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The Semiotics of Ratt

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Rummaging through the record racks after school the cover of Ratt Invasion of Your Privacy caught my adolescent eye for some inexplicable reason.  No, not the back cover where the band grimace and gurn away at the viewer with perfect, back-combed, permed hair in a succession of outfits which, let’s face it, would get your head kicked off your shoulders in most towns even if you wore them for your grocery shopping.   Nope, it’s the front cover I’m talking about:

Lovely model, with a hairstyle which plants her firmly in the 80′s, putting on little lacy ankle socks whilst only wearing her knickers and vest.  Now we could just leave this at the ‘Phwoarr! it’s a hot chick in her undies, who is obviously up for it’ level, but we are all better than that, people.  Let’s have a look at the visual semiotics of the cover:

French Windows:  Open, inviting, transparent – clearly this hot chick is up for it.

Dressing Table – No toiletries / lady products or other adornments, no further beautification of the subject is necessary - clearly this young lady is hot, permanently available and up for it.

Bed – Slightly tousled duvet, with a frilly edge (unconsciously reminding viewer of her panties) – clearly this is where the action happens.

Shoes – Impractically heeled, discarded (perhaps in a moment of passion) – clearly this hot chick isn’t going anywhere fast.

Rug – Inexplicably resembles the sort of mats put in front of toilets by fastidious elderly relatives – symbolic of the inevitable decay of youth and beauty, even for hotties like this who are up for it.

Hot Chick – Vacant expression – symbolic of shallowness of physical vs. mental attraction, is she putting on, or taking off that sock? this is the key to the whole conundrum of existence – clearly up for it.

Speaker – Clearly for pumping out cool rock sounds which inevitably increase hot chicks up-for-it-ness.

CCTV Camera – I’ve owned this LP for 23 years and this is the first time I have EVER noticed this.  It probably symbolises the corrupting influence of narco-militaristic consumerism on something, possibly, maybe.

So class – what have we learned today? this is not just a picture of a hot chick alone in her room, being spied upon by adolescent, or older, males for the purposes of sexual gratification, this whole LP sleeve can be read as a text in its own right.

Which is just as well because the music on offer here is absolutely rank ! with the sole exception of the first track, ‘You’re in Love’.  Uninspired songs played efficiently.  This is why Ratt weren’t bigger, overseas at least and do you know I have never even heard ‘Round and Round’.  I have nothing else to say on the subject, other than I didn’t learn my lesson that scantily clad ladies on the cover of LPs were not a guarantee of the quality of their contents.

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Filed under: Hard Rock, Lego art, Music, Ratt, Record collecting, Sleaze rock Tagged: Hard Rock, Invasion of Your Privacy, Panties, Ratt, Vinyl

A Distant Bell Tolls

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Black Sabbath? Black Sabbath Black Sabbath, Black Sabbath! “Black Sabbath”. Much as I do love punctuation (and Sabbath) I’ll stop there.

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There was a funny moment in about 1992 when suddenly the music press, coming to terms with the fact that every grunge band ever (even the pimply, blatantly fake ones) claimed they owned almost everything to Sabbath, started to pretend that they’d really liked Black Sabbath all along. Hang on! thought all of us long hairs – you’ve mocked and derided us for our tribalism and uncool musical tastes for ever – you can’t steal our Gods. But they did and suddenly Black Sabbath were lauded as one of the most influential bands ever, which they were of course. We knew that.

Almost all of the Ozzy-era Sabbath LPs are perfect and I know they made better ones, but Black Sabbath has a special place in my heart. I own a really cool Vertigo original vinyl copy, with a swirly inner label and everything – in fact I stole it from my dad in around 1990. If you discount Hendrix and suchlike my dad only owned two hard rock/metal LPs, Thin Lizzy Bad Reputation and this one; or should I say ‘owned’. My conscience is, worryingly, clear – clearly I can and should blame this theft on backwards-masked messages on the LP.

Everything about this record is just perfection – creepy cover image of robed chick in overgrown garden? check; sound of a mournful bell tolling midnight in the rain? check; singer who sounds fearful for his very soul itself? check; the invention of almost every worthwhile metal riff ever recorded? check; LP released on Friday 13th? check; evil? check; scary upside-down cross in the gatefold containing even scarier poem? check; despair? check; three of the best rock musicians ever assembled in one place? check; 1537′s favourite ever rhythm section? check. I could go on, but you’d probably skip off to a better blog.

Original UK gatefold (with authentic original scary-robed lady Lego figure)

Original UK gatefold (with authentic original scary-robed lady Lego figure)

One of the reasons I like this LP so much is that while it contains some tracks that are undeniably metal, you can really hear their origins in the hard-blues tracks like ‘Warning’ and ‘Wicked World’, the logical progression is there for everyone to see. I really wish I could have heard it when it first came out, it must have just sounded so wrong, so negative – brilliant. No wonder all the critics, reportedly, hated it.

There are undeniable cold classics here such as ‘Black Sabbath’, which is just perfect even before the music starts and unlike lots of songs by lots of other artists, gets even better when it does start, ‘N.I.B’ and ‘The Wizard’, but I even like the more throwaway tracks like the cover ‘Evil Woman’ and the 10-minute ‘Warning’. To be honest I just have the hots for this LP and if the final track was a kazoo-only cover of ‘Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da’ I would still argue it was a proto-metal classic*, a neglected part of their canon and that it showed a clear progression from, umm, something to something else a bit different. I have no objectivity here, I have to have this LP at least once a month.

I’ll spare you my ramblings on just how great Bill Ward and Geezer Butler are for another time and stash my Tony-Iomni-is-a-genius rant for later on, but what I will say is that if you ever tire of the multi-media buffoon Ozzy either has become / or pretends to be, or appalling 80′s Ozzy in a blouse, then just feast your ears here, when he is in full cry. His voice is every bit as much of an instrument as any other here, his tone perfect throughout, giving every track here just the right texture and feel.

My favourite track on Black Sabbath Black Sabbath? ‘Black Sabbath’ of course.

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What is this that stands before me?

What is this that stands before me?

* Proto being my new prefix of choice which I use wherever possible, even if it’s not proto-relevant.


Filed under: Black Sabbath, Hard Rock, Heavy Metal, Lego art, Obsessive behaviour, Record collecting, Rock, Vinyl Tagged: Black Sabbath, Black sabbath Lego

I Love Lorraine

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… which is exactly what I thought Ian Astbury was singing when I first heard this song, hundreds of years ago – okay, circa 1986; ‘what a great love song’, I thought, ‘I bet Lorraine’s pleased with it’.  The Cult Rain is one of my favourite three 80′s British hard rock singles I can think of, off the top of my head.  In fact the top 3 would read:

  1. Prime Mover – Zodiac Mindwarp & The Love Reaction
  2. She Sells Sanctuary  – The Cult
  3. Rain – The Cult

In Carmarthen’s single ‘Nite Spot’ the Riviera Club on Thursday’s student night (think Star Wars bar, but with more cider) Rain and ‘She sells..’ * would always go down an absolute storm and I also observed an interesting phenomenon, girls seemed to like them too.  As with all songs I truly like, I quickly developed an interesting and expressive dance routine that owed little to the beat or melody of the song concerned, or indeed the available space.  I’m not a fan of any of the Cult’s LPs, although I do own Electric, but for a while I think they were a mean singles band^.  Just like ‘She sells ..’ this track is a perfectly paced tune, with a killer hook, great vocal performance and a killer guitar sound; not to mention lyrics that sound brilliant but don’t bear closer scrutiny:

Hot sticky scenes, you know what I mean
Like a desert sun that burns my skin
I’ve been waiting for her for so long
Open the sky and let her come down

Here comes the rain
Here comes the rain
Here she comes again
Here comes the rain

Why do I like / own so many songs about rain, maybe because I’m from a particularly soggy part of the country and maybe it’s because rain is deeply embedded in the British psyche.  Whatever, this is a great tune and I defy anyone with warm blood flowing through their veins to dislike it.

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Needless to say out of the three songs on this 12″, only the single version of ‘Rain’ is worth the trouble of listening to.  There is a big 80′s extended version of ‘Rain’ called ‘(Here Comes the) Rain’, which true to 1537′s law takes the focus and brevity of a great tune and adds pointless drum and keyboardy bits, to no good effect.  The other B-side is an earnest indie-rocker called ‘Little Face’, which wasn’t worth the time it took to listen to.

Incidentally, I feel a bit uneasy writing about this record as it doesn’t have a little sticker on it telling me when I bought it – its okay I didn’t steal this one too, it belongs to Mrs 1537.  About 10 years ago (after 8 years of marriage) I reluctantly merged our record collections, an act of intimacy that didn’t come easy, even bearing in mind the fact we’d had our children by that point.  Not, I hasten to add, that Mrs 1537 isn’t cool – she is, just well, it was my record collection and I didn’t want it diluted with hers**.  For God sake we even have 2 copies of ‘Permanent Vacation’ now and I’m not selling mine!  For a while I kept hers ghettoized in the corner, next to the classical ones and the seriously uncool ones inherited from my grandparents.  As Ian puts it so well and I think we can all agree, ‘Hot sticky scenes, you know what I mean’.

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The mysterious Lorraine?

The mysterious Lorraine?

 

*which I only bought on 7″, failing to grasp the implications this would have 27 years later for my blog.

^Before they convinced themselves they were Native American Warriors – why? Cult, why?

**all 12, or so: Mrs 1537 having been persuaded by an evil ex-boyfriend to sell her record collection years before I came on the scene – otherwise I’d have a complete collection of Whitesnake LPs, damn!


Filed under: Cult, Obsessive behaviour, Rock, Self-indulgent nonsense, Vinyl Tagged: 12", Cult, Marriage, Rain, Vinyl

Come to Mock – Stay to Rock

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Somebody called the bouncer and get this guy off the stage
He wrote his number on his boxers
but he’s three times my age

In my quieter hours I worry about things, politics, the environment, globalisation, whether it’s morally right that I catalogue bands whose names begin with a number (e.g – 808 State) in the equivalent alphabetical bit of my collection (continuing e.g – under E) and also that my records are mostly all by men.  Is this incipient sexism on my part? should I deliberately go out and buy some chick records? would that constitute tokenism? who’s counting anyway – it’s a record collection not the freaking Smithsonian?! Is it because ladies don’t rock hard enough for me? of course not – my Babes in Toyland, PJ Harvey, Huggy Bear, Bikini Kill LPs say otherwise.  Do mixed bands like Sonic Youth, Raging Slab or White Zombie count? should I waste my intellectual powers on weightier matters? But anyway (turns lights down low) here’s a 1537 for  the ladies …

Donnas Turn 21; a brilliant record from a band I first heard about courtesy of the excellent book ‘Fargo Rock City’ by Chuck Klosterman (which any small-town metaller should read*) and so feeling flush back in May 2004 I mail-ordered Turn 21 and Get Skintight from the US.  Talk about hitting paydirt!

The opening track ‘Are You Gonna Move it For me’ is 2:31 of pure perfection, snotty attitude, execution and groove – it’s the most played song of mine on I-tunes by far.  We’re straight back to the 80′s but in a really good way.  ‘Do You Wanna Hit it’, just revs things up even further, it really is 80′s glam filtered through a punk filter done way better than anyone else I know who has tried it.  Donna R really writes and plays a mean, mean riff, a far cooler CC DeVille.  Joint personal fave ’40 Boys in 40 Nights’ is up next, a tale of the joys of touring and collecting groupies’ underwear as trophies.  They also let rip with a mean cover of Judas Priest’s ‘Living After Midnight’, which I prefer to the original, which really shows the rhythm section off to perfection, take a bow Donnas F and C.

Forty boys in forty nights / I got no time to see the sights

Forty boys in forty nights / I got no time to see the sights

It just rocks on from there, there’s always been something of the playground in Donna A’s vocals and she taunts, hollers and purrs throughout, but the stinging put down of ‘Hot pants’ is my fave,

Hey little girl you’re tryin to get with my guy
I’ve got two words hands off or baby I’ll make you cry
I don’t pull hair and I don’t fight dirty
But piss me off at 9 and you’re lunchmeat by 9:30

Genius, as far as I’m concerned, beats Dylan all ends up.  Your enjoyment of this LP is going to be pretty contingent on how much a secret part of you still really loves all those Sunset Strip tunes from the 80′s, I do and I love this.  Okay the songwriting isn’t universally brilliant and (this is a criticism I have of all their LPs) there are a good fist of great tracks and a few place-holders, but with the longest of their original songs lasting 3:02 it doesn’t matter much anyway, the pace pulls you through the odd dip.  I never could resist a band who used the band name as surnames anyway.

‘But 1537′, I hear you say, ‘spokesman for a generation and all round righteous guy, 4 hot young chicks playing cock rock, singing almost exclusively about the reproductive act, are your motives for liking this LP pure?’

To which, my inquisitive inquisitor, I would answer that this is a great LP and stunning though the Donnas may be, it’s entirely irrelevant to how hard this beauty rocks.  If you came to Turn 21 (or the rest of their catalogue, for that matter) for novelty value, or more prurient reasons, then I guarantee that you might enter to mock, but you’d definately stay to rock. It’s a done deal and my unsung love for Donna C is testament to that (sighs).

Get this LP if you fancy a shot of fun in your life, or not if you don’t, obviously.  It really is your call.

Next up, four miserable looking men with guitars, probably.

5 Hot rocking fems (& stray robot)

5 Hot rocking fems (& stray robot)

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*it’s much, MUCH, better than this, stop wasting time here and buy it now dude.


Filed under: Donnas, Hard Rock, Music, Rock Tagged: Donnas, Turn 21, Vinyl

I Quite Like Snow

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Not photo-shopped - it's balanced on a tray

Not photo-shopped – it’s balanced on a tray

Yes in the name of my art – I actually put one of my precious records in the snow.  Word up.

Cinderella Gypsy Road 12″ was one I bought a couple years after it came out.  Me and my friends all LOVED Night Songs, ‘It’s just like AC/DC but better’ my mate Colin Dovey told me, you know what for about 6 months I agreed with him, I’ll write more about that at a later point so imagine my excitement when Cinderella released Long Cold Winter! Imagine my deep, crushing disappointment when, apart from about 3 tracks it SUCKED!  When I was 17 I was more excitable than I am now, everything ROCKED!, or SUCKED! – I’m better now, mostly.

I did like the track ‘Gypsy Road’ a lot and so when I found it on white vinyl (that ROCKED!) I bought it.  They were a funny-looking bunch of chaps Cinderella, I should know I had a poster of them on my bedroom wall for years, they never really looked very comfortable stuffed into those tight, tight, tight trousers and frilly shirts – surely they only wore it to work? I mean can you imagine taking your car to be serviced dressed like Eric Brittingham? or taking stuff to the dump looking like Tom Keifer? part of me hopes they did.

But anyway, ‘Gypsy Road’ was a total state-of-the-art late 80′s big rock tune (that ROCKED!) with some good playing and a damn good tune actually, before playing it again this morning I’d forgotten just how good actually.  There is a slightly downbeat, world-weary tone to it too which I liked,

And who’s to care if I grow my hair to the sky
I’ll take a wish and a prayer cross my fingers cause I always get by
Some fast talkin’ jerk for a dollar wiped the smile off my face
I’m drivin’ all night
Just to keep the rat in the race

Needless to say ‘Second Wind’ is too easy a target for me to demean myself by making the obvious joke about it’s properties and the two live tracks, ‘Somebody Save Me’ and ‘In From The Outside’ add nothing to the versions on Night Songs, in fact the latter sounds quite amateurish to my ears (that SUCKED!) - odd because I did see Cinderella in Bradford on the tour for Heartbreak Station and they were really good.

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So there you go, ‘Gypsy Road’ is a really good track and I had some fun in the snow after all.  Please note 1537 takes no legal responsibility for anyone leaving precious vinyl in the snow, although all gentle mocking rights are reserved.

GR

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Filed under: Cinderella, Sleaze rock, Snow, Vinyl Tagged: Cinderella, Gypsy Road, Snow, Vinyl

IV For Four

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Now here’s a challenge – write something about an LP that’s been written about solidly for 41 years and counting.  Led Zeppelin IV is the LP and I find it horrifically difficult to write about.

I’ve known the LP since I was roughly 15 when I taped it off my dad’s business partner’s copy, although I didn’t get around to buying my own copy until the millennium .  I remember my first impressions of it today, I remember loving the stop / start of ‘Black Dog’, the epicnessiosity of ‘Stairway to Heaven’ and the whimsy of ‘Battle of Evermore’.  To be honest that’s pretty much where I still stand today.

It is funny when you know an LP as well as IV, I find that I don’t actually tend to listen to it, it’s just there; I mean I would probably nominate it in a Top 30 Rock LPs I own sort of way, but I genuinely can’t remember the last time I played the sucker – especially not that big sappy track that finishes the first side of the LP!  Listening to it afresh though is an interesting exercise.

Let’s number the things I loved most today:

  • The down tuning, drone bit, seconds before the vocals start on ‘Black Dog’
  • The drum sound on ‘When the Levee Breaks’ (along with every other sentient being on Earth)
  • The keyboards on ‘Misty Mountain Hop’
  • The Tolkien whimsy of ‘Battle of Evermore’ and the sheer joy in the way Sandy Denny’s vocals stack up against Robert Plant’s.
  • The absolutely perfect cover art.

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You could play it to me again tomorrow and I’d name a different four, but that’s the joy of a giant LP like IV, the point of it even.  Everyone knows how hackneyed ‘Stairway to Heaven’ is, but listening to it again is an entirely different matter; It is just brilliant.  If you can bring yourself to suspend disbelief past the ‘bustle in the hedgerow’ stage, this is a great track, it is all very well talking about how Black Keys’ ‘Little Black Submarines’ apes this song**, another entirely to listen to the thing.  The reason that ‘Stairway to Heaven’ is a bit of a cliché is simply due to what a great, popular, original and powerful track it actually is; clichés do always exist for a reason.  No matter how yearningly preposterous ‘Stairway…’ is if you look at it in the cold light of day, Plant’s impassioned vocals, sell me the song instantly, from the first words right up until the climax he really means every last syllable.  Add in a great band and simply perfect guitaring and you can see why it stuck.

In fact if I were being ultra-critical the only tune out of the 8 that I would actually pick holes in would be in Plant’s vocals for ‘Four Sticks’, the music I like, I just find Percy too high-pitched and irrelevant here.  If forced at gun-point to chose my two fave tracks from this LP (an unlikely situation I admit, but it is always best to be prepared^) I’d go for the hyper-hormonal , cat-in-heat of ‘Black Dog’ and ‘Stairway to Heaven’.  It’s a bit like being asked to pick your favourite two children though* there may be different answers each time.

Some other general thoughts on listening to this LP under controlled conditions for the 1014th time (estimated) – just how amazingly good and clear the production is, how well Ian Stewart could play boogie piano and just what a completely unreconstructed hippy Robert Plant always was at heart (‘Going to California’, particularly).

If you know and love this LP then my words here are fairly pointless, but all I would urge you to do is to play it again straight through without distractions and actually listen to it again – you may well be surprised by the results.  I don’t mean put it on while you do your taxes, catch up on your marking or watch sport in the background – I mean properly listen to the sucker!  I did and I emerged with a brand-new love for it again.

Classics - listen to them, don’t just know them!  (is the slogan I will be running for MP / senator under) – Vote 1537, I got all the moves!

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The drums will shake the castle wall / The ring wraiths ride in black, Ride on

The drums will shake the castle wall / The ring wraiths ride in black, Ride on

*obviously if you had more than two, I have two – so it’s just a question of ranking.

**it does and it’s cool, but it couldn’t hold its head high in this company for a second.

^ I can see the headlines now ‘Three dead in Led Zep choice killer horror’


Filed under: Hard Rock, Led Zeppelin, Vinyl Tagged: Hard Rock, IV, Led Zeppelin, LP

Bruised Bad Apples

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Bruised bad apples crawling through the night …

I only own one Mötley Crüe record and I didn’t buy that one, it’s a copy of the 12″ of Hooligan’s Holiday I got from my brother in 1998, back in the day I did buy Theatre of Pain only to sell it after a month because I thought it was lame and this from a Jetboy fan! Don’t get me wrong I had bits of their LPs taped, but I always had them down as a 2 or 3 song band, there only ever seeming that number of decent songs on every LP they made; if you like hard rock you can’t argue with ‘Wild Side’, in particular.

I’d written the band of as a complete irrelevance before the release of the wonderful ‘The Dirt’.  Which is a book I just love, in fact I’ve just read a big chunk of it again today.  They were never too much cop at the music end of things, but they had the whole rock star angle covered, easy.  I love books like this, basically and very unselfishly, Mötley Crüe took every noxious substance and banged every underwear model / aspiring actress in Hollywood for us, so we can just get on with our jobs every day secure in the knowledge that there aren’t lines or slinky starlets out there going untended to.  It is a great read, just wash your hands afterwards.

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Drop dead beauties stompin’ up a storm, lines of hell on our face
Bruised bad apples crawling through the night.

On the back of the book really, I went to see them in 2005 on their Carnival of Sins tour and, big spectacle aside, they really weren’t very good apart from when they played ‘Wild Side’ and ‘Girls, Girls, Girls’ when the whole band just lit up and took off (not literally, although that would have been some damn spectacle!) - my abiding memories of the gig were wondering how Vince Neil ever made his living as a singer and the lengthy segment where Tommy and Nikki amused themselves by cajoling various ladies into revealing their assets – neither Mrs 1537, or I had a go – I considered that the inevitable stampede of excited ladies the sight of my manly torso would provoke, would only distract fatally from the show.  If I was a hot rock chick (a bit of a stretch I know) you’d have to play a damn sight better to see my tits than the Crüe did that night in Manchester!

But I digress, Hooligan’s Holiday, featuring John Corabi (a man who can sing) is a really decent track.  I like this tune for the reasons that most Crüe fans probably don’t, it’s got good strong vocals* and I really enjoy the way it goes off-piste and flirts with techno and dance beats for 3 minutes in the middle section of the extended 10:37 version; in some ways prefiguring Tommy Lee’s later Methods of Mayhem LP, which I still maintain sounds good while you’re running.  The two other mixes do what 12″ mixes usually do which is to take all the bits of a song I like and throw them out the window, whilst dancing on the remains, in a bad way.

Great rock stars, dodgy music but a good strong tune here.  Next!

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*am I the only one who wonders what may have been if they’ kept faith in him? probably!


Filed under: Hard Rock, Mötley Crüe, Vinyl Tagged: Hooligan's Holiday, John Corabi, Mötley Crüe, The Dirt

Amphetamine Reptile Cheesecake

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NP3

For today’s little tidbit I’ve plumped for the morally upstanding, shrinking violets and wall flowers that are Nashville Pussy and their fist-in-your-face debut LP Let Them Eat Pussy from 1998.   I guarantee there will never be books written about this LP, no 40th anniversary documentary about the making of Let Them Eat Pussy, Christ I’d be very disappointed if they could remember a thing about it.

Now let’s get things straight here, this is a band whose sole reasons for existence are noise, sex, sleaze, acting real mean and the fact that their name has a bit of a rude word in it.  In case you don’t know, the music they play is an arse-rattling collision between Motörhead and any number of various US punk ogres like Fang, or The Dicks, or MDC; latterly flavoured with a pinch of southern rock.   Once described by a proper music journo I read as, ‘two guys you wouldn’t want to fuck with and two girls you, err…’ , I love Nashville Pussy unreservedly for their mix of beefcake and cheesecake.  This is joyous noise.  I mean come on! Their original bassist (on the left) was a 6’2″ former model who liked to blow fire on stage, Ruyter Suys* is both gorgeous and a scary shit-hot punk metal guitarist; what’s not to love here for any 41-year-old balding family man? If this band did not exist I’d have had to invent them.

Like much that is good in my life I stumbled across Nashville Pussy in Chuck Klosterman’s excellent book Fargo Rock City and not having much cash to risk on an import copy of something I wasn’t sure of the merits of, illegally downloaded bits of Let Them Eat Pussy and other of their tunes.  Now my finances are a bit more stable this is not something I do anymore at all and I do understand all the arguments about how file-sharing rips off artists at the expense of new art, not that I totally buy this argument at face value.  In a spirit of total dubious moral convenience, I used to operate a two-tier moral system here, backed up by the fact that as a nutjob collector if I really liked something I’d buy it on vinyl just as soon as I could – I’d download from big bands only – okay so this then got me into various grey areas, what constitutes ‘big’?^ why aren’t big bands entitled to the fruits of their labours? who the hell are you to justify your theft like this anyway hiding behind a pseudonym like some kind of blackmailer? you looking at me? yeah, you, you heard me – wanna make something of it? outside?

Long story short, I loved Nashville Pussy and so bought all their stuff anyway.

NP1

Let Them Eat Pussy opens with the low blow that is ‘Snake Eyes’, a full-throttle ode to the joys of being a hard-living (or should that be, hard livin’ ?) mean son-of-a-gun set against a backing reminiscent of sheet-metal Motörhead.  You don’t need the lyrics to ‘You’re Goin’ Down’, ‘Go Motherfucker Go’, or ‘All Fucked up’ to guess their contents.  It’s pretty one-paced but in a really great way, exhilaratingly so actually  – like being strapped to the front of a speeding train.

My particular faves are ‘I’m The Man’ ( I’m the man, a real motherfucker / You ain’t shit, just another sucker / I wake up with my balls on fire / I sweat gasoline when I perspire), their cover of The Contours’ (Smokey Robinson penned) ‘First I look at the Purse’ and ‘Johnny Hotrod’, which for my money is the best thing on offer here, it’s a blistering tale of a dirt-track loser and a real epic by their standards weighing in at 2:56 ( when they pulled him out the wreck he said ‘did I win? / No you silly boy you just FUCKED UP AGAIN !!).  But basically if this sort of racket is your game, you’ll lap it all up, I’ve never grown out of finding swearing big and clever, or punk-metal and so I play this a lot if the kids aren’t around.

I don’t want to get all macho on you but it’s great music to iron to. Word up.

Someone say cheesecake?

Someone say cheesecake?

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*pronounced ‘rider sighs’ the internet tells me; and we all know that everything that anyone puts on the internet has to meet with strict standards of accuracy and truthfulness – it’s not like any random dweeb can set up some sort of half-assed Lego and LP based nonsense and go around pontificating about stuff like he was … oh.

^the definition I stuck with was ‘tours in a bus not a van’, if you’re interested.

NP2


Filed under: Heavy Metal, Motörhead, Nashville Pussy, Record collecting, Rock Tagged: Let Them Eat Pussy, LP, Motörhead, Nashville Pussy

Side White / Side Black

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QWhite

I don’t tend to get surprised by the records I own very often, yes occasionally some things are better than I remember, some things worse and occasionally I hear new things in them.  However last night Queen II, knocked me off my feet (metaphorically, I’m far too burly to ever be taken down by an LP; even a double live one).  Even if I don’t actually delve into certain corners of my collection very often, I tend to have a rough handle on what they’re like.  I hadn’t listened to Queen II for 18 years easily, maybe more.  But even so this really isn’t an LP that should catch me unawares.

First off, I bought this LP on 7 July 1986, making it the third one in my collection – trust me when you’ve only got 3 LPs they get played on a pretty tight rotation.  Secondly I was obsessed with Queen, like really truly, borderline DSM-IV obsessed.  In my teenage diaries – sort of like this blog in written form, but with more hatred / anxiety and far, far, far more sexual yearning* I kept a chart of my Top 10 favourite songs each week on a Wednesday, presumably for the benefit of future biographers, now I was so obsessed with Queen that they had their own chart each week and it was a Top 12 because I couldn’t keep it down to just 10.  Oh yes, that’s the level we’re talking about.  I must have played this LP a thousand times.

So it really shouldn’t have surprised me.

QBlack

I love the whole Black/White schtick going on here, the alternate band pictures, the fact that the first side is called Side White – you can work out the name of the second side yourselves.  the references to the black queen and the white queen etc.  As a 14 year-old who loved Lewis Carroll this hit the spot instantly, as did the sheer bloody-minded pomposity on show.  Now I don’t use that word as a pejorative term at all, far from it.  In my view, in this context it just represents the sheer chutzpah / cojones to produce statement rock** like this.  Not wishing to get stereotypical here but Queen II just flounces into the room, shouts ‘love me – love my Ogre Battles and all my outrageousness’ and struts off 40-ish minutes later.  You need to bear in mind that this is a hard rock LP and was marketed as such (pop Queen was a few LPs away at this stage), this LP was pitched straight into the wolf pit of 1974 to fight it out for scraps with Deep Purple, Mountain, Nazareth , Mott The Hoople, Styx and Kiss.

They were often likened to Led Zeppelin and I can see why in traces here, I can barely remember Queen (hmm, similar names) but it was more straight-forward rock than this.  Okay, so Brian May is no Jimmy Page, but he just dazzles here throughout, there is a real virtuosity evident throughout this LP, right from ‘Procession’ onwards (why, oh why, did I not have that at my wedding?), through the meatier riffing and soloing on ‘Father to Son’ (for what it’s worth my favourite track here), to the harmonics on ‘White Queen (As it Began)’ – okay I’ll shut up now, but that’s just the first three tracks!

So far so good, we have a good band with a flash guitarist and a flamboyant singer with a great voice, singing fairly overwrought songs about ogres, chess pieces and such like but what I think really elevates them here and points them towards the stratosphere is the sheer flashes of otherness they show in the likes of ‘The Fairy Feller’s Master-Stroke’ – which me and all my equally foul-minded chums thought simply must be referencing certain acts of (we considered) a depraved nature.  Little did we know it was a reference to poor Richard Dadd’s painting.

Dadd FFMS

This really is where Queen II achieves lift-off, other bands out there at the time could have written and performed a lot of the other tracks here, maybe not have sung or played them as well, but I cannot think of anyone out there in 1974 who could have / would have wanted to hatch this tune and certainly none who would have had a chance of carrying it off successfully like this.  Ditto, to a lesser extent, the sumptuous 1:19 of ‘Nevermore’, which I think just shows again what a string to their bow Freddie Mercury’s piano playing was^.  ‘Seven Seas of Rhye’ actually sounds like a single here, which it never did to me on their Greatest Hits, albeit a warped rocky single – Queen get massive 1537 bonus points here for releasing a single containing the words ‘privy counsellors’.  Respect.

There are elements here which haven’t stood the test of time so well, Roger Taylor’s ‘The Loser in The End’, which used to regularly feature in my Wednesday Queen Top 12, just sounds dated and trite to me now and occasionally the pomposity can grate a bit, like being force-fed a gallon of liquified Battenburg, you can have a bit too much of a good thing.  However, as I said, I was just knocked out by just how brilliant and hard rocking Queen II was and I guarantee I won’t wait until 2031 until I play it again.

129 Down.

*its my back these days, I’m just not up to yearning much anymore; at least not spontaneously.

**my new genre – please use sparingly.

^don’t tell me if  a)it wasn’t him b)it wasn’t a piano – you’ll just spoil it for me and everyone else.


Filed under: Hard Rock, Pop, Queen, Record collecting, Vinyl Tagged: Pomposity, Queen, Queen 2, Vinyl

Men In Vests, Chicks in Suspenders

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Thunder Backstreet Symphony

I once read a truly great piece of writing about Thunder, in fact as I sit here to review their debut LP Backstreet Symphony I find that this writer has already stolen my, umm, thunder quite a bit.  If you click on it you will see how he cleverly and wittily makes fun of his earlier self for obsessively chasing down and purchasing every last limited edition gizmo they released and how his self-knowledge of this was not enough to stop himself.  In fact he’s stolen much of what I was planning to write about this LP, I’m not cross I think that sometimes you just have to acknowledge the talent out there. What a writer! What a guy! he is clearly a man of subtlety, wisdom and I am willing to bet a sexual athlete of some repute!*

Anyway, I liked Thunder a lot, although I never did get around to buying anything other than Backstreet Symphony, I think heavier and weirder things intervened at that stage.  As I mentioned in the earlier post the first I ever heard of them was when I saw them support Aerosmith at Birmingham NEC and they won over a potentially difficult audience with a good attitude and some very good songs.  It’s difficult to write about Thunder without using, or overusing, the word ‘classic’ because they are one of those classic sounding British rock bands, you can hear the likes of Free, Humble Pie, Bad Company, The Faces and even the poppier sensibilities of Def Leppard in their music.

I don't need your dirty love...

I don’t need your dirty love…

I like this LP it’s a little oasis (small ‘o’) of calm amongst all the febrile, hurly-burly of music and fashion, it stands apart.  Backstreet Symphony will never sound unfashionable, because it never was, this sort of blues-based hard rock is just intrinsically a-fashionable, if you’re born with the right genes you like it.  Thunder never worried about skate, industrial, goth, thrash, glam it was just an irrelevance – they were plugged into the mother lode.  The best songs here, ‘Love walked in’, ‘Higher Ground’ (not a cover), ‘Gimme Some Lovin’ (a cover) and Backstreet Symphony’ are all just really well-written songs performed really well.  Danny Bowes has a fine voice but without being rude, none of the rest of the band are particularly stand-out players, just really good ones and in this context it works because they really play the hell out of these tunes with an evident passion and some real emotion.  It really is all about the performance here and possibly why they were dab hands at creating that trickiest of beasts, the credible ballad.  Andy Taylor, yes him from Duran Duran who all the girls I knew fancied, produced and did a sterling job too, adding just enough gloss and polish to the poppier tracks like ‘Dirty Love’ (‘Like a cheap suit, you were all over me’) and ‘She’s so Fine’.

Similar to No Sleep ‘Til Hammersmith we get a photo collage on the inner sleeve charting the recording of the LP and the mateyish good humour found in ‘An Englishman on Holiday’ and which was doused all over their live shows shines through; even to the jokey name credits to an extent not seen since early Iron maiden (maybe it’s an English thing).  Thunder were a genuinely very likable band and a fun one to spend some time with.  The front cover features a leather and lace clad back-combed lady, with a bit of a constipated expression on her face lurking in a doorway sporting some decidedly impractical legwear – never, ever estimate the power of lingerie-clad lovelies to sell music to hormonal adolescents^, the drummer dressed as a conductor and an unconvincing tramp.  Now the back cover is the telling one here**, now how can I put this diplomatically? well, I’m no male model myself, no it’s true – I insist you hear me out! and let’s face it these guys were somewhere behind me in the line when the good looks were been given out and certainly WAY behind me in the, ‘how do I maximise these meagre looks I have by not wearing vests and strangely-tailored jeans’ queue – Danny Bowes what’s going on with your trousers, man?  I’m guessing this is why the covers weren’t reversed – men in vests vs. chick in suspenders – I’m afraid there was only one winner there, sales-wise.

Danny, the trousers!! Nooooo !!

Danny, the trousers!! Nooooo !!

But I digress, as well as classic I find myself reaching for adjectives like warm and authentic – all the good ones in fact.  I suspect that there was always something a little bit parochial and slightly too insular about Thunder to draw them onto the next level, which is maybe why I find Backstreet Symphony a nice warm, cosy LP and there’s nothing wrong with that at all.

BS05

134 Down (I own it on picture disc as well as regular – I know, I know – you don’t need to tell me).

EXTRA CREDIT: All ‘Thunder’ figures put together by Martha 1537.

*note to self: don’t forget to praise my awesome humility too, it’s the virtue I’m proudest of.

**rather tellingly not replicated on the picture disc version.

^not that the music industry would ever stoop so low, of course.

BS03


Filed under: Hard Rock, Lego art, Obsessive behaviour, Record collecting, Thunder, Vinyl Tagged: Backstreet Symphony, picture disc, Thunder, Thunder Lego

Just Got Paid

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Next up, ZZ Top Rio Grande Mud, from way back in 1972.  Please don’t expect any proper criticism of this LP, I have no real objectivity where ZZ Top are concerned.

I first heard this LP when we stayed with some friends of my parents en route for a holiday in  Scotland (Glen Coe and Edinburgh, mostly, since you ask), I was sleeping in their lounge and already loved Eliminator, but took the chance to spin Rio Grande Mud and a copy of West, Bruce & Laing Why Dontcha? I loved both immediately and taped them straight away and putting this LP on takes me straight back to sitting there in a sleeping bag listening to this for the first time on big, big headphones.  I got around to eBaying a copy of this LP in December 2003, I must have listened to this LP quite literally thousands of times in the intervening years.

IMG_2537

Kicking off with the sly, lusty ‘Francine’ which is a great boogie track elevated into genius by the female backing vocalists going ‘woooo’ at the end (about 2:30 in, to be precise), you can just tell this is going to be an amazing LP from the get-go.  ‘Just Got Paid’ is possibly my favourite ever ZZ Top song, straddling the thin line between thuggish and cuddly, sneering and cute, this song just ROCKS. I have heard more cover versions than I care to name, but no one I have heard out there has ZZ Top’s instinctive grasp of heavy and humorous.  I mean, a man’s wages are a serious, serious thing,

It’s the root of evil and you know the rest
But it’s way ahead of what’s second best

I mean just listen to the guitaring going on in this tune, it is absolute perfection.  You are left wondering how a three-piece could possibly make so much noise; which is what every great trio makes me think (I never learn).  The appropriately hazy ‘Mushmouth Shoutin” is up next, a heavy lysergic blues where the amps sound full of mud, from whatever source, which kicks straight into the drive and melody of ‘Ko Ko Blue’.

My next favourite is ‘Apologies to Pearly’ a sprightly blues-boogie instrumental which leaves everyone trailing in the wake, whilst vaguely sounding like they’re taking the piss.  I do love this element of ZZ Top, they were clearly having so much fun throughout, making music which seems so simple, but which no band I can think of has ever come close to equalling.  I mean have you ever heard a half-decent ZZ Top cover? Countless bands, some great ones too, have tried to ‘do a ZZ Top’ and just ended up sounding clumsy, lazy and crass.  My view is that this is down not to Billy Gibbons’ heroics, but to Dusty Hill and Frank Beard’s awesome rhythm section which just swing and kick like no other.

The tear-strewn ballad, ‘Sure Got Cold After the Rain Fell’, is just sung and played beautifully, managing to resonate with some proper emotion.  The two rocking finales hit next,  ’ Whisky ‘n’ Mama’ and ‘ Down Brownie’; the latter which features a guitar tone so dirty you really should shower immediatly after hearing.  Looking back, if  you were looking for evidence that this band would ever break big, I would say you would pick ‘…Rain’, to prove your point that here were a gang who could do a lot more than play amped-up blues to clubs full of hairies, they had a change of gear.

Rio Grande Mud is, I think an excellent and much underrated LP.  like all of ZZ Top’s best LPs it is deceptively simple.  Also like all of ZZ Top’s first 6 LPs, it is just recorded so perfectly,  I often think that Bill Ham is never really talked about as a great producer, but probably should have been on the evidence here and elsewhere.  I’m technically ignorant enough not to know whether great guitar tone is the preserve of the guitarist, the producer or a combo of both (which seems most likely to me)  but every instrument here is recorded and separated so beautifully.  The man knew what he was doing.

rgm

142 Down.


Filed under: Hard Rock, Record collecting, Vinyl, ZZ Top Tagged: Boogie, Hard Rock, Rio Grande Mud, ZZ Top

Blown Video

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Not being one to shirk a challenge I thought I’d write about a nadir today, one for my favourite band no less.  Before you read on know this, AC/DC are my favourite band ever (I have detailed my love for them before) they soundtracked my teenage years better than anyone and then just carried on soundtracking all my other years too.  Okay so I haven’t been strictly faithful in this relationship, occasionally I’ll go off and have a fling with trip-hop, or my eye will be taken by skate punk over in the corner, or Hungarian dubcore, but AC/DC don’t mind they’re above all that, they know I’ll be back again when the novelty wears off and I realise that my infatuation with hardcore grot-ambient was just a chemical thing.  It always does and I always did.

I got into AC/DC in about 1985, when I was 13.  I was busy still discovering all their back catalogue for a couple of years when they released Who Made Who, which I really liked but by 1988 I was ready and waiting for them to do something new.  I can still remember my friend Jamo telling me in Geography on a bright, sunny morning in January 1988 that he’d heard AC/DC were going to release a single and as he was off to Swansea (our nearest city, growing up) he’d get it for me if I gave him the cash, this tore my attention away from the ox-bow Lakes and flood plains I was meant to be concentrating on and so the following Monday he presented me with the 12″ of Heatseeker.  No ordinary 12″, but a ‘limited edition gatefold collector’s package, includes unique video stills’ – extra cardboard basically, but it pleased me at the time.  What shocks me now is how young Angus Young still looks on the cover.  I loved the track ‘Heatseeker’ itself and it still isn’t bad today, the B-sides did both sound like B-sides though, with ‘Snake Eye’ ominously sounding a lot better than ‘Go Zone’ which was on the forthcoming LP.

ACDC Heatseeker

Best of all though was the information on the inside cover that AC/DC were touring! I duly applied some parental pressure and I was off to my first ever gig* at Wembley Arena on 13 March 1988.  I’ll tell that tale elsewhere, if anyone’s interested, another time; let me know if you are.

On 28 March 1988 I bought Blow Up Your Video and the 12″ That’s The Way I Wanna Rock N Roll in Woolworths, Carmarthen – after saving up a bit more.  I was probably still wearing my Heatseeker tour T-shirt at that point, in fact I doubt whether I took it off for weeks (I can still remember the hollow feeling when the last dates on the back of the shirt had been played and it was no longer ‘live’) and my ears had probably just finished ringing from the cannons.  I remember the total puzzlement when I got the LP home after the first two tracks finished, ‘Heatseeker’ and ‘That’s The Way…’, waiting to find another good one.  It’s a horrible thing to have to say but there aren’t any other good ones and even those two tracks are only good in the context of Blow Up Your Video, put them on Fly on The Wall, or Flick of the Switch and they’d just be an annoyance.  I get the feeling Brian Johnson really enjoys singing ‘That’s the way…’ as it stayed in their set lists for a long time.

I really cannot fathom what happened here, okay I know Malcolm Young was battling alcoholism at the time (his cousin replaced him on the date I saw them on) but it’s just all so half-baked.  The song writing is off and production is poor, and this from Vanda and Young! I can hear the germs of some songs which could have been better, ‘Some Sin For Nuthin” and ‘Meanstreak’ but that’s it.  In fact when I was listening to it for a second time just now I found myself thinking about how I need to oil the garden furniture and clean out the garage at the weekend.  I daren’t spin it again in case I find myself spontaneously doing the ironing; maybe it’s a backwards message thing? I just haven’t got anything good to say about Blow Up Your Video at all, even the cover is pants - my redesign fingers are twitching here.

Lego are a bit short on Gibson SGs

Lego are a bit short on Gibson SGs

The 12″ of That’s The Way I Wanna Rock N Roll is exactly as you’d expect, more of the same.  This time around the non-LP B-side was called ‘Borrowed Time’ and, unlike ‘Snake Eye’, it would not have improved the LP.

This has happened to me a couple of times now, you discover a band, groove on their back catalogue for a while and then they let you down with a stinker of a release – stand up Primal Scream (amongst others).  Still I wasn’t too distraught, my friend Colin had just started obsessing about a cassette called Night Songs, some bunch of poofy-haired Americans – could be worth a go…

153 Down**

Blow Up Your Video

*I’d seen stuff with my parents before, but that didn’t count – this was my band and I was paying.

**near enough of a tenth of my way through – freedom is within sight!


Filed under: AC/DC, Hard Rock, Rock, Vinyl Tagged: AC/DC, Blow Up Your Video, Hard Rock, Heatseeker, That's the Way I Wanna Rock 'n Roll

I Make Love to Mountain Lions

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1916c

True story.  Sometimes three at a time.  Yeah, that’s how Rock and roll I am.  Oh yes, metal to the core.

Well okay I admit it I don’t for the following reasons

  1. It wouldn’t be safe.
  2. There is probably a specific offence on the statute books prohibiting it – The Violation of Endangered Wild Life Act (1988), or some such.
  3. I’m pretty sure at least two of my marriage vows forbade such high jinks, particularly with animals, male or female.
  4. I don’t fancy mountain lions anyway

Suffice to say if there is one living rocker out there who has tasted the joys of hot mountain lion lovin’ it would be Lemmy.  He is a man I love unreservedly and totally.  I genuinely can’t imagine life without Motörhead and I don’t want to either.  My rocker uncle was a devotee and as a kid I remember their scary posters and records, including the copy of No Remorse with a black leather sleeve – even as a lifelong vegetarian, I have to admit that was simply cool as hell (sorry cows).  My first real exposure to them was when they played ‘Ace of Spades’ on the University Challenge episode of The Young Ones and I liked it.

My first purchases of theirs were the shaped picture disc version of The One To Sing The Blues and the LP 1916 (on cassette so I could listen to it on my Walkman on the way home) which I got as soon as they came out.  It was very snowy at the time in Leeds and I remember my big Hi-tec basketball boots, with black jeans naturally, sliding all over the place.  Best of all though was the news Motörhead were touring and I saw them play a blistering live show in Bradford in February 1991, before getting into a fist fight in the station on the way home – ahh those were the days!

Taking photos of shiny vinyl objects indoors can be frustrating!

Taking photos of shiny vinyl objects indoors can be frustrating!

The single was great, there is always something innately pleasurable about an irregularly shaped piece of vinyl spinning on your turntable and it was a good single too.  The B-side, ‘Dead Man’s Hand’ had an interesting riff and a rather exciting lat 20 seconds, but that was about it.

But anyway, I really liked 1916 and it still sounds good to me.  I love the extended kiss-off of ‘The One To Sing The Blues’, the frantic drumming and the twist at the end, who couldn’t fall for Lemmy when he confesses at the end of 3 minutes of macho chest beating, ‘Listen to me faking, even though my heart is breaking / Miss you now you’re gone, now I’m the one to sing the blues’ ?* I remember the adrenalin just coursing through me when straight afterwards the band accelerated into ‘I’m So Bad Baby I Don’t Care’, where as well as boasting about his carnal knowledge of Puma concolor**, we learn he sleeps on red-hot branding irons, he’s older than the Rolling Stones and posits an unusual cure for any visually disabled people out there. ‘I make the blind to see / Shoot ‘em full of R and B’.  I love the jokey big-balled swagger of this song, descended straight from all the blues bragging you’ve ever heard.

Other highlights? there are loads – the creepy menace of ‘Nightmare / The Dreamtime’ and it’s Sisters of Mercy style synths, the early AC/DC / Status Quo-isms (I kid you not!) of ‘Going to Brazil’ and then there’s my favourite track of all.  Possibly more famous now for actually being played by The Ramones themselves, ‘Ramones’ is an absolute belter of a track, 1:27 of sheer genius as far as I am concerned, a brilliant tribute to a brilliant band, by another brilliant band; what’s not to love? I also love the fact that The ramones took about 15 seconds off the song when they performed it live.

Actually I’ll tell you what’s not to love, ‘Love Me Forever’ which opens Side 2 is nothing short of a power ballad and quite reminiscent of Lemmy’s extra-curricular song-writing stints for the likes of Ozzy.  It hurts, he doesn’t have the voice for this and Ed Stasium’s production doesn’t suit either.  Some people hate the closing and title track and its plaintive tale of a 16 year-old boy soldier, set to a backing of (slightly dodgy) synths and a drum, I like it though.  Lemmy’s wobbly singing voice works perfectly here and I’d actually compare it to Pink Floyd’s ‘When The Tigers Broke Through’.  There are a few fillers scattered about on this LP too.

I did really enjoy 1916, a good few people I knew did.  We all knew it wasn’t classic Motörhead, but that’s often been this band’s problem – they knocked out arguably, 4 of the best heavy metal LP’s ever in the space of 3 years and by 1991 they were ‘just’ a really, really good band, hence this good LP, as always happens though they get judged against that magic period – but much more about that later in the 1537.

155 Down.

1916a

*that’s one of them fancy rhetorical questions, as favoured by women and politicians.

**mountain lions for any non-ancient Romans out there.

(I think the audience are oddly staid during this performance)


Filed under: Hard Rock, Heavy Metal, Motörhead, Ramones, Record collecting, Vinyl Tagged: 1916, Motörhead, The One To Sing The Blues, Vinyl

Ya Ya Choral

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YYC03

Oh dear, turkey time.  As I ‘ve said several times I feel very bad if I ever have to be unremittingly negative about any LP in my possession, mostly because having no musical ability at all I’m in awe of those who have and, hey, even the worst LP out there is one up from any I’ve ever made.  And so on*.

I mean the immunity the internet gives you to voice your irrelevant opinions to all and sundry is one thing but let’s face it I’m about to be unkind about someone’s auntie, or mum from Sydney, not spark the Arab Spring here.  So let’s be kind and gentlemanly and bear others’ feelings into account and report that this LP is not a good one, in a kind way.

Remember that really good covers band around your home town when you were young? remember how they just rocked ass playing ‘Shock Me’, ‘Tush’ and, probably ‘Pretty Vacant’? ever wondered, around about the 4th bottle of lager, how they would do if they got a chance to record an LP? wonder no more, dear musical travelling companion, it would sound just like Ya Ya Choral One Small Step For Mankind.  I found this going cheap in (the late lamented) Backstreet records in Carmarthen on 13 February 1990 – I’m guessing I didn’t need to buy anyone a valentines card that year!  It was an Aussie import, there was a (badly drawn) skeletal dude on the cover and I’m struggling to recapture my motives after that.  I genuinely think that before today, when I span it the regulation twice whilst painting my daughter’s wardrobe, I had only played this twice before in my life.  There’s a reason for this.

yyc

The playing is the competent side of okay, the production is flat and muted, the song writing is poor and the singing is, frankly, awful.  I’m sorry.  The production thing is particularly tough, you get the right breaks and you get millions of Australian dollars thrown at you – maybe even enough to buy Mutt Lange and 5 weeks in the Bahamas; you get the shitty end of the stick and you get the best local guy and as many studio hours as you can, beg borrow or steal.  It’s not fair is it? even so, the sound here is flat and awful, but I guess money was scarce at Rattlesnake Record, Sydney in 1990.

There are some signs of life during ‘Hit’ and ‘Clock’, at least good lead guitar but that really is it from the positives desk this evening.  What really kills it for me are Fiona Graham’s vocals; kills it dead in fact, as I said I’m sorry if you’re a relation but she’s damn awful.  I didn’t recognize AC/DC’s ‘Touch Too Much’ until we were half way through the first chorus.  And I haven’t even quoted the lyrics out of context yet for humorous purposes.

As I said though I don’t want to be unkind, so I’ll just tramp the dirt down on this one and move on.

It does beg the question why keep this? why not just bin an LP that I don’t think I will ever listen to again? because I would then have to change the blog name to 1536 is not a good enough answer.  I’m not sure what the real answer is, compulsion? a reluctance to airbrush my personal musical history? the fact that I’ve just had a new shelf built so shelf space is not at a premium?

Ah well, One Small Step For Mankind is just one step beyond for me.

167 Down.

YYC04

*sorry, am re-reading Kurt Vonnegut’s Breakfast of Champions for about the 4th time and bits of it are contagious.  And so on.


Filed under: Hard Rock, Vinyl, Ya Ya Choral Tagged: Backstreet Records, Crap Cover, Fiona Graham, Kurt Vonnegut, One Small Step For Mankind, Ya Ya Choral

Wait For The Ricochet

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Rather incongruously I first heard that Jon Lord had died from my friend Will in the wonderfully plush glass-and-plants-and-chrome lobby of a rather flashy law firm, we were both really saddened by this and we both said we would play some Deep Purple that night.  When we compared notes the next day it turned out that we had both reached for the same track ‘Child in Time’ from the mighty In Rock*.  I’m not ashamed to say I sat in the dark and lit a candle for the man and had a wonderful, borderline spiritual, 10 minutes just listening.  Okay a bit selfishly I admit that this is a great way to listen to music regardless of the occasion and it’s the sort of thing I do I get the space to, it was a great moment though and boosted In Rock right back onto my Playdar**.

Coming out in 1970, the same year as such mighty Colossi as Led Zeppelin III, Paranoid , Atomic Rooster and Argent, I always feel that Deep Purple in general and In Rock in particular simply do not get the kudos they deserve.  Everyone knows that Deep Purple were one of the classic rock groups, but the problem in my eyes is that ‘Smoke on The Water’ has become so ubiquitous that so many people don’t bother to listen beyond that, let alone beyond Machine Head.  I got leant the cassette of In Rock early in my metal career and it just stuck, luckily.

DP01

Like most of my favourite rock leviathans you can talk about Deep Purple in terms of eras and In Rock marked the debut of my favourite Mk II line-up, now the Coverdale/Bolin MK III era has its charms, but this is the line up for me.  Every player here was an absolute master of their instrument topped off by a singer with a truly incredible voice.  Sorry to have a one-track mind but just spin ‘Child in Time’ again, the soloing from Lord and Blackmore and the show-stopping turn from Gillan are just unsurpassed.  As always when such extravagance abounds, unless it is built on a rock solid foundation it just sounds shallow and flashy, which is where the, comparatively seldom lauded, Paice and Glover come in.  What a band! WHAT A BAND!

Listening to the first minute of this LP you get a real sense of a band just flying free on their own virtuosity and revelling in the fact that they really are making the rules up as they go along, the wild soloing that starts ‘Speed King’ is just exhilarating^.  You forget that rock as a genre was new, exciting and progressive at the time, all the clichés and forms that we know and love today and that the later rockers we love, subvert or obey, or add/subtract bits to/from just hadn’t ossified yet.  I get such a sense of the joy of that on In Rock.  These guys were in the room when the rules of hard rock were all set down.  This LP was released on the Harvest label (in the UK at least, things were a bit more complicated elsewhere) which was set up solely to promote progressive music – to push things forwards; Deep Purple duly obliged.

Jon Lord’s organ sound is every bit as prominent throughout as Ritchie Blackmore’s guitaring and I think it gives Deep Purple a different dimension to most of their contemporaries, whether he is setting a gentle backdrop ready to be shattered asunder by more violent sounds, matching Blackmore lick for lick or even sounding a little like a spacey Ray Manzarek, or all three simultaneously on ‘Speed King’.  I have a genuine dilemma here because I can’t work out if I love ‘Speed King’ or ‘Child in Time’ better, I love all the lyrics ripped straight from Little Richard and belted out even faster than he did and I am a real sucker for Gillan’s laugh near the end of the song – it genuinely just sounds as though he was having that much fun.

DP02

‘Bloodsucker’ suffers from being stuck between my two favourite tracks, helpfully described by the band on the inner sleeve as ‘a particularly nasty sort of fellow, there are lots of us’, its fine but not a truly substantial offering, in this company anyway.  Side 2 just rocks from start to finish, the riff on ‘Flight of the Rat, is just filthy and it sounds way punky to these ears, as though parachuted in from 6 years in the future.  I interpret ‘Into the Fire’ as a nasty little revenge song, but then I’m just a nasty little man, so what do you expect?  ‘Living Wreck’ and ‘Hard Lovin’ Man’ both rock out, the latter sounding like the blueprint that the band would build the mighty, mighty, mighty ‘Highway Star’ on next time out.

One of my all-time favourite Deep Purple tracks ‘Black Night’ was released as a single prior to In Rock and, as was often the custom of the day, not included on the finished LP.  I can see some logic behind it, ‘Black Night’ is a far poppier proposition than anything on In Rock.  It’s getting difficult to remember when bands had such riches they would just throw them out there in an explosion of creativity/attempt at regular income and then just concentrate on the proper art, the LP.

If you don’t own this one treat yourself, if you’re a ‘Smoke on The water’ kind of guy/gal/neuter then investigate further and if you do own it and maybe just haven’t spun it for a while, turn the lights off, spark up a candle, whack it on just marvel at how good it is and think nice things about Jon Lord.

Sweet child in time you’ll see the line
The line that’s drawn between good and the bad
See the blind man shooting at the world
Bullets flying, taking toll
If you’ve been bad, lord I bet you have
And you’ve not been hit by flying lead
You’d better close your eyes
Bow your head
Wait for the ricochet

173 Down.

*some people call it Deep Purple In Rock, I think they’re wrong.

**see what I did there? a genius walks amongst you folks!

^sorry Americans – apparently the US version just cuts out the first minute, search for the version that’s 5:50 long – that’s the baby.


Filed under: Deep Purple, Hard Rock, Heavy Metal, Record collecting, Rock Tagged: Deep Purple. In Rock, Hard Rock, Jon Lord, Mk II Purple Line Up

Hell HoL

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As regular readers know I like being a cheery sort, bountifully dispensing ‘I love this’ and ‘I love that’,  in industrial quantities and I don’t like it when I find absolutely no merit in a LP.  But even if I do I can usually look back fondly on when I bought it and patronise my young self from a protective distance.  That’s just how I roll, but I’m struggling here folks, really struggling.

Today’s prisoner hauled off my shelves and made to fight for its’ life is the self-titled debut LP by House of Lords, released on Gene Simmons’ record label.  I can vaguely, vaguely remember buying this one cheap in Backstreets Records in Carmarthen (6 March 1990, my handy sticker tells me) and after 23 years all I can remember about my motives for buying it were the nice marble-effect cover* and a good review in Kerrang!  You know that crushing moment in life when you realise your parents are just ordinary fallible mortals and not the gods you thought they were? this had a similar effect.

House of Lords 02

Why did I buy it though? it’s AOR for Crom’s sake ! Nothing good ever came of AOR, ever!!** Also, never mind the marble-effect cover flip the sucker over and feast your eyes on the band.  There they stand, blinking in a blue haze wearing frilly blouses and collectively sporting the worst hair I can think of this side of D’Molls - did I not notice?  Also, check out the song titles – Love Don’t Lie, Under Blue Skies, Call My Name, Hearts of The World – Come on 1537, pay attention!!  Also naming a band after the UK’s unelected second chamber of governance – stuffed full of archbishops, the nobility and ennobled political cronies does seem like a very strange thing to do^, in fact I can’t think of a less rock and roll name.

To give myself some credit for open-mindedness, I do remember playing this LP a certain amount of times to see if I could make myself like it.  I felt the same way again just now.  To give the band their dues they’re competent and professional sounding to the core featuring Gregg Giuffria (of Angel fame) and a drummer who’d done time with Alice Cooper, but that’s it – that really is it.  If the music isn’t pompous and laden with awful 80′s rock band synths (not in a good way like van Halen’s ’Jump’), it’s a sexless rock swagger distilled from the corpses of various US bands.  The sound, in particular the drum sound, is so trebley and awful, it is as if the songs have been given a non-stick sheen, guaranteed to repel any interest a listener may wish to lavish upon them.  The songs come in two types, Heartfelt or Raunchy – Call my Name vs. Lookin’ For Strange, if you like; neither of which do what they should.

One enduring piece of mystery about this LP is that it was produced by the late Andy Johns, a man whose credits include Exile on Main Street, Led Zeppelin II, III and IV (as engineer) and as a producer Marquee Moon, Free Heartbreaker, Night Songs and the first two Humble Pie LPs.  That’s a serious pedigree.

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The best bit on the LP is a touch of Spanish-sounding flamenco guitar at the beginning of either ‘Call my Name’ or ‘Jealous Heart’ – I don’t know which, I’d lost interest by then and was probably only 8 AOR minutes away from losing total control of my bowels.  That’s it - that’s the highlight.  That’s me trying to be positive.

All in all It adds up to a waste of co-polymer of vinyl chloride acetate, folks!

181 Down.

*always been a sucker for marble-effect covers, ‘been a ruin for many a poor boy, and lord I know I’m one’ – as someone sang once, probably.

**apart from those 3 Pat Benetar tracks, More than a Feeling, Don’t Stop Believin’, those 3 Foreigner tracks, those 2 Toto tracks, Keep on Loving You and that Jimmy Barnes one I liked; but apart from that …

^having said that I did pick this LP tonight because the House of Lords (real, not musical) have just voted to allow the bill allowing same-sex marriages, which I heartily approve of (and not just out of spite!) to proceed to the next stage of legislation.  True story.


Filed under: AOR, House of Lords, Record collecting, Rock Tagged: AOR, Direst Nonsense Imaginable, Gregg Giuffria, House of Lords

Fay Wray, King Kong, I Need A Caffeine Bomb

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Caffeine Bomb01

My brother and I just loved the Wildhearts (he saw them live, I never did), but we’re not the only fans in our family my mum will happily sing a long to a particular Wildhearts B-side, which I have to say I think is really cool.  The track in question is one of the B-sides to Caffeine Bomb.  I’m not sure how big a splash they made anywhere else apart from the UK so in brief, The Wildhearts were formed by singer/guitarist Ginger after he was booted out of the Quireboys (UK version) and did some brief time in The Throbs*, gathering together other sleazy reprobates they quickly got a reputation for blistering live shows and quickly became the latest in a long line of ‘Next Big Thing’ on the UK rock scene.  I’ve got all their early records so I’ll spare you the whole history now, but think sleazy hard rock with equal dashes of Ramones, Replacements and Cheap Trick in the mix, excellent playing and even better lyrics and you’re pretty much there.

The other thing they were was really prolific, which made such a welcome change from all those constipated big bands I liked with their 3 year LP cycles.  Give the Wildhearts 8 hours of studio time and you’d have two EP’s and four spare B-sides guaranteed.  Caffeine Bomb was released in 1994 between their debut LP Earth Vs. The Wildhearts and the follow-up P.H.U.Q and features 4 new tracks not on either LP.

The title track hits the road like a seriously turbo-charged punked-out Cheap Trick and is all about the joys of trying to cure that hangover, not one of your casual ‘bit of a bad head and a swirly stomach’ ones, but one of those ones which make you genuinely wish you’d never been born and sincerely promise God / Allah / Jehovah / Lucifer / Jah that if he/she will make it go away, not only will you never drink again but that you will undertake never to let any reincarnation of you taste alcohol again throughout all eternity.

Eyes dried tight gotta get myself together
need a kick-start cocktail, ten per cent coffee
a high-rise family size, guaranteed to cauterize
the little bit of brain I got a-hanging on from last night

This tale of woe is spat out at 100mph and is one of the best tracks the Wildhearts ever did for my money, 2:41 of pure inspired genius.

Caffeine Bomb02

Next track ‘Girlfriend Clothes’ is a chugging rocker about precisely the sort of creepy bar wildlife all right-thinking people avoid like the plague and even features several seconds of lounge-jazz-style scat singing towards the end of the track.  Lyrically, as always, Ginger nails him,

it’s getting late and you’re so
frustrated, four hours and not one bite
old Mrs Palm and her five young daughters is
all you’ll get tonight, right!
grab some friends maybe throw some
insults at some longhair all alone
call him a fag as he goes to meet his girlfriend waiting home.

The last track is ‘And the Bullshit Goes On’, flavoured by more US alternative sounds it’s a tuneful rant aimed at, umm, bull shitters really and features some great riffing late-on, including a blatant steal from ‘My Sharona’.

Possibly best of all, depends on my mood is the classic ‘Shut Your Fucking Mouth and Use Your Fucking Brain’ – my mum’s favourite Wildhearts song and yet another possible funeral song for me in the year 2100**.  I think she must have heard my brother playing it over and over again, but she loves it.  To be honest the title gives you all you need to know about the song, except how viciously it’s delivered.  You know me well enough by now to know that it ticks both my swearing and my short songs boxes admirably.  The live version below gives you the right idea, the bassist dislocated his knee early in the show, got a roadie to pop it back in and sat down on a flight case to finish the rest of the set! The Wildhearts were real men!

The studio version has better sound of course, but I do quite like this one.  Any novices might also want to check ‘My Baby is a Headfuck’ which features Mick Ronson on slide guitar, possibly his last ever recording – I’m not sure.

Caffeine Bomb03

They just don’t make ‘em like this any more.

182 Down.

*anyone out there in blog land remember, The Language of Thieves & Vagabonds at all? I thought that was a great LP, but I’ve not got around to replacing my cassette yet.

**bring sandwiches, go to the toilet before the service; at this rate it’ll end up being like seeing Springsteen live.


Filed under: Hard Rock, Record collecting, Vinyl, Wildhearts Tagged: 12", Caffeine Bomb, Hard Rock, Swearing, Wildhearts

Not Trash

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I like Alice Cooper a lot.  Like every other similarly-minded rocker I loved the early LPs when the name referred to the band, I got a little less interested during his Hollywood and booze years and a bit more interested again from 1984′s Constrictor onwards, teenage gore hound that I was I particularly loved the gory murder stuff on Raise Your Fist And Yell (candidate for one of the worst LP covers I can think of, off hand).  So there I was with some change in my pocket on a hot day in Carmarthen , 31 July 1989 to be precise (I know, I know, I’m not proud of myself) and I spotted a new 12″ of his, Poison.  After much mocking from my two mates I bought it, trusting Alice to make them eat their words.  He did, he came through for me.

First off let’s get the Desmond Child thing out in the open.  For anyone too young to remember, too normal to bother forensically scrutinising record sleeves, or just far too hip to notice, Desmond Child bestrode the world like a slightly paunchy commercially incontinent titan in spandex.  He effortlessly tossed off quintuple platinum hits for Kiss, Aerosmith, Bon Jovi, Cher etc etc.  and it wasn’t a cause for much rejoicing in the cooler rock circles.  He was a hip name for bands, especially thrashers, to drop in their shit lists.  I can see it both ways, as always when one person dominates to such an extent it produces a certain homogenity unsurprising given that he was writing and producing seemingly everything for a while, on the other hand ‘Livin’ on a Prayer’, ‘You Give Love a Bad Name’, ‘Dude (Looks Like a Lady)’, ‘I Hate Myself For Loving You’; look I like Black Flag as much as the next man, but those tracks are just brilliant, big catchy commercial rock tunes* that make me happy when I hear them.  You can’t moan about how effective they are because that’s their point, that is their whole point – just as you can’t moan about how effective a weapon tank is whilst being run over by one, resistance is futile.

Cooper Trash02

But anyway Poison was, to my ears, a great track, which robbed the intro wholesale from ‘Sweet Child O’ Mine’ before becoming a bit menacing and a bit ballady.  The B-sides being ‘Trash’ a surprisingly tough, sleazy glam rocker featuring Aerosmith’s rhythm section and Bon Jovi backing vocals and a competent run through of the awesome-in-its-original-form, ‘The Ballad of Dwight Fry’.  Poison went on to sell gazillions and to justify my taste in my friends’ eyes.

My copy of Trash was given to me by my girlfriend who gave me it when I gave her an autographed copy of the same LP to her for Christmas ’89 - ever a romantic! Okay we knew what we were getting here, a bunch of big commercial rockers, trading subtlety and originality for wallop and choruses.  When it works, like on the brilliant ‘Bed of Nails’ it’s ace, it even retains a bit of Alice’s old menace,

Our love is a bed of nails

Love hurts good on a bed of nails

I’ll lay you down and when all else fails

I’ll drive you like a hammer on a bed of nails

Health and safety note: 1537 does not advocate driving people like hammers on beds of nails, so don’t try this at home, or certainly not trying it at home and then suing me.

Cooper Trash 01

I found Trash surprisingly listenable when I played it again just now, in fact I added a few to my Ipod again for when I’m in a big rock mood.  Okay there’s some clunkers here too, I can live without ever hearing ‘Only my Heart Talkin”, or ‘This Maniac’s In Love With You’ again, but overall it does a job.

I saw him on the tour for this LP at a date in Birmingham which they filmed for release and he was really good, lots of swordplay, gallows, bloodletting and dancers – just a good, fun family night out.  It was funny seeing him because even at that age I could tell that Alice Cooper was nothing more, or less than a really good, professional entertainer in the Hollywood tradition.  A friend of mine’s wife, called Alice, is a proper photographer and she shot Alice Cooper for a magazine in London about three years ago (with a snake, naturally!), she told me that he and his manager were both lovely, courteous old-school professional types – pretty far-removed from what she usually encounters on these shoots.  When she introduced herself as Alice, he shook her hand and said ‘I’m Alice too, but you can call me Coop’; I like that.

187 Down.

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*I also have a thing for ‘Livin’ La Vida Loca’, but if you tell anyone … (mimes fearsome throat-cutting gesture) … we understand each other?


Filed under: Alice Cooper, Record collecting Tagged: Alice Cooper, Desmond Child, Trash, Vinyl

Lance And Tiffany And Skid Row

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Since I was born they couldn’t hold me down
Another misfit kid, another burned-out town
Never played by the rules I never really cared
My nasty reputation takes me everywhere

I look and see it’s not only me
So many others have stood where I stand
We are the young so raise your hands…

You get 19 highly-collectible hard rockin’ 1537 bonus points if you can sing the next minute and a half of the song without cheating.  In 1989 there was a seemingly unstoppable tide of flash new American bands, a fair proportion of whom seemed to have links to Bon Jovi, so forgive my yawns when Skid Row released their debut LP.  I was never wrong about bands and this lot clearly sucked – I mean they had a dude who seemingly had to chain his nose to his ear and a singer who was a dead ringer for Natassia Kinski.

Sebastian Bach (honest!)

Sebastian Bach (honest!)

Now by 1989 a good third of the records I bought were made by dudes who looked like ladies, I was well used to all the pouting, preening pretty boy singers centre right and the solid-looking drummer at the back who was clearly worrying about what his pa would say to him when he caught sight of  him wearing lacy fingerless gloves.  What I wasn’t used to was rockers who actually looked like good looking women, now I’m not saying Sebastian Bach was ever a cause of sexual confusion to the adolescent 1537, but well, you know he was, umm, hot, sort of – look, I don’t want to talk about it !!

Now I was wrong about Skid Row; they were a good band, most glam/hard rock bands of the period were pop bands who upped the guitars to hit the minimum-rock threshold, Skid Row came on like a proper metal band who were toning it down to make the charts.  They were brash and mean and so were their good songs – about a third of the first LP was a bit run-of-the-mill but the others hit hard.  I saw them in Bristol in 1989* and they were far heavier live, Sebastian Bach seemed enormously tall and spent most of the show spouting off brash Americanisms of the , ‘Fuck you business man’ variety and twirling his long microphone lead around and around, letting it loop around his neck.  They were a lot of fun live, a young band really getting a glimpse of their own brilliance.

Anyway, I own three Skid Row records, a 12″ promo of 18 and Life, a guitar-shaped picture disc of Youth Gone Wild and a clear vinyl 10″ of I Remember You – yup, I never quite got around to getting Skid Row (or the even better Slave to the Grind).  I span them all last night and the results were mixed.

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First up, Youth Gone Wild – This is just brilliant.  I mean what’s not to love about a guitar-shaped record? nothing, that’s what!  To be honest even if all this record contained was Scotti Hill and Rachel Bolan farting and wolf-whistling along to ‘Calling Occupants of Interplanetary Craft’ then this would still be one of my favourite teenage rock artefacts.  I find this song just captures dumb testosterone-fuelled rebellion perfectly, the guitar sound is just brilliant, the shouty bits hit home and overall it just makes me a) happy b) jog faster.  Yup – yesterdays’ youth done gone wild on the bread and cheese and is now running wild trying to shed a bit.  The B-side, a live version of ‘Rattlesnake Shake’, is an eminently forgettable version of one of the poorer LP tracks.

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18 and Life, my first ever promo (God I was excited about that!) came in a black sleeve with a date (22.01.90, since you ask) in the centre – how exciting.  the track is another one of their best actually sort-of a ballad, sort-of not because it was about accidentally shooting your friend rather than losing your girl to a man with a bigger pickup truck.  I have to say here though that Sebastian Bach really did have a hell of a set of lungs on him, the vocal on this track is excellent.  On the B-side is a live version of ‘Youth Gone Wild’ which is okay, apart from a lengthy rant about (the usual**) people who want to tell you how to live your life, which is really just a bit of an excuse to get a crowd to shout ‘Fuck You!’ over and over again – I used to think that was brilliant, now I just tend to think ‘well those interfering sons-of-bitches may have had a point Sebastian’ and turned the sound down so as not to alarm the nice couple next door.

I Remember You is just excruciating – precisely the sort of rent-a-ballad that all hard rockers were required to make by law in the late 80′s^ which I’m pretty sure was directly responsible for grunge blowing them all away for a while.  Sorry if this was your make-out song back in the day, but your taste sucked even if your date… Jeez! what’s happening to me tonight!  All rockers needed to bang out a tune like this to show that beneath their tough-guy exteriors they were just waiting for the right lingerie model to come and mend last week’s broken heart, I suspect the theory was also so that oodles of girls would flock and buy the single too – I’m guessing record company logic being that the poor dears wouldn’t like the proper stuff.  Well I bought it! So take that WEA Records  – who’s winning now !  Actually Skid Row, or whoever pulled their strings at the time deserves some plaudits for putting ‘Makin’ A Mess’ (my joint-fave Skid Row tune) on the flip side, even though it might have punctured the romantic mood a bit,

 T-bone Billy just a singin’ the blues
Caught his lady with another man
Lit up a smoke and did some talkin’
With the back of his hand

Do you know what? I never even thought about what this song was about until I heard it just now.  Great, now I find out that my joint fave Skid Row song is about domestic violence?! How did I never notice before? just listened to the menace and the guitars I imagine.  Shit.

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It actually makes more sense now to put the tunes together, surely someone needs to write an overly-simplistic screenplay called Makin’ a Mess of Life, about Lance and Tiffany’s relationship filtered through this vinyl.  Lance, quarterback, and Tiffany, cheer leader, obviously get together at the prom to the sounds of ‘I Remember You’, after a dark warning from Lance’s drunken ex-girlfriend.  Two years later, Lance is all washed-up after a knee injury^^ and is hitting the bottle hard and tiffany harder, one day after a chance meeting with lance’s drunken ex-girlfriend at a diner when ‘I Remember You’ plays on the radio, Tiffany has had enough and either:

  • Shoots him ‘accidentally’, mirroring the tale of ’18 and Life’ exactly.
  • Runs away with ex-girlfriend (after a completely gratuitous shower scene).
  • Becomes a zombie-bitch from Hades and with her hellish horde lays the entire town to waste, saving the joy of eating Lance’s brain to the very last

I’ve not quite decided which crowd-pleasing ending to tack on yet, but if any big Hollywood studios are out there reading this then I am willing to discuss optioning the rights.

 So there you go, that’s Skid Row – I may have strayed off-topic a bit near the end, but I think I got away with it, without anyone noticing.

 191 Down.

*supported by Vain, glam fans (fanz?).

** take any 3 from 4 of cops / teachers / parents / politicians.

^the Mandatory Ballad Act of 1988 (part of the Homogenised Teen Fodder Provisions of 1988) , if you must know – colloquially known as the Jovi-Michaels Amendment.

^^left one.


Filed under: Hard Rock, Skid Row, Vinyl Tagged: 18 And Life, Hard Rock, I Remember You, Skid Row, Youth Gone Wild

Atomic Trouser Arouser

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Spare a thought for the straight man*, people.  The competent foil in the best comedy acts who gets none of the laughs, but tees up each and every one of them for his, or her, funnier partner instead.  It’s his job to be smart, presentable and on the money with his delivery and take the odd custard pie when the other fella just has to turn up make funny faces, hit a favourite catchphrase and fall over to get all the laughs.  Pity the straight man, just as Lee Majors sang in ‘The Fall Guy’,

I might fall from a tall building so Burt Reynolds don’t get hurt

I might leap a mighty canyon so he can kiss and flirt.

While that smooth talker’s kissin’ my girl

I’m just kissin’ dirt

Such was the professional career of Steve Stevens, raven-haired guitar slinger for Billy Idol.  Everyone I ever knew loved ‘White Wedding’ and ‘Rebel Yell’, but not because of the strangely-irradiated looking twitch-lipped clown doing the singing, nope we rockers loved them for the guitar and the tunes (mostly).  So, as is always the case the talented one stepped out from the shadows to make a go of it himself.

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The result was Steve Stevens Atomic Playboys (I have a niggling doubt that the title of which is grammatically incorrect, but maybe that’s just me).  It starts brilliantly too and by that I mean in the cover department, I mean a full-on H.R Giger cover? good moves Steve.  For once I’m not being dismissive when I say it is the best thing about the record, its shrouded techno-medusa guitarist figure is just brilliant.  If you look at the other bands Giger has been involved with you get a list including the weird and/or heavy likes of carcass, Celtic Frost, Emerson Lake & Palmer, Danzig & Atrocity; along with the fabulously-titled Penis Landscape poster inside Dead Kennedys Frankenchrist LP.  Which gives you an indication of everything this LP

                                                        ..isn’t about.  With a couple of minor deviations this is a slice of pretty mainstream US rock 1989 style.  Which is fine, but not quite what the front cover promised: check out singer Perry McCarty on the back cover, the poor dude has been shoe-horned into the tightest satin and suit jacket combo so quickly he forgot to put his shirt on, maybe that’s why he is face is as eerily expressionless as a shop mannequin.

One of these two is a lifeless, expressionless plastic figure.  The other is made of lego.

One of these two is a lifeless, expressionless plastic figure. The other is made of lego.

The first and title track hits the track running at 100mph and within 30 seconds of the music starting you can recognise Stevens’ handiwork, those trade mark runs and, umm, squonky noises (N.B – check technical terms for that and for all the widdi-wii-Chhhwrr noises).  A great big surface rock monster – aided by Ted Templeman’s trademark slightly too-trebley all-surface production.  There is a vaguely (radiation = bad, SDI = also bad) political message here too, which is undercut by the fact that you and they know that they just thought the phrase atomic playboys was cool; it is.  Next track ‘Power of Suggestion’ is a soul-tinged number which really wouldn’t sound out-of-place on a Robert Cray LP.

Third track is a cover of ‘Action’ by Sweet, years before Def Leppard thought of doing the same.  They do a damned good job too, for years I thought it was an original track of theirs, their best one too.  The playing on this track is both tight and loose enough to work.  Unfortunately we have the BIG BALLAD up next and whilst Mr Stevens’ solo is predictably good, it’s just cookie-cutter generic filler.  You know I’d never stoop so low as to quote lyrics out of context for a cheap giggle, don’t you?

Light a candle

Hold a flame down by the floor

Count the tears

Tell me who you’re crying for my love

Sorry Mr Stevens but you and your Atomic Playboys are clearly in breach of several important health and safety rules here – holding a flame near the floor? that’s just asking for secondary item ignition! Tears on the floor? a clear slipping hazard! it’s a wonder any of us rockers made it through to the 90′s.

Unfortunately we then get becalmed in the end of A side, start of B side waters – even the reference to the hot chick in ‘Pet the hot Kitty’ being  ‘a trouser arouser’, fails to save it from being more generic mulch.  However the LP is pulled up by its bootstraps by the very smooth, soulful ‘Evening Eye’ which I confess I had no recollection of ever listening to back in the day, it works a treat though.  ‘Woman of 1,000 Years’, a more uptempo ‘all women are bad’ song carries on the revival.

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Best of all by far and the track I remember liking the most** is the brilliant instrumental track ‘Run Across Desert Sands’ an acoustic track with a Spanish and African flavour it’s completely unexpected in the context of Steve Stevens Atomic Playboys.  I’ve seen interviews with Steve Stevens where he surprised me by saying he started out on acoustic guitar when he was 7 and didn’t get an electric until he was 13 and he was/is really into folk, his favourite players being the likes of Joan Baez.  I also know he collaborated with Juno Reactor on one of their tracks too and this is what I find a little frustrating here.  There is a clear sense that Steve Stevens plumped for a big commercial-sounding LP when he really should have let his creativity flourish a bit more.  My problem with this is not that it is a big commercial rock LP, it’s just that it’s an inconsistent one.

He should have allowed himself  to run across those desert sands a bit further, allowed himself to weird up a bit more and his LP would have been a bit more worthy of its’ cover.

 193 Down.

*can’t think of any straight women off the top of my head, but they must be out there – however for the sake of simplicity I’ll stick with the ‘man’ bit.

**it involved ‘parking’ with my gf who played this LP over and over and I’m far too gentlemanly to say any more.


Filed under: Hard Rock, Record collecting, Steve Stevens Atomic Playboys Tagged: Billy Idol, Steve Stevens Atomic Playboys, Strangely dressed Dude, Vinyl
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