who could claim to have invented rock 'n' roll (via
Mic). After he married Tina, Ike was yet more famous for
being a husband so abusive that murdering him might have
led to the creation of a whole new category of
justifiable homicide.
Tina once wrote that their lives together were "defined
by abuse and fear." According to the Cut, Ike took
Tina to a brothel on their wedding night. He routinely
did cocaine and then had sex with her in such a brutal
way that Tina admitted it felt more like rape. He
sometimes beat her. At various times he broke her nose,
broke her jaw, gave her two black eyes, and left her
with third-degree burns after hurling hot coffee in her
face. At one moment in her autobiography I, Tina, the
star writes with shocking frankness about tasting blood
from a beating as she sang on stage.
There are also rumors, many recounted in a Spin Magazine
interview in which Ike tried to defend his
behavior, that he threatened to kill Tina, shot bullets
into her house after they split up, and once drove her
to attempt suicide. When asked about it, Ike said, "I
didn't hit her more than the average guy beats his
wife." What a class act.
MICHAEL JACKSON: CREDIBLE
ACCOUNTS OF CHILD ABUSE
In the
post MeToo era, we've learned that the rich and powerful
will frequently do everything they can to silence
accusers. That may be why, despite an all-out assault by
the Jackson estate calling its subjects' credibility
into account, the documentary Leaving Neverland is
actually getting shown on TV. A four-hour film featuring
detailed interviews with two men who say they survived
persistent abuse at the hands of Michael Jackson as
children, it was so shocking when screened at Sundance
that Indiewire's reviewer said it "proves Michael
Jackson sexually abused children."
According to Variety, Leaving Neverland slowly builds an
effective, methodical case with so many damming details
that it becomes hard to question. Not that people
haven't tried. The two accusers, Wade Robson and James
Safechuck, had previously defended Jackson at his trial
and later lost a civil suit against the estate for abuse
allegations. Jackson's estate says this shows their
story is motivated by greed.
Still, what a story it is. Robson and Safechuck credibly
allege that Jackson groomed them as children, molested
them, forced them to perform sex acts on him, and even
staged a mock wedding with Safechuck. All the while
Jackson threatened them with prison if they ever told a
soul. That's a classic abuser power play. It might
finally be time to delete Beat It from your Spotify.
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Not every supergroup has been able to
sustain the lasting appeal of Cream
or Crosby, Stills, Nash &
Young. The following list shows how many of
these acts have been forgotten over the years.
For every Asia or Bad English that managed
to reach, or even exceed, the commercial success of their
members' earlier work, there are seemingly dozens that
never got beyond a single album and tour cycle. This was
often due to personality conflicts within the band or a
record that simply failed to capture the public's
imagination.
Sometimes these were simply side projects -- never
intended for a long reign -- where members of one or more
previously famous bands decided to moonlight with other
musicians, perhaps to explore different styles of music
then they performed with their main group.
Perhaps most frequently these forgotten supergroups formed
when two or more former members of other famous acts
decide to hitch their wagons to each other in order to
climb back up rock's mountain of fame.
Whether these musicians left their original group because
of personality conflicts, a desire to lead their own band
or even due to the death of a former bandmate, they often
find that it is difficult for the public to accept them
under a new moniker.
In some cases, the supergroup's short tenure was by
design. This below list includes one-off performances by
members of the Beatles, Rolling
Stones, Cream and the Jimi Hendrix Experience, a
Rush-fronted
collection of Canadian stars who recorded one song for a
movie and a Guns N'
Roses-Metallica-Skid Row aggregation that
was put together for a party we really wish we had
attended.
The Gak
Sebastian Bach participated in a one-off supergroup called
the Gak with three members of Guns N' Roses -- Axl Rose,
Slash and Duff McKagan -- and three members of Metallica:
James Hetfield, Kirk Hammett and Lars Ulrich. The occasion
was a party thrown by 'RIP' magazine in Los Angeles. They
took their name from a slang term for cocaine.
Big Dirty Band
When the Canadian TV show 'Trailer Park Boys,' was set to
make a movie, Rush's Geddy Lee and Alex Lifeson led an
all-Canadian supergroup comprised of members of Big Wreck,
Three Days Grace, Die Mannequin and the Tea Party. They
recorded a cover of Bobby Fuller Four's "I Fought the
Law."
Lord Sutch and Heavy Friends
Screaming Lord Sutch was an eccentric British horror
rocker who gained a cult following in the '60s. For his
1970 debut he got contributions from stars Jimmy Page (who
co-produced), John Bonham, Jeff Beck, Nicky Hopkins and
Noel Redding. Despite the musical firepower of the guests,
it received savage reviews and reached only No. 84 in the
'Billboard' album chart.
Steampacket
Steampacket (or Steam Packet) could be called a reverse
supergroup, in that everyone in it went to greater fame.
In the summer of 1965, Long John Baldry, a mainstay of the
British blues scene, formed the group with singers Rod
Stewart and Julie Driscoll, keyboardist Brian Auger and
guitarist Vic Briggs. They gigged around the U.K. for a
little more than a year, with Stewart leaving in March
1966 and Baldry quitting that August.
Shadow King
After a pair of solo albums following his departure from
Foreigner, Lou Gramm got together with guitarist Vivian
Campbell, who had established quite a reputation by this
point with Dio and Whitesnake, and Donnie Iris and the
Cruisers drummer Kevin Valentine to form Shadow King.
Their only album, a self-titled release from 1991, was
produced by Keith Olsen, with whom Gramm had worked on
Foreigner's 'Double Vision.' Another song they recorded,
"One Dream," appeared on the soundtrack to 'Highlander II:
The Quickening,' although it was credited to the Lou Gramm
Band.
SuperHeavy
During a break from the Rolling Stones, Mick Jagger
created SuperHeavy with Dave Stewart (Eurythmics), singer
Joss Stone, reggae star Damian Marley and Bollywood
composer A.R. Rahman. They reportedly cut 29 songs in only
10 days, and 12 were released on a self-titled album in
2011.
The Law
Singer Paul Rodgers teamed up with drummer Kenney Jones
and created the Law. Their 12-song self-titled album came
in 1991. Despite featuring songs written by Phil Collen,
Bryan Adams and Chris Rea, and guitar work from Dave
Gilmour on one track, the record peaked at only No. 126,
although "Laying Down the Law" was a big hit at album-rock
radio.
The Dirty Mac
The Dirty Mac was a one-off supergroup put together in
1968 for the Rolling Stones 'Rock and Roll Circus'
television show, but it can't get much more super than its
lineup: John Lennon, Eric Clapton, Keith Richards and
Mitch Mitchell. They performed the Beatles' "Yer Blues"
and backed Yoko Ono on a free-form piece called "Whole
Lotta Yoko."
Bruce-Baker-Moore
Despite decades of well-known animosity between them,
former Cream bandmates Jack Bruce and Ginger Baker looked
to recreate their magic in 1993 with a new power trio.
They brought in Irish guitar legend Gary Moore, who was
also the principal songwriter, and put out 'Around the
Next Dream' a year later. They broke up following a
handful of concerts in the U.K. and Europe.
Eric Clapton’s Powerhouse
Looking to fill out a few tracks for a 1966 blues
compilation called 'What's Shakin',' producer Joe Boyd, on
the suggestion of Manfred Mann's Paul Jones, looked to use
some of the stars of London's blues scene. Eric Clapton,
fresh off his time with John Mayall's Bluesbreakers, was
the guitarist, and Steve Winwood, who was starting to make
his name with the Spencer Davis Group, was recruited to
sing. The rest of the group was comprised of three members
of Manfred Mann -- Jones (harmonica), Jack Bruce (bass)
and Pete York (drums) -- and pianist Ben Palmer. They
recorded four songs, three of which made the record, and
Clapton and Bruce formed Cream soon after.
Damnocracy
Damnocracy was created in 2006 for the purposes of a VH1
reality program called 'Supergroup,' in which a bunch of
rockers had to live together and collaborate on putting on
a show. The group consisted of former Skid Row singer
Sebastian Bach, Ted Nugent, Jason Bonham, Scott Ian (from
Anthrax) and Evan Seinfeld (Biohazard). After the show,
which includes highlights from their respective catalogs,
some Led Zeppelin and AC/DC covers and a new song called
"Take It Back," the members returned to their day jobs.
Captain Beyond
One of the longest serving supergroups, Captain Beyond
formed in 1971 and, despite a handful of periodic breakups
in between, toured as recently as 2015. Blending prog-rock
intricacy with blues-based psychedelia, the band featured
original Deep Purple singer Rod Evans (who fronted the
band during their more prog-focused incarnation),
guitarist Larry "Rhino" Reinhardt and bassist Lee Dorman,
both of Iron Butterfly, and Johnny Winter drummer Bobby
Caldwell. The band released three records including a live
album during their initial run from 1971-73, and the
current touring lineup includes Caldwell as the only
original member; Reinhardt and Dorman both died in 2012.
Rock Star Supernova
After INXS found a new lead singer on the reality TV show
'Rock Star,' the second season featured a supergroup
consisting of Tommy Lee, Jason Newsted and Gilby Clarke
holding a competition to find a new singer. After 15
episodes, Lukas Rossi was crowned the winner. An album was
released in late 2006, and they went on tour to promote
it.
HSAS
In 1983, Sammy Hagar got together with Neal Schon of
Journey, and recruited bassist Kenny Aaronson (Billy
Squier, Foghat) and drummer Michael Shrieve (Santana) to
form HSAS. They recorded their album, 1984's 'Through the
Fire,' live in concert at the Warfield Theater in San
Francisco, with minimal overdubs added. Their lone single
was a cover of Procol Harum's "A Whiter Shade of Pale."
Planet Us
Sammy Hagar, Neal Schon, Michael Anthony and Deen
Castronovo formed Planet Us in 2002. They tried to snag
Slash too, but he turned them down, so the guitarist gig
went to Joe Satriani instead. They didn't last long, but
the seeds were planted for another supergroup -
Chickenfoot.
WhoCares
In 2011, Ian Gillan of Deep Purple and Tony Iommi of Black
Sabbath got together to raise funds to help rebuild a
music school in Gyumri, Armenia, that had been destroyed
by an earthquake. Along with friends Jon Lord, Jason
Newsted, Nicko McBrain (from Iron Maiden) and Mikko
Lindstrom (HIM), they recorded two songs as WhoCares, "Out
of My Mind" and "Holy Water." That was followed a year
later by a two-CD set that packaged those tracks with
rarities from throughout Iommi's and Gillan's careers.
GTR
In 1985, prog-rock guitar heroes Steve Howe (Yes, Asia)
and Steve Hackett (Genesis) formed GTR with singer Max
Bacon. Their lone album reached No. 11 on the 'Billboard'
album chart and they had a Top 20 hit in "When the Heart
Rules the Mind." But perhaps it's best remembered for the
review it received from J.D. Considine in 'Musician'
magazine: "SHT."
Hardline
Formed in 1991 by brothers Johnny and Joey Gioeli,
glam-metal supergroup Hardline included Todd Jensen
(Sequel, Harlow), Neal Schon (Journey, Bad English) and
Deen Castronovo (Bad English, Tony MacAlpine). The band
released one self-titled album in 1992 before disbanding.
They re-emerged in 2002 with an altered lineup, and have
continued to record and perform.
The Storm
Exiled from Journey in 1985, the rhythm section of Ross
Valory (bass) and Steve Smith (drums) picked up founding
Journey keyboardist Gregg Rolie and 707 vocalist Kevin
Chalfant and created the Storm. A one-hit-wonder, the
Storm earned a Top 40 hit with their eponymous debut
album's power ballad "I've Got a Lot to Learn About Love"
in 1991 before dissolving two years later.
Blizzard of Ozz
A bit of explanation is in order: Ozzy Osbourne's first
project after leaving Black Sabbath was originally
intended as a supergroup. In 1980. he enlisted Randy
Rhoads (Quiet Riot), Lee Kerslake (Uriah Heep), Bob
Daisley (Rainbow) and Don Airey (Rainbow), and christened
it Blizzard of Ozz. But even though early press photos
confirmed it as a group, Jet Records instead credited the
album to Osbourne and used the band name for the album's
title. Daisley has since argued that he co-founded the
band; Osbourne and Rhodes are generally recognized as the
principal songwriting engine.
Squackett
More than two decades after GTR, former Genesis guitarist
Steve Hackett got together with another Yes legend,
bassist Chris Squire, and formed Squackett. It came about
when Squire was looking for a guitarist for a solo project
and was put in contact with Hackett. Their one album, 'A
Life Within a Day,' came out in 2012.
B.L.T.
The talents of former Cream bassist Jack Bruce and
ex-Procol Harum guitarist Robin Trower were always
best-suited for a power trio, so it made sense that the
two virtuosos would eventually work together. In 1981,
they enlisted drummer Bill Lordan (from Sly & the
Family Stone) and released 'B.L.T.' Although Lordan didn't
last beyond that album, Trower and Bruce recorded 1982's
'Truce,' and returned for 2008's 'Seven Moons.'
Union
After his time with Motley Crue came to a halt, singer
John Corabi formed Union in 1997 with late-era Kiss
guitarist Bruce Kulick, David Lee Roth bassist James
Hunting and touring drummer Brent Fitz. They lasted for
three studio albums, 'Union' (1998), 'Live in the Galaxy'
(1999) and 'The Blue Room' (2000), before calling it quits
in 2002.
Brides of Destruction
Initially called Cockstar, Nikki Sixx and L.A. Guns
guitarist Tracii Guns formed Brides of Destruction in 2002
following Mötley Crüe's 2001 hiatus. After briefly
flirting with the moniker Motordog and testing differing
lineup configurations, the group released its 2004 debut
'Here Come the Brides' with singer London LeGrand, drummer
Scot Coogan and guitarist John Corabi. After further
lineup shakeups, the band released its second and final
album, 'Runaway Brides,' in 2005.
58
During Motley Crue's turn-of-the-century hiatus, Nikki
Sixx got together with Boxing Gandhis guitarist Dave
Darling, Steve Gibb (son of Bee Gee Barry) and drummer
Bucket Baker. Taking their name from the year in which
Sixx and Darling were born, 58's lone album, 'Diet for a
New America,' featured a mash-up of genres, including a
cover of Gilbert O'Sullivan's soft-rock 1972 hit, "Alone
Again (Naturally)."
Paice Ashton Lord
After the breakup of Deep Purple's Mk. IV, founding
members Ian Paice and Jon Lord picked up veteran singer
Tony Ashton, who had worked with Lord in the past.
Released in 1977, their only album, 'Malice in
Wonderland,' veered away from the progressive hard rock of
Deep Purple into R&B and funk territory. They broke up
a year later.
Adler Z'Nuff
Chip Z'Nuff of Enuff Z'Nuff had played bass in Adler's
Appetite, a project of former Guns N' Roses drummer Steven
Adler from 2005-11. A year before Z'Nuff left, they
recorded a self-titled five-song EP using both their names
that they sold at gigs and online.
Badlands
After being fired from Ozzy Osbourne's band, guitarist
Jake E. Lee formed Badlands with two former members of
Black Sabbath, singer Ray Gillen and drummer Eric Singer,
and bassist Greg Chaisson. After their 1989 self-titled
debut, Singer left to join Kiss, and was replaced by Jeff
Martin of Racer X. Internal squabbling led to Gillen being
fired around the time of 1991's 'Voodoo Highway,' although
he was brought back to tour behind it. The band broke up
in 1993.
Duff McKagan’s Loaded
Assembling a backing band to tour in support of his 1999
solo album 'Beautiful Disease,' Duff McKagan's Loaded
became a full-time operation when the album was shelved.
McKagan's Loaded released their debut, 'Dark Days,' in
2001 with Martin Feveyear, Dave Dederer (from the
Presidents of the United States of America) and Geoff
Reading (New American Shame). The group disbanded in 2002,
but returned with 'Sick' in 2009 and 'The Taking' in 2011.
Neurotic Outsiders
By the mid-'90s, punk rock was enjoying its third wave.
And one of its premier architects, Sex Pistols guitarist
Steve Jones, assembled a cast of like-minded industry
luminaries to establish Neurotic Outsiders. Joined by
Duran Duran's John Taylor, Guns N' Roses's Duff McKagan
and Matt Sorum, the decorated quartet released their only
album, 'Angelina,' in 1997.
Living Loud
After Ozzy Osbourne had reissued his first two solo albums
with a different rhythm section, the men who played the
original parts, bassist Bob Daisley and drummer Lee
Kerslake, got together with the albums' original
keyboardist, Don Airey, Deep Purple's Steve Morse and
singer Jimmy Barnes to form Living Loud. For their
self-titled 2004 record, they cut new versions of six
Osbourne songs that Daisley wrote and five originals.
Saints of the Underground
Comprised of well-established glam-metal veterans, Saints
of the Underground formed the way most first-time acts do:
by light-heartedly jamming cover songs with peers.
Featuring Jani Lane (Warrant), Bobby Blotzer (Ratt), Keri
Kelly (Alice Cooper) and Chuck Wright (Quiet Riot), Saints
of the Underground released their sole album 'Love the
Sin, Hate the Sinner' in 2008.
Contraband
In 1990, L.A. Guns manager Allen Kovac set out to
construct a band consisting of glam-metal scene VIPs.
Recruiting the likes of Michael Schenker (Michael Schenker
Group), Richard Black (Shark Island), Tracii Guns (L.A.
Guns), Share Pedersen (Vixen) and Bobby Blotzer (Ratt),
the group released a self-titled album in 1991. The band
was short-lived, however, dissolving two years later.
New Race
In 1981, a pair of Detroit proto-punks, Ron Asheton of the
Stooges and Dennis "Machine Gun" Thompson of MC5, joined
up with three members of Australia's Radio Birdman --
Deniz Tek, Rob Younger and Warwick Gilbert -- to create
New Race for an Australian tour. 'The First and Last' was
a live album compiled from those dates, although Younger
re-recorded his vocals in the studio.
Blue Murder
In 1987, John Sykes picked up a record deal after getting
fired from Whitesnake on the eve of the band's
breakthrough. But rather than go solo, he hooked up with
Firm bassist Tony Franklin and veteran drummer Carmen
Appice and launched Blue Murder. But after their 1989
self-titled debut, he replaced them with Marco Mendoza and
Tommy O'Steen for 1993's 'Nothin' but Trouble.' A live
album released only in Japan followed the next year, and
Sykes then opted to go solo.
Cactus
Birthed by Tim Bogart and Carmine Appice, the former
Vanilla Fudge members enlisted the talents of Jim McCarty
(Mitch Ryder's Detroit Wheels) and Rusty Day (the Amboy
Dukes) to form Cactus in 1969. The band managed four
albums before dissolving in 1975. They resurfaced for
'Cactus V' in 2006.
KGB
When the Electric Flag dissolved for the second time in
1974, blues-rock guitar legend Mike Bloomfield and
Electric Flag co-founder, keyboardist Barry Goldberg,
enlisted songwriter Raymond Kennedy. The trio used the
first letter of their last names for their project, and
they released 'KGB' in early 1976. The rhythm section was
comprised of two men who had histories with supergroups:
bassist Ric Grech (Blind Faith) and Carmine Appice (Beck,
Bogert & Appice).
The Greedies
During some time away from Thin Lizzy in 1978, Phil Lynott
formed a loose supergroup with Steve Jones and Paul Cook,
who were without a band following the breakup of the Sex
Pistols. Called the Greedies (short for "Greedy
Bastards"), they played a handful of gigs, and sometimes
Lynott's bandmates Gary Moore and Scott Gorham joined
them. Their lone release was a 1979 Christmas single, "A
Merry Jingle," a medley of "We Wish You a Merry Christmas"
and "Jingle Bells." It was featured on 'The Kenny Everett
Video Show' Christmas screening.
Armageddon
After leaving the folk-inspired progressive group
Renaissance in 1970, former Yardbirds singer Keith Relf
then took to producing other artists, including
Steamhammer. It was out of this venture that came his next
musical project. Recruiting Steamhammer's Martin Pugh and
Louis Cennamo on guitar and bass, respectively, the newly
formed Armageddon would additionally include Bobby
Caldwell, a drummer from Johnny Winter's backing band.
Aided by Cennamo's friend Peter Frampton, the group struck
a recording and management contract, releasing their only
album, the eponymous 'Armageddon,' in 1975.
Orion the Hunter
As a result of internal band disputes, guitarist Barry
Goudreau left Boston in 1981. In establishing Orion the
Hunter, Goudreau sought the assistance of former Heart
drummer Michael DeRosier and Fran Cosmo, who had performed
on Goudreau's 1980 solo album. They released their sole
self-titled studio album, which featured backing vocals by
Boston's Brad Delp, in 1984.
Bloodline
Every aspiring guitar hero has to start somewhere. But Joe
Bonamassa outdid most when he, while still in his preteen
years, had refined his blues licks to the point where he
was opening for B.B. King at the age of 12. Before
Bonamassa was legal, he formed Bloodline, featuring
musicians associated with Miles Davis, Robby Krieger and
Berry Oakley. The group scored a minor hit with "Stone
Cold Hearted" in 1994.
Mother's Army
A supergroup in the truest manifestation, members of
Mother's Army covered the spectrum of rock acts. Featuring
Joe Lynn Turner (Deep Purple, Rainbow), Carmine Appice
(Cactus, Ozzy Osbourne), Bob Daisley (Black Sabbath,
Rainbow), Jeff Watson (Night Ranger) and Aynsley Dunbar
(Journey, Frank Zappa), the short-lived Mother's Army
released three studio albums between 1993 and 1998.
Streets
When several members of Kansas became born-again
Christians, Steve Walsh left to form Streets with
guitarist Mike Slamer, bassist Billy Greer and drummer Tim
Gehrt. '1st' arrived in 1983 and 'Crimes in Mind' followed
two years later. The band broke up and Walsh returned to
Kansas, where he remained until retiring in 2014.
Alcatrazz
Former Rainbow singer Graham Bonnet formed Alcatrazz in
1983 with former Iron Maiden drummer Clive Burr and rising
guitar wizard Yngwie Malmsteen. But Burr left after a week
and was replaced by Iron Butterfly's Jan Uvena. Their
debut, 'No Parole From Rock 'n' Roll,' peaked at No. 128
on the 'Billboard' album chart. Malmsteen left for a solo
career a year later and was replaced by another
up-and-coming guitarist, Steve Vai. The group disbanded ,
but were revived from 2006-14.
Bad Moon Rising
Lion was most known in the U.S. for contributions to
'Transformers: The Movie' and 'Friday the 13th: The Final
Chapter.' But when the group disbanded and Lion alums Kal
Swan and Doug Aldrich forged Bad Moon Rising in 1990,
they'd find soundtrack-free superstardom in Japan. They'd
enjoy a fruitful eight-year run before disbanding in 1998.
U.K.
After King Crimson's 1974 breakup, the rhythm section of
John Wetton (bass) and Bill Bruford (drums) decided to
keep working together. They brought in guitarist Allan
Holdsworth (Soft Machine, Gong) and keyboardist/violinist
Eddie Jobson (Roxy Music) for U.K. An album followed in
1978, but Bruford and Holdsworth left after their tour.
Deciding to go without a guitarist, they brought in
drummer Terry Bozzio for 1979's 'Danger Money' and a live
album, 'Night After Night.' Wetton formed Asia shortly
afterward, but the trio reunited in 2012.
Alias
Three years after Canadian rockers Sheriff split up, their
song "When I'm With You" became a hit in the U.S. Unable
to get the band back together, singer Freddy Curci and
guitarist Steve DeMarchi turned to three founders of Heart
-- Roger Fisher, Steve Fossen and Mike DeRosier -- and
created Alias. Their 1990 album resulted in two major
hits, "More Than Words Can Say" and "Waiting for Love,"
and a minor one in "Haunted Heart." However, the Heart
contingency soon left, and the two Sheriffs re-formed the
group in 2009 with other members.
Gogmagog
As Iron Maiden grew in popularity in the mid-'80s, two
former members, singer Paul Di'Anno and drummer Clive
Burr, teamed up with guitarists Janick Gers (White Spirit)
and Pete Wells (Def Leppard) and bassist Pete Murray
(Whitesnake). They released a three-song EP, 'I Will Be
There,' in 1985 and then broke up.
Oysterhead
In 2000, Les Claypool of Primus and Trey Anastasio of
Phish were asked to put a project together for the New
Orleans Jazz Fest. The got Stewart Copeland of the Police
to drum, and they called themselves Oysterhead. It worked
out so well that they kept it going, releasing 'The Grand
Pecking Order' in 2001 and mounting a North American tour.
They reunited in 2006 for a few festival dates, and have
wanted to get back together, but their schedules have not
synched up.
Street Sweeper Social Club
When Zack de la Rocha exited Rage Against the Machine in
2000, the remaining members soon found themselves fronted
by late Soundgarden singer Chris Cornell, performing as
Audioslave. Tom Morello, however, still desired a more
political outlet. For this he paired with the Coup emcee
Boots Riley to form Street Sweeper Social Club in 2006.
The duo released a self-titled studio album in 2009 and a
follow-up EP in 2010.
Tinted Windows
In 2009, former Smashing Pumpkins guitarist James Iha
assembled a group of power-pop stalwarts under the banner
of Tinted Windows. Accompanied by Tyler Hanson (from the
brothers group Hanson), Cheap Trick drummer Bun E. Carlos
and Fountains of Wayne bassist Adam Schlesinger, the group
released a sole self-titled studio album in 2009. While no
breakup was ever officially announced, the group has
remained inactive since.
Satellite Party
When three-fourths of Jane's Addiction formed the Panic
Channel, Perry Farrell went off with Extreme guitarist
Nuno Bettencourt and established Satellite Party, with
2007's 'Ultra Payloaded' featuring guest contributions
from members of the Red Hot Chili Peppers, New Order and
the Black Eyed Peas. But Bettencourt and drummer Kevin
Figg took exception to the increased role given to
Farrell's wife, Etty Lau Farrell, and quit before the
North American leg of their tour.
Arcadia
By the end of 1984, Duran Duran were a worldwide
phenomenon - but one in need of some time apart from each
other. So in 1985, they splintered into two side projects.
Power Station, John and Andy Taylor’s team-up with singer
Robert Palmer, grabbed the majority of the headlines.
Meanwhile, Simon Le Bon, Nick Rhodes and Roger Taylor
formed Arcadia, a synth-pop outfit that achieved a Top 10
hit on both sides of the Atlantic with “Election Day"
before dissolving the following year.
The Wondergirls
More of a collective than a supergroup, extra-populated
one-off project the Wondergirls was formed by Stone Temple
Pilots' Scott Weiland in 1999. The Wondergirls released
only two songs, "Let's Go All the Way" and "Drop That
Baby," with contributions shared among an army of
alternative-rock peers, featuring members of Sugar Ray,
Orgy, the Cult, Queens of the Stone Age, 30 Seconds to
Mars and more. A new version of "Let's Go All the Way"
surfaced in 2013 for the 'Iron Man' soundtrack.
Ataxia
During his second stint with the Red Hot Chili Peppers,
John Frusciante went off with Fugazi's Joe Lally (on bass)
and drummer Josh Klinghoffer and created Ataxia. The
experimental rock band put out two records: 'Automatic
Writing' in 2004 and 'AW II,' a collection of tracks left
over from the initial sessions, three years later.
Klinghoffer would later replace Frusciante as the Chili
Peppers' guitarist.
Automatic Baby
Both R.E.M. and U2 had been strong supporters of Bill
Clinton during his 1992 presidential campaign. For his
inauguration, two members from R.E.M. -- Michael Stipe and
Mike Mills -- joined up with two from U2 -- Adam Clayton
and Larry Mullen Jr. -- and performed "One" at MTV's
inaugural ball. They called themselves Automatic Baby,
after both bands' recent hit albums, U2's 'Achtung Baby'
and R.E.M.'s 'Automatic for the People.'
The Backbeat Band
Ian Softley's 1994 film 'Backbeat' focused on the time the
Beatles spent woodshedding in Hamburg. To underscore their
lack of polish in 1960, Softley recruited a sextet of
alternative rockers -- Greg Dulli (Afghan Whigs), Dave
Pirner (Soul Asylum), Thurston Moore (Sonic Youth), Don
Fleming (Gumball), Mike Mills (R.E.M.) and Dave Grohl
(Nirvana) to play revved-up versions of covers that were
part of the Beatles' set lists in those days.
The Both
After touring together in 2012, Aimee Mann and Ted Leo
decided to start collaborating with the hopes of putting
out an EP, which resulted in enough material for a
full-length. They called themselves the Both, after the
hashtag they created to promote their gigs. 'The Both' was
a rare moment when two established acts came together and
created something greater than the sum of its parts.
Deconstruction
Between Dave Navarro's tenure in Jane's Addiction and the
Red Hot Chili Peppers lies a short-lived project called
Deconstruction that's been lost to the dustbin of alt-rock
history. Navarro, with drummer Michael Murphy and Jane's
Addiction bassist Eric Avery, used Deconstruction as
vehicle for more sensitive and experimental material. The
trio released a self-titled album in 1994, but while the
commercial impact of the record was nil, 'Deconstruction'
has regained a modest cult following.
Eyes Adrift
In 2002, former Nirvana bassist Krist Novoselic got
together with longtime friend Curt Kirkwood of the Meat
Puppets and Sublime's Bud Gaugh to create Eyes Adrift. The
group released only one self-titled album and one single,
“Alaska,” which failed to chart.
Fear and the Nervous System
In 2008, Korn guitarist James "Munky" Shaffer began
corralling his friends, including members of Faith No
More, Avenged Sevenfold and Repeater, into the studio to
jam. Four years later, the tracks saw the light of day in
the form of Fear and the Nervous System's self-titled
debut. Wes Borland of Limp Bizkit was also involved early
on, but his contribution in the end was limited to the
album's artwork.
The Glove
In 1982, the Cure's Robert Smith spent a bit of time
playing guitar with Siouxsie and the Banshees. The next
year he and Banshees' bassist-keyboardist Steven Severin
went off and formed the Glove, with Jeanette Landray
handling vocal chores. They released one album, 'Blue
Sunshine,' which included drums by Andy Anderson, who
would soon become a member of the Cure.
Hindu Love Gods
Hindu Love Gods were what R.E.M. and their friend Bryan
Cook called themselves when they wanted to
semi-anonymously play covers in the bars in their hometown
of Athens, Ga., On one occasion in 1984, Warren Zevon sat
in with them. When Zevon hired R.E.M to be his backing
band for 1987's 'Sentimental Hygeine,' they devoted a
late-night session to recording a bunch of folk and blues
standards ... and Prince's "Raspberry Beret." They
released the session under the Hindu Love Gods name in
1990.
The I Don't Cares
Friends for years, Paul Westerberg and Juliana Hatfield
branded themselves as the I Don't Cares and released 'Wild
Stab' in 2016. The record included a new version of "Born
for Me," a track that was first found on Westerberg's 1999
release 'Suicane Gratifaction.'
Mongrel
After leaving the Arctic Monkeys in 2006, Andy Nicholson
formed Mongrel with his former drummer Matt Heiders, Drew
McConnell (Babyshambles) and Jon McClure and Joe Moskow
(Reverend and the Makers). 'Better Than Heavy,' their
album that focused on political issues, was released in
2009.
The Panic Channel
When Jane's Addiction broke up for the third time in 2004,
guitarist Dave Navarro, drummer Stephen Perkins and
bassist Chris Chaney picked up former MTV VJ Steve Isaacs
and established the Panic Channel. After the fatefully
titled and critically dismissed 'ONe' in 2006, Powerman
5000 bassist Siggy Sjursen replaced Chaney. But the band
disbanded later that year.
Zwan
Following the dissolution of Smashing Pumpkins' original
lineup, Billy Corgan took drummer Jimmy Chamberlin,
longtime friend Matt Sweeney, David Pajo and future Pixies
bassist Paz Lenchantin and formed the True Poets of Zwan,
who are better known as just Zwan. They broke up due to
internal conflicts a few months after the release of their
only record, 2003's 'Mary Star of the Sea.'
Mick Nick Pick Mick Nick
If the idea of a supergroup named after Mick Mars (Motley
Crue), Nick Rhodes (Duran Duran), Pick Withers (Dire
Straits), Mick Box (Uriah Heep) and Nick Hogan (Hulk's
son) sounds too weird to be real, you're right. It's a
concoction of the comedy team of Tom Scharpling and Jon
Wurster, and referenced on numerous occasions during their
routines on their podcast 'The Best Show.'
------------------------------------------------------------------------
That amazing cover of Don Maclean's American Pie was by
none other than local rockers - FM.
Just received this corker of a superbly-engineered Rock
cover song from a local band. I was gonna host their
picture and mention what a rockin' uplifting version this
was but . . . another slant - take a listen and see if you
can guess who these guys are. And oh yes, they're
North-East regulars; you've heard of them, seen them, and
they have featured in Riffs many a time. This seven-minute
rendition just blew me away - (and if I was in a Rock band
[I can dream can't I?] this is the drum sound I would
insist on) - and I just have to share . . .
HERE
Oh - and do I really have to say: PLAY LOUD.
I'll leave it a few days and then tell y'all who can take
credit.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
 WELL, IF
THERE'S one thing you can say for definite about Thunder’s thirteenth
studio album - 'ALL THE RIGHT NOISES', it’s that
the roll continues.
Having returned to the fray with 2015’s triumphant Wonder
Days, Luke Morley, Danny Bowes
and co. seem to be mining an endlessly generous seam of
rock’n’roll gold.
Given the events of the past year or so, this is precisely
the kind of thing that hits the spot – top-drawer tunes
and no-nonsense, full-throttle delivery, with chief writer
Morley clearly fuelled by anger and frustration, but still
finding inspiration to lighten the mood with some cheery,
upbeat rockers.
If you’re going to tackle serious stuff then you might as
well go big straight from the off. Here it’s with the
urgent and driven Last One Out Turn Off The Lights,
putting the boot into Brexit, followed directly by
possibly the heaviest song the band have ever written,
Destruction, about mental illness and depression, and then
we have The Smoking Gun, a low-key acoustic number
smouldering with righteous fury.
It’s quite a triple whammy to kick off the album with, and
the dark mood is echoed on Force Of Nature, focusing on
Donald Trump and what must have gone through his mind as
he rose to power, the brooding Don’t Forget To Live Before
You Die (carpe diem, baby), and St George’s Day, which,
dissects immigration and intolerance.
Fortunately the heavy stuff is expertly balanced by some
wonderfully carefree feel-good rockers. Going To Sin City,
where ‘bad girls and pretty boys strut their stuff’, is a
gloriously low-slung stomper. She’s A Millionairess is a
bright and breezy piss-taking rocker (‘She can’t be too
blond and she can’t be too thin’). Young Man is propelled
by an infectiously bouncy riff.
The strutting, cheeky You’re Gonna Be My Girl is decorated
with honky-tonk piano and has a middle section surely
designed for crowd participation for when such things can
happen again. And sitting in the middle of it all is I’ll
Be The One, one of the finest ballads the band have ever
written, featuring a rather ace Morley
guitar solo.
Honest, consistent and uncompromising, All The Right
Noises is quite the classy tour de force of
songwriting prowess and pacy execution, with Thunder sounding enraged,
engaged and thoroughly energised throughout. Which is just
what we need right now.
Having
been one of the UK's most popular rock acts in the early
'90s, Thunder found that
record labels were no longer willing or able to promote
their releases properly. Now they have taken matters
into their own hands, using the Internet and new methods
of distribution to get their records back in the charts.
 Speak to any
artist, producer or manager who has been around for some
time and they will tell you that the global record
industry has changed enormously over the last decade or
so. While CD burning and the illegal downloading of MP3s
have robbed the industry of necessary record sale revenue,
other entertainment industries such as computer games are
believed to have appropriated a portion of consumer
spending once destined for singles and albums.
Whatever the reasons for industry difficulties, the upshot
of it all is that record labels have less money to spend
developing new acts, or indeed, sustaining the acts they
already have on their books. Bands that were once flavour
of the month are quickly dropped when their heyday has
passed, and those that still have contracts often find
there is no money in the pot for promoting and advertising
their releases.
It's not surprising, then, that bands with loyal and
active fan bases are now questioning whether signing to a
label is the right thing to do, when they get so little in
return for signing over the rights to their music.
Ups And Downs
British hard rock band Thunder are
a good example, having recently enjoyed a top 30 hit
despite having no label or management company, and without
the help of any TV or radio advertising. They reached
their commercial peak in the early '90s, performing
sell-out gigs at London's Hammersmith Odeon and appearing
at the Monsters Of Rock Festival. Their second album even
reached number two in the charts, but they found
themselves out of fashion when the grunge rock movement,
spearheaded by Nirvana,
knocked stadium rock from its pedestal.
Thunder kept their
recording contract with EMI until 1995, when they were
finally dropped because of declining sales. Nevertheless,
they still had many record-buying fans, and on that basis
were picked up by independents Castle Communications for
one album, and then by Eagle Rock. By the end of the
decade, though, the band had decided cut their losses and
pursue other interests.
"Signing to Castle and Eagle Rock went well at first,
but we soon realised that they'd spent loads of money on
signings and didn't have anything left for marketing,"
explains Danny Bowes,
singer and now also manager of the band. "We had a
decent-sized fan base and that encouraged them to pay a
lot of money to sign us, but, with hindsight, maybe they
paid too much — which is why they couldn't afford any
promotion and marketing. We began to feel like we were
going round and round in smaller circles, so I told the
band that I was getting tired. It takes just as much
effort to make a record that doesn't sell as it does to
record a hit album."
 After The Storm
The split came in 2000, but only lasted for two years
before the band regrouped to take part in a series of live
shows. "We didn't come back with a view to starting a
label and selling records in any kind of meaningful
way," explains Danny,
who was quite happily working in production after leaving Thunder. "I'd been
involved with a Smash Hits tour and thought that it
would be really good to have the same kind of thing for
rock music, although I was thinking of a Monsters Of
Rock-type thing for indoor arenas really. So I came up
with a few solutions to some of the logistical problems
and took the idea to a guy who runs Clear Channel in the
UK and became sort of a back-seat partner.
"There were a lot of classic rock bands waiting for an
opportunity to go out and play, so we asked Neil Warnock
of the Agency Group if he had a big-name act to
headline, and he said that Alice Cooper would love to do
it, so suddenly we had a show! Clear Channel then asked
Thunder to take part because our 'powder was dry',
metaphorically speaking, after two years away, and they
knew that we always sold well live.
"We didn't want to play some shows and then split up
again because the fans would think we'd just done it for
the money, so, before we knew it, we were making an EP
to sell via our web site and at shows. In the end we
sold 5000 copies to a total audience of 50,000, which
was very encouraging."
The success of the EP started Thunder thinking about
the possibility of making further single and album
recordings, but they had no label, management or
distribution, and did not intend to release anything
half-heartedly. "I'd never considered just using the
Internet to sell records because I didn't fancy doing
the cottage-industry-style thing of licking up labels
and sticking them on CD-Rs,"
Danny admits. "So I had a couple of
long conversations with a guy called Bruce McKenzie about
selling our music through shops without label
distribution. He runs a chain of record stores called
Townsend Records, but he's very much the new breed of
record-store owner who wants to be involved in making
records as well as selling them. He agreed to help me
sell them on-line if I took care of the manufacture and
finance of the records.
"Thunder had a
good relationship with retail, so I knew it was
possible. We used to do in-store tours around the time
of the release of our records. We'd do an acoustic set
in the morning, signing in the afternoon and we'd
literally tour the country that way. We'd take a little
PA and a driver who doubled up as a technical guy.
Retail loved it and we sold loads of records on the
strength of it. So I knew that if we said to retail that
we were doing an album ourselves, as long as we had
someone who could distribute the record correctly,
they'd be interested. We couldn't have done that from
scratch, though — we were in a position of strength."
 Teaming
Up
For Thunder to be able
to manage their own affairs, each band member has had to
take on a certain area of responsibility. Danny's friendship with
guitarist and writer Luke Morley
dates back to their school days (they formed their first
band at the age of 15), so the idea of drawing up a
contract denoting each Thunder
member's role was never discussed. Instead, each person
simply gravitated to their own area of interest. "We're
very fortunate that everybody is qualified to do
something that we need within the framework of our
organisation," says Danny.
When he isn't singing, Danny
manages the band, taking care of budgets, promotion and
distribution, and sorting out contractual legalities and
licensing deals, as well as other tasks that would
otherwise be handled by a label. "I take care of a lot
of the business, and do all the shouting and screaming
and coordinating," he says. "Luke is very much the
songwriter and the arbiter of taste when it comes to
music. He writes the songs, occasionally with a bit of
help from Harry James
the drummer and Chris Childs
the bass player. Luke's
always been interested in that side of it.
"Ben
[Matthews], one of our guitarists, is the Pro Tools man.
He's a qualified studio engineer, and knows what the
band needs. Last year we bought a big TDM Pro Tools rig
[consisting of a dual-1.25GHz G4 Mac, an HD2 system and
two 192 interfaces, each with the A-D expansion card,
plus numerous plug-ins] and that's worked out very well
for us. HHB designed it to fit in two cases which we can
get into the back of an estate car. You can take it
pretty much anywhere because all you need are a pair of
plug sockets and two cables to connect the units
together. The racks are also filled with Focusrite
preamps so we don't need a desk, and the Mac fits in the
cases too. You can operate the whole thing using pair of
headphones. It cost approximately £20,000 but it saves
us thousands too. We still have to record the drums and
loud stuff in a controlled studio environment, but we
can take the rig away and overdub and mix in our own
home studio, so it's the convenience as well as the
money savings that makes it a worthwhile way to work.
 "We also
get help from a Pro Tools expert called Rupert Coulsen who has
worked with us on the last four studio albums. He's
based at AIR Lyndhurst, and was trained by George Martin. He shares
the programming stuff with Ben.
"Chris, our
bassist, takes care of all the design, and what he isn't
doing himself he's coordinating with a designer. He has
a very keen eye for it although it has only emerged in
the last year or so. He's done all the T-shirts for
latest tour, as well as things like labels, but he has
had to find his way in terms of what needs to be sent to
the factory for production. A lot of it is learning as
you go.
"Chris came up
with the design concept for the new album. He wasn't
quite up to doing the whole album package himself, so we
gave the concept to another guy who we've used before,
but the work was based on Chris's
ideas. Chris also
has a PC-based studio at home, so together with Ben, he's one of the
technical guys."
The Knowledge
When Thunder temporarily
split up in 2000, Danny
immediately threw himself into a series of industry
production jobs which gave him valuable experience.
"Even when I first started singing in the band I was
interested in what happened behind the scenes. I was
always interrogating the manager, accountants and
lawyers. While the rest of the guys were working on the
tunes or chasing girls around after the gigs, I was
analysing the merchandising figures! After the split I
started doing production work for MTV,
staging dance and club shows, managing a band and
singer, and during that time I met the finance director
of the company who manage the Barfly venues around the
country. They were looking for someone to sort out all
their production troubles, so I became their production
manager.
"I also began acting as a consultant for the label
started by Dave Stewart
from the Eurythmics.
We started with just an empty building, so I found
myself doing things like getting the networking of the
computers sorted out and tour managing Jimmy Cliff, who Dave had signed. I ended
up negotiating with the BBC for the worldwide TV rights
for the Commonwealth Games closing ceremony, which was
performed by Dave
and Jimmy Cliff's
band."
Calm Behind The Storm
Despite having an able team of people within the band,
releasing records and managing everything that goes with
that process still requires outside help, particularly
when it comes to distribution, accounts, manufacturing,
publicity and promotion. Thunder
hire in the help they need as and when necessary rather
than retaining anyone on a salary, although it's possible
that the situation may change as more and more recordings
are released and need to be managed. "We're bringing in
a production girl to help with manufacturing, which we
haven't done before," admits Danny.
"Her job will be to solely oversee the production and
make sure records get made on time. We now manage four
records including some singles and a Bowes & Morley
album Luke and I
recorded together, and they're all selling constantly.
"I do a lot
of the accounting but we have a book-keeper who
comes in a couple of days a week and we have a
business manager who steps in every now and then. He
used to manage a very big company, so he and I have
the 'big picture' conversation a few times a year.
We hired a radio plugger and a publicity person for
the last single, but we won't use a plugger for the
LP because there's no point trying to get LP tracks
for this band on the radio. The publicity lady has
some radio connections with all the kinds of
stations we could expect to receive plays from, as
well as local national and digital radio stations."
As band manager, Danny
takes a cut of the band's net income too. The amount also
covers his work as the Thunder
'label manager'.
Thunder: The Band As Business
Bring On The Web
It's ironic that the very technology that many record
labels blame for forcing them to cut back on their support
for new signings and artist development has enabled some
acts to go it alone without any label involvement. On the
one hand, downloading and CD copying has allowed the
public to get their hands on music without paying for it;
on the other it has also made it easy for artists to place
downloadable taster tracks on their official web sites to
draw in the punters. Thunder
have done just that, but the biggest benefit they have
found has come from the way the site is used to publicise
gigs and new releases, and to canvas fans' opinions on a
day-to-day basis.
"Our web site is absolutely vital," insists Danny. "Direct
communication is what it's all about. When there are
thousands of people looking at your web site every week
you are in a position where you can swap information
with them, inform them of events, and they can tell you
what they think about it. For example, when it came to
the idea for a one-off T-shirt to be sold at the
Christmas show, I became very aware that we might be
demanding too much from our fans. We had already asked
them to buy our single which came in three formats, each
with a different B-side. All of those add up in terms of
money, and we'd also asked our fans to buy Deep Purple tour tickets
in November, tickets for our tour in March, and again
for our Christmas show.
"I was able to ask directly via the web site how
they would feel about us doing a limited-edition T-shirt
specifically for the show, explaining that we were
concerned that they might think we were trying to fleece
them. We got over 200 replies saying that they wanted
the T-shirts, and they were just the people who could be
bothered to reply, so we went ahead."
 The web site has also made
it easy for the band to notify the fans of up-and-coming
concerts, and to point them directly to the place where
tickets can be bought, therefore removing the need for
expensive advertising. "For our Christmas show at Rock
City in Nottingham, we did a deal whereby all our
tickets were sold directly from their box office. We
didn't go to a promoter, or advertise it anywhere apart
from on our site, we just pointed people to the Rock
City credit-card hotline, and sold all 1000 tickets in
six days at £25 a head. Being able to send out a blanket
email to 10,000 people is just incredible."
Feedback from the public has even helped Thunder tackle problems
with manufacturing and distribution, as Danny explains. "Recently
we had to delay a single release date by two weeks
because we had so many orders that we needed a larger
print run. The problem was that some singles leaked out
from the distributor to Virgin stores and started
selling, and this happened while we were busy on tour
with Deep Purple.
Our web site manager called us having received emails
from people who were buying singles two weeks early, and
with that information I was able to call the distributor
and get them to pull the stock from the stores. Without
that instant communication we wouldn't have been able to
do that, and would have lost our chart placing because
of it."
Passing It On
Now that Thunder are
having success managing their own releases, they are in a
position to help other bands get started in the industry.
Ever the businessman, Danny
is considering the possibilities. "We've talked about
it, and we've found a couple of interesting acts, but we
need a substantial pool of money to help them develop
and get a name, and at this moment in time we're still
building the label and the
Thunder catalogue by ploughing the money
we make back in, but if we had some fat we could devote
it to other acts, and I'd be happy to do that.
"If you find acts you believe in you have to be
able to put your money where your mouth is, but there's
no point berating record labels if you are just going to
do the same thing as them. We need to have the courage
of our convictions, find the acts and then get to work.
"It's actually hard to find acts who believe that
you can help them, because there is still this
misconception that only record companies can do it,
which is patently untrue. In November we charted a
single at 27, and we have no record label. What we do
have is UK record distribution, lots of expertise, and a
group of people working to help us put a proper campaign
together.
 "A new
band starting out might want to do it themselves but
don't have that experience. The Internet makes it very
easy to have a go, but unless you have some experience
and/or some kind of industry contacts then it's very
hard. I'm sure a lot of bands have gone into it very
gung-ho and come out disheartened by the whole thing.
"I wouldn't have gone for it if I was a new act
starting from scratch. Luke
and I had already been waiting for a deal for nine years
by the time our band Terraplane
were signed to CBS in 1984, so we've built up a
following and have loads of experience. The problem is
that it costs a fortune to find a fan base, and you
can't manufacture one out of nothing. People tend to go
and see the bands they know, so you have to get in front
of other people's audiences initially and hopefully take
advantage of your opportunities. After a while you can
book your own shows in your own right, but you have to
start small and build up, and it all costs money.
"I'm about to start managing a new band, but I'd
probably release something by them independently purely
and simply to help gain attention from a bigger record
company who can supply the money to develop a fan base."
Selling The Hard Stuff
So far, actually selling records via their site has been
less of an ambition for Thunder,
who are determined to continue placing records in
high-street shops. "We did an excusive deal with HMV
for our first single because knew we weren't going to
sell enough copies to put them in every shop in the
country," says Danny. "We told fans that
it was available in HMV and as a result we got it to
number 48 in the charts, which was very good considering
the limitations, and we made money out of that record!
"We used to sell all our on-line stuff through
Townsend's on-line setup, although we do now have our
own shop from where we sell some merchandise
exclusively. For records, though, we still have links to
Townsend's site. They buy the new stock from us, and
have a large on-line store which carries all the old
Thunder titles, rarities, imports and so on."
Naturally, Thunder
have investigated the possibility of releasing MP3s, but Danny remains unconvinced
that the necessary infrastructure is ready. "We are
embracing every aspect of the digital revolution, but at
the moment I don't feel totally comfortable that they've
got it right. We did a deal with a company in the States
to make the second Bowes &
Morley album available on iTunes, but I
wasn't very happy with how it turned out because
although we do get revenue, it is not a massive amount
because there are about eight people in the chain. For
us it's not so much about the money, it's more about
reaching a new audience through another shop window, but
the whole thing took about six months to happen which I
thought was ridiculous when the Internet is all about
high speed. It's work in progress, in my opinion."
Danny is also
sceptical that MP3s, and future download formats, are
necessarily the way music will ultimately be delivered.
"Downloading is very useful for people who live in
remote places, but I don't think it will take over as
the main way to buy records because of the physical need
we all have for retail therapy. There's something
irreplaceable about the feeling you get when you've
found the thing you've been looking for or happened upon
something you weren't expecting. The thing about the
Internet is that it is all very good if you know the
answer to the question.
"When I was young I bought records just because I
liked the cover, although there was a lot more to look
at on 12-inch vinyl. If something caught my eye I would
buy it. Dark Side Of The Moon is a classic case of
something I bought just because I was intrigued by the
cover. When I got it home I was blown away. It shows how
artwork can motivate people to do things."
 The Here And
Now
Thunder are
understandably pleased with themselves, having recently
charted a single at number 27 and completed a successful
UK arena tour with Deep Purple
and Peter Frampton. At
one point it must have seemed as though their 15 minutes
of fame were behind them, but it just goes to show what a
little determination and organisation can do. Danny: "This is a
fascinating business at this point in time, because all
the rules that were accepted five years ago are gone. It
now appears that you can do pretty much whatever you
want.
"Running your own affairs is incredibly empowering.
You don't see anything when you're a band signed to a
record label; you just hear what your manager tells you.
A&R don't like having difficult conversations with
artists. I used to ask fairly pointed questions of
people in our record company and they used to get very
nervous. They'd be trying to get out of giving me the
answers. The manager acts as the go-between, and there
are things that record companies will tell a manager
that they never tell an artist. Like the singer looks
like he's put on two stone, he needs to lose weight —
that kind of thing. The manager has to tactfully call
the singer and say 'Have you thought about going on a
diet recently?'
"Having the experience to know whether something is
worth acting on in the first place is fairly vital. If
you've been in the business long enough you know someone
who knows the answer, even if you don't yourself. It is
just a case of making enough phone calls and staying on
good terms with people.
"But, for me, the most important thing is that you
live and die by your own actions. If, at the end of the
day, it all falls down then it is our fault. By applying
a business-minded approach, we feel we're going about it
in the same way as a label, only we're responsible for
every decision, and every mistake, as well as every
success. We won't go into old age thinking it was all
the fault of record companies. It shouldn't be like
that. If you don't like a situation, do something about
it."
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
 51 years ago last
month, Black Sabbath
released their debut album and kicked off the entire
genre of heavy metal. We take an in-depth look at its
creation, reception and legacy.
It was a clarion call that echoed from the void, a raucous
cry of unity for rockers that couldn’t relate to the peace
and love vibes of the Woodstock era. The sound had less to
do with the escapist tone of most popular music and more
to do with the desperation and frustration of living in
the detritus of post-World War II Europe.
The eponymous album by Black
Sabbath, which was released in Europe on
February 13, 1970, and in North America on June 1 of the
same year, was like nothing hard rock fans had ever heard.
There were elements of Led
Zeppelin and Cream
in there, sure, but the music was grimmer and far less
euphoric.
Instead of flaunting exuberant energy, Sabbath focused on the
bleak and barren, confronting listeners with buzzing,
overdriven guitars, meandering bass, lumbering beats and
nasal, almost sepulchral vocals that sliced through the
organized cacophony like a scalpel through a corpse. It
was loud, it was weird and, for many, it was almost an
overwhelming sensory overload.
Black Sabbath started with atmospheric sound
effects and then guitarist Tony
Iommi launched into one of metal’s most
influential licks, the devil’s tritone – a dissonant,
unsettling configuration allegedly once banned by the
church and shunned by composers. Rarely was the tritone
heard in popular music; it was most often heard along with
the haunting noises in horror film soundtracks. Yet Black Sabbath relished the
uneasy feeling the repeated three-note passage engendered.
 Anthrax
guitarist Scott Ian
first heard the track when he was a kid listening to his
uncle’s stereo and the experience left an indelible
imprint on his brain. “I just sat there scared,”
he says. “From the start, I was listening to the rain
and the wind and the bell and then that riff started and
just blew my mind.”
Disturbed frontman David Draiman had a
similar experience years later when, during a game of
"Dungeons & Dragons" his friend put Black Sabbath
on the turntable. “They just brought a vibe and a feel
that no other band on the planet ever tried to do,” he
says. “Before them, no one played those notes and no
one played these doomy riffs with that sludgy, heavy
sound.”
Other heavy artists — including
Blue Cheer, The Stooges and Jimi Hendrix — had dipped
their toes into the gut-twisting morass of chords and
notes that was to become heavy metal, but Sabbath were the first to
capture the sound, vibe and attitude that defined the
genre.
Over the next five years they recorded five of the most
influential and essential metal albums ever, but Black
Sabbath was truly groundbreaking — a structurally
complete blueprint for doom. Even the cover art foreshowed
the originality within. The strange, unsettling image of a
plain-looking woman (a witch, perhaps?) standing in the
woods in front of a farmhouse contained no occult symbols
or violent imagery, yet it was as disturbing as the
original cover of The Beatles’
Yesterday and Today. The shot was taken at the Mapledurham
Watermill in Oxfordshire, and it remains one of metal’s
iconic images.
For such a seminal album, Black Sabbath was
practically an afterthought for Fontana Records, which
booked the band a single day in the studio, October 16,
1969, to record with beginner producer Rodger Bain and engineer Tom Allom at Regent Sound
Studios in London.
 After the album was
tracked the label washed their hands of it, shuffling Sabbath’s debut to Vertigo
Records. Just being in the studio was an exciting
opportunity for Sabbath,
which started as a 12-bar blues band called Earth before changing
their name, and the musicians were eager to prove
themselves.
As Earth, they had
tested crowds with the songs “Black Sabbath” and
“Wicked World” and the reactions were promising.
“That was the first time that people started looking up
and going, ‘Wow, what’s this?’ says Iommi. “They’d come up
afterwards and say, ‘What were those songs? We really
liked those.’”
As soon as Earth
decided to stray from their blues roots, they expanded
upon their new sound with a batch of dense, equally
textural tracks, including “N.I.B.” and “Behind
the Wall of Sleep” and rehearsed them until they
could play them from start to finish, time and again. They
were tight, they were heavy and they were ready to
transform rock 'n' roll in a day.
“We went in the studio and we were off from the word
go,” Iommi recalls. “It’s
hard to even remember the session. One second we were
playing these songs and then the next thing we knew we
were out of there. Some people think the album was
recorded in a haze of drugs, but we hadn’t discovered
that yet and we didn’t have time to get stoned. We had
one day to prove ourselves, and that’s what we did.”
“We literally went in and played as if it was a live
gig,” adds Butler.
“We didn’t know anything about studios or production or
engineering. We just went in, set up and played and they
recorded us. It sounds easy, but it’s actually a really
hard thing to do – to record a band live in the studio
and get the whole feeling across. A lot of producers
tried that but dismally failed. But Roger and Tom just had the knack
of doing it.”
Aside from the cult Chicago band Coven,
which wrote Satanic lyrics and included a recording of a
black mass on their 1969 album Witchcraft Destroys
Minds & Reaps Souls, Sabbath
were the first group to write songs that mentioned Lucifer
and Satan and featured occult themes. To a large extent Sabbath knew they were
playing with fire and enjoyed being provocative. They
wrote from a knowledgeable perspective since they had
dabbled in occult rituals and readings.
“We were into it,” Iommi
says. “Certainly [bassist] Geezer
[Butler] and myself were. It was certainly an interest.
There was this thing called ‘the occult’ and we wanted
to soak in as much as we could about it and find out
what it was about. I suppose we got wrapped up a bit too
much sometimes.”
 Black
Sabbath didn’t exclusively write about
darkness and evil and they stopped short of endorsing the
occult. “Black Sabbath,” which is often referenced
for its blatantly Satanic lyrics, was actually written by Ozzy Osbourne and was
based on a paranormal experience Butler
had one night.
“In the middle of the night I felt this presence,” Butler recounted. “I
woke up and there was this black shape looming over the
bottom of the bed. It frightened the pissing life out of
me. I told Ozzy and
that inspired him to write the lyrics to the song as a
warning to people that were getting heavily involved in
black magic.”
Considering the band’s name, it’s not hard to grasp how
Satanists misunderstood the meaning of some of Sabbath’s lyrics and
assumed the musicians shared their blasphemous views.
Despite their interest in black magic, Sabbath were hardly devil
worshippers.
In response to vocal and vehement adoration from witches
and Satanists, Sabbath
mocked them in interviews and started wearing large
crosses around their necks at the suggestion of the head
white witch in England. Sabbath’s
response pissed off disciples of Satan. At the same time,
the band’ s dark imagery incensed parents and religious
figures, neither of whom stopped to consider that Sabbath’s lyrics didn’t
endorse Satanism.
“There was one incident where we were due to play in a
town and we got banned by the church,” Iommi says. “The show
was announced in all the papers for two weeks before we
got there. The church managed to ban us. And then the
bloody church burned down and we got the blame. They
were trying to say that we had caused it, which was just
weird.”
 It’s no
surprise that most of the mainstream press didn’t cater to
Sabbath’s charms,
labeling them primitive and untalented. “They thought
our music was for yobs and doubters,” Iommi says. “They
didn’t see it as music at all.”
That didn’t stop hard rock fans from reacting to the
band’s trailblazing music. Not long after its Friday the
13th release, Black Sabbath was No. 8 in the U.K.
album charts. And when the record came out in North
America three-and-a-half months later, it climbed to No.
23 on Billboard and remained on the chart for a year,
chalking up more than a million album sales.
“We built up our reputation through word of mouth,”
Iommi says. “Every
time we’d play in clubs [in Europe], we’d see more and
more people coming to the show. Little pockets would
build up and then eventually they became big pockets.
Then, when the album got in the charts in the U.S., we
could say, ‘Look what we’ve done,’ and more people
started to check us out and if they liked it they
brought in their friends. It became this ever-evolving
thing.”
The U.K. release of Black Sabbath featured two
cover tunes, Crow’s
“Evil Woman” (which was previously released as a single
that also contained “Wicked World”) and Aynsley Dunbar Retaliation’s
“Warning.” The U.S. release removed “Evil Woman” and
blended “Behind the Wall of Sleep” into a single track
that also included “N.I.B.” and the U.S.-only cuts “Wasp”
and “Basically.” The original U.S. version also merged
“Warning” into a medley that also featured “A Bit of
Finger” (U.S.-only) and “Sleeping Village.”
 Through the
decades, Black Sabbath has been repackaged and
re-released numerous times with previously unreleased
songs, outtakes and alternate and instrumental versions.
Most recently, the album was remastered and issued in 2016
as a two-CD deluxe edition. The recurring reissues are
hardly surprising and, maybe, less of a cash grab than an
effort to keep the album vital. There wasn’t a band around
in 1970 that was as heavy as Black
Sabbath; the influence of their debut is
incalculable.
50 years after its release, Black Sabbath remains
a must-have for any metal collection.
“They wrote the playbook for heavy metal,” Scott Ian says. “That's
where every riff ever written comes from. Tony Iommi is the guy
responsible for all of this.”
These days, Butler is
far too much of a polite English gentleman to brag about Black
Sabbath being the most important metal record of all
time, but he concedes that he considers it the band’s
greatest achievement.
“The odds were completely against us when we did the
album,” he says. “Nobody wanted to give us a
chance. Nobody wanted to manage us. Our families didn’t
believe in us. But we persisted. And we made this album
that we liked and, apparently, loads of other people
liked. For us, it was the beginning of an incredible
ride.”
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The Story Behind
The Song: Metallica’s
Enter Sandman
By Rich Hobson (Metal Hammer)
How a grunge band inadvertently inspired the song that
would turn Metallica into the world’s biggest metal
band.
By the end of the 1980s Metallica’s
place as thrash metal’s biggest band was unassailable.
They entered the 90s with their sights set on an even
greater prize: becoming the world’s biggest rock band,
period. The only problem was that there was no way they
were going to do it with another record like 1988’s prog
metal-tinged epic …And Justice For All.
“When we were done with …And Justice For All there was
no place to go,” drummer
Lars Ulrich told Uncut in 2020. “We’d
hit the wall. After playing all those songs on the road
for a couple of years we said, ‘There’s got to be a
reset here.’”
It wasn’t just Metallica
who felt that way. By the start of the new decade the
entire music industry was looking to hit the reset button.
Glam metal, which had ruled MTV for the last few years,
was fast approaching its sell-by-date, and while thrash
may have crossed over into arenas with the landmark Clash
Of The Titans tour, it too felt long in the tooth.
Yet something was stirring in Seattle. Bands such as Soundgarden, Mudhoney and
a pre-superstardom Nirvana
were mashing together punk and metal into an abrasive new
sound dubbed “grunge” by the press – and it would provide
unexpected inspiration for
Metallica.
 "It was about two or
three o'clock in the morning. I had just been listening
to Louder Than Love, the Soundgarden album,"
recalled guitarist Kirk Hammett in
2017. “I heard that album, I was inspired; I picked up
my guitar and out came that riff."
Hammett’s early
morning riff would become the basis of Enter Sandman,
itself the first song the band wrote for what would become
their self-titled fifth album (aka the Black Album). Metallica wanted their
next record to be a 180-degree shift away from …And
Justice For All’s complex time signatures and epic
running times, and Enter Sandman encapsulated
this back-to-basics approach.
Stripping their sound right down wasn’t the only thing
that that had changed. Metallica
had enjoyed a fruitful relationship with Danish producer Flemming Rasmussen since
Ride The Lightning, but they figured they needed
fresh input to help them execute their great leap
forwards.
Enter Bob Rock, who
had worked with Bon Jovi,
Aerosmith, The Cult and Mötley Crüe. Recruiting
such a commercial producer was a clear signal of Metallica’s intent.
 “Some people thought Bob would make us sound
too commercial,” said James Hetfield. “You know:
ʻOh, Bob works with
Bon Jovi, Bob works
with Mötley Crüe.ʼ
But if Flemming Rasmussen
worked on a Bon Jovi
record, would Bon Jovi all
of a sudden sound like Metallica?”
Not that Metallica
were entirely comfortable with Rock
at first - nor vice versa. But having worked with some of
rock‘s biggest egos, the producer certainly wasn’t
unafraid to trample over the band’s feelings.
“I really didn’t give a shit, to be honest,” Rock recalled to Uncut in
2014. “When they started doing things the way they had
always done, I just gave [songs] back to them. They were
quite taken aback. When they’d do stupid things I’d call
them on it. Lars would
show up really late and I’d say, ‘What a fucking asshole
you are…’ I don’t think people did that to them before.”
Yet Rock’s impact on
Metallica was
immediate. Where the band had previously recorded their
parts separately, he insisted they play together in the
studio.
It was Rock, along
with Lars Ulrich, who
pressured James Hetfield
into rewriting the song’s lyrics. The frontman’s original
subject matter revolved around Sudden Infant Death
Syndrome, or cot death – the line "Off to never never
land" was originally "Disrupt the perfect family”.
But the drummer and producer both thought the subject
matter was too heavy, and told Hetfield
so.
“That pissed me off so much!” the singer told Guitar
World in 2018. “I was like, 'Fuck you! I'm the writer
here!' But that was the first challenge from someone
else and it made me work harder."
Hetfield swallowed his
annoyance and rewrote the lyrics, reframing it as a kind
of twisted lullaby that drew on a child’s fears, real and
imagined. The Sandman of the title was a reference to a
mythical figure who would sneak into children’s bedrooms
to sprinkle sand in their eyes (ironically, the band had
been sitting on the title Enter Sandman for “six
years”, according to Lars Ulrich).
Not everything Bob Rock
suggested made it past Hetfield
and Ulrich. The
producer wasn’t convinced that the completed Enter
Sandman was an obvious hit, preferring the thrashier
Holier Than Thou as the album’s first single. This
time the drummer intervened, holding firm in his belief
that the track was the perfect way to launch what he knew
would be Metallica’s
most important album.
 Released on
July 29, 1991, Enter Sandman reached No.16 in the
US and No.5 in the UK. But this was more than Metallica’s biggest single
so far - as Lars
intuited, it was the perfect jumping off point for the
next stage of their career, teeing up the Black Album
just under two months later.
Enter Sandman and the Black Album proved to
be game-changers, turning
Metallica from one of metal’s biggest bands
into a genuine mainstream phenomenon (they also hastened
the demise of the thrash scene - which of their former
peers could hope to match it, artistically or
commercially?).
Thirty years on, Enter Sandman marks the biggest
turning point in Metallica’s
career, and a song that’s embedded deep within not just
metal’s DNA but the DNA of popular culture as a whole –
how many other songs have been covered by crooner Pat Boone, Motörhead and King Crimson mastermind Robert Fripp and his wife Toyah?
“It really did sweep across the board,” said Lars
Ulrich in 2020. “What's interesting for me is I
burn out on a lot of the stuff we do, but it has such
staying power. A short, simple rock song.”
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
There's four stages to life: Child,
Failure, Old, Death.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
German
band turns van into club
so fans can rock out one at a time
 German two-piece rock band Milliarden have turned a
van into a club where they stage gigs for one fan at a
time as a way of reaching music-lovers during the
pandemic.
Separated by a plastic sheet, Milliarden
(www.milliardenmusik.de) which translates as Billions,
treat fans to acoustic versions of their songs,
recreating a club atmosphere with lighting effects,
posters and plastic roses.
Large cultural events, including concerts, have become
virtually impossible in Germany due to the pandemic.
“The fact that we have the club with us, that we are
the club owners, so to speak, is something we use to
get to the people who are not so close to this, to
this cultural landscape, who are not in the big
cities,” band member Ben
Hartmann said.
“We actually went to the villages and stopped in
front of people’s houses and played for them. A crisis
like this one brings so many opportunities that you
only recognise once you do stuff. You just have to do
it.”
Milliarden this
month released their third studio album “Schuldig”
(“Guilty”). Fans can win tickets for the exclusive shows
via social media.
“I think it’s so nice that it works like this and
that people respect it and accept it like that and get
so emotionally connected to us here on this van. I
think that is a gift,” said
Johannes Aue, in charge of keyboards and
clapping.
“And that’s why it is awesome that we were able to
pull it off without thinking how we could earn money
with it. Because we are in an immense debt with our
fans.”
“I’m just happy. Just happy. It was so nice ... It
was so great, it was really great,” said fan
Nadine Spichal, exiting the van parked outside a Berlin
nightclub. 25/02/2021
Riffs thanks Reuters for
permission to re-create this article.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Y'know that speck of light at the end of that really long
tunnel? - well it's just increased in brightness. Just
check out our Listings page
where we have some reet royal rockin' in store . . .
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
 Anvil’s
debut album Hard ’N’ Heavy is an 80s metal classic
that should have turned them into superstars. Mainman
Steve ‘Lips’ Kudlow looks back on a career of missed
chances.
History doesn’t always get it right. While every metalhead
knows that the 80s began with a flurry of classic albums
from Ozzy, Priest, Maiden,
Motörhead and many more, one of the most
important and influential records of the decade’s first
couple of years rarely gets a mention. Released in the
spring of 1981, Toronto trio Anvil’s
debut album, Hard ’N’ Heavy, was one of the
catalysts that set metal’s wheels rolling towards the
birth of thrash and beyond, influencing Metallica, Anthrax and
countless more iconic bands in the process.
Today, genial frontman Steve
‘Lips’ Kudlow looks back on those early
days as a time of wide-eyed enthusiasm. “When the 80s
started, metal really didn’t exist, particularly in
North America,” he recalls. “It was something
that was mainly coming from the UK. We formed in ’78 and
I guess we were kind of bringing metal to our country.
We had cassette tapes that we’d run through our PA
system and we’d introduce other cool bands to the
audiences that we were playing for. So it was a really
new thing, but to us it was just a continuation of the
hard rock that we’d been listening to since we were
kids. They just started to call it heavy metal and we
were happy to be part of it. It was exciting, man.”
 "We were
always intrigued by
and loved Deep Purple"
Hindsight is a glorious thing. Looking back to the
music Anvil were
making in the early 80s, it’s easy to see how wildly ahead
of their time they were and how, along with Motörhead, they
contributed several major new weapons to metal’s creative
armoury. Although Hard ’N’ Heavy was a largely
straightforward hard rock record, songs such as Bedroom
Game and Bondage are some of the earliest ever examples of
what would become speed and thrash metal.
“Robb [Reiner,
Anvil drummer] and I were always really intrigued by and
loved Deep Purple a
lot, and the higher- tempo stuff really attracted us and
inspired us to want to be able to play like that,” Lips explains. “So in
doing that, instead of single bass drum beats, Robb started using
double bass drum beats and I would chug the guitar in
much the same way as [Ritchie]
Blackmore did on Speed King or Flight Of
The Rat or any of the higher-tempo Deep Purple songs. And I
guess that became speed metal, but we didn’t know that’s
what we were doing! That’s just what it became.”
Recorded at Quest Studios in Oshawa, Canada, Anvil’s debut album was
entirely self-financed, not least because the North
American music industry was yet to pick up on this new and
exhilarating breed of none-more-heavy rock. As Lips notes, the songs on
Hard ’N’ Heavy were written very early on in Anvil’s development as
musicians and songwriters, and it wouldn’t be until 1982’s
Metal On Metal that the band’s more brutal ideas
started to gain traction.
“Realistically, the material that was written for that
first record was written two to three years before it
was recorded. So it’s really previous to metal even
being called metal, if you know what I mean. What were
we influenced by? Obviously English stuff and also
American stuff. Bedroom Game was directly influenced by
Rainbow. Then
there’s Bondage, which was directly influenced by Ted Nugent. So it’s
really all that stuff that was part of the 70s. It just
so happened that we didn’t release it until 1981. As
soon as that came out, we started writing for the second
record, which came out in 1982. Metal On Metal was much
more of a heavy metal record than the first one.”
 "It
makes sense that the first album
was so much about sex"
Hard ’N’ Heavy was released on May 25, 1981 via
Canadian rock imprint Attic Records. Lips notes that securing a
record deal hadn’t been too much of a problem, but that at
least one prospective benefactor at Capitol Records had
flinched when confronted with the sexually charged (but
slightly juvenile) lyrics to songs like School Love, I
Want You Both (With Me) and, in particular, Bondage
(opening line: ‘Tie me down you mean old bag!’). Lips cackles at the
memory.
 “Anybody
between the ages of 18 and 23, that’s all that’s on your
mind, right?” he muses, not unreasonably. “That
guy hears School Love and he says, ‘Oh my god, that’s
absolutely filthy! We’re not signing that!’ Ha ha! So it
makes sense that the first album was so much about sex.
The second one made a slight departure from that,
because I guess it became a little less important. Maybe
my hormones weren’t working as strongly, I don’t know!
Ha ha ha!”
If you’ve seen Sacha Gervasi’s
astonishing documentary, Anvil: The Story Of Anvil
(and if you haven’t, what the fuck?) then you will know
that Lips’ hopes for
world domination never quite came to fruition. Despite his
and Robb Reiner’s
resolute determination, an initial flurry of low-key
success in the early 80s never led them to a major
commercial breakthrough, and due to poor management
decisions and a whole stack of bad luck, the 80s didn’t
turn out to be golden age that
Anvil unquestionably deserved. In fact, it
all sounds a bit rank.
"If
you slept in those beds
you were gonna get scabies and crabs"
“Getting the first
album recorded was a massive highlight,” Lips states. “But I
don’t look back at the 80s with great nostalgia. I’ll be
honest, I’ve had better times! Some of those days were
pretty rough. Some of the hotel rooms were horrible.
There were holes in the walls. You had to bring sleeping
bags, because if you slept in those beds you were gonna
get scabies and fuckin’ crabs. If you slept with anyone
you’re gonna get a dose. It was just a dirty time and a
dirty environment, so yeah, we had a lot of fun but
there was some pretty awful stuff going on.”
In musical terms, Anvil
plainly made their mark in those grubby early days.
Glowing tributes from the likes of Lars
Ulrich and Anthrax’s
Scott Ian at the start of Anvil: The
Story Of Anvil tell their own story about the
lasting impact and power of Lips’
prescient contribution to metal history, even if the band
themselves are underdogs to the last and proud of it.
 "I knew what we
had was special,
even back on Hard N Heavy"
“When you’re ahead of
your time, it’s a real problem,” he shrugs. “You
can have something extremely unique and cutting edge and
you send that to a record label, and they won’t sign it
because they don’t understand it. But I knew what we had
was special, even back on Hard ’N’ Heavy. I was never
going to give up and now I’ve been doing it for 40 years
nonstop. And we are still playing School Love!”
Even as Lips bemoans
the struggles that his band had to endure during their
pioneering early days, he still sounds very much in love
with the whole notion of playing in a heavy metal band.
He’s also happy to admit that it was
Sacha Gervasi’s support and the impact of
his documentary that finally, after 30 years of trying,
enabled Anvil to
become the secure recording and touring unit that they
always wanted to be.
 “We
fell between the cracks and that’s what caused the fall
into obscurity,” he notes, cheerfully. “But it
never put an end to what I wanted to do. I just waited
until it came around again. In the end, a kid that we
met back at The Marquee in London grew up to be Steven Spielberg’s
screenwriter, and what does he do? He makes a movie
about Anvil and
that’s it, bingo! Had I given up in ’83, there would’ve
been no history for that movie to base itself on. So you
can’t wish anything different.”
"We don't want to play
Glastonbury,
we want to be up close and personal"
Despite the 40th
anniversary of their debut’s release in 2021, Lips and his band have
absolutely no intention of wallowing in nostalgia. Their
2020 album Legal At Last upheld their mighty
legacy. True to form, it failed to set the world on fire.
But then Lips long
ago gave up on that dream.
 
"We don’t want to be playing at Glastonbury, 100 feet
from the nearest hand,” he says. “I want to be
right there, up close and personal. I want everyone to
say that they were really in the same room, at the same
place and time as Anvil. That’s the magic. I want to be
the biggest club band that ever existed and then I can
walk away saying that I’ve really done what I wanted to
do. It’s been a long haul, but it’s better than having a
day job, trust me!”
[all pics taken by Riffs' Nige at
Newcastle Riverside: April 14, 2016]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Bon Scott R.I.P. 1946 - 1980
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Drugs, drink and disorder:
UFO look back at the making of Strangers In The Night
  Strangers In The Night
captured a great rock band at their peak, and is one of
the all-time great live albums. But by the time it was
released they were no longer the band who’d made it.
It seems incredible now that a live
album could be a band’s defining statement – as much a
relic of the 1970s as the Raleigh Chopper and only TV
three channels. But so it was.
For bands who never quite achieved great consistency on
studio records, or who were never quite as comfortable
in the studio as on stage, the live album was the
perfect vehicle: part greatest hits, part introduction
for newcomers, part proof that the band really could be
as good as their supporters might claim. And it worked.
Just ask Thin Lizzy
for one. Or ask UFO,
for whom Strangers In The Night was just as
important as Live And Dangerous was for Lizzy.
“We were
always more of a live band,” says UFO singer Phil Mogg. “We had a
pretty cool set-list. We didn’t get to that until we
reached the live album though.”
That’s important, because Strangers In The Night
isn’t just a record of what UFO
sounded like on stage in October ’78. It’s also a record
of their transformation over five years since Michael Schenker had
joined as lead guitarist – their transformation as
players, as songwriters, as arrangers. It’s a record of
how they became, for a while at least, a truly great
rock band. The UFO
that Schenker had
joined were a very different group to the one he helped
them become.
"We were dropping
acid and going to the Roundhouse"
“Basically, they were a psychedelic rock band,” Schenker says.
“Instrumentally there wasn’t much going on, it was
more atmospheric. But there was a completely different
chemistry [with the new line-up]. You take one piece
out and put another in and you get different
outcomes.”
“I think at that point we were all living in a house
in Bounds Green, dropping acid and going to the
Roundhouse,” Mogg
told me last year. “I guess we went from there to
straightening up, thinking: ‘Do you really want to do
this? How serious are you?’ Basically, we got serious.
Not too serious, though.”
Over the course of five albums – Phenomenon,
Force It, No Heavy Petting, Lights Out and Obsession
– they went from a band who were trying to find their
way to one that barrelled down the road. They toured
unrelentingly, generating excitement and buzz, but never
quite made the leap to the top echelon.
Often, in the US, they were an opening act, but that
suited their dynamism and gave them the chance to hit
hard.
“We were very lucky to get some good opening slots,”
drummer Andy Parker
says. “We were getting exposed to larger audiences.
If you do a decent job, a lot of those people will
come and see you in the future, and that was working
for us. I used to love that Special Guest slot, the
second band on a three-band bill. You didn’t have to
play for too long, the crowd was already warmed up and
you could get home early. You could really hit them
hard with a shorter set.”
"So
paralysing was the drug
that Mogg could barely
move his mouth"
 A shorter
set and no headliner responsibilities allowed the band
to indulge themselves too. Take the three shows they
played with Fleetwood Mac
in California in 1976. On the way to one of them, Mogg told me in 2012,
they realised they were lacking in certain pick-me-ups,
so they arranged to meet up with the April Wine touring party
at a truck stop.
“So we got there, and this guy comes along with a
briefcase chock-a-block with stuff. ‘Oh, this is
great,’ we said. It was a bit like one of those movie
scenes where they chop out a line that goes from here
to next week. In our bravado we were: ‘Yeah!’ But by
the time we reached the gig no one could talk. We were
absolutely rigid. Time to go on, and we couldn’t move.
We were on stage, absolutely stationary.”
So paralysing was the drug that Mogg
could barely move his mouth to get the words out.
There was alcohol by the bucketload too.
“It seems comical now,” Parker
says. “It was white wine for the sound-check, then
beer, then on to the hard stuff in the evening. That
was the good thing about the Special Guest slots,
there was always booze left if you raided other
people’s dressing rooms. We were doing cocaine and
weed. The really heavy stuff, the really nasty stuff,
didn’t come in till later. I never dabbled in that. I
did quite a bit of blow, but then you end up staring
at the ceiling at three in the morning when you have
to be up in three hours.”
The arrival of Paul Raymond
in July 1976, to play keyboards and rhythm guitar, was
the thing that gave UFO
the extra depth they needed.
 “He
completed the chemistry,” Schenker
says. “He was very good at colouring in, and that
made it perfect. He was an excellent songwriter, too.
But he didn’t take all the credit for his writing
because he had a contractual situation.”
Pete Way, the bass
player who was the band’s irregular heartbeat, was
writing too, and UFO
became a band in which every member was making the
maximum possible contribution.
"By autumn '78 the band were on the brink
of
something"
“Pete was writing dirty stuff,
and I would put in a melodic chorus to it, like Lights
Out, that would balance it out,”
Schenker
explains. “The keyboards coloured it. It’s incredible
how Paul Raymond
did the intro to Love To Love, which started as an
instrumental I wrote, then it turned into a vocal song.
And the colouring in Lights Out is really good.”
By autumn ’78, although relations with Schenker were already
fraught, there was a sense that the band they were on the
brink of something.
“We were probably just about hitting our peak then,” Parker says. “Michael was still with
the band. We were at the stage where we could do
decent-sized arenas on our own. We would do three nights
in Chicago, which was our biggest market.
"Before, we’d been doing them with the likes of Rush and Blue Öyster Cult, Foghat, Styx and Jethro Tull and those
kinds of bands as Special Guests, but by this time we
were doing them on our own.
“I always thought that while we made great studio
albums, if you really wanted to know what UFO was about, go see
us live. We were always a band that tried to include the
audience. I’ve seen so many big bands that play at the
audience – it’s all about what they want to do, rather
than what the audience wants – but with this band we
included the audience.”
"He [Nevison] was
obnoxious, but
he knew what he wanted"
Strangers In The Night
was recorded over two nights in October 1978, in Chicago
and Louisville. Ron Nevison,
who had produced UFO’s
two previous studio albums, was brought in again to
oversee its completion.
“He wasn’t the
easiest guy to work with, but man he was good at
what he did.” Schenker
says. “He was obnoxious. But he knew what he
wanted and he knew what the end result had to be.”
There’s no doubting Nevison’s contribution
to Strangers In The Night. It’s an album on
which muscle and melody are in perfect balance, from
front to back (and the bonus live sets that accompany
the CD version of this year’s reissue prove that UFO could cut it without
the need for additional studio work).
It’s a
mixture of great songs and bravura performances – the
out-and-out rockers have a force and attack missing from
the studio versions (Doctor Doctor, especially,
makes the original sound like a demo); the longer and
more emotional tracks, such as Love To Love and Rock
Bottom, have an expressiveness that heavy bands at
the time rarely bothered to attempt.
But even as UFO
reached their zenith, things were going wrong. The exact
circumstances of Schenker’s
departure remain cloudy – you’ll get a different answer
depending on who you ask, and possibly which day of the
week you ask them.
"Schenker
left just as the band were working on
mixing Strangers"
Parker is certain
the band knew he was going to be leaving at the end of
the US tour in autumn 1978. The version that will go
down in history – because it’s on Wikipedia – has him
leaving shortly after the final show of the tour, in
Palo Alto on October 29. But according to Schenker he didn’t leave
until the band were working on the mixing of Strangers.
 What
isn’t disputed is that relations between him and his
bandmates, especially Mogg,
had been deteriorating for some time. Schenker hated touring,
and drank to combat his stage fright. After the success
of Lights Out, rather than celebrating a
breakthrough, he told his partner Gabi that this meant
years more of being trapped.
“It happens to many bands:
the moment they make it big, they all collapse,” Schenker says.
“And they get into a vicious cycle of being obnoxious
and completely controlled by alcohol and drugs.”
He was also sick of Mogg,
who he felt was violently aggressive. Indeed, even with
decades of distance, mention of the singer still riles
him. Five minutes after completing our interview, he calls
me and embarks on a monologue that opens with:
“If you look at Iron Maiden,
Steve Harris copied Pete Way, and the
guitarists copied me, but the singer didn’t copy Phil Mogg. Same with Guns N’ Roses – a
complete different vocal. Metallica
– a complete different vocal. And Def
Leppard – a complete different vocal.
Strangers In The Night had an influence because of the
guitar playing. It was the guitar playing that was
copied by all of these bands…”
A few minutes later, he concludes: “It’s impossible for
me to comprehend how people think. Why are people only
seeing what they can’t get? People have a problem saying
thank you. Instead of saying thank you, they say fuck
you. Nobody is copying Phil
Mogg, by the way. Goodbye.”
Then there were disagreements during the compiling of the
album, at the Record Plant studio in New York, one being Schenker demanding they go
for a different take of Rock Bottom from the one Nevison had chosen. By
the time Strangers was released, on January 2
1979, Schenker was no
longer in the band.
“He did an awful lot of walking, didn’t he?” Mogg says. “He used up
the shoe leather. Dear oh dear. He’s always walking away
from something.
"I can’t remember when he actually went. I remember
him doing the album with as much enthusiasm as everybody
else was putting into it. I remember that he wanted to
keep replacing stuff, and in the end Ron said: ‘I ain’t
fucking replacing shit. This is a live album.’ And Michael went: ‘Poor,
poor Rock Bottom’, and walked out. We didn’t see him for
a while."
 "UFO were paid
£86,000 for headlining Reading
- but
each band member got
only £1,000"
Money problems were arising, too. In 1980 UFO headlined the Reading
Festival for a fee of £86,000, of which the band members
saw £1,000 each, apart from new boy Neil
Carter who got half that.
After UFO spluttered
out in 1983, Mogg was
so poor he had to go to live with a friend and sign on for
unemployment benefit.
Strangers, though, was when things were special for UFO. It’s one of those
rare live albums in which the interaction between all the
band members is perfect – not just Schenker’s
spotlit lead playing, but also Mogg’s
command of the audience (interestingly, Schenker notes the
“monotony” of Mogg’s
voice, then observes that it combined perfectly with his
own melodic sense to produce something greater than they
could have been separately).
Parker’s drumming is
combustible. Remember too the contributions of the two
members who have passed away: Way
and Raymond were
just as integral to the sound of Strangers In The Night
as Mogg and Schenker were. The
just-released expanded version of the album stands as a
tribute to the pair of them.
Nowadays even Schenker, who was
merciless about its inadequacies after its release, has
made his peace. “Today Strangers In The Night sounds
good to me, because I’m not in it. I have distance and I
hear it differently. I am affected by it differently
because it became popular. And everybody likes it and
you automatically become part of that wave. Everything
influences your later opinion.”
 Parker’s
reaction is less complex: “We were at the apex of our
career, and it just exemplifies the band. It will always
be my favourite.”
Let’s be honest, mine and yours too, probably. It’s UFO’s defining statement.
By Michael
Hann (Classic Rock)
[The tracks
attached to the above images are from the Deluxe
Expanded Edition which feature both Chicago and
Cleveland gigs].
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The
Sweet:
Is it finally time to give them
the credit they deserve?
From Little Willy to a six-foot,
confetti spewing penis, The Sweet had it all... except
for the credibility they craved. Were these critically
derided glam tarts really rock gods after all?
“We
were like four dissipated old whores, mincing
about on Top Of The Pops and churning out
computerised pop, just being as flash as assholes.
Everybody thought we were a bunch of poofs…”
The above, offered by drummer Mick
Tucker in 1974, is evidence of the
many misconceptions concerning The Sweet, or merely
Sweet as they
became known once the affections of teenyboppers
wore off. The four members of Sweet were actually
womanising, drug taking, hell-raising, macho
alcoholics. And although they burst onto the scene
miming to early hits such as Funny Funny and Co-Co,
then emerged as highcamp stalwarts of the UK singles
with glam-rock anthems such as Blockbuster, The
Ballroom Blitz and Teenage Rampage, their best music
by far was created once the glitter had worn off. If
you flipped over just about any of the quartet’s
classic singles, a selfpenned B-side such as Burn On
The Flame, Rock ‘N’ Roll Disgrace or Need A Lot Of
Lovin’ would be ready to assault your eardrums.
Yes, Sweet were rockers… albeit
frustrated ones. At their prime, circa the Sweet Fanny
Adams and Desolation Boulevard albums, they were making
records good enough to have matched any of the true
giants of the 1970s, including infinitely more credible
names such as Bowie, Led
Zeppelin and
Deep Purple. Sadly, you probably never
heard any of them. That’s because Sweet were never
anywhere near as cool as the icons whose respect they
craved. Though unmissable, their exploits on Top Of The
Pops branded them damaged, novelty goods. To make
matters worse, wrapped up in their own vanity and
self-importance, they often behaved like complete and
utter fools. This, then, is a tale of glorious
underachievers. But by Christ, did Sweet have fun while
it lasted…
Gigs fuelled by a concotion
they called 'The Benny Buzz'
The year was 1966. Vocalist Brian
Connolly and drummer
Mick Tucker formed a band called Sweetshop with bassist Steve Priest and
guitarist Frank Torpey.
Various small-time gigs were performed, some fuelled by
a unique concoction they nicknamed The Benny Buzz.
Consisting of the contents of a Benedryl inhaler and
Coca Cola in a glass, it helped The Sweet (as they later
abbreviated themselves) to numb the pain of seeing their
first four singles all flop dismally.
Torpey was briefly succeeded by
Mick Stewart before the line-up
solidified with the arrival of former Elastic Band guitarist Andy Scott. Behind the
scenes, Sweet had also signed to RCA and been introduced
to producer Phil Wainman
and songwriters Nicky Chinn and Mike Chapman.
Mere months later, Funny Funny had peaked just outside
the Top Ten, becoming the first of Sweet’s 15 hit
singles.
At the start, these were exclusively penned by Nicky
Chinn and Mike Chapman, who along with producer Phil
Wainman insisted that Connolly should be backed by
session musicians. Wigwam Bam was the first single that
Sweet were actually allowed to play on, though they had
been responsible for their own B-sides since the start.
Naturally, these restrictions caused immense
unhappiness. To further compound the situation, Sweet
had agreed to let Chinn and Chapman manage them.
“What a stupid thing for us to allow them to do,”
commented Steve Priest years later. “We were being
controlled by a couple of novices. Mike Chapman could
write what sounded like hit songs, but Nicky was
brought up in a private boys’ school and didn’t know
his arse from his elbow.”
Whatever anyone’s reservations, the pair’s formula
proved immensely successful, and they soon began using
it on such other acts as Mud,
Suzi Quatro and Arrows.
“Chinn and Chapman’s songs were banal and simple, but
they offered endless possibilities,” admits Andy
Scott now. “We wanted to start having some of our
own material used, so the arrangement was never going
to last forever. So other bands ended up using our
rejects, though I won’t name any names.”
One of these was Mud’s
Tiger Feet, a fact confirmed years later by Mick Tucker
when he bitched: “Any group who’d recorded that would
have got a hit. Even though it went to Number One, it
was still an awful song.”
For the first and last time The Sweet topped the charts
with Blockbuster in early 1973. It beat off stiff
competition from David Bowie’s
Jean Genie, which featured an almost identical guitar
riff and was released via the same label just a week
apart. “I swear I’d never heard Bowie’s song before
ours was released… I was onto Nicky Chinn as soon as I
heard it on the radio,” says Scott now, adding
gleefully: “We felt a bit shabby about Blockbuster
coming out a week later – but ours went to Number
One.”
". . .
purchased vast quantities of our new release
and dumped them in the Thames"
Sweet would go on to stall at Number Two on no
less than five occasions, most annoyingly in September
’73 when the Simon Park
Orchestra’s Eye Level repeatedly held off
Ballroom Blitz for weeks at a time. As a small child I
recall sobbing in the kitchen when the single began to
plummet down the charts, but as Scott rightly points
out: “Sales-wise, what would have been a Number Two
in those days would now top the charts for months on
end.”
Steve Priest admits that certain underhand tactics were
used to massage their sales. Indeed, at least one of
Sweet’s early 45s may still be ‘bubbling under’, in a
manner of speaking: “Nicky [Chinn] sent Phil
[Wainman] and Mike [Chapman] around the country to the
stores whose sales were used to compile the Top 30.
Between them, they purchased vast quantities of our
new release and dumped them in the Thames.”
Nevertheless, the group’s bubblegum anthems and
über-camp delivery established them as mainstays on Top
Of The Pops (“We got to know the guy who let us into
the bar very well,” winks Scott). Nobody who
experienced it on the small screen will ever forget
Priest batting his eyelids and mockstuttering “W-w-w-w…
we just haven’t got a c… oh!” during Blockbuster
or Connolly prefacing Ballroom Blitz with the legendary
questions, “Are you ready, Steve… [“Uh-huh”]… Andy?…
[“Yeah”]… Mick?… [“Okay”]… well, alright, fellas,
let’s go-o-o-o-o-o.”
As Sweet
later discovered, the dressing up and cosmetics
would haunt them when they decided to get serious.
According to Scott, upon seeing Marc Bolan in all
his glam glory they realised they simply had to
compete.
"Bowie would tell our make-up
girls:
'No, no, no their eyes aren't right"
"At the start, we
just used make-up as a giggle,” recalled Mick
Tucker years later. “We were at Top Of The Pops for
Little Willy and Bowie kept telling our make-up girls,
‘No, no, no, their eyes aren’t right’. We all thought,
‘What a strange young man, taking it so seriously’.
Perhaps for Bowie it was the excuse he needed to wear
make-up in public, but for Sweet it was all a
piss-take. “
"After a while things rapidly got right out of hand,”
Tucker elaborated. “At gigs, Andy would mince onstage
swinging a handbag and call himself Andre. Steven
became Stephanie and I changed my name to Michelle.
Brian was the only one who never really went along
with the make-up thing.”
Gradually Sweet became aware that their audience was
polarising. While younger sisters were playing the
A-sides of their singles, older brothers were
appreciating the harder, self-penned rock of flipsides
like Burning and Someone Else Will. 1974s Sweet Fanny
Adams is generally acknowledged as their first real
album. Besides the two Chinn/Chapman compositions, the
tracks Set Me Free and Sweet F.A. were undoubtedly the
handiwork of a credible hard rock act. Critically
panned, it barely charted in the UK, though Germany and
mainland Europe were more open-minded.
Released the same year and featuring the hits The Six
Teens and Fox On The Run, the follow-up, Desolation
Boulevard rewarded Sweet with their first self-composed
success. With Chinn and Chapman away in the US, the
latter was re-recorded even without Phil Wainman and
climbed to Number Two. Musically, Sweet were on a roll.
They had made no secret of their appreciation of Deep Purple. Priest, in
fact, had very quickly arrived at the conclusion that
Tucker was in awe of Purple’s
Ian Paice. “Mick had decided that he
and Ian were in competition,” Steve later said.
“In my eyes, this was a mistake. He expended a lot of
energy trying to play like Ian, but he didn’t have
to.”
However, other acts also benefited from Sweet’s
innovative use of vocal harmonies. Among them were Queen. “They beat us
to it,” later conceded Phil Wainman. “I saw
them as a support band at Hammersmith Odeon. I went up
to Roy Thomas Baker, who was producing them and had
been an engineer for me. I said, ‘Roy, that band are
phenomenal. I’ll swap you all my acts for that band’.
He said, ‘I can’t do that’. I played Killer Queen to
Sweet, and all Andy could say was, ‘Yeah, Phil, we’re
being ripped off’”.
“I was scared to death when I heard Queen’s first
album, because till then I thought we were doing
alright,” comments Scott now. “I remember
having a wry smile when I met Brian May in Los
Angeles. Bohemian Rhapsody was out, and there were
definite similarities. I told Brian I liked the last
part of that one, that it was very reminiscent of [our
own] Action. But that’s okay, you beg, steal and
borrow. I’ve put a lot of Jeff
Beck and Hendrix
into some of the cheapest and nastiest pop singles
ever, and nobody realises.”
The
Sweet were also becoming notorious for their lewd,
hedonistic ways. Each night they took to the stage to
the strains of The Stripper, and Someone Else Will was
introduced by the line “If we don’t fuck you then
someone else will”. There were reports of a band
member pulling down his strides in a lift to a Swedish
teenage girl, and in March 1972 the group were banned by
the Mecca Ballroom chain after John Chapman of the
Portsmouth Mecca said their show was “The most
disgusting performance I’ve seen in 11 years” at
the venue (Sweet duly responded with the B-side Man From
Mecca). Considering their audience comprised of
under-age females, does Scott believe that Sweet always
behaved responsibly?
“Does anybody in the music business?” he parries.
“At the time what we sometimes did was considered out
of order, but you only have to look at Channel 5 late
at night to put it into perspective. Compared to Sex
In Japan, which was on the other night, what The Sweet
did was fuck-all, mate.” Nevertheless, on another
early Swedish tour it was alleged that Sweet beat up a
promoter, broke a window, rubbed excrement into a
tablecloth and pissed in an ice bucket. “The incident
you’re probably referring to was an open air show in
Stockholm,” clarifies Scott. “It was pissing
with rain, 15,000 fans were angry that the show was
cancelled and because there were no curtains on the
dressing room window we smeared some guacamole over a
pane. It was also reported that we took a shit into a
fucking piano… that would’ve been really stupid. But
afterwards we couldn’t get a hotel in Stockholm for
more than two years.”
Sensibly, Scott does not attempt to deny that there were
other moments of excess. “I personally couldn’t drink
and take drugs, so it was one or the other,” he
explains. “There are now only two of us left
[alive], so I shouldn’t need to add too much to that
fact. But we definitely lived the life. Rarely a week
went by without Brian being in the press for something
or other.”
"Pete Townshend invited Sweet to
open for The Who"
In his
autobiography Are You Ready, Steve,
Priest portrays himself to be something of a serial
shagger. So what would be the most people that Andy ever
shared a bed with? “Ha ha… my prowess wasn’t in that
department,” he grins. “You should be asking
that to MT or BC, the two that aren’t here.”
With kudos for their talents a rare commodity in
Britain, the rock world was astonished when Pete Townshend
personally invited Sweet to open for The Who at an open-air
show at The Valley in south London. Alas, in one of
those exploits that Scott previously alluded to,
Connolly was then beaten up outside an Uxbridge
nightclub. Brian had exited the club to find some youths
dancing on top of his Mercedes, and upon confronting
them received several kicks in the throat. While the
rest of the band were sympathetic to his injury, which
resulted in them cancelling their big break, they
nevertheless felt that one of the most famous faces of
1974 had put himself in an unnecessary position. “Brian
had apparently smiled at and been talking to this
guy’s girlfriend,” explains Andy.
Some say that Connolly’s voice was never the same again,
a possibility that Scott refuses to dismiss. “I’ve
never heard a range drop as drastically,” he
sighs. “There was no way he could get anywhere near
Set Me Free when we began to tour America.” Sweet
attempted to crack the States to promote 1976’s Give Us
A Wink album with a 50-date US tour, but once on US soil
they found themselves promoting material that was 18
months old. Ballroom Blitz, out in 1973 at home, had
emerged in the middle of ’75 Stateside and Capitol
Records opted to issue an amalgam of Sweet Fanny Adams
and Desolation Boulevard, under the latter’s title.
Support
for The Sweet was Back Street Crawler
On the US tour’s
closing night at Santa Monica Civic, Sweet were joined
onstage by Ritchie Blackmore.
Back Street Crawler
had been the advertised support act, though just 24
hours earlier Paul Kossoff
had died. “I hope that if Paul was watching, he
didn’t think it too disrespectful that at the end of
the show, a six-foot dick [stage prop] came swinging
down from the ceiling, spraying the audience with
confetti,” related Priest. “It was a realistic
looking affair, with all the attributes of the male
appendage. It was huge, with coloured veins and a
subtle 1,000-watt bulb inside.”
Sweet were still making great albums and scoring hit
singles. Give Us A Wink featured Action, later covered
by both Def Leppard
and Scorpions, and
The Lies In Your Eyes, though they reached just 15 and
35 respectively. The graffiti on the record’s sleeve
also bears the legend: “Queen are a bunch of winkers”.
The track Yesterday’s Rain described an encounter with a
hooker (“She gave me love for a fiver/Up to my balls
inside her”), further proof not only of the quartet’s
salacious underbelly, but also that they were leaving
the singles market behind.
Sure enough, Fever Of Love and Los Angels both vanished
without trace from the next album, Off The Record, and
with their attempt to become an album’s band foundering,
Sweet were in serious danger of falling apart. “There
was a certain indifference in our attitude while we
were recording,” admitted Scott in an interview
shortly afterwards. “I think what was missing was
honesty.”
Perhaps
addressing Scott’s admission that “Brian’s
vocals were no longer all they could have been”, Andy
and Steve shared the singing with Connolly on their
band’s first album for new label, Polydor. An
incredible 300 bottles of wine were consumed in just
a month upon decamping to Clearwell Castle to record
the Level Headed album. Their inner circle all knew
that Connolly had been drinking too much since the
mid-70s. But by the time, his alcoholism had almost
completely ostracised him from the rest of the
group, and he took up residence in a separate area
of the castle.
Brian had been telling anybody who
would listen of a plan to jump from his bedroom window,
and land fully unscathed some fifty feet below. No
attention was paid until a night when the band and crew
were eating. After a series of loud bangs and crashes –
one of which resulted when he thudded from the roof of
the mobile recording studio – Brian limped into the room
and proudly boasted: “See, I told you I could fucking
do it.” The incident earned Connolly the nickname
of Spiderman.
Brian’s depreciation also caused him to return to the
sessions from a weekend at home armed with a shotgun.
From his window he proceeded to take potshots into the
bird sanctuary behind Clearwell – over the heads of his
incredulous band-mates who at the time were playing
cricket. Describing the band’s stay at Clearwell, Priest
later commented: “After downing up to a dozen
bottles of wine at dinner, we would rush to the pub
and imbibe some of the local brew. The rest of the
evening was spent fornicating.”
Against all the odds, Level Headed turned out to be a
fine, adventurous album when issued in 1978. Happier
still, Love Is Like Oxygen provided Sweet with their
first Top Ten hit in three years. “The verses in
Oxygen…, the ones that Brian sang, were some of the
best he’d done in years,” says Scott.
"Cocaine
was beginning to ruin our lives"
Buoyed by
their return to the charts though sensing the last
chance saloon was looming, Sweet undertook another US
tour. With hindsight, it said plenty that JJ Cale’s Cocaine had
been introduced into the set. Priest and Tucker had
discovered the drug while recording Give Us A Wink in
Munich, but by the time of Off The Record as Steve
admits: “It was beginning to run our lives.”
By this point Sweet had recruited second guitarist Nico Ramsen and
keyboard player Gary Moberly,
and with Priest and Scott handling more and more of the
vocals, Connolly often had nothing to do onstage.
However, this was no excuse for his behaviour in
America, where the band were supporting labelmate Bob Seger. A deposition
from Capitol Records flew to check up on their charges
in Birmingham, Alabama, and returned to their bosses
with absolute horror.
“Brian had absolutely no idea where or who he was,”
related Priest in his book. “It looked like he had
taken some serious downers. The show had to go on, but
I wished it hadn’t. We struggled through Love Is Like
Oxygen, but eventually had to call it a day and left
the stage.”
“Being drunk onstage in front of 20,000 people was
the final straw,” agrees Scott sadly. “Brian
was dragged off after one song, and Ed Leffler [US
manager] was still shouting at him an hour later.”
"Connolly due to be replaced by
Ronnie James Dio"
The next
couple of shows proceeded well enough, but in Atlanta
the same problems emerged. With Scott lobbying the band
to sack Connolly and appoint former Rainbow frontman Ronnie James Dio in his
place, Brian vowed to behave and somehow scraped through
the dates, but invaluable options to extend their
touring in the US had to be declined. Bridges with
Capitol were unceremoniously burned. Back home, the
singer tried and failed to dry out, and after the band
tried to begin work on a new studio album he was given
the ultimatum of quitting with a semblance of dignity or
being dismissed. In February 1979, he accepted the
former option, claiming to have been planning a solo
career for three years.
Although Andy says he “definitely spoke to Ronnie
Dio” about replacing Connolly and received
positive interest, Sweet eventually elected to continue
with Priest and Scott doubling up on vocals. The trio’s
debut offering, Cut Above The Rest, continued their
creative growth. More mature than previous albums, songs
like Play All Night and the anti-dance music diatribe
DiscoPhony retained much of the original group’s
charisma, but Polydor showed precious little enthusiasm
in promoting them as a trio. Although Steve Priest
somewhat uncharitably said that it “sucked”,
1980s Water’s Edge was another excellent collection of
songs, though again there were neither adverts nor live
appearances. And with Steve relocating to live in New
York and Mick Tucker attempting to pick himself up after
his wife Pauline was found dead in the bath, things
looked bleaker still.
Just as
their fans were giving up hope, the three-piece
Sweet played an incredible comeback gig at London’s
Lyceum in January of 1981. An unknown act called Duran Duran were
billed as support, though for unknown reasons they
pulled out. Besides playing all their hits, two new
numbers were previewed. One of these, Identity
Crisis, was sung by Priest with all the
schizophrenic affectation at his command, and was
pure vintage Sweet. Such was the impact generated by
the Lyceum show that a dozen more UK shows were
quickly arranged, though it was all in vain when
Polydor only released the Identity Crisis album in
Germany.
"Scott produced for Iron Maiden"
Sweet finally
bowed to the inevitable. Besides releasing several solo
singles, Scott moved into production, becoming involved
with Iron Maiden in
their earliest stages. However, interest in 1984s Cherry
Red Record compilation Sweet 16… It’s It’s…
Sweet’s Hits and a 12” Disco Club Megamix of
the singles Blockbuster, Fox On The Run, Teenage
Rampage, Hell Raiser and Ballroom Blitz almost succeeded
in reuniting the classic line-up. The situation had
become unworkable.
Kevin Smith, a
long-time Sweet fan who ended up becoming their tour
manager from between 1983-1996, has his own theory about
why they never fulfilled their immense potential.
“They had absolutely no qualms in telling people to
fuck off, even if things were being done for their
benefit,” he says. “In the early days there
was a controversy at Top Of The Pops when they turned
up wearing jackets with ‘Fuck You’ and ‘Bollocks’
written on the back. The cameras just shot them from
the front, but they weren’t invited back onto the show
for several weeks, despite their single selling well.”
"Reformed Sweet to feature
Maiden, Heep and Weapon members"
At around the same time that Connolly resurfaced with
his New Sweet, Andy was assembling his own Sweet
line-up. According to Kevin Smith, Steve Priest had even
“made noises about re-joining” a grouping that
featured Tucker, plus former
Iron Maiden frontman
Paul Mario Day and future Uriah Heep keyboard
player Phil Lanzon.
Promo photographs were even taken with Priest supposedly
featured ‘live from New York’ on a TV screen, though
eventually they had to settle for ex-Weapon bassist Mal McNulty instead. But
the reunion would not last.
Things reached a nadir when a prime time TV documentary
followed Connolly as he played a show at a holiday camp.
For those who recalled the band at their peak, it was
painfully tragic viewing. Brian hobbled to the stage,
seemingly oblivious to the small children that were
mocking him in the background. Indeed, the show made
such an impression upon Scott that he phoned Connolly
afterwards.
“Brian was understandably livid because he’d been ill
and his backing band had played a gig as The Sweet
without him,” he states. “I told him the only
solution to everybody’s problems was for him to come
and play some gigs with my band. We’d play the first
half of the set and he’d come on for the last part. He
was really into the idea.” Scott’s call was made
around Christmas of 1996, but by the following February
Connolly’s illness had worsened and he died. A stroke
had led to liver failure. Members of Queen, Def Leppard and
Slade all paid
tribute to the singer, with Ritchie
Blackmore commenting: “He was a great
singer and a fantastic man.”
“I still have great memories of Brian, and without
warning sometimes they still make me laugh out loud,”
says Andy. “Things like the hotel receptionist
calling our tour manager and asking to retrieve him
from a corridor, where he’d been found spread-eagled
and bollock naked. He’d mistaken a pot-plant for his
bathroom door, peed on it, and passed out.”
Equally tragically, Mick Tucker succumbed to
complications related to the leukemia he had been
suffering from for five years. “Mick had had his own
problems with alcohol; generally with the lifestyle,”
offers Scott now. “It amazes me how are Aerosmith and
the Rolling Stones are still out there doing it?
Compared to bands like those, we were novices.”
Despite the occasional niggle expressed in this article
and Steve’s reluctance to tour, don’t be surprised if
Scott and Priest work together again someday. Confides
Andy: “At Mick’s funeral I told him, ‘The next one of
these could be yours or mine, let’s not wait till
then’. There’s life in the old dogs yet, and we are
working on project together.”
For the
moment, Scott has his hands full with his own Sweet
activities. Last year, his latest incarnation of the
band (bassist/lead singer
Jeff Brown, guitarist/keyboard player
Steve Grant and
drummer Bruce Bisland)
released Sweetlife, a marvellous slice of melodic,
anthemic pomp rock that somehow managed to slip
under the world’s collective radar, and a UK tour
beckons in the early part of 2003. The current Sweet
are also about to issue Chronology, a re-recorded
collection of the band’s best songs. Even with 30
million records sold, and with Ballroom Blitz having
re-entered people’s consciousness via Wayne’s World, Andy
Scott is aware that there are many brick walls
ahead, but he’s determined to overcome them.
By Dave Ling (Classic Rock
|
CELEBRATING ROCK AND METAL: 
THIS DAY ON .
. .
TUESDAY
SEPTEMBER 21
1963 - Bobby
Vinton started a three week run at
No.1 on the US singles chart with 'Blue Velvet'. The
single became a hit in the UK 27 years later when it
reached No.2.
1968 - Jimi Hendrix
Experience released their version of
the Bob Dylan
song 'All Along the Watchtower'. Hendrix had been
given a tape of Dylan's recording by publicist
Michael Goldstein. Dave Mason from Traffic and Rolling Stone Brian
Jones both played on the recording.
1970 - Freda Payne
was at No.1 on the singles chart with 'Band Of
Gold', the singers only No.1, which spent six weeks
at the top of the chart.
1971 - The first edition of the 'The Old Grey Whistle Test'
was aired. Presented by Richard Williams, the show
included film clips of Jimi
Hendrix from Monterey Festival
playing 'Wild Thing', Bob
Dylan playing 'Maggies Farm' plus America and Lesley Duncan 'live'
in the studio. The influential show went on to enjoy
a run from 1971 to 1987. According to presenter Bob
Harris, the programme derived its name from a Tin
Pan Alley phrase from years before. When they got
the first pressing of a record they would play it to
people they called the old greys—doormen in grey
suits. The songs they could remember and whistle,
having heard it just once or twice, had passed the
old grey whistle test.
1974 - Carl Douglas
was at No.1 on the singles chart with 'Kung Fu
Fighting.' The song was recorded in 10 minutes, had
started out as a B-side and went on to sell over 10
million and made Douglas a One Hit Wonder.
1977 - Meat Loaf
released his second studio album Bat Out Of Hell.
His first collaboration with composer Jim Steinman and
producer Todd Rundgren,
it is one of the best-selling albums of all time
having sold over 43 million copies worldwide (and
still sells over 200,000 copies per year). The first
single released from the album 'You Took the Words
Right Out of My Mouth' failed to chart when first
released.
1980 - During a North American tour, Bob Marley collapsed
while jogging in New York's Central Park. After
hospital tests he was diagnosed as having cancer.
Marley played his last ever concert two nights later
at the Stanley Theater in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
1992 - Parlophone Records released 'Creep' by Radiohead. as their
debut single. The single didn't chart but featured
in the majority of critics lists at the end of the
year and later appeared on their first album, Pablo
Honey.
1996 - The Fugees
scored their second No.1 single with 'Ready Or Not'.
The chorus in the song is based on 'Ready or Not
Here I Come (Can't Hide from Love)' by The Delfonics. The
Fugees previous single 'Killing Me Softly' was so
successful that the track was 'deleted' and no
longer supplied to retailers whilst the track was
still in the Top 20 to make way for the next single
'Ready or Not'.
2015 - Trumpeter Ben
Cauley, a member of the Stax Records
group The Bar-Kays
and the only survivor of the 1967 plane crash that
killed Otis Redding, died at the age of 67. The
Bar-Kays appeared as the backing band on numerous
recordings for Stax artists such as Carla Thomas, Isaac Hayes,
Rufus Thomas, The Staple Singers and
Sam and Dave.
MONDAY SEPTEMBER 20:
1957 - Buddy
Holly released the single 'Peggy Sue'
with 'Everyday' as the B-side. The song was
originally entitled 'Cindy Lou', after Holly's
niece, but was later changed to 'Peggy Sue' in
reference to Peggy Sue Gerron the girlfriend (and
future wife) of Jerry Allison, the drummer for the Crickets, after the
couple had temporarily broken up.
1968 - Led Zeppelin
(recording under the name of The
Yardbirds) started recording their
debut album at Olympic Studios, Barnes, London. The
album took only about 36 hours of studio time to
complete at a cost of around £1,782, with most of
the tracks being recorded 'live' in the studio with
very few overdubs.
1969 - Melody Maker readers poll results were
published. Winners included
Eric Clapton who won best musician, Bob Dylan best male
singer and best album for 'Nashville Skyline'. Best
group went to The Beatles,
Best single went to Simon
And Garfunkel for 'The Boxer' and Janis Joplin won
Best female singer.
1969 - During a meeting in London between John Lennon, Paul McCartney
and Ringo Starr, Lennon
announced he was leaving The
Beatles.
1970 - Jim Morrison
of The Doors
was acquitted on charges of lewd and lascivious
behavior but was found guilty of exposing himself
during a concert at The Dinner Key Auditorium in
Coconut Grove a year and a half earlier. At his
trial at the Dade County Courthouse in Miami, Judge
Goodman sentenced Morrison to six months hard labor
and a $500 (£270) fine for public exposure and sixty
days hard labor for profanity. The sentence was
appealed but Morrison was never brought to trial as
he would die in Paris France on July 3, 1971.
1970 - The Rolling Stones
live album 'Get Your Ya-Yas Out' started a two-week
run at No.1 on the chart. Recorded at New York's
Madison Sq Gardens on 27th & 28th Nov 1969,
featuring 'Jumpin Jack Flash', 'Honky Tonk Woman'
and 'Midnight Rambler'.
1973 - On his way to perform his second concert of
the day, US singer, songwriter
Jim Croce was killed with five others
when his chartered aircraft hit a tree on take off
in Louisiana.
1975 - 'Fame' gave David
Bowie his first No.1 in the US. The
song was co-written with
John Lennon. Lennon's voice is heard
towards the ending of the song repeating the words:
"Fame, Fame, Fame" from a fast track, through a
regular track, to a slow track, before Bowie
finished the lyrics.
1976 - AC/DC
released their third studio album 'Dirty Deeds Done
Dirt Cheap'. The album has been certified 6x
Platinum in the United States, which means that it
has sold at least 6 million copies, becoming the
third highest sold album by AC/DC in the US after
'Highway To Hell' and 'Back In Black'.
1976 - The first of the two night 100 Club Punk
Festival, Oxford St, London featuring the Sex Pistols, The Clash, Subway
Sect, Suzie (spelling on the poster)
and The Banshees, The
Buzzcocks, Vibrators and Stinky Toys.
Admission £1.50.
1993 - Just back from a tour of Japan, keyboard
player with The Charlatans
Rob Collins was out with an old
friend. They stopped at an off-licence and his
friend went in, half-jokingly saying he could rob
the place. When he came out with a loud bang,
Collins stupidly picked him up. The police arrested
the pair the next day and charged them both with
attempted robbery and possession of a firearm (it
was a replica gun).
1994 - The Dave Matthews
Band released ‘Under the Table and
Dreaming’, the album featured their first commercial
hits ‘What Would You Say,’ ‘Satellite,’ and ‘Ants
Marching.’ The album was dedicated to Matthews'
older sister Anne, who was killed by her husband in
1994 in a murder-suicide.
1997 - Pearl Jam's
'Jeremy' video was cited as one of the reasons
American teenager Barry Loukaitis had snapped into a
violent rage that left three people dead. Defence
attorneys took the unprecedented step of playing the
video in a Washington court.
2012 - The former north London home of the original
band members of Pink Floyd
was bought by a Singaporean developer. Sham
Masterman, who admitted not being a big fan of the
rock band, bought the Highgate house and the one
next door for £1.2m each. Roger Waters, Nick Mason,
Richard Wright and Syd Barrett had all lived in the
house in the 1960s. The previous owner, lighting
technician Mike Leonard, was landlord and friend to
the band and even inspired their earliest name,
Leonard's Lodgers.
2020 - American musician and singer Tommy DeVito died
age 92 after contracting COVID-19. He is best known
as a founding member, vocalist and lead guitarist of
the Four Seasons
who were one of only two American bands (the other
being the Beach Boys)
to enjoy substantial chart success before, during
and after the British Invasion. The Four Seasons are
one of the best-selling musical groups of all time,
having sold an estimated 100 million records
worldwide.
SUNDAY SEPTEMBER 19:
1960
- Former chicken plucker Chubby
Checker went to No.1 on the US
singles chart with 'The Twist'. It made No.14 in the
UK in 1962, version with
The Fat Boys made No.2 in the UK in
1988.
1964 - Oxfam printed half a million Christmas cards
in the UK of a drawing by John
Lennon called the Fat Budgie, which
was taken from his book A Spaniard in the Works. All
profits from the cards went to help raise money for
charity. Oxfam re-printed the cards in 2007 as a
limited edition card which again sold thousands.
1969 - Creedence Clearwater
Revival scored their only No.1 single
with 'Bad Moon Rising' . Also on this day the group
started a four-week run at No.1 on the US album
chart with 'Green River.'
1973 - Country rock singer, songwriter 26-year-old Gram Parsons
formerly of The Byrds
and The Flying Burrito
Brothers died under mysterious
conditions in Joshua Tree, California. His death was
attributed to heart failure but later was officially
announced as a drug overdose. His coffin was stolen
by two of his associates, manager Phil Kaufman and
Michael Martin, a former roadie for The Byrds, and
was taken to Cap Rock in the California desert where
it was set alight in accordance to Parsons' wishes.
The two were later arrested by police.
1992 - The Shamen started
a four-week run at No.1 on the singles chart with
'Ebeneezer Goode'. One of the most controversial
chart toppers due to its perceived endorsement of
recreational drug use. The song was initially
banned by the BBC.
1992 - Radiohead
filmed the video for their new single 'Creep'
during a show at the Venue in Oxford. During its
initial release 'Creep' was not a chart success.
However, upon re-release in 1993 it became a
worldwide hit.
1993 - Pearl Jam
released their second studio album Vs. The album
set the record for the most copies of an album
sold in its first week, a record it held for five
years despite the fact that the group declined to
produce music videos for any of the album’s
singles.
1999 - American musician, songwriter and record
producer Ed Cobb
died. He was a member of the Four
Preps and he wrote the northern soul
hit ‘Tainted Love’ for Gloria
Jones which
Soft Cell reworked into one of the
biggest pop hits of the 1980s.
2002 - James Brown was
being sued by his own daughters for more than
£650,000 of song royalties they said they were
owed. Deanna Brown Thomas and Dr Yamma Brown
Lumar, a Texas physician, said Brown had withheld
royalties on 25 co-written songs because of a
family grudge. The lawsuit claimed that Brown had
held a grudge against his daughters since 1998
when Ms Thomas had her father committed to a
psychiatric hospital to be treated for addiction
to painkillers.
2005 -
Research published by Guinness World Records
showed that Status Quo
have had more hit singles than any other band in
UK chart history. The band had scored 61 chart
successes, dating from ‘Pictures of Matchstick
Men’ in 1968 to ‘You'll Come Around’ in 2004. Queen came
second with 52 hits, with The
Rolling Stones and UB40 with 51
hits each.
2008 -
American drummer Earl
Palmer died. Worked with The Beach Boys, Little
Richard (‘Tutti Frutti’), Frank Sinatra, Ike And
Tina Turner (‘River Deep,
Mountain High’), The
Monkees, Fats Domino (‘I'm
Walkin’), Neil
Young, Elvis Costello, Tom Waits, The
Righteous Brothers (‘You've
Lost That Lovin' Feelin’) and Randy Newman, Tom Waits,
Bonnie Raitt, Tim Buckley, Little Feat
and Elvis Costello.
2020 - Ozzy Osbourne’s
former drummer, Lee
Kerslake, died aged 73 from prostate
cancer. He is best known for his performances on the Black Sabbath
frontman’s critically-acclaimed debut album Blizzard
of Ozz and was also the drummer in Uriah Heep appearing
on their 1972 album Demons and Wizards and nine
studio records as well as a live album with the band
before departing in 1978.
FRIDAY SEPTEMBER 17:
1931 - The first long-playing record, a 33
1/3 rpm recording, was demonstrated at the Savoy Plaza
Hotel in New York by RCA-Victor. The venture was doomed to
fail however due to the high price of the record players
which started around $95 (about $1140 in today's dollars)
and wasn't revived until 1948.
1956 - The BBC announced the removal of Bill
Haley and His
Comets'
‘Rockin'
Through The
Rye’ from its
playlist
because they
felt the song
went against
traditional
British
standards (and
included the
lyrics "All
the lassies
rock with me
when rockin'
through the
rye"). The
record, based
on an 18th
century
Scottish Folk
tune, was at
No.5 on the
charts.
1964 - During
a US tour The Beatles appeared at the Municipal
Stadium in
Kansas City.
The Beatles
were paid
$150,000 for
the show which
was more than
any other act
had ever been
paid for a
live show.
Tickets cost
$4.50.
1967
- The
Doors
were banned
from The Ed
Sullivan Show
after Jim
Morrison broke
his agreement
with the
show’s
producers.
Morrison said
before the
performance
that he
wouldn’t sing
the words,
‘Girl, we
couldn’t get
much higher,’
from 'Light My
Fire' but did
anyway. The
Doors also
performed
their new
single 'People
Are Strange.'
1969 - Media
on both sides
of the
Atlantic were
running
stories that
said
Paul McCartney
was dead. He
was supposedly
killed in a
car accident
in Scotland on
November 9th,
1966 and that
a double had
been taking
his place for
public
appearances.
In fact Paul
and his
girlfriend
Jane Asher
were on
vacation in
Kenya at the
time.
1978 - The
video for Queen's single 'Bicycle Race' was filmed
at Wimbledon
Stadium,
Wimbledon. It
featured 65
naked female
professional
models racing
around the
stadium's
track on
bicycles which
had been hired
for the day.
The rental
company was
reported to
have requested
payment to
replace
all the
saddles when
they found out
how their
bikes had been
used.
1996 - A bomb was found at a South London sorting office
addressed to
Icelandic
singer Bjork. Police in Miami had alerted the
post office
after finding
the body of
Ricardo Lopez
who had made a
video of
himself making
the bomb and
then killing
himself.
2000 - Paula Yates
was found dead
in bed from a
suspected drug
overdose.
Yates had
presented The
Tube during
the 80s,
married Bob Geldof and was the girlfriend of INXS singer
Michael
Hutchence.
2004 - Israeli police arrested two of Madonna's
bodyguards
after they
assaulted
photographers
waiting for
the singer
outside her
hotel. Madonna
was in Israel
with 2,000
other students
of Kabbalah,
the Jewish
mystical
offshoot.
2011 - The estate of Jimi
Hendrix
gave the
go-ahead for
another round
of archival
releases
nearly 41
years to the
day after the
singer's
death. The
four new
products
included an
expanded
version of his
landmark
Winterland
concerts in
1968, a revamp
of a 1972 live
compilation,
an upgraded
DVD of his
final U.K.
festival gig
and a DVD
reissue of
some old
talk-show
appearances.
WEDNESDAY
SEPTEMBER 15:
1956
-
Anne Shelton
was at No.1 on
the singles
chart with
'Lay Down Your
Arms.' Shelton
was a British
vocal star of
the 40s &
50s and one
time singer
with the Glenn Miller Orchestra.
1966 - Member
of Parliament
Tom Drilberg
asked
Britain's
House of
Commons to
officially
"deplore" the
action of a
magistrate
who'd earlier
called The Rolling Stones "complete
morons...who
wear filthy
clothes."
1967 - Working
at Abbey Road
studios in
London, The Beatles recorded 11 takes of 'Your
Mother Should
Know', giving
the song a
stronger beat,
but this
version of the
song was
discarded in
favour of the
original
recording.
1970 - Led Zeppelin won 'best group' in the
Melody Maker
readers Poll.
This was the
first time in
eight years
that
The Beatles
hadn't won
'best group.'
1970 - Jimi Hendrix joined Eric
Burdon
on stage at
Ronnie Scotts
in London for
what would
become the
guitarist's
last ever
public
appearance.
1977
- 29-year-old
former T Rex singer Marc
Bolan
was killed
instantly when
the car driven
by his
girlfriend,
Gloria Jones,
left the road
and hit a tree
in Barnes,
London. Miss
Jones broke
her jaw in the
accident. The
couple were on
the way to
Bolan's home
in Richmond
after a night
out at a
Mayfair
restaurant. A
local man who
witnessed the
crash said,
'When I
arrived a girl
was lying on
the bonnet and
a man with
long dark
curly hair was
stretched out
in the road -
there was a
hell of a
mess.'
.1988 -
Former Clash drummer Topper
Headon
was released
from jail
after serving
10 months of a
15-month
sentence on a
narcotics
charge.
1996 - Pearl Jam
played the
first night on
their 'No
Code' tour at
the Key Arena
in Seattle,
Washington.
Because of the
band's refusal
to play in
Ticketmaster's
venue areas,
they were
forced to use
alternate
ticketing
companies for
the shows
which fans
complained
were
out-of-the-way
and hard to
get to.
2008 - Norman Whitfield
died in Los
Angeles,
California
from diabetes
and other
illnesses. The
Motown
songwriter and
producer
collaborated
with Barrett
Strong on such
hits as 'I
Heard It
Through the
Grapevine',
‘Ain't Too
Proud to Beg’,
‘(I Know) I'm
Losing You’,
‘Cloud Nine’,
‘War’, ‘Papa
Was a Rolling
Stone’, and
‘Car Wash’.
2009 - Mary Travers
from Folk trio
Peter,
Paul And Mary,
passed away
after
suffering from
leukemia for
several years.
She was 72.
Mary's lead
vocal can be
heard on the
group's
biggest hit,
1969's
'Leaving On A
Jet Plane'.
2013 - A souvenir booklet from the 1967 Monterey
Pop Festival
signed by Jimi Hendrix fetched $6,500 on eBay. The
artifact also
included
autographs
from three
members of the
Mamas
and Papas.
2018
- English
multi-instrumentalist
musician and
record
producer Martin Allcock died aged 61. He was a
member of folk
rock band Fairport Convention and Jethro
Tull
and also
played
keyboards for
The
Mission.
TUESDAY
SEPTEMBER 14:
1955 - Little Richard
entered a New
Orleans
recording
studio to
begin two days
of recording.
Things were
not going well
and during a
break Richard
and his
producer Bumps
Blackwell went
to the Dew
Drop Inn for
lunch. Richard
started
playing the
piano in the
bar like
crazy, singing
a loud and
lewd version
of ‘Tutti
Frutti.’ With
only fifteen
minutes left
in the session
Richard
recorded the
song and
coined the
phrase,
‘a-wop-bop-a-loo-bop-a-lop-bam-boom.’
1968 - Roy Orbison's house in Nashville burnt
down;
his two eldest
sons both died
in the blaze.
Orbison was on
tour in the UK
at the time of
the accident.
1968 - The
first episode
of the comic
strip 'The
Archies' was
aired on US
TV. The
recording
group had
contributions
from Ron
Dante, Andy
Kim, Jeff
Barry and
others. Rock
mogul Don
Kirshner (who
also brought
us The
Monkees)
was put in
charge of the
studio group.
The following
year The
Archies
started a
eight-week run
at No.1 on the
UK singles
chart with
'Sugar Sugar,'
becoming the
longest
running One
Hit Wonder in
the UK.
1984 - David Bowie won
Video of the
year for
'China Girl'
at the first
MTV Video
awards. The
song
co-written by
David
Bowie
and Iggy
Pop
during their
years in
Berlin, first
appeared on
Pop's album
The Idiot
released in
1977.
1997 - Over 2000 fans watched
Pete Townshend
unveil a
English
Heritage Blue
Plaque at 23
Brook Street,
Mayfair to
mark where Jimi Hendrix had lived in 1968-69. Hendrix
was the first
pop star to be
awarded with
the plaque.
2005 - HMV stores in Canada removed Bob
Dylan
CDs from their
shelves in
protest at the
singer's deal
to only sell
his new album
in Starbucks
after he
signed an
exclusive
contract with
the coffee
giant. The
chain has
previously
boycotted CDs
by Alanis
Morissette
and The
Rolling Stones
to complain at
exclusive
deals.
2005 - The newly refurbished Grateful
Dead's
original tour
bus went on
display at the
Volo Auto
Museum in
Volo,
Illinois. The
1965 Gillig
bus, which
Jerry Garcia
and the rest
of the Dead
dubbed ‘Sugar
Magnolia’ was
used by the
band on their
frequent tours
across the US
between 1967
and 1985. The
ceiling was
lined with
hundreds of
vintage rock
posters
featuring The Beatles, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin
and others who
had visited
the bus.
2008 - Iron Maiden
singer Bruce Dickinson was one of the pilots who
flew specially
chartered
flights after
85,000
tourists were
stranded in
the US, the
Caribbean,
Africa and
Europe after
Britain's
third-largest
tour operator
went into
administration.
The singer,
who had worked
for the
airline
Astraeus for
nine years,
took up flying
during a low
point in his
solo career
after he quit
the band in
1993.
MONDAY
SEPTEMBER 13:
1958
- Cliff
Richard
made his
British TV
debut on Jack
good's 'Oh
Boy',
performing
'Move It'.
Before he was
allowed to
appear on the
show, Richard
was ordered to
remove his
sideburns.
1960 - A
campaign was
started to ban
'Tell Laura I
Love Her' by Ray Peterson. The song was being denounced
in the press
as likely to
inspire a
teenage
"glorious
death cult."
The story told
of a lovesick
youngster who
drives in a
stock car race
to win the
hand of his
sweetheart. He
crashes and
just before
dying, groans
out the words
of the title.
1963
- Graham
Nash
fell out of The Hollies van after a gig in Scotland.
Nash checked
to see if the
door was
locked;
it wasn't and
he fell out as
it travelled
at 40mph.
1964 - During
a UK tour two
dozen rugby
players were
hired as 'a
human crash
barrier' at a
Rolling
Stones
gig at the
Liverpool
Empire. The
'human chain'
disappeared
under a wave
of 5,000 fans
as the Stones
took to the
stage.
1965
- The Paul
McCartney
song
'Yesterday'
was released
as a Beatles
single
in the US.
McCartney's
vocal and
acoustic
guitar
together with
a string
quartet
essentially
made for the
first solo
performance of
the band. The
final
recording was
so different
from other
works by The
Beatles that
the band
members vetoed
the release of
the song as a
single in the
United
Kingdom.
(However, it
was issued as
a single there
in 1976.)
1967
- The
Beatles
formed an
electronics
company called
Fiftyshapes,
Ltd.
appointing John Alexis Mardas (Magic Alex) to be the
company's
director. Alex
claimed he
could build a
72-track tape
machine,
instead of the
4-track at
Abbey Road
(this never
materialised).
One of his
more
outrageous
plans was to
replace the
acoustic
baffles around
Ringo
Starr's
drums with an
invisible
sonic force
field. George Harrison later said that employing
Mardas was "the
biggest
disaster of
all time."
1986
- The
Communards were
at No.1 on the
singles chart
with 'Don't
Leave Me This
Way', which
had been a hit
for
Harold Melvin
& the Blue
Notes
in 1975 and
later a hit
for Thelma
Houston.
1996
- Both Noel and Liam
Gallagher
arrived back
in the UK on
separate
flights from
the US amid
rumours that Oasis were splitting. A statement from the
record company
said there
would be no
live gigs but
the band would
continue to
record.
2005
-
The Sex
Pistols were
among new
names added to
a celebrity
Walk of Fame
in Covent
Garden,
London. Other
musical
celebrities to
immortalised
on the Avenue
of the Stars
include
Bob Geldof,
Tom Jones,
Gracie Fields
and Bob
Hope.
2015
- Gary
Richrath,
lead guitarist
and songwriter
for
REO Speedwagon,
died at the
age of 65.
Richrath
recorded 12
albums with
the band
before leaving
in 1989 and
released his
own solo album
in 1992.
2019 -
American
singer,
songwriter and
multi-instrumentalist
Eddie
Money
died of cancer
age 70. He
released over
ten albums and
had a string
of hits in the
late Seventies
including
'Baby Hold
On', 'Two
Tickets to
Paradise' and
'Take Me Home
Tonight'.
SUNDAY
SEPTEMBER 12:
1963 - The Beatles
were at No.1
on the singles
chart with
'She Loves
You', the
group's second
No.1. It
became the
biggest seller
of the year
and the
biggest
selling
Beatles single
in the UK.
1966 - N.B.C.
aired the
first episode
of The
Monkees
TV show in the
US. The series
ran for a
total of 58
episodes.
1967
- Filming
continued for The Beatles Magical Mystery Tour. The bus
headed for
Widecombe on
the Moor where
a local fair
was being held
but the bus
driver (Alf
Manders) took
a shortcut to
bypass heavy
traffic and
ended up stuck
on a bridge;
the coach
ended up
having to
drive in
reverse for a
half-mile
before it
could turn
around. They
then head for
Plymouth,
followed by a
20-car convoy
of journalists
and
photographers.
1970 - Bob Dylan joined Joan
Baez, Pete
Seeger
and Arlo
Guthrie
at the Woody
Guthrie
Memorial
Concert held
at the
Hollywood Bowl
in Los
Angeles,
California.
1970
- Creedence
Clearwater
Revival scored
their first
No.1 album
with Cosmo's
Factory. It
also enjoyed a
nine-week run
at No.1 in the
US where it
sold over
three million
copies.
1970 -
Smokey
Robinson and
The Miracles
were at No.1
on the singles
chart with
'The Tears Of
A Clown',
their first UK
No.1. Stevie
Wonder
(who was
discovered by
Miracles
member Ronnie
White) and his
producer Hank Cosby wrote the music for the song.
1986 - Public Image Ltd
guitarist John McGeoch needed 40 stitches in his
face after a
two-litre wine
bottle was
thrown at the
stage during a
gig in Vienna.
1990 - Stevie Nicks
and
Christine
McVie
from Fleetwood
Mac
announced they
were leaving
the band at
the end of
their current
tour. At the
time, some
believed that
Nicks’ and
McVie’s
departures
were hastened
by bad blood
in the wake of
Mick
Fleetwood’s
memoir,
'Fleetwood: My
Life and
Adventures in
Fleetwood
Mac'.
2002 - The son of Rod Stewart
was sentenced
to 90 days in
jail and
ordered to
undergo drug
rehabilitation
after pleading
no contest to
attacking a
man outside a
Malibu,
California
restaurant. 22
year-old Sean Stewart had been arrested on Dec.
5th, 2001,
after he was
seen kicking
the man in the
face and
stomach.
Stewart was
also sentenced
to five years
of probation
and ordered to
pay $5,600 to
the victim.
2003 - Singer
songwriter Johnny Cash died aged 71 of respiratory
failure. One
of the most
influential
musicians of
the 20th
century, known
as "The Man in
Black." He
traditionally
started his
concerts by
saying, "Hello,
I'm Johnny
Cash." Had
the 1969 US
No.2 & UK
No.4 single 'A
Boy Named
Sue', plus 11
other US Top
40 singles.
Cash also had
his own US TV
show in late
60s early 70s.
2007 - The surviving members of
Led Zeppelin
announced they
would reform
for a
star-studded
tribute
concert in
London. Robert
Plant, Jimmy
Page and John
Paul Jones
would play at
a show to
remember the
late Atlantic
Records
founder Ahmet
Ertegun. The
place of Led
Zeppelin
drummer John
Bonham, who
died in 1980,
would be taken
by his son
Jason. The
one-off
concert, the
trio's first
performance
for 19 years,
would take
place at the
O2 arena in
London on 26th
November.
2013
- Ray
Dolby,
the US
engineer who
founded Dolby
Laboratories
and pioneered
noise
reduction in
audio
recordings,
died aged 80
of leukemia.
The analog
Dolby
noise-reduction
system works
by increasing
the volume of
low-level
high-frequency
sounds during
recording and
correspondingly
reducing them
during
playback.
SATURDAY
SEPTEMBER 11:
1956 - Police were called to break up a crowd of rowdy
teenagers
following the
showing of the
film Rock
Around the
Clock
at the
Trocadero
Cinema in
London. The
following day
The Times
printed a
reader's
letter that
said: "The
hypnotic
rhythm and the
wild gestures
have a
maddening
effect on a
rhythm loving
age group and
the result of
its impact is
the relaxing
of all self
control."
The film was
quickly banned
in several
English
cities.
1962 - After George Martin insisted that session
drummer Andy White took Ringo
Starr's
place, The
Beatles
returned to
EMI Studios in
London for a
third attempt
at recording
their first
single. 'Love
Me Do' was
selected to be
The Beatles'
first A-side,
with "P.S. I
Love You" on
the flip side
(a reversal of
the original
plan). The
single that
was released
on October 5th
featured a
version of
‘Love Me Do’
with Ringo on
drums, but the
album ‘Please
Please Me’
included a
version with
Andy White on
drums.
1964
- The London
Evening News
reported that
a 16 year-old
Eltham Collage
boy,
introduced as
Laurie
Yarham,
was everyone's
idea of a
winner in a Mick Jagger look-a-like competition.
Laurie looked
like Mick
Jagger and
seemed to know
his every
action and the
audience at
Greenwich Town
Hall were
delighted,
until the
winner turned
out to be
Mick's younger
brother Chris
Jagger.
1967 - Filming
began for The Beatles ‘Magical Mystery Tour’. There
was no script,
nor a very
clear idea of
exactly what
was to be
accomplished,
not even a
clear
direction
about where
the bus was
supposed to
go. The
‘Magical
Mystery Tour’
bus set off
for the West
Country
stopping for
the night in
Teignmouth,
Devon where
hundreds of
fans greeted
The Beatles at
their hotel.
1970 - NME’s Keith Allston
interviewed Jimi Hendrix. The interview turned out to
be Hendrix's
last; he died
a mere seven
days later.
During the
interview,
Hendrix talked
about a new
musical phase,
with planned
collaborations
with Miles
Davis
and Paul
McCartney.
1982 - Chicago
started a two
week run at
No.1 on the US
singles chart
with 'Hard To
Say I'm
Sorry', the
group's second
US No.1. Taken
from the film
'Summer
Lovers', a
No.4 hit in
the UK.
1987 - Founder member of The
Wailers, Peter
Tosh,
was shot dead
at his home in
Kingston
Jamaica by
armed robbers.
1987 - Peter Gabriel
cleaned up at
this year's
MTV Awards,
winning best
video, best
male video,
best concept
video, best
special
effects and
five other
awards for the
track
'Sledgehammer'.
1987 - Level 42s
'It's Over',
became the
first CD video
single to go
on sale. It
contained
twenty minutes
of music and
five minutes
of video
(which
remained
unseen until
CDV players
went on sale).
1996 - Noel Gallagher
walked out on
the rest of Oasis half way through an American tour
after a fight
with his
brother Liam in a hotel in Charlotte North
Carolina. Noel
flew back to
London the
following day.
2003 - Tommy Chong,
one-half of
the comedy
team of Cheech and Chong, was sentenced to nine
months in
federal prison
and fined
$20,000 for
selling drug
paraphernalia
over the
Internet. The
65 year-old
Chong pled
guilty to the
charges last
May. He
remained free
until April,
2004, when he
went to jail.
2019 - American songwriter and artist
Daniel
Johnston died
of a suspected
heart attack
at his home in
Waller, Texas,
at the age of
58. Kurt
Cobain
once described
him as 'the
best
songwriter on
earth' and
famously wore
one of
Johnston's
t-shirts to
the 1992 MTV
Awards. Other
musicians who
have covered
Johnston's
songs include
Pearl
Jam, Tom
Waits, Wilco,
Death Cab for
Cutie, Sufjan
Stevens
and Yo
La Tengo.
FRIDAY
SEPTEMBER 10:
1962
- The BBC
banned Bobby 'Boris' Pickett and the Crypt Kickers
single
'Monster Mash'
saying it was
offensive. The
single went on
to be a No.3
hit in 1973.
1963 - The
Daily Mirror
published a
two-page
article about
The
Beatles.
Written by
Donald Zec,
the feature is
entitled ‘Four
Frenzied
Little Lord
Fauntleroys
Who Are
Earning 5,000
Pounds A Week’.
Zec, who had
attended a
Beatles
concert in
Luton on Sept.
6 and then
invited them
to his home to
complete the
interview,
referred to
The Beatles'
haircuts as
‘A stone-age
hair style’.
The article
provided a
major boost to
their career.
1964 - The Kinks third single 'You Really Got
Me', was at
No.1 on the
singles chart.
Future
Led Zeppelin
founder and
guitarist Jimmy Page played tambourine on the track.
1965
- The
Byrds
begin
recording
‘Turn! Turn!
Turn!’. Unlike
their first
hit, ‘Mr.
Tambourine
Man’, members
of the group
itself were
permitted to
play instead
of session
musicians.
1968 -
The Beatles
were at No.1
on the singles
chart with
‘Hey Jude’,
the group's
15th No.1 and
the longest
chart topper
ever at seven
minutes and
ten seconds.
The single was
the first
release on the
group's Apple
record label.
1974 - The New York Dolls split up. The
influential
American band
formed in 1972
and made just
two albums,
the 1973 'New
York Dolls'
and 1974 'Too
Much Too
Soon'.
1991 - Nirvana's
single 'Smells
Like Teen
Spirit' was
released in
the US. The
unexpected
success of
'Smells Like
Teen Spirit'
in late 1991
propelled
Nevermind to
the top of the
charts at the
start of 1992,
an event often
marked as the
point where
alternative
rock entered
the
mainstream.
1996 - Music journalist Ray
Coleman
died of
cancer.
Coleman had
worked with The Beatles and
The Rolling
Stones
and had been
the editor of
the UK music
weekly
Melody Maker throughout
the heyday of
The Beatles
and The
Rolling Stones
into the era
of Pink
Floyd
and Led
Zeppelin.
2002 - Chris Cowey
the man behind
the longest
running music
TV show Top Of
The Pops
accused record
bosses of
controlling
the singles
chart with
marketing
scams and as a
result the
chart lacked
credibility
and was
'full of crap
records.'
2005 - The 1967 Beatles
track 'A Day
In The Life'
from Sgt
Pepper's
Lonely Hearts
Club Band was
voted the best
British song
of all time by
music experts.
The survey by
Q magazine
called the
track "the
ultimate sonic
rendition of
what it means
to be
British". The Kinks' song 'Waterloo Sunset' came
second in the
poll and
'Wonderwall'
by
Oasis
was voted in
third place.
2007 - Pamela Anderson's ex-husband
Kid Rock
was involved
in an alleged
assault on
drummer
Tommy Lee
(who was also
married to the
actress up
until 1998).
Police
interviewed
witnesses to a
tussle
involving the
pair at the
MTV Music
Video Awards
in Las Vegas.
Lee was
removed from
the ceremony
while Rock was
allowed to
stay.
2009 - A harmonica owned by Bob
Dylan
sold for
£2,700 at
auction in
Norfolk,
England, more
than four
times the
guide price.
The
singer-songwriter
had presented
the chromonica
harmonica,
made by
Hohner, to a
member of his
wardrobe
department in
1974. Lifetime
Dylan fan John
Fellas of
Gorleston,
Norfolk, who
wore
Dylan-style
sunglasses
while bidding,
outbid fans
from across
the world for
the
instrument.
The inside of
the harmonica
case was
signed and
dedicated by
Dylan. It had
is expected to
fetch more
than £600 at
the sale by
Barnes
Auctioneers.
Fellas told
reporters he
was still
plucking up
the courage to
tell his wife
about what he
had done.
2015
- American
guitarist Don Griffin was killed in a car accident
in Denver,
Colorado. He
was 60 years
old. Griffin
appeared on The Miracles 1976 No.1 hit, 'Love
Machine' and
had also
worked with Anita Baker. Griffin's dance band Madagascar
was signed by
Clive Davis to
Arista Records
in 1981 and
released the
single 'Baby
Not Tonight.
THURSDAY
SEPTEMBER 9:
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