D’ire, D’abominable, D’abysmal – this is all too D’easy.  Bought in 1991, when I was old enough to know better here’s D’Molls.  It was cheap, it was glam rock from 1988, I’d sort of heard about them and they looked kinda funny on the back cover = bought it*.  Oh dear.

Before today I genuinely don’t think I ever made it through more than three songs in a single go and I have tried two, or three times.  Today, for you, I sat down and listened to it all the way through once, so you don’t have to.  Now I’m a glam veteran, I own/have owned far more of this stuff than was strictly necessary and it has sound tracked more than I can tell you about whilst maintaining my status as a gentleman.  But, for Angus’ sake it was all thirty seven times better than D’Molls.

D’Molls genuinely makes Poison Look What The Cat Dragged In sound like Reign In Blood, it’s rock in name only – everything is a high-pitched, treble-overdosing abomination.  On an 11 track LP, there’s only a real discernible guitar solo on one track**, the rest of the guitars just sound like they were played on cheap keyboards.  I genuinely can’t distinguish between one plodding tune and the next, the heavily-treated beat of each and every track sounds like an undertaker making your own bespoke coffin as a cruel reminder that you’re minutes closer to your own grave than you once were.  Listening to this is like being force-fed 4 kilos of sugar … through every bodily opening, except your mouth. That good.

Now D’Molls do get 1537 bonus points for the band member’s names, step forward Desi Rexx, Billy Dior, Lizzy Valentine and the wildly dubious) S.S Priest.  They don’t make ’em like that anymore*^.  It reminds me of a game my friend Steve and I used to play at work when we were bored, trying to name the ultimate glam metal group, the best we came up with was:

• Screech Benson – Vocals
• Dizzy Banger – Drums
• Fido – Bass
• Lionel ‘Wang bar’ Riichardz – Guitar

The D’molls were clearly better at it than Steve and I. Click to marvel at them properly.

Future generations will undoubtedly put this band in their full historical perspective and mock fools like me who failed to identify the D’Molls as a game-changing harbinger of all future culture, but until then we can just amuse ourselves with their lyrics.  I know it’s arbitrary and unfair, but hey, welcome to my world.  Some personal favourites are:

Mayor’s daughter, shouldn’t oughta     (All I Want)

Winners of the human race’ll / Lose a little social grace / Just as well, ’cause what the hell’s / An elevator?   (777 (not a Danzig cover)

 Umm, it’s a device to take you between floors in a building?

With one too many her lights turn green / She’ll hand you the keys to her pink machine   (Rally Baby)

Dudes, AC/DC would have knocked that double entendre back for lack of subtlety!

And I’m going to stop right there.  Although D’Molls do something I find a little odd in their usual, vastly long credits, they split them between ‘Dolls’ and ‘Dudes’, I’ve never ever seen a band do that before, carry out some kind of strange gender apartheid.  Bizarre.  If I was Ahmet Ertegun I really wouldn’t have allowed them to include my name in the thanks bit for, and I quote, ‘D’Atlantic Family’.

As I have been a little bit less than gushing this time out, I shall nail up the usual 1537 disclaimer right here, which is D’Molls is a far, far better LP than any I have ever released and I appreciate smart-arsed blogging is no substitute for having been there and done it.

But, still.

569 Down.

*the same day I rather more successfully bought Four Horsemen, the Atom Seed and that other glam metal classic Neil Young Freedom.

**on ‘All Night Long’, and its quite good – but admitting that spoils my argument, so Shhhh!.

*^not since the 1991 Taste Act was passed into federal law.

Brain dead, totally tired, I needed a pick-me-up and here are the boys with a real doozie, ZZ Top Sleeping Bag.  Not only that but it’s on a pharaoh shaped picture disc, a vinyl shape that has in exhaustive scientific tests been found to be up to 39.56% more perky and restorative than normal boring round vinyl.

I really loved their Afterburner LP, okay so it lacked the guitar bite of Eliminator, but you go back to it now and there are some really great tunes in there.  I suppose it may depend on your tolerance for Texan robo-synth-blues-boogie.  I’ve never had much resistance to it personally, especially when, like most of my favourite music, almost every lyric is just a big steaming double entendre; it really might be about time I grew up past the age of 15.

The title track of Sleeping Bag is a case in point.  Billy Gibbons sings of spreading it out and laying on down and then hits us with ‘we’ll tuck it in until it’s clean out of sight’, hmm ladies and gentlemen, I think this might just be some of that sex talk stuff I’ve read about.  Poor ladies, I bet they didn’t stand a chance with all that metaphorin’ going down.  A passing verse about Egypt, gives us the really rather cool image for the picture disc.

The B-side is ‘Party On The Patio’ from 1981’s El Loco, not an LP I ever got on with, in fact I sold my copy about a year after getting it and this hasn’t really prompted me to revisit it*.  It was a bit too treated and synthesized for me – I know I’m being a hypocrite here, maybe ZZ Top just got much better at doing it that way.

Never mind I’m happy again, pharaoh-shaped happy.

Let’s go out to Egypt ’cause it’s in the plan,
sleep beside the pharaohs in the shifting sand.
We’ll look at some pyramids and check out some heads**
Oh, we’ll whip out our mattress ’cause there ain’t no beds.
Slip inside my sleeping bag,
slip inside my sleeping bag

570 Down.

PS – this is dedicated to Mr Victim Of The Fury, a man who crosses the Nile every day on his way to work – how cool?

*Anyone out there rate El Loco more than I do? I just think it’s lacking some bollocks.

**I always heard that as ‘hash’, rather than ‘heads’ before today. True story.

Yesterday I had a blackout, one minute I was walking down the street in Chester, then the next thing I remember it was 20 minutes later and I was clutching a bag containing Elvis and Black Sabbath drinks coasters and Faith No More Angel Dust, a beautiful deluxe reissue on 180g vinyl* with an LP of bonus goodies, nice sleevenotes** etc.  But that’s not what I’m here to tell you about today.

The one moment of clarity I had in the record shop was noticing that the deluxe reissue of The Real Thing had a bit of an obscure track on it that I already owned, ‘Sweet Emotion’ which was only previously released on a Kerrang! flexi disc.  By the time I was getting into music flexi discs were few and far between, their 70’s/early 80s heyday long gone, CDs were still a bit expensive at the time to be putting on the outside of magazine covers, apart from expensive classical music mags, still they did appear occasionally.  With very average sound quality and a tendency to skip, or just stop spinning^ I assume most were treated as being highly disposable and binned off after a few listens, surely only a real obsessive psychopath with no life whatsoever would keep them immaculately preserved and looked after for over 26 years?

So here is my immaculately preserved and carefully looked after collection of 26 year-old Kerrang! flexi discs.  There were two series, Flexible Fiends and Sexy Flexi, I have all the former but only one of the latter ones survived.  I think they give quite a neat snapshot of the rock/metal scene at the time, or those on the fringes of it at least – established bands didn’t need to bother with such things.

Fiend 1: Anthrax: Now It’s dark   /   Disneyland After Dark (D.A.D): Jihad

Anthrax were probably the biggest name at the time on any of these discs.  This was the first ever bit of thrash metal I owned, it didn’t make much of an impression then but I like it better now, even though the live recording is a bit scrappy around the edges and it puzzlingly fades out before the track ends.

Happily back in 1990 I’d never had the occasion to hear the word ‘Jihad’ and I remember having to look it up … in a book (yup, that’s how long ago it was kiddies!).  I loved this live track straight away and it’s still a firm favourite today, although not as good as ‘Sleeping My Day Away’ which is one of my fave hard rock tracks of the whole era.  Nice to see D.A.D using their full name before the Disney lawyers got to them too^*.

Fiend 2: Faster Pussycat: Cathouse  /  Femme Fatale: Touch ‘N’ Go

This was like Christmas come early for me back in 1989, a live track from my joint fave band at the time.  ‘Cathouse’ shows all that was good about Pussycat back in the day, this is ragged, punky, frenetic and highly charged glam rock and so sleazy that I fear I may have just contracted three hideous STDs aurally.  This just surprised me by how good it was.

Femme Fatale – bouffy hair, Collagen lips, lots of cleavage so-far so-nothing-you-can’t-get-from-Poison, except Femme Fatale’s singer was actually a chick; well I’m 90% sure, things weren’t so clear-cut back then.  This is a studio cut from their debut LP and it’s all very run-of-the-mill workaday stuff.  It sounds rather like the kind of identikit rock that always seemed to crop up on the soundtracks of the third instalment of horror movie franchises.

Fiend 3: Balaam & The Angel: It Goes On  /  Faith No More: Sweet Emotion

I remember Balaam as being a poor man’s cult and coming from the same scene as the likes of Crazyhead et al.  This live track is really good, rather pleasing, melodic rock, although they definitely reside on Cult Boulevard, you know turn left after the Sonic Temple – if you pass a man from Bradford dressed as a native American singing about wolves then you (and he) have gone too far.  There’s a 12″ single of theirs in my local charity shop, I should go back and buy it on this showing.

This was possibly the first time I’d ever heard a note from FNM, I remember wondering why a band with such prominent keyboards and bass was being featured on a Kerrang! flexi disc and what was with that singer’s nasal voice? heard now it sounds like an interesting transitional piece between The Real Thing and Angel Dust without the latter’s inspired insane genre-bending.  ‘Sweet Emotion’ is not an Aerosmith cover by the way, I had hoped it was at the time, it’s an interesting track but not particularly remarkable in its own right; although I’d like to hear it with a better sound than you can get with a flexi disc.

Fiend 4: Vain: Far Away  /  Tigertailz: Cheap Talk

Anyone remember Vain? they sneaked in at the tail end of the whole glam/hair metal thang and delivered a really good, quite dark (in places) LP, No Respect which I really rated.  I saw them support Skid Row and they could certainly cut it live too.  This track was a demo for that album and ended up as a polished version on their second LP.  I prefer the roughness of this version, this song sounds like it’s all about the burn-outs and casualties that never quite got to the good times Poison were singing about – much like Vain themselves^^.

I’ve always regarded Tigertailz as something of a national embarrassment, I know you’d have thought I’d have been all over a glam metal band who came from 20 miles up the road from where I grew up, but they just weren’t much good, too soft for my tastes.  Man the way they looked too, think Look What The Cat Dragged In era Poison’s older, Welsh ex-hooker sisters.  Funnily enough, ‘Cheap Talk’ sounds rather good to me now, confident and swaggering, maybe I need to listen again?  later in life they cut a really kick ass version of Megadeth’s ‘Peace Sells’, heavy as shit but with a real glam-style chorus.

Sexy Flexi 3:  Almighty Wild Angel  /  Overkill: E.Vil N.ever D.ies

My fave British hard rockers of their era do what they did best, tearing up a great live version of one of their best tracks with some extra bonus swearing.  I must have seen The Almighty 5 or 6 times in a three year period and they were never less than absolutely brilliant.  This is a good representation of them live too, although not as good as early live LP Blood, Fire & Live.

Overkill? man this is shit awful I’m afraid, high-pitched Pinky and perky style vocals and music that sounds like it was recorded at 45RPM.  Still, it’s far better than any music I’ve ever released.

For some reason either I only bought one of the Kerrang!s carrying the Sexy Flexi series (maybe I was at uni then?).  It was fun listening to all these tracks again, okay so with the exception of FNM and Anthrax they were all comparatively second division acts but it brought home to me again how the scene sounded, smelt and looked back then.  Even the bands I didn’t buy anything by, I can still half remember pictures of them, reviews of and interviews by them all, Kerrang! was my life for a good while, my Wednesday act of worship.

Amen.

590 Down (still)

*is there actually a correlation between heavy gauge vinyl and sound? or is it just a plot to one day bring down my record shelves?

**SLEEVENOTES!!! Sweet Lord above, I love me a good sleeve note.

^grizzled old hand that I am I know the trick is to put your flexi disc on top of a LP when playing it.

^*also see hardcore band Bomb Disneyland!, can’t for the life of me see why Mickey Mouse objected to that.  Still, I liked the fact they changed their name to Bomb Everything!

^^since I’m feeling nostalgic, dig this.  It’s very of its time, but I like the bit where the lady strokes the, highly symbolic, snake:

From Hollywood, California – the stooopidest band in the world … Love/Hate!

Ah well since I was looking at old stuff I got free with Kerrang! in ’89/90 I thought I’d look at this one too and make Mike even more jealous.  Around Christmas 1990 Kerrang! gave away a live 7″ single (a proper one, not a flexi disc) from my fave new sleazy hard rockers Love/Hate.  The Live E.P is a good object and had its own artwork devised by Skid and came with details of the UK tour* and a hyperbolic write-up by Neil Jeffries,

Outta Hell, California – somewhere not a million miles from Hollywood – came the venomous eight-legged scuttling beastie known as Love/Hate. 

Recorded in The Empire Club, Cleveland, Ohio about a month before it was released Live E.P catches the band in all their ragged glory as the band belt through four tracks from Black Out In The Red Room, the title track, ‘Mary Jane’, ‘Fuel To Run’ and ‘She’s An Angel’.

Opener ‘Black Out In The Red Room’ is the most different from the studio version as it includes all the bits live recordings usually miss out, the Hendrix intro tape (‘Are You Experienced’), a bit of a false start, the intro that began this post and three of minutes of ferocious jamming from the whole band before the track starts – whammo!!

Click to read & emlarge

The other three tracks are far more like their studio counterparts, okay so a bit faster and more out-of-tune but structurally similar; I’m not a massive one for live EPs, LPs or CDs**.  However, when the material is of this quality it’s still well worth hearing.  I know I’ve said it before, being the tedious old bastard I am, but Love/Hate were a real quality rock band, much darker, sleazier and harder than most of their contemporaries, except maybe Sea Hags.  They wrote deceptively simple sounding rockers, that when you listened to them carefully were a lot more complex and arty than they’d have liked you to have noticed.  I think they were a great band who never got their just desserts, mind you their, umm, partying caught up with them good style in the recording of their second LP, the very honestly titled, Wasted In America.

So this little single is a good little time capsule, a souvenir of one sweaty, steamy night of rock from a band that really should have scored higher than they did, if you’re the sort of lame-o oddball anti-social dumbass misfit who doesn’t own a copy of Black Out In the Red Room, then please put that right immediately and you can be my friend again.  Easy.

590 Down (in the gutter).

*Nowhere anywhere near 17 year-old me, sadly.

**Sorry Bruce.

I grew up fast on a working class street
First thing I learned was life don’t come cheap
Technical school it was a waste of time
Makin’ robots for some factory line

Fancy some rage? Go on, I’ve got some of the good stuff here, 100% proof, raw from-the-mean-streets of Coburg, Melbourne? Some real ‘you fucking lookin’ at me’ aggression? as a leftie vegetarian pacifist* this is just like playing dress up for me, so let’s crank Rose Tattoo Scarred For Life and party like its 1982, we haven’t bathed for a week, we’ve just been laid off from the logging plant and we’ve been drinking cleaning products cut with orange juice since 3am yesterday morning.

If you don’t know Rose Tattoo, a quick scan of the cover will give you most of what you need, 5 really bad-ass hombres who just happened to make some real blue-collar hard rocking boogie for your delectation, but not in a cissy way, alright? I mean come on, look at ’em you’d definitely cross the road to avoid them – remember they got these tattoos way back when, way before every MF on earth had two whole sleeve tattoos and they truly marked you out as a dangerous outlaw.

Got my first tattoo when I was 16
The rebel had lost his teenage queen
I’d taken a stand for an outlaw’s life
My ma’s words kept ringin’, “Angry, you´re scarred for life”

Scarred For Life isn’t quite up to the same mark as Assault & Battery, but it’s a close run thing.  The title track kicks things off with a tale of heartache, rebellion and tattoos (natch!).  I really like this one, it’s a fist-in-the-face challenge right from the off with that jack hammer riff, before the melody hits – the Tattoo boys at their best always had a real knack with a good tune and this has one, I’ve peppered this post with the lyrics from this one, but there is just one bit most of the way through where Mr A. Anderson, who sings brilliantly on this one, sings the lines, ‘I fought tooth and nail, every inch of the way / I got scars…to prove it’, that makes the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end.

I spent some time a guest of the state
I got out and wanted to go straight
People don’t forgive, the police force don’t forget
I was jailed for crimes I did not commit

Then its time for one of my big teenaged anthems ‘We Can’t Be Beaten’, I used to play this all the time on my Walkman when our school team was on the bus to matches, over and over again** to psych myself up.  It’s simplistic, antagonistic and very simple, in quite a brilliant way, those gang-backing vocals just hit the spot for me, and man that bit where the music drops away … look you get the picture.

Next up, after establishing their hard-man outlaw bona fides, Rose Tattoo turn their steely eyed gaze on the fairer sex on ‘Juice On The Loose’.  Oh yes, Mr Anderson is looking straight at ya baby, he likes what he sees and he’s got a subtle metaphor all, umm, cocked and ready, all he needs now is a bouncy rhythm and some slide geeetaww!   Watch out here he comes!

I need a trick, I need a kick
To get me runnin’ make my motor tick
Oh mama, c’mon stroke my goose
Yeah, stroke – stroke

Don’t need a pill, I need a thrill
I need a job where I can use my drill

Hmm, we’re not exactly talking Omar Sharif levels of sophistication here.  This is far more threatening than the fighting songs!  Imagine, it’s your first night in prison on a 9-year stretch and you just realize that the 6’9″ Mexican transvestite body-builder who’s your new cell mate, wants to take your relationship to the next level; that’s the overall effect here.

The next few tracks hit their straps with plenty of endeavour but not a huge amount of star-dust.  The bluesy ‘Texas’ comes on like ZZ Top’s developmentally arrested angry cousins and features yet more great slide guitar, ‘I’m goin’ down to Texas where the big breasted women grow’^.  I’m also pretty keen on the, you guessed it, angry ‘Dead Set’, but there are maybe 5 tracks here that are just filler and don’t really do it for me at all, mostly for tune-related deficiencies (T-R.D), which is why I don’t quite rate Scarred For Life as a whole.

I was scarred, Scarred for life
Been knocked around had a hell of a life
I was scarred, Scarred for life
I fought my way through the trouble and strife

But there is one I do have to mention, one that gives me a big chuck of disquiet, the last track on the album, ‘Revenge’.  It certainly isn’t crap, the music is a real evil dirty blues number and Anderson barks and hisses out the lyrics in a way that shows they mean a lot to him.  I’m not really a naïve chap, I know that an image like Mr Anderson’s tends to pitch you over into a very hard-right line of politics and here it is laid bare in all its venom.  Unions? evil; Immigrants? evil – particularly those from the East it would seem, ‘parasites‘; Government? evil.  It’s prophesied that blood will run in the streets.  Interesting stuff given that it’s barked out by a man who was himself half-Mauritian.  It’s the bands ‘One In a Million’ moment, as far as I’m concerned.

It all conspires to leave a bad taste in my mouth, it always has for as long as I’ve owned this.  The band can write songs about whatever they want to, they have that right.  I’m not saying you have to share my own brand of lesbian pinko commie pro-environmentalism to find favour with me and I am conscious that had the band been singing against fascists, oppressive policing and corrupt capitalism, in exactly the same terms then I’d be cheering along loudly.  I recognize my essential hypocrisy here.  Maybe the difference is essentially one of societal power relations, ‘Revenge’ rails against minorities from a position of majority strength (albeit camouflaged behind that eternally self-justifying myth of the oppressed working man) and that is what rankles, I will always stand up against a bully, proudly.

So what does this say about the rest of my liking for Scarred For Life?  That I’m happy to go pick certain bits out of the mix and glorify the attitude and clenched fists, to laugh at the daft sexist bits in a knowingly ironic way, until it hits out at something I deem unacceptable?  I think I do and that as long as you are aware of the completely arbitrary, often contradictory processes and decisions involved then that’s an okay thing to do.

Hell, I’m 1537, king-of-all-kings, ultimate arbiter of rock, bestower of accolades, slayer of giants and ruler of the nine planes and if I say there are 5 really good tracks here, a couple of them absolutely brilliant, then that is so.

591 Down.

*although not when there’s an oval ball involved.

**sadly, Mr Anderson and chums got it wrong, we very often were.  I wasn’t going to go and ask him for my money back though.

^I have been unable to verify the truth of this statement at the time of going to press, it seems implied that they’re being specially cultivated that way down near Amarillo.  I may have to investigate further.

Three Aussie hard rockers from Adelaide, you know what they’re going to sound like, right? well, no, not this time actually, the sound of those (mostly) Scottish émigrés is conspicuous by its absence on Tracer El Pistolero.  Released in 2013 El Pistolero is a damn fine-looking beast of an LP, the worn edges and Mexican folk art approach of the cover – gotta love skulls, pistols and roses, add in the chunky cardboard cover, the sugar skulls artwork on the inner sleeve and the fact I picked up a very limited edition red vinyl and copy and … I … oop …  aaaahhh!  (smokes post-coital cigarette).

Formed from the ashes of a blues band by the horribly precocious trio, El Pistolero is the sound of some hungry young rockers who have come fully of age to the sounds of Audioslave, QOTSA, and Soundgarden, there is an interesting grunge filter applied to their all-out rock assault here.  That and a damn cool dusty-booted cowboy vibe, tales of revenge and repentance beyond the law.  I’m not making this up you know, try this!

I’d like to look like them too.  I really enjoy ‘El Pistolero’, which is one of three tracks tagged as being part of ‘Suite Del Desperado’ and as well as a great bass heavy sound has opening lines I love, ‘In a seedy bar is Saragossa / I saw the devil only closer’, death, revenge and a blazing shoot-out follow, rather inevitably, but thrillingly for Mr Pistolero himself.

Tracer have a really good sound, but my criticism would be that they stick too closely to it at times and the listener is left scanning the tracks for differences, the blistering guitar solo in ‘Lady Killer’, the exhilarating full-on mania of, umm, ‘Manic For Ya’, the totally excellent Doors-play-spaghetti-Western of ‘Until The War Is Won’ and the filthy ZZ Top-esque riff of ‘Wolf In Cheap Clothes’.  Kevin Shirley’s production throughout is, as you’d expect, rather excellent too, deep without being too muddy.

Overall, El Pistolero is a really good, confident, modern hard rock LP by a band whose next album is out damn soon and I might have a chance of seeing play next month, it’s not up there in classic territory yet though, there’s a filler or two present, but the good stuff bodes very well indeed for their future.

597 Down.

Hear that? that’s electricity, that is!  The Biters Electric Blood, to be precise.  I’ve been waiting for a new hard rock record to take me out and show me a time this good for years actually, which is why I’m cheating again and writing about a 2015 LP.  Well, 2015 going on 1975 and I mean that in a good way,

I wanna lose my mind / I wanna Rock n Roll all night, like it’s 1975

I woulda sold my KISS records and bought a machine / If I wanted to hear a robot sing

Let’s be dang clear here, Electric Blood is, in my not-very-humble opinion, fucking great.  Yup, I swore, it’s that good.  This is the first commercial-oriented hard rock LP by a new band that I’ve liked in an age, sure I’ve liked loads of genre-specific albums* but true to all that great stuff I fell for from the 70s and 80s, this is at heart a damn fine well-muscled pop album.  If you have even a single red rock blood cell in your electric bloodstream, there are hooks and choruses here that you’ll find yourself singing in the bath/car/on the toilet/on the job, easy.

There’s an amusing video I picked up from the Kerrang! website that’s an intro to The Biters**.  In it they, very sincerely, spout every cliché and ‘Phew! Rock and roll!’ shout-out I can think of, whilst being filmed kicking ass/kissing chicks/smoking/head-butting walls/drinking/loading out, you know what though? it comes over as funny and passionate, rather than old and tired – hey, they’re young and they’ve pretty much got the best job in the world, they look like they’re enjoying it too.  There’s occasional flashes here and there that show the Biters are a bit cleverer than they make out too, which is all to the good, most of my real faves do that.  I’m particularly taken by the seemingly completely unironic closing statement from lead singer Tuk that (and I kid you not),

‘You wanna run with the turkeys, or fly with the eagles? The Biters are about flying with eagles’.

Yeah! Rock n Roll forever!

Check this video out, I believe it is simply unedited documentary footage of a night with the Biters.  Warning: contains graphic depictions of drinking, youth being hassled by the man, a cock being drawn on a sleeping person’s face and side boob (2:52, exactly^):

All of which would just be mildly amusing/irritating (delete as applicable) if the band didn’t have the smarts and chops to carry it off.   Electric Blood sounds at times like Cheap Trick jamming with 1537-faves The Wildhearts on a set of Thin Lizzy and Heartbreakers cover tunes.  Every so often you get a Sum 41-style chorus, a melody that’s reminiscent of The Cars, or a Lizzy twin guitar line thrown in with some glam Bowie piano and Glitter Band drumming; it’s a real treat.  Comparisons are only a crude guide anyway and this is no assembly job, or Frankenstein’s monster.  What The Biters really bring to the party, and it is a party, is an overriding personality all their own and an absolutely killer sense of melody.

Favourites? I’m really taken by the bass-driven ‘Loose From The Noose’ and the snarl of ‘Low Lives In High Definition’, (‘All the rats get fat off the next big thing / While the sexless gimps all worship TV‘) and the Ziggy Stardust meets So-Cal punk of ‘The Kids Ain’t Alright’.  Better still, The Biters totally endear themselves to me by not bothering to put a single ballad on the LP – how cool is that? I know it directly contravenes the Hard Rock Testament: The Book of Coverdale, Ch.2 (5-8) which states, and I’m paraphrasing here, that it is mandatory for any band softer than Maiden to have at least one slowie on an album^^.

There really isn’t a single duff track in this set, turkey runners need not apply here, this is strictly eagles only turf.  Electric Blood is not going to change your life, but it will make it much more fun, which is more than enough for me right now.  So just be prepared to jettison all your irony and party like it’s 1975/2015 – what’s 40 years between friends?

602 Down.

*try me.  I’m bang up to speed on all manner of proto black metal ambient doom metal-core.

**Try it.  I quite like the bit where he tries to eat a girl’s hair.

^the things I do for you.

^^otherwise known as the Doctrine of St. Chixdiggit.

The silence is speaking
so why am I weeping
I guess I love it
I love it to death     (Long Way To Go)

No matter how great the music within, we 1980’s record buyers really got the shitty end of the stick from record companies.  Take, my beloved, Alice Cooper Love It To Death – a stone cold classic, scabrous chunk of ugly beauty and wondrousness.  When I forked over my hard-earned cash for it on Valentine’s Day 1989* all I got back was a vinyl LP that was almost thin enough to see through and the black and white pics on front and back covers.  Along with the track listing, that really was it, no credits, no lyrics, not even the band members’ names.  Piss poor.  I didn’t even know that it originally came in a gatefold until I looked it up this morning**.

My knowledge of Alice Cooper when I bought this was confined to the track ‘School’s Out’ and that they played hard rock and my parents had a book called West Coast Story in which there was an interview with Mr Alice Cooper, who I’m pretty sure was naked apart from a boa constrictor.  We were still 5 months off Trash back then.  I just wanted some hard rock kicks and thrills from Love It To Death, it coughed some up for me and then gave me a load more besides.

The two big hitters for me at the time were the most obvious tracks here ‘I’m Eighteen’ and ‘Ballad of Dwight Fry’.  I still think ‘I’m Eighteen’, which of course figures large in the Sex Pistols’ legend, is a brilliant song, capturing all the confusion, all the exuberance all the snot and spite of the age – it feels unselfconsciously epic too, which can only be good thing to be and there is something perfect about Mr Furnier’s raspy voice and the organ chord sounding at the very end.

Mommy, where’s daddy?
He’s been gone for so long.
Do you think he’ll ever come home?

And as for ‘…Dwight Fry’, as well as keeping the makers of bespoke strait jackets for touring rock stars employed for nigh on 45 years now, it is just a wonderfully conceived and executed slice of schlock horror.  I just get goose bumps when the guitars come in after that piano intro, it fits the 1537 definition of genius perfection in that I can’t think of anything you could either add to, or take away from it, to make it one iota better.  Plus I have always been a sucker for songs with distinct separate sections in them.  Needless to say, the singer gets to ham it up good style and that’s another reason I like him so much, his references and acting come straight from that wonderful classic Hollywood tradition*^ – all good clean family entertainment, even when it’s dealing with the descent into insanity and gibbering darkness.

And speaking of Rolf Harris, their cover of ‘Sun Arise’ that closes Love It To Death has always been a WTF moment for me, in fact I think I may have just listened to it all the way through for the first time.  Wobbleboard aside^, it’s a pretty true cover too, apparently they used it as a show opener for a while.  The mind boggles.  There’s nothing wildly wrong about it as a piece of music, but still …

I’m guilty of taping off my two fave tracks, along with the lascivious shimmy-shimmy of ‘Is It My Body’ – which if I were a 70s rocker I’d have sung directly to the laydeez and the square straight-baiting ‘Hallowed Be Thy Name’, which owes The Doors a big debt in terms of its rhythm and overall sound, raspy vocals aside:

Sluts and the hookers have taken your money
The queens are out dancing but now they’re not funny
‘Cause there goes one walkin’ away with your sonny
Cursing their lovers
Cursing the Bible

This time around though I find myself listening more and more to the other tracks here, some of which are real gems.  What really struck me is how much of a 1960’s album Love It To Death was, if you’ve ever listened to Mr Furnier’s radio show then you will know that he is always praising the Yardbirds and the Doors to the high heavens, you can really hear their influence on this album, overlaid by some 70s brashness.  Take the rave-up of ‘Long Way To Go’, written by Michael Bruce, which sounds like a hot-rodded slice of the British Invasion.  How snotty do you want?

Please don’t waste your energy on me my friend
cause we still got a long way to go
we’ll meet again some day
but right now just go away
’cause I still got a long way to go

I’ve also got a real jazz-on for ‘Black Juju’, which sounds not unlike a honky take on Santana jamming with Dr John, but with some extra amateur dramatics in the middle.  I always picture the band recording this one dressed up like Screaming Lord Sutch meeting Arthur Brown uptown.  Named after a stray dog, it is one in the context of the album, it borrows more than its organ part from Pink Floyd’s ‘Set The Controls For The Heart Of The Sun’, this is interstellar travel for the Quaalude generation.  It is a great showcase for the instrumental talents in the band too, they can never get enough credit as far as I’m concerned too, Glen Buxton and Michael Bruce never get their dues as a guitar tag team and the rhythm section of Dennis Dunaway and Michael Smith are so nimble and light on their feet, nothing here ever plods.

I had no idea that ‘Second Coming’ was written as a reaction to the, umm, reaction to ‘The Long and Winding Road’ when it was released,, it’s not a hugely arresting tune but is pure Bob Ezrin to the core, a mini symphony, tightly wound to a tee, guitars perfectly meshing, the drums to the fore – huge bonus points too for the seamless intro to ‘…Dwight Fry’, courtesy of Ezrin’s piano playing.  Strangely, whilst it is no way bad, the weakest track here is the opener ‘Caught In a Dream’ which comes over as a bit of a rocker by rote but I do love the line that I pinched for the title of this here post.

So there you have it the Alice Cooper’s first great album, and the start of an inspired winning streak of 4 LPs that ended with Billion Dollar Babies and moved rock’s tectonic plates for good.  Love It To Death is the sound of the band just stepping forward into that future, carving out some brilliance for themselves, having not quite thrown off the decade that shaped them yet – don’t worry, they’d get there 8 months later with Killer.

Inset photo taken by the, rather damn brilliant, Alice hawkins

PS – Surely this has to be the first review of this album that doesn’t end with some variation on, ‘I loved it to death’? I claim my prize!

*well, it is a day for treating someone you truly love. I’m very proud to say that romance is still going strong too.

**There’s a bigger question here, one mentioned often by Mike Ladano over at his place, Alice Cooper’s back catalogue really needs some proper TLC lavishing on it.  I can’t think of many bands of their stature and import who haven’t had a full-on rerelease campaign, with some archive material, sleevenotes, artwork etc.  Are there weird Byzantine contractual issues involved?

*^he acted with Mae west, became good friends with Groucho Marx and paid £27k to restore one of the ‘o’s in the Hollywood sign in memory of him, which is a story I love.

^which in lieu of burning it, is the correct position for one.

I fancied a slice of ’77 rock this afternoon and so I grabbed an album that I like, but rarely seem to play, UFO Lights Out.  Wow, this way better than I remembered it was, I love it when that happens because it so often doesn’t.  Tell you what, this is precisely the type of album that not only defines but justifies the existence of (horrid term alert!) ‘classic rock’, God bless Pete Way’s striped spandex pants!

In fact it wasn’t until I was playing air guitar along with Michael Schenker towards the end of ‘Too Hot To Handle’ that I realised why I don’t get this one out more often, its the cover.  I know, I know it’s by the revered Hipgnosis and whilst I’m as big a sucker for power stations as anyone, all those painted pipes, thrusting gauges and handles, it’s the, umm, human furniture that bothers me.

Enhanced, or as nature intended? you decide if the member (Latin; Moggus Cockus) has had work done.

I’m really not sure why the cover wants to put you at crotch level with Phil Mogg in his handily opened overalls, but it does – Richard Manning even notes on his excellent website that he ‘was also asked to enhance the member of the Band member!’, although he coyly refrains from telling us whether he did extend the mini-Mogg at all.  Personally, had I been UFO’s singer I’d have asked him to crop out my crab ladder.  Added to that there is the somewhat androgynous young figure of Michael Schenker shrugging out of his own overalls in the background, combining the slight grace of a classical nude with the self-assurance of a figure by Manet, the light glistening off his shoulders, his mane of feathery hair falling across the sensitive nape of his neck … Arggh! Stop it! Stop it!

Okay so my own sexual confusion aside, my other petty gripe with the LP cover is the decision to print the words in red, making them almost impossible to read.  THAT’S THE WHOLE POINT OF THE WRITTEN WORD!!!

(deep breath)

There’s some music in here too, apparently.  Some damn good, verging on brilliant, music.  Everyone likes a bit of hard rockin’, hard drinkin’, hard screwin’ braggadocio and opener ‘Too Hot To Handle’ ladles it out by the gallon.  What a great band UFO were at this point, with the exception of Schenker, none were virtuoso players but everything here is played bright, tight and right; the point being that UFO ended up being far more than the sum of their parts*, which to my mind is the whole point of a band – give me that over any supergroup, any day.  I also love Mogg’s voice, it strikes just the right, manly notes – not too polished, not pretty.  Mind you I find his lyrics on this one a bit of a mystery, what could he possibly mean?

Sha la la la, roll you over
Turn you around and do it again
Sha la la la, keep on coming
Do it once but never the same

If I have one slight musical gripe with Lights Out it is with Ron Nevison’s production, although it is clarity personified, it occasionally doesn’t hit as heavily as it could do.  Take ‘Just Another Suicide’, which is my joint least favourite track, to my ears it has too big a flavouring of late period Who about it**, but even so the track doesn’t cut and resonate quite the way it should, although I never skip it because of the excellent Dave Gilmour-esque guitar solo that lights up the whole track.  I really like the big ballad ‘Try Me’ it’s a lush, grandiose thing featuring a full string arrangement and some great playing by keyboard dude Paul Raymond and if the computer scientists who program Rod Stewart these days had any taste this is precisely the sort of thing he should be singing.

Your rock receptors would have to have atrophied and fallen off for you not to bob your head up and down to the thrust of ‘Lights Out’ and ‘Electric Phase’, what I particularly dig here is the fact that they’re not quite as straight ahead as they seem, the former is driven almost entirely by bass and keys at first and the latter by some arty guitar FX.  These are proper foot-on-the-monitors tunes to give it absolutely loads to.  But just when you’re thinking that Lights Out is a very good album, it goes and gets real classic on our collective asses.

I shouldn’t have to much about with the contrast and colour levels in order to read the blooming credits!

Where to start with ‘Love To Love’? well not with the lyrics that’s for sure.  If you read them out of their context there’s almost nothing there, but couple them with some awesomely emotive and thrusting playing then they suddenly make perfect sense.  The string sections work within the song, emphasising certain passages but never overwhelming the song as a whole, or Mogg’s voice in particular and, yet again, the keyboards are excellent.  There’s a real shot of Queen about this track and I don’t mean just in the opening gong either^, it’s in the sweep and drama of the piece as a whole, but Freddie and the boys never had the barroom edge that UFO could bring to the party, which properly envenoms the heavier passages here.  I swear you can hear a disturbance in the air before the guitar solo kicks in, it is simply that massive; spiralling upwards and outwards he tears at the strings like a man fighting for his life, then wallop! 40 seconds later it’s done.  Perfect.

Being an 80’s rocker I had always thought of Michael Schenker as a wildly gurning, widdly-widdly merchant and purveyor of the fairly obvious, Lights Out shows me he wasn’t always thus and I’ve had to re-evaluate.  I was absolutely knocked out by the tone and delivery of his guitaring here and I am always impressed by any hotshot guitarist who doesn’t play too many notes, knowing how to leave some space in the songs.

So classic rock it is then, loud and clear.  Lights Out is pretty much a perfectly judged amalgam of light and shade, rough and smooth with some added stripey spandex and a cover I find confusingly homoerotic^*.  Super.

608 Down.

PS – I have completely ignored their cover of ‘Alone Again Or’, it’s not awful, or offensive, just totally pointless.

*reader can insert their own joke about the size of Phil Mogg’s part here.

**I don’t like them. Sorry, I know you probably do.

^which is a dead ringer for ‘Teo Torriatte’.

^*Look, it’s Monday night, this is no time to be challenging my core beliefs and sense of sexual self.  That’s what I set Thursday nights aside for.  True story.

Welcome folks, welcome to the third annual 1537 awards.  These awards are often eagerly anticipated by the artists, industry and press alike and seen as a good indication of the Grammy and Oscar awards later in the year*.  After the lavish displays and pre-award entertainments of the previous few years I thought I’d tone things down a bit for our new age of austerity and sombrenecessityness, so it’s just me sat here in last year’s tuxedo, eating peanut butter on toast, drinking lemonade and solemnly typing this, like I mean it (man).

The Lemmy Memorial Award For the Rudest LP Cover Bought This Year:

Again, another disappointing year for nudity, suggestiveness and outright rudery being depicted on record covers.  The second-best I could manage were a pair of amusingly fake ones on the cover of The eagles of Death Metal Zipper Down, but luckily 2015 was the year I found 1994’s Blood Orgy Of The Leather Girls, in all its’ deviant glory.  The appeal of the LP cover was described, by no less an authority than, umm, me as ‘four be-weaponed chicks standing atop the body of a supine dude on the cover, the lady on the left with the clear plastic pasties and Hitler moustache being a particular draw for me’.  I feel the great man himself would approve.

The Philthy Animal Taylor Award For The Best Looking & Put Together LP Bought in 2015:

Some great LPs of thisteryear and yesteryear were purchased, in strict order we have:

Pond Man It Feels Like Space Again.  I was hipped to this by my Antipodean chum Mr V. Connection.  I loved its primo psychedelic riffing on the Big Brother & The Holding Company cover and I have always had a thing for die-cut covers.  Oh, the music is pretty fab too!

But the winner is … (drum roll please) … Ian Gillan Band Clear Air Turbulence, because of the rather far out picture of a spaceship by, the immortal, Chris Foss.  I was so pleased to make this find in my dad’s record shop, even if the music is pretty dodgy in places.

But now for the main event.  The Primo Evento.  Numero Uno Eventissimo.  Dos Eventsos Primososs.  The 1537 Top 58 9 LP’s of 2015.

1.  The Biters Electric Blood.  I’ve been waiting for a good commercial rock LP to come along and seduce me for years now; Electric Blood spotted me across the bar, winked at me, bought me a beer and before I knew it, had made a man of me outside in the car park, before ignoring all my calls afterwards.  Shades of pop punk, glam Bowie, Thin Lizzy and even some Cheap Trick, all stirred up to make a really fizzy rocktail.  I’ve had more fun with this album this year than any other new one and every single time I’ve played it Mrs 1537** has asked me what it was.  If you like life, cheap thrills and fun buy this record, if you don’t then I don’t want to be your friend, but buy this LP anyway.

2.  Locrian Infinite Dissolution.  A complete impulse buy late at night on the Relapse Records website, on silver vinyl (natch).  WOW!! A proto-ambient-death metal post-rock extravaganza, just like grandma used to bake.  Like the cover art suggests, glacial and cold are the words I’d use to describe this, razor cold.  Infinite Dissolution was a precise, exacting, calculated assault on your senses and simply does not sound like anything I’d ever heard before.  The perfect album to soundtrack a nuclear winter, or maybe just a strontium spring.

3.  Bad Guys Bad Guynaecology.  Man, I’ve been waiting for this album for years without knowing it.  It’s ferocious, funny, heavy, soulful and damned clever, all they’re lacking is a talkie bit in the middle of one of their tunes and I could die contented.  Bad Guynaecology makes me happy and let’s me know that I’m not out here alone – well worth the outlay, if you ask me.  The fact they were kind enough to give me an interview and an amusing one at that, only makes loving this record even better.  But don’t take my word for it, Zack likes ’em too!

4.  Ufomammut Ecate.  Inaugural winners of the 1537 Best LP of 2012 with Oro: Opus Primum, the Mamms^ came back this year with an album that was just MORE.  More spacey, more atmospheric, more heavier (?!), more metallic, more Italian-space-stoner-doom.  You want quiet bits vs. loud bits? you want a desperate (space) plea for the intervention of Goddess in mortal affairs? you want great cover art by Malleus? you just need a blissful crushing? then listen on.

5.  Songhoy Blues Music In Exile.  I know, I know, there’s a Malian LP in here every year, but maybe I’m just an easy mark, I just can’t help myself when I’m faced with bands who are just clearly so in love with the sound of the guitar; a band who are fighting back despair with joy and life-affirming melody; a band who really do have a worthwhile story to tell us.  I defy anyone with a soul, half a soul even, not to grin and shuffle about a bit listening to the track ‘Soubour’.  This is exactly why that bloke invented electricity, you know the one.

6.  Ecstatic Vision Sonic Praise.  Another silver vinyl Relapse Records 25th anniversary release, this is the sound of an indeterminate number of freaks flying their freak flags high and free; very high and very free in fact.  A great tip-off from Mr Hubner, this LP is precisely what the world has needed since Lemmy left Hawkwind, a groovy, strung-out electric coda that sounds eerily like the effects of Martian drugs on the human nervous system.  Whether you’re cruising the galaxy, flashing through uninhabited systems at light speed, or merely orbiting your parent’s basement approaching terminal velocity then, my little stoner, this is right up your third eye.

7.  White Hills Walks For Motorists.  This was released so long ago, it could almost be 2014, or at least that would be the case if this beauty didn’t sound so much like 2015 to me.  The best gig I went to all year showcased this for me perfectly.  White Hills went for an external producer for the first time and added a large quotient of bass power to their trademark space rock, the likes of ‘Automated City’ slunk along rather seductively, meshing perfectly with the epic widescreen inter-galactic ballyhoo of ‘Lead the Way’.  Great album, very nice people too.

8.  Mbongwana Star From Kinshasa.  Probably the most acclaimed LP on this list, this band from the Democratic Republic of Congo, teamed with an Irish DJ have produced a bunch of sounds almost like no other I have heard in all my years of WOMAD-ing.  To pinch a line from a review I read, it can be a disorientating experience, like plunging yourself straight from a plane into an African marketplace.  There is a wonderful, organic flow and feel about From Kinshasa a bit akin to letting yourself relax into a river current.  The guest spot from 1537-faves Konono No.1 is also very welcome.  I wouldn’t be at all surprised if I was still playing this LP and discovering new corners to it in another 10 years^^.

9.  Night Flights Vol.1.  Okay, so this came out in December 2014 and I am bending the rules a bit here, but then again I am omniscient.  An expansive, gorgeous (mostly) analogue synth voyage between the stars by the man from Carlton Melton, it sounds like it’s cover looks and that really is no bad thing; especially on yellow vinyl.  This has been a record I’ve listened to all year-long.

So those are the releases I’ve spent the most time with and those which have just given me the most fun this year by far.  A couple of new old friends in there along with a whole bunch of new bands for me to watch out for, nostalgia wasn’t really my thing this year at all^* .  2015 was definitely the year that the vinyl finally ate my brain, which on balance was a good thing.

The committee’s deliberations were lengthy

Best of the old stuff I bought was Blue Öyster Cult Secret Treaties – man why has no-one ever told me how good they were? I thought you were supposed to be my friends! This is genuinely one of the best LPs I’ve bought in years, I sang the whole of ‘Career of Evil’ in the shower this morning.  The other real find for me was a reissue of Le Tigre from 1999, their strident, bouncing blast of a debut album, feminism has never sounded so groovy.

But that’s enough nauseating self-indulgence from me, normal service will be resumed after the commercial break.

620 Down (Still)

*in that I have a proud 100% record of not anticipating any of them, ever; particularly not the Oscars.

**the exacting immortal high Empress of Rock.

^as we fans call ’em.  Well, me and my mate Steve anyway.

^^but don’t take my word for it:

^*I’m afraid I didn’t even rate the new Star Wars movie very highly, although I am already quite fond of BB-8

‘Of course, Girlschool!’, went my thought process tonight.  When, after the recent sad news I didn’t fancy listening to any more Motörhead for a while and I fancied some rock kicks, I reached for Girlschool Hit And Run, their hand grenade from 1981.  Always associated with that band by dint of sharing bills, beds and bands, for their brilliant ‘Please Don’t Touch’ single released as Motörheadgirl*, they were much more than the ‘Motörhead with tits’, label that they got stuck with.

You see why within seconds of the needle hitting the beautiful red vinyl and ‘C’mon Let’s Go’ hitting your woofers and tweeters.  A cocky squall of guitar noise is overtaken by some frantic drumming and every muscle, every note is straining forwards, you don’t need the lyrics to tell you that – everything is momentum and flash.  It really is a great opener and there’s a neat touch of glam rock about it too**.  Then things turn a little slinky for ‘The Hunter’, with its’ great slow-burn guitar solo and before you know it, you’ve hurtled through the rest of Side A bumping up against their cover of ‘Tush’, which for me is the only real misstep on Hit And Run.

The band really fire on all cylinders here, the guitars of Kim McAuliffe and Kelly Johnson really combining and hitting out hard, the rhythm section of Enid Williams and Denise Dufort keeping it revved up.  Vic Maile, a bit of a hit or miss producer in my experience, really gets it right here keeping things just raw enough and just smooth enough to hit the bull’s-eye.

Girlschool light up their rock with a nice shot of punk energy and a great sense of melody, just check out my snotty fave on the LP, ‘Yeah Right’ – basically, just imagine if Runaways^ were as good as I always wanted them to be then double it, then you’re almost scoring the same on the Righteous-o-meter.  Cue this one and the downright mean ‘Watch Your Step’ up and I’m starting to get all tingly inside, 1537-faves The Donnas owe Girlschool a fuck of a lot.  You want some classy structure and melody? just pick out Hit And Run‘s title track, or ‘The Hunter’.  Great playing, all the rock any sane person would need, really good song writing chops, what went wrong? sadly, I think it was, mostly, chromosomal^^.

Lovely, lovely red vinyl.

Girlschool evolved out of covers band Painted Lady long before they made their play for stardom, there’s a good interview I saw somewhere where they were asked why they didn’t write more girlie songs and, to their credit rather than just shouting ‘For fuck’s sake!’, they answer that they spent their days gigging on the pub circuit covering Hendrix and Deep Purple tracks and they just liked and wanted to write good rock songs.  The very fact that someone asked them that shows the problems they had, they were really good musicians, writers and performers but their insistence on being resolutely normal and honest, rather than playing the sex angle for all its’ worth pretty much hamstrung them in terms of their time.  If you look back at old articles on them there really is a sense that they were regarded as a strange novelty item, the metal equivalent of a skateboarding duck; in terms of sexual geography, the early 80’s were a very different world.

Hit And Run was a Top 5 LP in Britain.  Statistically though, if you want a full-on metal career, you need all the fan boys you can get, idiots like me who’d buy every LP, T-shirt and 4 versions of every single you release and support the band like a football team; it’s not an exclusively male phenomenon, just almost so.  My theory is that, certainly back then, maybe still, an all-girl band weren’t going to get this, without a bit of overly obvious pandering to our reproductive urges anyway.  Sure punk was making some inroads here but, for all our vaunted outlaw credentials, rock is an inherently conservative metier.

Some chicks, apparently in a band, or something

Girlschool were brilliant, at least for a few hard years and you can tap straight into that through this LP, a good, sweaty, honest heavy album, lacking nothing – I can’t recommend it enough.  My uncle Alastair saw Girlschool on the tour for Hit And Run and tells me they were brilliant, played a blinding set, dealt with a couple of bellowing morons in the crowd easily and ten minutes after the show, they were signing things and drinking with their fans downstairs.  That’s proper rock – Yeah, right!

621 Down.

PS: Here’s a last word from Lemmy, I found an interview in old copy of Mojo from 2011 I picked out of my attic at random today on the late Kelly Johnson,

‘Kelly Johnson from Girlschool – she died young as well, which was a terrible, terrible shame.  I had a small affair with Kelly, she was a good-looking girl and a great guitarist.  People used to say, ‘She’s all right for a girl’, and I’d be like, ‘She’s better than you motherfucker!’.  On a good night Kelly played like a young Jeff Beck’. 

*their cover of ‘Bomber’ rocks harder than the original, with a better guitar solo too.

**as in Slade/Sweet I mean, none of your Hollywood nonsense here!

^ironically as Kelly Johnson later moved to LA to live with Runaways bassist Vicki Blue.

^^albeit aided and abetted by a few dubious career decisions here and there; most notably smoothing their sound and image to appeal to a notional US audience, think Saxon Innocence Is No Excuse but with even silkier leggings.

‘Cleveland Ohio! In this corner, that corner and that corner weighing in at 32,000 pounds will you welcome the next heavyweight champion of the world … Starz!’

They don’t do live album introductions like that anymore, still that’s the way they rocked it back in Cleveland on 14 August 1977.  I love it, things were much more fun before they invented irony – the band play full tilt, the singer shrieks and whoops and says dumb-ass things like ‘Are you ready to do it with us tonight Cleveland?‘ and the crowd scream like someone just unwrapped a Farah Fawcett.  Times were simpler back then, okay so massive nuclear annihilation was just a touch away, but who cared? if one thing was certain and sure it was that the dope was getting stronger and that Starz would shortly take their rightful place in the pantheon of US hard rock gods, for like all eternity and shit.

In the very late 80’s I became a massive fan of a band that almost no-one else had heard of* Starz.  Like most of the best inanimate things in my life to date Kerrang! introduced me to them via their little series of booklets of 100 Best Rock LPs ever, in 1988**.  Even if I hadn’t heard of a lot of the music I’d heard of most of the artists and they formed a buyers guide for me and my friends for years afterwards, but there was an intriguing couple of mentions for a band with a great logo who were a mystery to me, Starz.  Long story short, I found out more and gradually became their biggest fan in rural West Wales^.

That’s me, that was

I bought up a few of their LPs and due to an upswing in interest, that I take complete credit for, obviously, Roadracer Records announced that they were going to bring out a 1970’s double live LP called Live In Action.  This was actually an amalgamation of two promo live LPs, Cleveland from 1977 and Louisville, Kentucky from 1978 – the latter being fairly legendary amongst long-haired record collecting nut jobs of a certain age.  I snapped it up in December 1989 and it totally blows away any of the Starz studio albums I have.

NB: Knees never closer than 3 feet apart during whole performance. Do not try unless you are a trained rock warrior.

First thing to say about Live In Action is that given the age of the recordings they are perfect, crystal clear and loud, with just enough mistakes on there to show that these are live recordings and not a studio concoction using the applause from another LP.  Starz always had some great songs, but what really comes over here is the performance – even the songs I think are a bit formulaic like ‘She’ are totally elevated through the energy and electricity on show.  Live In Action manages to do what most live rock LPs don’t for me, it puts you right in the pit at the front shaking what you got in time to the drums, punching the air and screaming along to all the guitar solos.

I promise you I won’t plagiarise myself and everyone else who has ever written about Starz and bang on about the comparisons between their career and KISS, but bloody hell! I’m not much of a fan of Gene and the boys^^ but, cover aside, this blows Alive out of the water, for me.  Just check out the breadth of it (baby!), the moody, stately ‘Johnny All Alone’, the slasher movie tricks and kicks of ‘Subway Terror’ which Michael Lee Smith sings like he was mid-jerk and all the fun songs about banging hot babes in between.  Where I think Live In Action scores really highly again is when it, fires up the Epictron, leaps into the Epicmobile and prepares to Journey To the Centre of the Epic.

The first stage of EPIC begins with them firing up the mighty ‘Coliseum Rock’, which works as a showcase for Richie Ranno and Brendan Harkin to show off some serious harmonising guitar chops a la Queen’s ‘Now I’m Here’.  It works wonderfully except for reasons best known to themselves they include it as a medley with a much inferior track called ‘Waiting On You’.  But don’t worry gentle reader, it only gets more epic from here. Seriously, just try this big boy out for size:

The second stage of EPIC features what I can quite honestly call, after some consideration, my favourite song ever about turning your girlfriend’s life support machine off ‘Pull The Plug’.  Did I mention that I love this bunch of sickos?  I’ve quoted the lyrics in all their tabloid glory in another post so I’ll restrain myself here, unlike the band.  Ranno is all over this track again, wailing away on his stringy guitary electric thing like a man possessed^*.  Why did this man not get his image carved onto the side of Mount Rushmore? he is a fabulous guitarist.  This track also works as a great showcase for the rhythm section of Peter Sweval and one of the best named drummers in rock, Joe X Dube.

The final stage of EPIC smacks us straight through into rock nirvana, ‘Boys In Action’.  Everyone and everything screams during this track.  If you like 70’s hard rock then you’ll just fall to your knees and worship the riff.  It is a good job that sexism hadn’t been invented in March 1978, as it contains the most astonishing bit of sexual bragging I can think of in a 70’s rock track (ladies please look away now and go and do some knitting, or whatever else you chicks do) as Mr Smith claims that ‘when we cum it tastes just like a milkshake’, it shocks me every time.  The best bit of all is when the song crash lands near the end and Smith sings, sounding like a broken man, ‘if you want action … that’s … what … you’re … gonna … get’, before a solo hits that’s so fast and sharp it should require a safety guard.

I have gone on record before as not being much of a one for live albums, you usually just get the same crap played a bit faster and some bonus noodling around thrown in, or the sneaky buggers pay Tom Allom or Tony Visconti to touch it all up, but this is one I really like, Live In Action isn’t just a great live LP, it’s a great LP that just happens to be live.

‘Cleveland Ohio! In this corner, that corner and that corner weighing in at 32,000 pounds will you welcome the next heavyweight champion of the world … Starz!’

630 Down.

PS: For the sake of maintaining maximum positivity overdrive I have ignored the awful ‘Greatest Riffs Of All Time’ medley, nobody needed them to do that.

PPS: Here’s the Kerrang! review, from The Mighty Scrapbooks of Rock:

Live In Action is much better quality than this, which is a bit lo-fi to my ears.

*long-haired skinny little smart-ass that I was, that was part of the appeal.

**best guess.

^a title that was retired when I left to seek fame, fortune and wanton, voluptuous chicks elsewhere; fame and fortune eluded me, sadly.

^^apart from that one about putting the X in Sex … can’t remember the title, exactly – I rate that one up there with ‘Let It Be’, ‘Grace’ and ‘Redemption Song’.

^*I hope I’m not getting too technical for all you non-metal heads out there.

I wonder whether vinyl is/will be the last bastion of ‘the grower’, LPs that don’t necessarily make you leap out of your chair, cast aside your crutches and duck-walk down  the main street playing air guitar at the first listen.  Why would you stream something you don’t like more than once? I’ve caught myself just flicking through MP3s judging tracks, or even whole artists, on 15 second bursts, but because LPs are so Goddamned expensive you make more of an investment in them and the cover art is that much bigger and brighter, so I think you’re more inclined to give them a second, third, fourth go.  It’s how I’ve found many of my favourite albums, It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold us Back, Kid A and The Dreaming included.

I recently had a similar experience with Earthless Rhythms From A Cosmic Sky.  I was bullied into investigating this band by a certain Mr J.Hubner73* and the fact that they were on Tee Pee records, did them no harm at all in my eyes and neither did the fact that their drummer, the brilliant Octopus-like, Mario Rubalcaba was a fave of mine from Off! and Rocket From the Crypt.  Add in the ace gatefold psychedelic art of the LP and the fact it was pressed on sexy red vinyl and I was in.

Behold, perfection shall arise in the East

I bought it, ogled it for a bit and played it a few times without it ever really biting.  Sure the playing was absolutely top-notch, as you’d expect from three dudes who dare to put out an instrumental rock LP and I like side-long tracks as much as the next stoner**, but … it never did quite grab me by the short and curlies.  All until the last few days actually, every time I’ve played this recently it has really got through to my soft white underbelly.

First up a misconception: that three gnarly dudes, some wild guitarage and a swirly, smoky space cover = stoner rock.  Have a good listen to either track (side?) on Rhythms From A Cosmic Sky will soon put the lie to this.  First track ‘Godspeed’, handily split for us into 5 separate movements, starts with all the swirly feedback and vibes you could want and then as guitarist Isaiah Mitchell steps up to the plate the track just explodes into explosively fast riffage,  in fact there are bits of this track that put me in mind of Iron Maiden circa Piece Of Mind, it is that heavy.    This isn’t the languid, doomy affair that I’d associate with stoner rock at all – in an interview Rubalcaba calls it coffee rock, the guys in the band being mucho caffeinated, rather than mucho stoneo in the making of it.  It’s a good description, you can hear a certain, kinetic, frenetic quality throughout this LP.  We may be heading for nirvana via expansive instrumental enlightenment, but Earthless are taking the express elevator there, thank you.

Let’s face it Rhythms From A Cosmic Sky is as out-there as you could possibly wish for.  I hear more of the likes of Amon Düül II and the, totally MF cosmic, Acid Mothers Temple, than the usual Black Sabbath tropes.  Listen to ‘Sonic Prayer’ and you really could be listening to a heavier Cream, or even occasionally the Jimi Hendrix Experience in a really bad mood^.  I would also like it recorded here, for the record, about the record that Mike Eginton is a really amazing bassist too.  That three musicians can get such a great, fat, warm sound without, to my ears at least, much/any studio trickery is a thing of wonder for me, that they rock so hard doing it provokes foaming at the mouth in me.

So if you know what’s good for you, light up the candles and bless the room, take a good swig of Java and hit the volume, I guarantee you won’t fall asleep to the sound of Oeufless.

632 Down.

*he threatened my livelihood, the lives of my cats and to call me really nasty names unless I bought it.  I’m very susceptible to name-calling, so I bought it.

**Blown Away Drifting Way Out Between Suns, from 2014 being a particular recent favourite of mine, which I’ll get around to writing about one day.

^I sort of borrowed those comparisons from that Hubner fella, but it’s okay I doubt he’ll notice.

I’ve not been to Australia yet but I know exactly what it’s like.  It’s a mostly flat radioactive wilderness girded by primitive settlements, tribes almost, of mutants and scavengers ruled over by various fearsome warlords and chieftains who enforce their tyrannical rule on their enslaved subjects through unthinking, unceasing barbarity and brutality, charging around in their souped-up cars*.  In the evenings these children of the apocalypse gather together in rudimentary drinking establishments to quaff fermented mental juice, fight recreationally and listen to diamond-hard boogie.  Oh and there are koalas in Australia, I like them, they’re cute.

Australians, yesterday

Neither cute, nor koalas, The Angels From Angel City burst into my consciousness when I guy I knew called Wilf at university copied ‘a fucking great tape’ for me with Manitoba’s Wild Kingdom on one side and Beyond Salvation by this Aussie band I’d never heard of on the other.  It knocked me out.  The opening track ‘Dogs Are Talking’ was the most exciting hard rock boogie thing I’d heard in years and it became the first LP I bought in 1991**, despite the cover being a bit pants.  I never heard of the band again.

Well that is until I read an obituary of the lead singer Doc Neeson in 2014 and I found out that he had fronted a band called the Angels who were an Aussie hard rock institution.  Supporting AC/DC*^ back in ’75-76 Bon and Malcolm apparently recommended them to the indomitable duo of Vanda and Young who promptly signed them up to Albert productions and lent them their production skills; cue a serious cavalcade of punky, hard rock and new wave treats over a number of years.  Come 1989, come GNR and Great White manager Alan Niven and a deal with Chrysalis Records, the Angels were poised to do big things and they released Beyond Salvation.

In the grand tradition of Aussie hard rock LPs the overseas version of the album was completely different to the domestic release, the band adopted the Angels From Angel City moniker to avoid confusion with/litigation from that lot from the USA that Punky Meadows used to front.  The Aussie version was, very sensibly, an all-new affair but the international version featured a handful of newies and re-recordings of a bunch of greatest hits that may not have made it overseas first time around.

It was ‘Dogs Are Talking’ that hooked me at first listen and it is still a great slice of rock today, macho sexy nonsense aside.  I found myself dancing to it whilst doing the ironing feasting with my conquered enemy’s concubines this morning.  It’s just as much of a blast for me now as it was 25 years ago.  Team it up with the next two tracks ‘Rhythm Rude Girl’ and ‘Let The Night Roll On’ and I’m well on the road to Valhalla.  The former is a big, slow raunchy hairball of a track about just the type of infernally pneumatic exotic dancer that would scare me, umm, rigid in real life and the latter is pretty darned special.  ‘Let The Night Roll On’ is a straight-ahead head-banging boogie which sounds a bit like the Georgia Satellites in a really bad temper and there’s a gratifying bit of chaos and damnation about Doc Neeson’s vocals on this one too.  ‘City Out of Control’ brings the side of originals to a close and it’s a slinky, menacing beast of a track, with some rather good guitaring on it courtesy of Rick Brewster and Bob Spencer.

I had no idea until yesterday that one of the tracks on Beyond Salvation pretty much held the key to the whole of the Angels’ career, it wasn’t even a track I rated particularly.  The track, ‘Am I Ever Gonna See Your Face Again’, written after a friend of a friend died has rather good, sensitive lyrics about loss and longing,

Went down to Saint Tropez
Where Renoir paints the walls
Described you clearly
But the sky began to fall

Am I ever gonna see your face again?
Am I ever gonna see your face again?

So far, so good.  That is until Aussie audiences started shouting ‘No way, get fucked, fuck off!’, every time in answer to the question.  It surprised the band at first and then they embraced it and it became their signature thang live^.  I really like that story because it’s the tale of the audience grabbing a song from the artist and making it theirs.  Plus it appeals to my childish joy at totally gratuitous swearing.

The second side of Beyond Salvation is the weaker one, having done a bit of research I find the originals are a bit rawer and leaner every time.  Still though, nothing here is bad and I can picture it as just the sort of hard-rocking hard-drinking music I’d want to soundtrack a four-day bender to after I’d come off a three-week shift at the bauxite mine and I was looking to blow a fuse or two.

That the Angels From Angel City never did go on to bigger things internationally with Beyond Salvation is definitely no reflection on their songs or talent, it’s probably more of a reflection on their age, the slightly overblown band name and the fact that Chrysalis always seemed to be rubbish at pushing hard rock bands properly.  I’ve not been to Australia yet but I know exactly what it’s like….

634 Down.

spotify:album:7IyGOTlimniMEESAFeEonC

*or was that just Mad Max: Fury Road? (which I watched today).

**just chucked that in there for future biographers of mine.

*^apparently, some kind of local band from over there, down under.

^but don’t take my word for it:

Re. audience response to the Angels singing ‘Am I Ever Gonna See Your Face Again?‘, which was to belt out ‘No Way, Get Fucked, Fuck Off’, I was musing* along with Mr Beatthemtodeathwiththeirownshoes about other songs with question marks in their titles that would benefit from such a chant.

The really obvious ones for me are:

• Do Ya Think I’m Sexy?
• Are You Lonesome Tonight?
• Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow?

Does anyone else want to play?**

634 Down (still)

*I’m really good at musing, possibly black belt level.

**two gold stars for anyone answering that with ‘No way, get fucked, fuck off’.

Always distrust men who bang on about how manly they are all the time.  Well, apart from me, obviously.  I am really manly.  Totally manly.  Do-my-own-stitches-whilst-wearing-a-loincloth manly, in fact.  You want a bear wrassling? call me.  You want a guy who can drink moonshine for 9 hours straight before working a shift down at the steel mill? over here!  It’s a good job for a sizable portion of the women of the world that I don’t consider kissing and telling manly.  Oh yeah.

Steely-eyed hunk of beef that I am, the envy of men and the idol of women, I had been lulled into thinking that I was the pinnacle of all manlinessosity but I was humbled in November 2014 when I liberated three Blackfoot LPs amidst the spoils of a successful raid on a neighbouring tribe of barbarians, to keep my copy of Marauder company.  I thought I was a man, but I was nothing but a stripling boy.  Here were men.  Men who worked hard*, played hard and sang it like they meant it, smashing any doubters over head with handy implements and instruments until they gave in and cravenly admitted the band’s utter primo manliness.

Manly me

Tomcattin’ has become a firm favourite of mine in a certain mood**, it doesn’t quite have the songs and subtleties of Strikes, or Marauder, but there really is something awe-inspiring about just how effective a blunt instrument can be if wielded right.

Before anyone invented thrash and doom (properly) Blackfoot were always the heaviest of the southern rock contenders, there was more metal in their heavy and I also liked the way that they avoided the temptation to use every track to cheer lead for the south.  True to form Tomcattin’ explodes right of the gate with ‘Warped’, it’s a bludgeoning rocker that has plenty of attack, possibly at the expense of tune, but hey no-one tells Rick ‘Rattlesnake’ Medlocke what to do!  Then the quality immediately cranks up when the mean, strutting, slinky riff of ‘On The Run’ slithers out of the speakers – this is just such a great hunk of sweaty rock, with a cool compressed backing vocal too – real chest-beating perfection.  The kind of music that makes you feel like you’re wearing nothing except a pair of backless chaps, work boots and a bandolier … or is that just me again? oops.

A couple of more average tunes boogie on by before ‘Gimme Gimme Gimme’ ignites things again.  I would stress that this is, sadly, not an ABBA cover – Blackfoot do not require, desire, or (have reason to) acquire a man after midnight.  True story.  Again, this is a great two-fisted party starter.  A song of the honest working man’s frustration at everything holding him back*^ (‘Gimme, Gimme, Gimme that’s all I ever hear / Ain’t got no money to buy me a beer’) which, as a suit-wearing desk jockey I can completely relate to.

Tomcattin’ rises to new heights of masculinity with the track ‘In The Night’  which begins with Rick Medlocke making a low, keening moan which one can only assume is his, undoubtedly successful, mating call; there are whole bands’ discographies, heck even whole genres that never get as unaffectedly manly as this.  Witness:

Whoa milk and honey
She can have some other lovin’ too
Well I singe the sheets to a rock’n’ roll beat
Oh that turn a rock star blue

I suspect that this is one of them sex songs that I’ve read about.  It’s also quite excellent, some wonderful slow-burning guitar, choppy rhythms and harmonica^, it has the feel of prime Bad Company, which is never a bad thing.

Tomcattin’ closes with the hobo yarn of ‘Spendin’ Cabbage’ and the rural metaphor-fest of ‘Fox Chase’ and all-in-all it is a good LP, rising to excellent on occasion, but somehow as a set it definitely rises to become more than the sum of its’ (manly) parts.  Hell, things were good and simple way back in 1980.

You are now 23.27% more manly than when you began reading this post.

635 Down.

Post Post Rant: This bloody LP cover appears to have been fashioned out of pure Shinium, the shiniest element in the universe! I’ve done my best people, I really have!

PS: Thanks to HMO, without his generosity I wouldn’t own this beast of an LP.

PPS – Is it just me or is Spotify not embedding properly at the moment for some reason?

spotify:track:7BZbBSpRwQ8LnyEHJQ3zpD

*probably using pick axes and other manly accoutrements.

**Just another manly Monday …

*^his woman and a businessman, both = bad news.

^provided by Shorty Medlocke, Rick’s grandpappy and frequent Blackfoot collaborator.

I popped out for a sandwich yesterday lunchtime* and accidentally ended up, after a 15 minute brisk walk, in a record shop.  Then I had one of those nasty blackouts that I’m prone to and the next thing I knew, wallop! four new LPs.  Why me Lord? Why me?! Why must I be the one to suffer so?!

Four absolute crackers they are too, three of which I’ve wanted for a long time and one impulse buy.

Black Sabbath Headless Cross.  I’ve wanted this one since I read a review of it when it was released in 1989; springing into action a mere 27 years later, here it is.  I’ve seen folks trying to charge silly money for this LP in the last year, or so, but this was just the right price.  First listen is very favourable too.

Black Sabbath Featuring Tony Iomni Seventh Star.  I know this is supposed to be, mostly, pants but it was cheap, I’m a sucker for Glenn Hughes AND the slightly lost and scared looking Tony on the LP cover.  I’ve only played two tracks so far, ‘Danger Zone’ was good.

Cheer up Tone, it might never happen!

The The Infected.  I’ve wanted this LP since my school friend played it to me in ’86.  This is a mint copy with a great big poster that I can now put up over the fireplace at home.  Bizarre fact that I didn’t know before yesterday, the piano player on ‘Heartland’ (wonderful track by the way)? none other than future Marillion vocalist, Steve Hogarth!

Hawkwind Quark Strangeness And Charm.  Again I’ve just been waiting for a decently priced copy to fall into my clutches for a good few years now.  What a great album this is.  A real radical departure from their signature sound.  I stayed up to 1am last night listening to this.

Okay, okay so a sandwich would have been a lot cheaper, but it would have been spiritually less nutritious.  Three LPs finally crossed off the long mental list I lug about with me everywhere I go and that I mentally scroll through every time I hit a record shop and go straight to the ‘B’ section to compose myself.

So I’m off to put on my fringed leather jacket, stand in the desert and look slightly despondent.

You’ve got a friend in me (da da da da daa)

638 Down (still)

*braving temperatures of 5 above freezing and the very real possibility of gentle rainfall – now that’s extreme weather, Canadians!

Sometimes our musical stars can seem just like us, normal Joes and Janes who got blessed with a bit of talent, fortified it with a healthy dose of persistence and got lucky too; I like that, it tweaks my sense of democracy.  Other times though, some artists’ work just seems to have descended upon us from a higher plane of perfection, okay so it may have been shaped by mortal hands but only in the role of vessels for the celestial vibrations of the Gods; I like that too, it’s nice to be totally overwhelmed occasionally and reminded of your true status in the multiverse.

AC/DC Back In Black definitely falls into the latter category.

From first to last-minute it is sheer machine-tooled perfection, there is not a spare or slack second here.  Did I say machine-tooled? that’s not it, it is more human, more humane, than that too.  We can agree on the perfection though, surely?

‘Stand Up’, from Fly On The Wall, was the AC/DC track that gave me that first hit of head lightning when I heard it – it quite literally changed music for me for ever, it’s this thrill I’ve been chasing in my music buying ever since. without that jolt I doubt I’d have become a rocker, at least to the extent I did.  It changed what I listened to, the length of my hair, what I wore, what I spent my free time doodling, what I spent my money on, who I ended up being mates with, influenced which lucky ladies had the honour of becoming my girlfriends – not bad for an album track.  Then came ‘Hells Bells’ and I flipped out even further.

A friend of my dad’s lent me Who Made Who* and I can remember now the impact that ‘Hells Bells’ had on me.  I was listening to it on my Walkman on a sunny day, walking by the side of our farm where the chicken coop was.  The bell! The bell! Sunny day, or not, I was suddenly walking through a graveyard on a menacing rain-drenched night.  Quite simply I had never heard anything so perfect before, so transformative, so mean.  I genuinely had no idea how anyone was allowed to make music this nasty, this ominous, this scary.  Just listen to the tone of that guitar, it reeks of evil.  Brian Johnson never sounded so aggressive, before or since; the fact that I could understand one word in six of anything he was singing, helped the words I made up in those heady, pre-internet days were way more blood-curdling than the real ones eventually turned out to be.  Suddenly here was something that was totally and utterly mine, rather than belonging to any world of my parents’ devising**.  I suddenly realised I wanted nasty and I definitely wanted MORE.

Slippery when black?

After listening to ‘Hells Bells’, roughly 1.76m times, I bought the vinyl of Back In Black on the same day I bought High Voltage*^.  I knew the history and the context of the album before I bought it, the sleeve punched that home even to an idiot like me.  I can remember the bus journey home, pouring over the inner sleeve – I still haven’t forgiven Atlantic for not putting the right track order on the back cover though, yes I know it looks a bit more like a haiku the way it was arranged, but come on, this is AC/DC!

Being AC/DC the songs run through the full spectrum of the human experience – romantic love (Let Me Put My Love Into You^^), nocturnal love (You Shook Me All Night Long), purchasable love (What Do You Do For Money Honey), trigger happy love (Shoot To Thrill), a few paeans to drinking and loud music and then, most wholesomely, the love of a man for his family pet (Given The Dog A Bone).  There’s a whole lotta love on Back In Black.

Listening to Back In Black tonight, every single track has memories for me, from a highly inappropriate family sing along in a holiday cottage to ‘What Do You Do For Money Honey’ where, thinking fast I told my small children it was a song about how bees earned their living, through to seeing the band crank out ‘Shoot To Thrill’ the last time I saw ’em and the last night out in Carmarthen before I went off to university dancing to ‘You Shook Me All Night Long’ with a raven-haired beauty^*.  I have a lot invested in these grooves and just like one of Proust’s madeleine’s I only have to hear a note before it all comes flooding back to me.

Which is all very good and very teenage, I am perfectly sure that any music lover will have similarly loaded albums but what makes Back In Black transcend this is just the fact that it is so incredibly good.  Every track hits the mark, every track (apart from ‘Shake A Leg’ which I’ve always thought of as the weak link) sounds even better than the last.  The performance the band put in is nothing short of phenomenal, the sound Lange extracts from them is perfection itself.  The rhythm and swing of ‘Back In Black’ is just unparalleled, no wonder every hip-hop mother bugger has rapped over the top of it at some point, it is inventive too.  Every riff sounds tightly coiled and every vocal line is either attacked, leered over, or both if necessary.  It is the drum sound that I’m obsessing over tonight though, Phil Rudd whilst possibly being a bit of a challenging chap to have in your circle of friends was one holy hell of a sticksman, everything hit hard and beautifully precise, recorded just as it should be too; there’s a beauty in it that more technical/showy drummers never nail for me.

Everywhere I turn there are more cheap thrills than I can handle on this LP, some massive like the lyrics of ‘Hells Bells’, others comparatively minor like the swing of ‘Let Me Put My Love Into You’, or the sheer heads down head-banging of the end of ‘… Honey’ and the start of ‘… Bone’.  I just played around putting the needle down at random to see if I could find a single Planck time of music that I didn’t think was awe-inspiring.  The best I could come up with after this exhaustively scientific experiment?  the gap between ‘… All Night Long’ and ‘Have A Drink On Me’, although as an unbiased fan I still maintain that the gaps between AC/DC’s tracks are better than most bands’ entire careers.  I wonder if anyone has ever made a suitably rudely titled compilation along these lines?  Thigh Gap: AC/DC’s Best Silences.

There are tribes of as-yet-undiscovered tree-dwelling indigenous folk in darkest Borneo that have an opinion on Bon/Brian/Post-Pre-Pro-Anti, each on its’ merits I say as long as you realise that your opinion isn’t as important as mine because I AM 1537 (and it’s unlikely you are too).  All I’ll say is that I hope someone writes me an epitaph, intentional or not, a fraction as good as ‘Have A Drink On me’, which will always feature in my AC/DC Top 10.  I’ve always found it a really potent song, always used to crank it up before going out on the town and there’s just something about the way the last verse gets smashed out by the boys that moves me.

I’ve written way more here than I usually let myself do and I haven’t even made it to half of my favourite songs yet, but my advice is to stop reading this (in a minute, not yet!) and get playing this instead.  Call me excitable but every second of Back In Black thrills me and that’s all I need.  I’m guessing by the fact that it has sold a few copies here and there, others of you may feel the same – good because if any LP in my collection has descended upon us from a higher plane of perfection, then it is Back In Black.

641 Down.

*I do actually get around to writing about Back In Black later on, don’t worry – you haven’t been the victim of AC/DC related spam, whatever Google may think of me.

**although to date the only thing my mum has ever knocked on my door and told me to turn down was Iggy & The Stooges Raw Power, on the grounds it was a ‘totally negative racket’.  Yeah!!

*^exactly a week before I bought Appetite For Destruction – there was just unlimited greatness to discover back then, I miss that.  That is the UK version of High Voltage by the way, I’d had the Aussie version for 6 months already by then.

^^home to one of my all-time fave double entendre thingys, ‘Let me put my love into you babe / Let me cut your cake with my knife’, oh Ronsard, eat your heart out!

^*who was strangely unimpressed when I told her that I had been a little bit sick in my mouth five minutes before, but that I had decided I would kiss her now.  Chicks, eh?