I don’t seem to have much luck with the girls these days
I think they find it hard to get accustomed to my ways      (Drunk Like Me)

Woah, woah, woah
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah
Woah, woah, woah, woah, woah, woah, woah, waoh, yeah
Woah, woah, woah
Yeah, yeah, yeah
Ay, ay, ay, ay, ay, ay, ay, ay, ay, ay, ay, ay, ay, ay       (Errol Flynn)

So what you up for tonight, dear friends? fancy some whiskey-sodden romantic regrets, a side order of bonhomie and a lick of loquaciousness all served up on a bed of rollicking hard rock and roll? good, because I do.  Welcome to Dogs D’Amour Errol Flynn*, welcome to 1989, welcome to the LP that I’m about 35% certain was playing when I lost my virginity**, welcome to the best LP Charles Bukowski never made.

You know the drill by now, the Dogs were a scuzzy, sleazy British rock and roll outfit who sang wonderfully bedraggled songs of love, liquor and longing.  They took their rock from Hanoi, their and from the Faces and their roll from 70’s Stones, plundering them all for their look, along with a certain befuddled tramp’s dignity.  Lead singer Tyla, was a genius lyricist, living the life he wrote and writing the life he lived, hard.  They get lumped in with the Hollywood bands sometimes, but theirs wasn’t the music of slick strippers and fishnet-clad heartbreakers, it was about love and romance and how badly you can fuck both up when you’ve been drinking jet fuel for 9 days straight.  Example? Hell, check the song titles on Errol Flynn ‘Drunk Like Me’, ‘Goddess From The Gutter’, ‘Dogs Hair’, ‘Ballad of Jack’, ‘Princess Valium’ …

But don’t take my word for it^, dive right in.  Crank up the title track^* and swagger along to the sound of all the young bucks at the beginning of the night, when you’re slamming the tequila (not vice versa), adventures are to be had and everything is loud, clear and possible:

You wanna be like Errol Flynn
Captain Blood was a whore
You wanna be like Gary Cooper
High on a horse
You wanna be like Lon Chaney
Howlin’ at the moon

It doesn’t last of course, us doomed romantics know that already.  Just hit up, the quite beautiful, ‘Satellite Kid’ to hear the sound of a man wailing it straighter than he can still walk; hey darling, just because this drunk you met an hour ago, with the three-day stubble, soiled black velvet jacket and a sourmash smell slurs the marriage proposal, doesn’t mean he doesn’t mean it.  The playing on this one is spot on by the way, Jo Dog was an excellent guitarist, hitting all the right country notes to great effect.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, you might ask what’s so special about a wino howling his love songs to his ‘Goddess From the Gutter’, or the ‘Girl Behind The Glass’ – surely there’s a million scenes like this playing out late every Friday night?  that’s as maybe partner, but when it’s a cold Wednesday morning and the commuters are stepping over you to get their hustle on downtown, it shows a certain committment to say the least.

Errol Flynn is an album I really love, from the ever-awesome artwork and lettering by Tyla on in, it creates a little world for you to go and visit, like all the best LPs do.  It isn’t a flawless album by any stretch, some of the production by Mark Dearnley sounds a bit dated, especially on the second side and a couple of the songs miss their mark (I’m looking at you ‘The Prettiest Girl in the World’), but for me this one is all about the overall effect.  It’s all I can do not to drink along with this one, luckily my willpower is adamantine*^ and I have to hold a job down, no matter how much the strutting T-rex-isms of ‘Dogs Hair’ warrant it.

So raise a glass to the Dogs – Tyla, Bam, Jo and Steve James.  Raise a glass to the D’Amour and raise one final glass to the Satellite Kid.  Cheers Errol Flynn!

Sometimes I feel like I am dying inside
Love is like smoke, it disappears through the night
Sometimes I feel like I am drowning in your charmsv
I’m the satellite kid when I’m in your arms …

844 Down (in one).

PS: My photography skills having deserted me this evening, I apologise for the shite photos of the LP cover – I haven’t done it justice.

PPS: Treat yourself:

*retitled King of Thieves in the USA and, oh, what do you call that big, often snowy, maple syrupy place above it? don’t tell me, it’ll come back to me.

**hey, I was otherwise engaged at the time and my girlfriend loved Dogs D’Amour.

^although I am totes omniscient and stuff.

^*an acoustic version of which was one of the very best things on their previous LP A Graveyard of Empty Bottles.

*^’adamantine’ doesn’t mean dressing up as a dandy highwayman by the way.

Roly Poly Bus Loady

The first words on the first track recorded by of one of my very favourite bands, Fu Manchu.  I’m trying to work out if I had heard their debut single Kept Between Trees, way back in 1990 would have persevered with them, the same way I did after swooping in 9 years later and hoovering up their back catalogue*, or would I be left standing on the beach bellowing at an uncaring, uncomprehending sky,

‘Where are all the good time songs about vans and chicks in vans wearing Vans? tell us Fu Manchu?!’  

Way back in the mists of 2015 Kept Between Trees got a 25th anniversary re-release and upgrade from Fu’s own At The Dojo record label, moving on up to a gold vinyl 10″ with a lyric sheet and a bonus track.  This is the sort of thing I live for and I pounced on it like a particularly lithe sex panther one lunchtime, carting it back to my lair before marking it with my own distinctive man musk.  True story.

Formed from the ashes of punkers Virulence, Fu Manchu featured Ruben Romano and Greg McCaughey as the rhythm section, Glenn Chivens on vocals and the omnipresent, omnistonernipotent Scott Hill on guitar.  Don’t bother getting too attached to McCaughney and Chivens folks, they won’t be around too much longer in this story.

‘Kept Between trees’ has a slightly sickly, Sabbath quality to it – not metal, but something else … something unwell.  A similar feel to Tad, actually.  This is definitely a sound that has a lot more in common with the rainy Northwest than Cali, which was a real surprise to me.

‘Bouillabaisse’ is a bit of a fishy stew of a track, it has a flatter sound, a slower pace and just makes me feel a bit uneasy – Scott Hill weighing in with some eerie-dreary moaning and some distinctly angular guitars.  I’m starting to get into this more, especially with the similar, but more persistent ‘Jr High School Ring (7 Karat)’.  Bonus track ‘Blowtorch’ is, surprisingly, very similar but noisier and has the first mention of driving on the EP and the line ‘flash platinum pulchritude’ which I like.

The download card comes with yet another unreleased track, called ‘Flashin” (not on the vinyl) from sessions late in ’90, which is a bit more developed and enlivened by the ace ‘A kid who tells on another kid is a dead kid’ quote from Over The Edge.

Between the Trees was an interesting one for me, a little like following a river up to source.  Fu Manchu sound quite callow and much more linear to me, history shows they needed to ditch some of the angst and let the rhythm section drive the music, harder.  I think Romano is a very good drummer too, his later band Nebula were great stoner rockers, but he didn’t have it down yet.

So, an interesting stepping stone on the road to brilliance, Between The Trees is a very pleasing object to own but maybe one for completists only.

846 Down.

PS: thanks to the Shamen for gifting me the post title in a weird moment of cognitive dissonance, via the iPod shuffle.

*it’s an interesting game to play with your favourites.  Some bands are born fully formed and others have to work at it.  For example the Beatles first couple of LPs are quaint, but strictly yawnsville for me, if I’d forked out for them at the time I probably wouldn’t have bothered.  Ditto the first two Stones LPs**

**although the sleevenotes urging you to hit a blind man over the head for the money to buy one of them, would have got my vote.

Ever wondered how many people in the world are playing the same music as you are at the same time?*  I played a fairly well-known prism-adorned LP from last night and idly wondered how many other folks were listening to it in the dark simultaneously across the globe, before wondering if there was a neat-o literary sci-fi plot idea in being able to travel in time and space between all the instances of it being played at random; zapping all over from Oregon through to Oz, Oxford, Ostrava, Okinawa, Oyo and Oberhausen^, solving crimes, selflessly righting wrongs, zapping baddies with lasers and de-clothing chicks.

Which is all well and good if you suddenly gain the power to travel via the auspices of the third best-selling album of all time, but what if, due to an interdimensional admin error, the Titans of Ra only granted you the power to travel using the 1980 compilation Metal For Muthas, Volume II:  Cut Loud?  I rather suspect you might have been waiting around in the vortices of time and space for a while.  In fact I was a little concerned that some straggly bearded skinny dude clad in cock-throttling jeans, Hi-Tec baseball boots and a Praying Mantis T-shirt would somehow come tumbling into the room through my turntable as I cued it up tonight.

MFM II, as I shall henceforth call it, was EMI’s rushed through sequel to the influential NWOBHM compilation Metal For Muthas, which helped launch the careers of Nutz and the E.F Band into the stratosphere as well as providing double loser ballast in the shape of callow no-hopers Iron Maiden.  Both LPs came out in 1980 and all was metallic and groovy, the first volume even had a badly drawn mounted warrior/guitarist with diamond tits on the cover*^, they couldn’t be arsed even giving MFM II that much care, just a bit of a blue cover. Who cares though because we’re going snuffling for NWOBHM truffles tonight!

The compilers of MFM II, having given Maiden two tracks on the first volume, clearly wanted to kickstart the career of the Suffolk-based band Trespass this time out, book ending the LP with ‘One Of These days’ and ‘Storm Child’ respectively.  History shows us this was not to be, but the band give it a damned good go anyway.  ‘One of These Days’ is an absolute stonker too, a grandiose feel, great playing and some really biting guitars – it has classic just written all over it, proper rock.  ‘Storm Child’ has a certain Hawkwind-meets-Deep-Purple quality to it, slightly disassociated vocals teamed with some proper guitar crunch going on behind the scenes.  You would think after this showing Trespass would at least get a chance, but no, they imploded and didn’t release an LP until they reformed twelve years later in 1992.

Eazy Money ‘Telephone Man’ is about as weird as it gets in these circles, Marc Storace (later of Krokus fame) sings in the most bizarre strangulated yelp^* and the song is drenched in precisely the sort of keyboards that were against the NWOBHM credo, some very nice twin guitars and a very odd rhythm.  It is apparently their only recording and perhaps that was for the best, once a decade is fine for me.  Xero were an equally obscure London band, who briefly worked with a young Bruce Dickinson and their offering here ‘Cutting Loose’ has a well sung vocal and yet more melodic twin guitars – this crew beat Trespass even, their first album being released in 2015 – 32 years on from their debut single.

I like Janick Gers far too much to tell you what I think of White Spirit ‘High Upon High’ but Dark Star bring side 1 to a rollicking, swashbuckling end with ‘Lady of Mars’, which sounds a bit like Wishbone Ash in a very bad mood.  Highly recommended.

High energy US infiltrators Horsepower contribute ‘You Give Me Candy’, which steals some licks and attitude from Montrose to great effect and, as far as the internet is concerned, totally mysterious dudes Red Alert give us the workmanlike ‘Open Heart’.  Early 70’s survivors Chevy give us ‘Chevy’ which is all very competent, but a bit lacking in bite, bollocks and The Raid ‘Hard Lines’ which is the exact opposite.

I enjoyed playing MFM II a lot tonight, there was more good on here than I remembered and I do have a bit of a thing for odds and sods metal compilations.  I always find that the enthusiasm of the NWOBHM bands is always infectious.  Plus I hope I may have inadvertently managed to speed any number of intradimensional vortex travellers along their merry way.

847 Down.

*this is one of those rhetorrrywhatsitical questions, even I the almighty and all-powerful 1537 don’t know the answer**.

**Cambridge Analytica probably do though.

^and that’s just the O’s.

*^Diamond Tits, from Partick, being one of the least successful NWOBHM bands ever.

^*I’m guessing it might have been a problem with his jeans cutting off the blood supply to his vocal chords, or something.

My next black vinyl guest is the proud holder of the, ahem, record of being the 46th best-selling LP of the 1970’s, combining the talents of three renowned British bands into something of a monster mamma jammer, put your flippers, fingers and fins together to welcome … Free The Crimson! No, sorry, I mean Freeking Mott! No. I’ve got it now, ladies and gentlemen please welcome Bad Company!!

The sizable phoenix that rose from the ashes of Free, Bad Company absorbed the stellar talents of Mott The Hoople’s Mick Ralphs and King Crimson’s Boz Burrell, adding them to Paul Rodgers incredible voice and Simon Kirke’s straight-forward drumming.  Taking on, literal, heavyweight management, in the person of Peter Grant, recording at Headley Grange, being the first release on Led Zep’s Swan Song label and getting a Hipgnosis sleeve to boot, Bad Company was a record born to greatness.  1974 didn’t stand a chance.

When I was first getting into hard rock when I was 13-ish a friend of my father’s leant me a few LPs Bad Company was one of them*, I remember falling hard for title track and then thinking it was all a bit too wussy after that; Metal Dave had just taped Killers and Flick Of The Switch for me, that was more my level of subtlety.  I’ve owned Run With The Pack for almost 30 years now, but bolstered by that first impression I only picked up Bad Company 5 years ago.  I like it a lot more now than I did back in 1985** but I do think it is a flawed album – for my money Bad Company‘s classic status rests on the fact that it’s good songs are GREAT, rather than any inherently GREAT qualities it has as an album.

There are very few voices out there in music better than Paul Rodgers, he is just supreme.  There is a great strutting tomcat quality about it and I love the fact that even when he really opens it out and goes for it, there’s no straining, it’s all within his range and that just adds to the confident sound of it all.  I have been listening to Free gluttonously in the last year and I think that on Bad Company there is a difference in the way he uses his voice, it is generally more laid-back, easier sound but like the 1537-mobile cruisin’, there’s always a further gear to slip into that just leaves the opposition trailing in the dust.

Not that anybody else involved in Bad Co. were slouches either.  Mick Ralphs, Simon Kirke and Boz Burrell play it perfectly, each one keeping it simple, but not simplistic, the overall sound is quite sparse, certainly by most hard rockers’ standards but every note seems placed just so; a perfect embodiment of less is more.  I can’t think of many leaner albums than Bad Company, if this LP were a man^ it would be a lean, mean womanizer in rather skinny, dusty jeans.

Which leads us neatly to Bad Company‘s defining attribute, cock.  This is a decidedly thrusting LP, a definite traditional-sexual-role-models-type affair.  Ladies, are all well and good, this isn’t really about them; this is about the male spirit, a certain version of it at least.  Mr Bad Company is an outlaw adventurer entirely unfettered by domesticity and suchlike; neither the jail/relationship or the underpants have ever existed that can tame his spirit, or his cock.

Truly this is the Music of The Spheres that philosophers have been theorising about since time immemorial, they were just looking too high up – it’s a bollocks thing, not an astrological one.  Cojones not corazón.

Just take the freewheeling excellence of ‘Can’t Get Enough’ and ‘Rock Steady’ as examples, cocksure, pripaic and perfect, they absolutely embody Bad Company at their best.  Both tunes strut and preen to great effect, nothing flash but everything right. If I had to choose a favourite I’d plump for ‘Rock Steady’ for the supremely funky groove ploughed by Kirke and Burrell and the well-placed female backing vocals.

You want it a bit more cocked and loaded, then hit up the title track, which I think is the best thing on here and to be honest, I suspect there’d be very little on the 45 better selling LP’s of the 70’s to touch it either.  I have such a clear memory of the very first time I heard it thinking, ‘wow, that’s a whole western in a song’.  The atmospherics and dynamics of ‘Bad Company’ just deliver it, umm, hard.

I also have a real thing for the repurposed Mot The Hoople track ‘Ready For Love’, which is the most effective, reflective track on offer here.  Mick Ralphs also contributes some great keyboards here and Mrs 1537 tells me that when Paul Rodgers sings ‘I’m ready for love’, he sounds like a man who knows what he’s doing^^.  Regardless, I think it’s a bit of an under-valued gem in the band’s treasury.

For me though the rest of Bad Company is a little limp.  I quite like the pretty  sounding ‘Seagull’ that closes the album, played entirely solo by Rodgers, but it’s minor compared to what went before it.  The rest have no merits for me.

I have a late 70’s cheapo re-release without the gatefold and the inner sleeve, but hey this isn’t the sort of rock that needs fripperies, it suits a pared down presentation.  Which is why I think that Hipgnosis got the cover art exactly right for Bad Company, stark, suggestive of leather and pitched at a penetrative angle. Perfecto.

So there you have it, Bad Company, an LP with some really great tracks on it rather than a great LP; a tribute to and a warning of the merits and limits of, proper cock rock.

Here endeth the lesson.

848 Down.

PS: Have some of this!

In fact, here’s the whole gig – I’ve watched it twice today:

*Alice Cooper Greatest Hits, Vardis 100MPH and ZZ Top El Loco were the others I remember.

**maybe I’ve developed some subtlety and maturity of my own in the last 33 years? nah!

^and it certainly would be.

^^she added a completely silent, ‘just like you, dear’ to the end of that sentence, I could sense it.

They came from Barnsley; they roared and sang of bikes, planes and locomotives; they wore tighter than skin-tight trousers that must have crippled their sperm count; they weren’t very complicated; ladies and gentlemen I give you … Saxon Strong Arm Of The Law.

Released only 4 months after their classic Wheels Of Steel album in 1980, way back when bands were real men who had to bloody work at it for a living, recording a full LP every quarter in between playing 30 nillion* gigs, Strong Arm Of The Law shows absolutely no dip in quality, which is no mean feat.  This is proper blue-collar heavy metal, nothing fancy, this is music for, literally, letting your hair down to and mindlessly headbanging along with for hours on end.  Sometimes I just crave something this whole-heartedly simple.

I say with some authority that Strong Arm Of The Law is Saxon’s heaviest LP**, for a chunks of the album they could easily match Motörhead beat-for-beat, mostly thanks to the astonishing drumming of Pete Gill^.  Just listen to ‘20,000 FT’, their ode to the joys of flight. where Gill really gives it some welly while Biff gives it his best schoolboy poetry:

It’s just like making love
When you’re up above
Riding in my bird of silver steel

In what way is it like making love Biff? because you get to deploy your landing gear amidst much squealing?  Maybe we’ll just leave that simile there and tiptoe away.

You want heavier? just wang on opener ‘Heavy Metal Thunder’, which does everything you could ever hope a track called ‘Heavy Metal Thunder’ would do.  Hell, it even opens with the sound of … thunder.  Oh yes!  It’s just straight up brilliant too, you don’t like this, you don’t like metal; simple.  The guitars of Paul Quinn and Graham Oliver are just sheer perfection here, choppy and rocky, as Steve Dawson’s bass rumbles menacingly underneath it all.  It’s the sound of a young band just revelling in their own power.

For all that I find ‘To Hell and Back Again’ a bit of a misstep, I’m just not very keen on the melody but I do like the riffy spiffy chorus and the excellent guitar solo/drum breakdown, I do confess though that it is my most skipped track.  I just don’t think Biff’s voice can quite carry this one to where it needs to go.  But that’s okay, my second favourite Saxon song is up next.

Being a pillar of the local community and a man of good character and unquestionable habits, I have never been able to get enough of songs about being hassled by the pigs, ‘Strong Arm Of The Law’ is one such.  Everything about it is just Saxfection, from the slow build to the massive chorus, Biff really owns this track too – giving it his all in this tale of a pointless police shakedown, there’s something about the line ‘Into the night came a blue flashing light’, that just electrifies me every time.  Ha, take that authority figures!

Next track ‘Taking Your Chances’ is a real underrated gem, not just on Strong Arm Of The Law, but in Saxon’s repertoire period.  Again it’s a great example of the band absolutely firing on all cylinders, smelting riffs of pure adamantine and just hitting it at 100mph.  I think the change of pace in ‘Hungry Years’ works excellently too, the slower roll of it contrasting brilliantly with the belters that precede it, showing that Saxon had more than one arrow in their quiver.  Speaking of quivering …

Sixth form can’t get out at night
They keep them in, it’s an awful sin
Should set them free and let them roam

Hmm, ‘Sixth Form Girls’.  Tales of naughty 16 year-old schoolgirls, no less.  Now I was 15 when I first heard this track and so I always interpreted as an ass-pirational^* song about the joys of older chicks, now as the parent of a soon-to-be sixth form girl my perspective has changed a little.  All I’ll say Biff is that you’re a nice guy and all, but if I catch you and your be-Spandexed chums hanging around my daughter’s school again, I’ll have the law on you – now go and sing some more songs about transport, it’s what you do best.

Which brings us to the grand finale in a motorcade, ‘Dallas 1 PM’, another great Saxon song and so by definition another great metal song.  It’s a pretty straight telling of JFK’s demise set to that great chugging back beat the band do so damned well, nobody ever chugged as good as Saxon.  I particularly like the way it never lapses into histrionics, the big guitar solo is wonderfully restrained and elegiac and it gets big 1537 bonus points for including the conspiracy-tastic sound effects of three shots, rather than a single one.

The fact that the artwork is based on a British police badge is great but the band again score big by including an iron-on transfer patch of the logo with the original pressing of Strong Arm Of The Law.  I love this.  In 2018 record companies would be too worried about all the potential litigation from heavy metal Berserkers/cretins who had tried to iron it on to their own foreheads to go with a freebie like this; isn’t progress great?

I still fall for the decidedly proletarian charms of the classic Saxon line up every time I hear them.  I’m not being sneery there either, there is something winningly naive and straight lined about this band at their best.  I have a real sense that the band are just giving it their absolute all on every single track, a proper performance.  Now if you’ll excuse me I have an appointment with a patch, an iron and a mirror.

854 Down.

*I’ve just invented the ‘nillion’ as a unit of imaginary yet highly exaggerated measurement.

**although I’ve only ever properly listened to four and a half of them.

^a fact not wasted on Lemmy who borrowed him between ’84 and ’87.

^*see what I did there? just give me a Pullitzer now, it’ll do as a stopgap until they can ready the Nobel Prize For Literature for me.

Ever read Brett Easton Ellis’ Less Than Zero? that tale of dangerously bored rich L.A kids numbing themselves as fast as their father’s gold Amex would allow, living for sick kicks isolated from the consequences by money, stuffing up the cracks narcotically to the point where basic morality and humanity just withered, dried up and blew away in the wind.  Those that survived, grew up and had kids of their own that formed a kick-ass rock band.

That’s what Starcrawler sounds like to me.

My brand new favourite band from 2018, Starcrawler tick all my boxes like only an eight-armed box-ticking tsunami of bright righteous noise ever could.  It really isn’t an original thought but cross the Runaways, Sabotage-era Sabbath and, umm, probably someone else way cool and you’re on the starting grid for Starcrawler, and ready to rock.  It’s as utterly disposable and as utterly indispensable as you can get.

Starcrawler is a 28-minute blast of, mostly, sugar-coated riffage and ‘tude, which is fine lots of bands have angled for that, but where Starcrawler triumph is that they back it up where it counts with some serious speed and a surprising amount of muscle.  The songs are good and the playing is really spiky, Henri Cash – aged 16 at the time of recording*, is an absolute monster! He needs to be because lead singer Arrow de Wilde, is a huge personality and without some real weight behind the music it would all be a bit much.

But don’t take my word for it, crank this – I love the video (directed by Arrow’s photographer mum) but it is pretty much the softest track on Starcrawler:

The LP kicks off with the excellent propulsive ‘Train’ which comes hurtling down the tracks like one of those, oh you know, what do they call those big metal runs-on-rails things …? I love every second of its 1:22.  Austin Smith’s drumming is spot on and Cash’s guitar sound is just freaking perfect, dirty and loud.  It is just a great opening statement, especially as it hurtles off the tracks straight into the rocking mess of ‘Love’s Gone Again’, via Timothy Franco’s bassline.  And yet again Cash’s guitaring makes me howl, the way it cuts through all that fuzz, wow.

Starcrawler as a band just sound on it – over-caffeinated**, no hooks are left unhooked, no riffs left unriffed.  Every track is a highlight for me, the deadpanned ‘Different Angles’ rocks like a bastard for all of 1:58, before leaning into the sickly, faux menacing ‘Chicken Woman’.

Perhaps simultaneously the best and most disposable moment on Starcrawler is the deliriously teenaged^ ‘Pussy Tower’.  This is pure sleaze pop rock, served up with a great guitar tone and some rather cheeky vocals and the sort of lyrics that were hilarious to write in your mates’ exercise book during a dull lesson but look a bit silly the next day;  ‘Head, I want it every day / Oh head, it never fails to pay’.  The mucky little tykes!

Starcrawler chuck in a chord sequence, or two, looted from older sisters’ Nirvana records on ‘Full of Pride’ and go for some genuine numbness on ‘Tears’, which today is my favourite song on the LP^^, which I interpret as a plea for escape from emptiness.  This all builds nicely to a well-paced bit of spiralling epicness on ‘What I Want’, where drummer Austin Smith gets to do a little show stealing of his own.

Plus I will shoehorn in a stack-heeled boot full of praise for Ryan Adams’ production skills here too.  The sound is clear, warm and dynamic – well played fella.

Starcrawler is definitely no novelty teenage act, it is a really well-crafted pink fizzy wizzy rock explosion.  If you could taste these tunes they would be pure synthetic strawberry, each and every one of them – not a single vitamin to be had; and all the better for it too.

Far more than zero.

855 Down.

PS: Treat yourself to this LP it is a real blast from start to finish:

*young even for this band of teenagers.

**I do love me a good short LP and Starcrawler definitely is one.  They haven’t got the time to mess around, 10 songs in 27 minutes will do me just right.

^as in over-excited, immature and slightly embarrassing.

^^as opposed to my other favourite three tracks.

When I was younger I used to have no problem at all doing it almost every night, sometimes twice a night* even.  Now I find myself struggling to crank it up once a week, hell I went a full 11 days without at the beginning of this month.  Maybe it’s my advancing years, the fact that my son has been celebrating his 18th, the unseasonably great weather keeping me outside ’til late most nights, my full-blown Witcher 3: Wild Hunt addiction, the World Cup, or the fact I’ve been working away for a few days a week – whatever the cause, my frequency has suffered.  Maybe I’d benefit from a bit of role play? I have heard that dressing up to do it can help rekindle the fire sometimes.

So, yeah, I haven’t been posting as much recently.  Sorry mortals, I do appreciate that I have a wider responsibility to brighten up your otherwise quite ordinary lives with my incredible talents and I have been letting you down.  Whilst I am pretty sure my back isn’t up to doing it twice a night anymore I will henceforth try to manage to bang one out a bit more often, possibly.

I have been buying some records though, you’ll be shocked to hear.

Today I found myself in grey & Pink Records, Chester – I was dropping my kids off at the train station, which is sort of on the same street so it would have been rude not to pop in and say hello.  I’ve been worn down and bullied** to the point where I had to buy Aerosmith Live! Bootleg the first time I saw a copy and it is excellent, visceral and raw, a perfect antidote to the load of ballads they are now.  Blue Öyster Cult Spectres is the one with ‘Godzilla’ on it, reason enough to buy even if I wasn’t becoming more and more addicted to Buck Dharma’s whiplash lead guitar.  As for the Ian Hunter, any LP with ‘Once Bitten, Twice Shy’ on it is worth the price, let alone one with gems like ‘Boy’ on it as well.

Along with the usual suspects like the new Sleep, Wooden Shjips and Earthless LPs I may have treated myself to a couple of other ones recently too:

Age of Taurus The Colony Slain:  Full-on swords and sorcery metal on Rise Above.  Show me a man who can resist songs sung in character with titles like ‘The Lost Garrison’ and ‘From The Hills To The Halls’ and I will show you a man who … has a mental age of more than 14 and probably has a girlfriend.

David Bowie Bowie Now:  Released for RSD 2018, this is a re-release of a 1978 US promo LP featuring all the odd, haunting album tracks from Low and Heroes.  They sound great together but I half think I have sort of conned myself by buying this one when I have all the music already.

The Mission God’s Own Medicine: A gift from a mate, who bought a second copy of it by accident during a particularly frenzied LP buying session^.  I have seen the Mission twice and they were excellent, but I have never owned a note of their music.  I love their brand of widescreen, portentous goth rock – ‘Wasteland’ and ‘Severina’ are excellent.

Oh and on entirely related news my son bought his first ever LP today, aged 18.  Better late than never, I am very proud.

682 Down (still).

PS:  I passed on Maiden Japan, Slide It In and Women And Children First at the shop today … I can feel that fact gnawing at the base of my soul even as I type this.  Will my record buying never be done?!

*not to brag on y’all, but my powers of recovery were legendary.

**Mr Superdekes and Mr Ladano, to name names.

^I haven’t done that yet, accidentally buying a second copy of something, I mean.

Anyone up for a yabbering, slavering hunk of obnoxious sped up Norwegian hard rock (and roll)?  Quick then, all aboard the good ship Gluecifer – Captain Poon, the bridge is yours:

I got a car full of stash And I want to sell it
Got some tickets and hash And now I want to sell it

Oh yes, yes, yes! Welcome to Gluecifer Automatic Thrill, the band’s 2004 swan song and my favourite LP of theirs.  From the late 90’s onwards so much great rock music seemed to pour out of Norway and Sweden; I loved the Hives, Backyard Babies, the Glorious Bankrobbers, Turbonegro, the Hellacopters but most of all Gluecifer.  There was just something fresh and unjaded about the whole scene to my tired old ears anyway – a thrillingly fresh injection of maximum rock ‘n roll.

I got some shit on a boat And I want to move it
A crate of guns and a goat And I want to move it*

Gluecifer’s lineage runs somewhere through the MC5, Hanoi Rocks, the Stones and the Damned, which will do me fine coming down heavy in the rock, rather than metal, trench.  I remember the first time I heard ‘Shaking So Bad’, I just flipped out and started spasming in pure joy – how could anything this cool have existed in the world without my knowing it before? it sounded like everything I liked in rock without sounding like anyone else much at all.  Yowza!

Gluecifer go heavy on the accelerator and aggro for every track on Automatic Thrill like it might be the last they would ever get to play on, I love that – no room for slackers in this unit.  Examples? try ‘Here Come The Pigs’ for size and yes, it is about being busted and beaten up by the man**.  That bass line does things to me that I normally have to pay for. True story.  To make everything even better, closing track ‘The Good Times Used To Kill Me’ has a long talkie intro, Biff Malibu doing his best Iggy Pøp impression, narrating the casual carnage of a night out amongst the lowlifes in Oslo^.

There’s not a lot else to write here, other than to simply restate that Automatic Thrill is a damn cool ride, sculpted by men who wear leather and sunglasses after dark.  It isn’t an overly simplistic treat either I play this LP a lot and I find that I keep being rewarded with new things in it, a phrase I missed here, a little harmony there.  But let us not pretend this is a latter-day Radiohead LP, this is just a darned good time and as chroniclers of sickening excess they have few peers, ‘I got a speedfoot tapping on the bathroom tile / I got a rabbit heart and a mouthful of bile’. Indeed.

So just lie back on deck baby and let Captain Poon, Biff Malibu and Raldo Useless^* engage the forward thrusters and take you on a salacious safari ride to Thrilldania.

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*a crate of guns and a goat?! Man, that’s going to make for one depraved and wondrous weekend. Just please fellas, I don’t want to see the photos.

**as a wild-eyed outlaw, scraping a maverick existence in the criminal demimonde myself I can really relate to this.  I probably wouldn’t be able to if I was just some legal jerk who worked in an office, or something.

^not too many other songs in the 1537 feature someone shouting ‘take a dump in my head!‘ over and over again.

^*I’m ignoring Danny Young here, great drummer he may be but his name isn’t quite RAWWK enough.  My friend Ste and I used to play a game at work where we’d come up with glam rock names for ourselves – Dizzy Banger and Screech Benson (on drums and vox respectively) were our favourites.

Yeah! Yeah! We got some maniacs up front here! 

I’m not a massive one for live LPs but I did always like the nonsense singers spout between tracks.

Anyway, I found out yesterday that this internet thing isn’t just for looking at pictures of ladies without any clothes on, who knew that?!  If you know where to look and you take the right precautions there is this thing I’ve discovered called the dark vinyl web (or Discogs for short) and (looks around carefully) you can get any LP you want on there – there’s even pictures of albums disporting themselves shamelessly out of their sleeves too.  Better even than that though is that, as well as sating lusts you’ve held for records you couldn’t afford 29 years ago, you can stumble across totally new-to-you LPs you didn’t even know by bands you really liked back then.

Which is what happened to me this year with Circus Of Power Still Alive a 1989 live mini LP* that I had absolutely no idea existed.  As soon as I stumbled across it I was suddenly clobbered with 29 years worth of yearning as though in some deeply walled-in part of my soul had known of its’ existence all along and was finally free to expel all that pent-up desire in a single silver second of clarity.  Having forked out the princely sum of £1.99 it was mine a couple of weeks later^ and I could finally scratch that itch.

And what a great little gnarly nugget it is too.  I always really liked Circus Of Power, in amongst all the glamsters and chancers at the arse end of the 80’s rock scene they had something tougher and a little more street about them.  They convinced as tattooed brawlers and bikers, unlike some of the other shysters out there back then they never seemed like they were just aping the accessories of the outlaw lifestyle.  Still Alive is one tough hombre.

Detroit we got a song for you. What is it? It’s ‘Motor’ for fucking Motor City. It’s ‘Motor’.

Still Alive is a good little relic from the far off historical days of yore, well-recorded without being suspiciously so and it gets over the careless joy of a proper down home rock show.

Circus kick it all off with a cover of Rick Derringer’s ‘Still Alive And Well’ which I didn’t know at all but in CoP’s hands it burns with a gnarled defiance.  The band really emphasise the stop start nature of the riff and bring out a certain truculent grooviness in the song and I’m quite a fan of truculent grooviness, it has to be said.  They then smack into ‘Motor’ the band really, umm, motoring hard behind singer Alex Mitchell, it’s a better fuller version than the one on Circus Of Power.  Ditto their version of ‘Letters Home’, which was the band’s first sign that although they called the streets of NYC home, their musical hearts were really somewhere swampier and more southerly.  This version really improves on the studio version, there’s a bit more bite and brio to it, not to mention some proper Southern fried guitaring from Ricky Mahler and Gary Sunshine^^.

You know a white trash queen from somewhere right? She’s that girl you picked up in K-Mart in the lingerie department. 

Flip the sucka and we’re extolling the joys of a ‘White Trash Queen’, a much better track than the title makes it sound.  The band ride the stop/start groove of it hard and we’re definitely down south again where it’s hotter and stickier ‘Radio singin’ all about ‘Dolly Dagger’ / Sun so hot, gonna make you stagger’. 

You got free beer, free tits and free music – I don’t think I ever had that*^ 

‘Heart Attack’ which seems to be the set closer is the sole disappointment here, the only track that doesn’t sound a bit harder in the flesh, it comes over as a bit lightweight even.  So it is for the best that Still Alive chucks in an otherwise unreleased tune**^ called ‘Turn Up The Jams’ after an obligatory bit of stage chat about drinkin’ beer and feelin’ horny.  It’s not much of a song but the performance makes it a good fun time for all.

And then with a bit of cheering and a hint of sweaty leather Circus Of Power have left the building.  That’s all you need sometimes.

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PS:  From the Mighty Scrapbooks of Rock – I found this today, a live review from 1989 which does mention Still Alive, so maybe I have always carried this knowledge with me subliminally? it would go some way towards explaining why I can never seem to remember anything remotely useful.

*I do like me a good mini LP, bit of a dying breed these days, sadly.  My pet theory is that this is because of the daft prices charged for new vinyl these days, ‘why waste it on half the songs of a normal LP’ any rational person would opine**.

**good job I’m not one of those sick rational freakos.

^the seller contacted me and apologised for an unforeseen 1 week delay, I messaged back that it was fine I had waited 29 years for this record and another week was nothing to me. I’m not quite sure he got it.

^^one time Axl W. Rose collaborator and owner of a name that never fails to make me smile.

*^seriously? you get given all this free at a Circus of Power show? now that’s what I call a rider.

**^still, to my knowledge anywhere else.

My dad had a friend called Fred, a builder who had quite literally rebuilt the living room of his remote farmhouse around a massive pair of concrete speakers under his floor*.  I shit you not.  Fred, like my father, a hippy of the old school, I can remember being really into Camel, The Pink Fairies and Spirit; I heard all of these for the first time at his house in the hills**.  For some reason I remember one evening it was just me, aged about 13 and my dad there and he played us a new LP he’d got – warning me I might want to stand back a bit as he fired up his amp and proceeded to play Randy California Restless at us, at something approaching full volume.

Having never seen a hard rock band live at that point, I had never experienced anything like it.  I could feel the volume in my stomach.  There have only been a handful of times in the 34 years since that I have felt louder PA systems than Fred’s home speakers.  I was given some homemade wine and I felt duly inducted into a new adult male world.  The music was devastating, I can still remember the sensation of hearing last track ‘Childhood’s End’ for the first time – the sheer weight of it.

I taped my dad’s copy putting Bryan Adams on the other side of the C90, creating a potent Restless / Reckless combo.  As happens when you only have a handful of your own tapes I played it to death, I couldn’t get any of my friends into it though, I do remember contemplating punching one guy who told me it was just ‘old music’ and that Stryper were much heavier and better; prick.*^ As you can see, I’m not one to harbour grudges at all.  Nope, no grudges from 32 years ago here; none at all Andy.

But I digress.  I was reunited with Restless a few years ago and I must admit I was a bit loathe to play it, just in case it didn’t live up to my memories of it.  I get easily hung up on stuff like that; prick.

I really need not have worried.  And I write that having just air guitared my way all the through ‘Childhood’s End’ for the second time tonight, it probably won’t be the last time tonight either.

I shan’t pretend to be remotely objective about anything here but I really don’t think there’s a single duff moment on Restless.  Okay, there are some sonic touches here and there that would enable me to date it back to 1985 if I was hearing it for the first time tonight and there are a couple of tunes here where the guitar sound is better than the songcraft.  But you know what? rock.

It seems like such a shame that Restless never caught the break it deserved, it should be so much better known than it is today.  Hell, Randy California should be too – Spirit notwithstanding.

Just crank up ‘Second Child’ as a case in point and luxuriate in that ‘eavy sound:

I can hear Purple in that one today, but I was a couple of years away from Gillan and chums then.  Or slip on the opener ‘Run To Your Lover’ which is just a great commercial sounding rocker to my tired old ears at least and one which I was able to air guitar my way through note perfect even after all these years without hearing it.

So many highlights for me here:

• Jack Rabbit:  There’s a fragility to California’s voice here I love and the drumming from Preston Heyman is particularly great on this one.  The way it builds to a climax is perfect.
• Shane:  Just a great aggressive hard rocker.  I named a cat after this song.
• One Man’s Heaven:  That guitar intro.  It just smokes.
• Battlemarch Of The Overlords:  Come on! Even if it didn’t have oodles of blistering hot fretwork this would be on the winner’s podium just for the title alone.

The band assembled for Restless need due credit too, for the bulk of the sessions it was Curley Smith on drums, Neil Murray on bass^^ and Adrian Lee on keys.  There are some other players too, Ed Cassidy, Preston Heyman, Joe Leeway and Neal Doughty to name a few.  For the 13-year-old me they were all there solely to service Randy’s blistering guitar breaks.  Which totally ignores the fact that the man was such a complete player, the likes of ‘Camelot’ show a lovely gentle touch.

Restless really is another one of Proust’s hard rocking madeleines for me.  One note and I’m right back there in a remote Welsh farmhouse, at the back of the room, the taste of elderflower wine on my lips, a rising unfamiliar heat from the alcohol in me, the childish thrill of being invited to participate in something pretty grown up and that music, soaring and swooping around and through me.  Special times, special music, special guy.

RIP Mr California, long live your music.

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*it was something to do with valves and the curve of the polished concrete that created the vast sound.  I’m a bit hazy about the precise details; I’m not a very hi-fi person.

**and Fred was kind enough to make me a mix tape heavily featuring all of them.

*^regrets I’ve had a few, and it is true what the Butthole Surfers say, it is better to regret something you have done, than something you haven’t.  I didn’t and I should have.

^^‘appears courtesy of Whitesnake’ it says on the inner sleeve, the first time I had ever heard of that particular serpent.

Well you live and learn don’t you friends?  I had never looked up the English national anthem’s lyrics before* until just now when I was looking to make a cheap Queen gag.  They’re shocking, including references to ‘Confound their politics / Frustrate their knavish tricks’ and, most bloody tellingly, ‘Like a torrent rush / Rebellious Scots to crush’ !!  Goodness me.  As if Freddie and co would ever want any of their knavish tricks frustrated!

Queen, the bands’ debut was released seven months too late to be part of the Glorious Year of Culture & Humanity’s Greatest Achievements, or 1972 as you mortals know it; don’t worry though it’s still good, just not quite as astonishing as it would have been then.  A friend of mine taped his Fame reissue of Queen when I was 14, telling me it was ‘a bit shit compared to The Works‘ and on first listen I sort of agreed, except I stuck at it as you do when you only have a few tapes of your own and it grew on me, my own honest review by the time I was 16 would have rated it as ‘not quite as good as Queen II, but not shit’.  I never got around to rebuying it on vinyl until a couple of years ago and as I put it on to listen to it for the first time in 20 years I was a) surprised at how much I really rated it and b) shocked that I could sing along with every single track.  It was clearly lodged deep inside my brain, confound their knavish tricks!

Queen opens with the comparatively straight-forward hard driving ‘Keep Yourself Alive’ complete with all manner of flanging and phasing trickery from Brian May and self-mythologizing from Freddie Mercury.  The band always seemed to get compared to Led Zeppelin in their early days but I really can’t hear it, they just sound like themselves right from the get go.  This is especially true on the piano^ led ‘Doing All Right’ penned by May and Tim Staffell – making him the first non-Queen member to get a writing credit until Bowie on ‘Under Pressure’, the melodies are great and the heavier sections really do flare up just so, without losing the fab harmonies.

‘Great King Rat’ was always a real favourite of mine, partly because it was heavy and mostly because it had the word ‘whore’ in it which I thought was a bit naughty, still do. Whilst I do like it mostly for some excellent raw-sounding guitaring from May and Roger Meddows-Taylor’s^^ funky polyrhythms, it hasn’t aged massively well with all the different sections and stoppy-starty bits.  If I had been in the band’s orbit at the time I’d have taken them aside and told them there was no future in putting together hugely ambitious songs with lots of different sections and complex structures, not if they wanted to be successful.

Ditto the totes bonkers ‘My Fairy King’ which has the rare effect of making me want to prance about the house in a most peculiar manner; talk about knavish tricks!  It gets 1537 bonus points for mentioning ‘fallow deer’ which are a species I rather like but which are unfairly under represented in the hard rock oeuvre.

I think Queen serves its first true ace with ‘Liar’, heavy and massively, ridiculously, humungously overblown as only Queen could pull off, it rocks along to the beat of its’ own eccentricity, obeying only its own internal logic, taking no reference points from anybody else before or since.  It’s also the second time Freddie Mercury drops his surname into a song he’s written on the LP.  I love it, of course.  Equally so the gently dextrous ‘The Night Comes Down’ featuring a great build up and harmonies that nobody else ever quite mastered, you can say that this track more than any other on Queen set the template for the band’s future sound.

My fave on the album was always Meddows-Taylor’s ‘Modern Times Rock ‘n’ Roll’ a 1:48 blast of rock with attitude, sounding like Mott The Hoople at their meanest.  I always used to put that one on compilations for rockers of my acquaintance.  Then we’re back on the heavy-heavy bombast of ‘Son And Daughter’ which is still a lyric I find baffling, even with the reissue’s handy lyric sheet – all I know is it has the word ‘shit’ in it, which is always good and some heavy riffola.

I have a bit of an issue with ‘Jesus’, which may say far more about me than Queen.  I remember feeling very embarrassed about the song’s religiousness and I used to always turn it right down every time I played it, lest my hippy parents heard it and got concerned over my spiritual wellbeing to the point where they would stage an intervention with an astrologer, homeopath, or geomancer.  I still feel that thrill of furtive embarrassment even now, bizarre.  I do like the music but find it really embarrassing even now, shadows of the past.

Then with a quick instrumental blast of ‘Seven Seas Of Rhye’*^ Queen are gone and Queen is done.  It may not be their best LP but it sure beats the living shit out of The Works.  As my tastes raced towards the heavier end of the spectrum it got more and more play when I was growing up and now I supposedly am, I find it a good time.  Yes, it is quite callow and of its time in places, the band are in the process of finding their feet and balance together and it is all rather gauche, but there is a real power and latent talent that cuts through it all, preventing anyone frustrating their knavish tricks.

Happy and glorious – indeed, Long to reign o’er us – indubitably.

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PS. For all you audiophile dudes and dudettes the 2011 remastering job was very well done indeed, nothing too intrusive or jarring has been done to the tunes here, other than a very noticeable increase in the quality of the sound.

*I’m usually too busy treating it with indifference at the rugby** before belting out our own glorious ‘Hen Wlad Fy Nhadau’ which is the greatest song ever sung and never fails to make me weep, raw, salty tears of patriotism.  Did you know it was the first anthem ever to be sung at a sporting event? 1905. Missed that one but I was there for this one:

**never booing it, that’s rank knavish behaviour and not something I’d ever want to be part of. Not rugby, that. Even if it is a Godawful dirge.  Okay, I admit it, I may have gone off the subject a little bit here.

^played by Brian May, rarity spotters.

^^clearly by Queen II young Roger had decided that being double-barrelled really wasn’t very cool.

*^reminding me just how thrilling a track it is.

Or, 1537 Tries To Like KISS Again: Part Trois

Street hustler comes up to me one day
And I’m walkin’ down the street minding my own business
And he looks me up and he looks me down
And he says, “Hey man, what be this?” and “What be that?”
I just looked at him and kinda laughed
And said, “Hey man, I am cool; I am the breeze.”

I was in the mood for something good and uncomplicated this evening and there I was flicking through The Racks of Doom (TRoD) in the front room and I suddenly knew just what I wanted.  So here I am reviewing a quarter of my Kiss collection for you, Lick It Up dudes!

Way back in the misty mists of time Gary Moore Dirty Fingers was playing on a crappy old tape machine before school as I asked my cool mate Colin what Kiss were like.  His reply was pretty much along the lines of ‘looked great but the music wasn’t heavy enough’, but then he said that Lick It Up was really great.  A fortnight later I scraped together enough cash to mail order it from S.T Records along with Night Songs and Georgia Satellites: I got Kissed for the first time.

I liked Lick It Up then and I like it now; there was a middle period when I found the lyrics just made me wince too much, but I can (mostly) deal with it now.  I’ve heard the title track and ‘All Hell’s Breakin’ Loose’ a fair few times, as they made the cut for my iPod but it has been a good few years since I had aired this LP properly.  From my very limited Kiss experience it is the heaviest I’ve heard them play, consistently so too.  The cocoa tin drums of the earlier LPs had definitely gone by 1983* and there was an admirably frenzied, restless sound around the likes of ‘Young And Wasted’ and ‘Exciter’.

I come at Lick It Up from a bit of a different angle than most – sheer bull-headed ignorance about the band’s past.  I really rather like the disco-rap stylings that break through hither and yon and I’ve always just loved Vinnie Vincent’s playing, so if the make-up was getting in their way then I was happy to see it gone.  Plus I really like the band’s fluffy poodle hair on the front cover, it all went a bit Brian May out there in ’83.

Songs? 10 of them, nine of them good.  I simply cannot listen to the appalling chick beating song ‘Dance All Over Your Face’, Gene why? this was 1983, not 1883. I have a fantasy whereby L7 do to it what they did to G’N’R’s ‘Used To Love her’ covering it and just flipping the genders around, thereby lancing the boil once and for all^.

Where was I? songs = good.  The jerky, exciting ‘Exciter’ is great (complete with uncredited guitar solo by Rick Derringer) and following it up with the I’m-so-mean ‘Not For the Innocent’ gives Lick It Up a great one-two opening punch. Some days the slower ‘Not For The Innocent’ was my favourite track here, anything that makes you feel dangerous, sexy and mean when you’re a pimply bucket of testosterone and insecurity has to be treasured.

The title track ludicrous though it is, is just perfect catchy rock and I love the whole seize-the-day carpe diem thing it has going down.  ‘Don’t need to wait for an invitation / You gotta live like you’re on vacation’ – see? it’s not about oral pleasures at all. Honest.  Now let’s see someone belt out an earnest piano only version for a mobile phone advert and we’ll know that the end times are here.

Now here’s a video that needs a parental warning of some sort.  Paul Stanley is wearing the girliest boots this side of your local branch of GirlzBootz ‘R’ Us and is Gene going slack-jawed at the mouth on purpose, or is he having a stroke? looking at the pitifully uncoordinated way he’s moving I’m going for the latter.  Also, I appreciate we’re in a bargain budget apocalypse scenario here but how come Vinnie Vincent is twice as feminine as any of the women on set? or is that just me?

Anyhoo, honourable Lick It Up mentions go out to ‘Young and Wasted’ and the spiteful near-ballad ‘A Million To One’ which I really like, ‘A million to one / There’s someone better than me’^^.  The remaining honours go to the dynamic duo of ‘Fits Like A Glove’ and ‘All Hell’s Breakin’ Loose’.  The former is a turbocharged ode to getting one’s nut and the latter is just frankly bonkers rap/rock/disco homage to just how damn cool Kiss say they are; of course it is – just like the other Kiss bits I seem to like best it’s entertaining pantomime nonsense.

Lick It Up turned the oil tanker of Kiss’ fortunes around, hitting #24 in the US charts and a quite frankly surprising #7 in the UK.  This is an LP that I don’t play as often as I should do, it’s a really good solid hard rocker and anything that makes you feel dangerous, sexy and mean when you’re a 46 year old bucket of testosterone and insecurity has to be treasured.  Oh and apparently they didn’t wear make-up anymore, or something, which was a big deal back then.

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*I have never heard Creatures Of The Night (I will pick it up the next time I see it in the wild) so I don’t know to what extent this was a continuation, or a fresh jaunt into heavier waters.

^I miss L7, they were such an amazingly cool kickass band:

^^at loving maybe, at singing I’d offer Evens.

I tell you one and one makes three
I’m the cult of personality
Like Joseph Stalin, 1537 and Gandhi
I’m the cult of personality
The cult of personality
The cult of personality

Now here’s something, Living Colour Vivid an LP that I have been trying hard to love for nigh on 30 years now.  I’m still not there yet: Spoiler Alert*.

I remember being excited to hear about Living Colour in 1988 when they released Vivid.  Who couldn’t warm to the idea of a really talented flamboyant bunch of hard rockers, blending together all manner of genres in a fantastic Day-Glo splash of colour? particularly when it was all topped off with the patronage of Mick Jagger and the virtuoso guitaring of Vernon Reid.  What made them stand out in 1988 was race – Living Colour were black**.  This felt really exciting at the time.

Okay, we nerdy rock scholars could go back in prehistory to, the very mighty, Mother’s Finest^ and 1537-faves punkers Bad Brains, but there was such an absence of black hard rock bands at the time that Living Colour were newsworthy^^.

So, when I finally got a taped copy of my mate I was all a-buzz to hear it – he loved it too.  I put it on, pressed play and waited for Vivid to hit me like a ton of bricks.  I am still waiting.  Ten years ago I picked up a promo copy of Vivid so I could try it again as an old dude.  Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose, as we Welsh say.

We have to wait for the very last track for my favourite tune here, ‘Which Way To America’ which absolutely storms out of the speakers and cuffs you around the side of the head the way I like it.  A blast at the haves from the have-nots, it is well-targeted and burns with some real venom – real props to Mick Jagger for his production on this track too (as well as his all round championing of a young band).

I look at the T.V.
Your America’s doing well
I look out the window
My America’s catching hell

Coincidentally, or not, Jagger also produces my second-fave track here ‘Glamour Boys’ where all sorts of things just come together brilliantly, the Caribbean rhythm, Corey Glover’s best vocal and the delightfully silly chorus ‘I ain’t no glamour boy – I’M FIERCE’, it all hits home.  I’m very fierce too, you can probably tell. Grrr.

‘Cult of Personality’ was the big hit from Vivid, propelled there by a really good video, although I have never been tempted to co-opt Glover’s snug one-piece look for myself.  For me it just never really takes off, apart from Vernon Reid’s stinging guitar solos, I have always found it a bit of a plodder and an odd choice for an album opener; personally I’d have stuck ‘Which Way To America’ in first place to inject a bit more urgency into matters.  As a showcase for Reid’s spiralling, eclectic electric playing though it serves its’ purpose.

A couple of the tracks here and there pass by without leaving any mark on me at all but I do quite like the heavier ‘Middle Man’ (driven by Will Calhoun’s fluid drumming), the heartfelt restraint of ‘Broken Hearts’ works for me^* and the churning Talking Heads cover ‘Memories Can’t Wait’ is great, especially the great breakdown section in it.  But other than that I can’t really join in the celebrations for and of Vivid.  I have a bit of a problem with Ed Stasium’s production, I find it a bit too trebley and Living Colour reach for that funk rock bass sound far too often that I just can’t be dealing with; you know the one.

So there it is, Vivid has a couple of really excellent moments for me, some great playing and a good dramatic entrance for a refreshingly different new band.  I still struggle to see it as anything more though, if you love this one let me know why, I am interested.

Me, I’ll go back and blast the last few tracks again.

Look in my eyes, what do you see?
The cult of personality
I know your anger, I know your dreams
I’ve been everything you want to be

Taking you to heaven, like 1537
I’m the cult of personality
Like Mussolini and Kennedy
I’m the cult of personality

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PS: Check out the cardboardtastic video for ‘Glamour Boys’, I am sure that any resemblance to the current US president is entirely coincidental:

*and to think some fools think these should go before the spoil-y bit, cretins!

**sadly it would still be true today in the hard rock field to a large degree.

^best described as ‘a funkier, deeper sounding Van Halen fronted by a Nubian banshee’.

^^I’m ignoring bands who had some black personnel like King’s X and bands who rocked like a beast occasionally, but who did not predominantly peddle hard rock, say Fishbone.  Bear with me, selectively picking and ignoring facts makes arguing a point so much easier.

^*with harmonica by Mick Jagger – it is starting to look like it is no coincidence that three of my favourite bits on Vivid have been touched by him.

She reached over and squeezed on my rocks
I lost it all in the popcorn box!    (Cool One)

By God this blade is razor sharp
Do you know how to play a harp?    (Subway Terror)

Starz Violation, they just don’t make ’em like that anymore, eh? we have lost so much as a culture in the last 31 years.

I like coming into a band’s discography via a greatest hits collection, in this case Brightest Starz, as you get the fun of filling in the gaps by buying the individual albums – or at least that’s we old fuddy-duddies did before the internet came along and spoiled everything*.  Which is where Violation came in, as I work my way through Starz’ discography.

I promise I won’t blather on to you for a third time about how Starz should have/could have been massive in the late 70’s but just crapped out and missed riding the hard rock wave to stardom and riches but were a more talented bunch than many who did.  Promise.  But they should have been.  They had all the usual essentials – the instrumental chops, the management, the songs, the producer, a great logo and a luxuriantly moustachioed drummer**.

Violation opens with the chirpy pop rock of ‘Cherry Baby’, which is the sort of sugar-coated rockfectionery I always imagine myself listening to in a convertible somewhere scenic with a hot chick^.  But look beneath the chiming guitar hooks and you find a bit more of a gritty story, which is a definite Starz trick, the singer is pining for his girl whilst he’s doing time for an unspecified offence; I’m going with either littering, or pre-meditated homicide.  Then Starz change it up into fifth for ‘Rock Six Times’ a real belter of a tune which recasts the plot of ‘2112’ but uses a copy of ‘Walk This Way’^^ as the catalyst to throw off the moral shackles of a dystopian future. It rocks.

We are back on the dessert trolley for the excellent ‘Sing It, Shout It’, a Sean Delaney co-write.  This tune just does everything I want a happy-go-lucky pop rocker to.  Which runs us smack into ‘Violation’, another rocking tale of a dystopian future where rock is banned^*.  The amount this tune rocks is in direct correlation with its’ inherent daftness. Richie Ranno and Brenden Harkin were a top-notch guitar team and the rhythm section of Peter Sweval and Joe X. Dubé hit everything just right.

Then Violation gets really great.  To steal a plagiarise a paragraph from my favourite writer:  genuinely creepy tale of a murderer/mugger/sex attacker doing his rounds – Michael Smith really inhabits his character on this one, after a scary line, or two about nurses we get the immortal couplet, ‘By God this blade is razor sharp /Do you know how to play a harp?’, followed by (thank you Jack Douglas) a harp.  Top-notch sicko rock.

‘All Night Long’ is just the kind of slack-jawed post-lude ode to loose women and frenzied coupling, that rockers banged out in their sleep back in ’77.  It’s perfectly okay but there is something a bit reptilian about it to my jaded old ears, Michael Lee Smith sounds like he can barely keep it together long enough to sing this one, let alone seal the deal later.  The popcorn-tastic ‘Cool One’ is a real rock and roll hoot and the best song about groping in the cinema since AC/DC’s ‘Can I Sit Next To You Girl?’, needless to say there’s not an unsticky seat left in the house.  Starz ride just the right line here between cheeky and crude.

I confess to being  a bit baffled by the last two tracks on Violation.  ‘S.T.E.A.D.Y’ is a strange tale of psychotropic manipulation and union politics.  I kid you not, it is both sinister and deeply silly, some great cowbell part way through too.  One of my very fave song titles ever, ‘Is That A Street Light Or The Moon’ is just plain odd, Smith sings in a bizarre falsetto, sounding like an asthmatic person of indeterminate gender over a rather good (if a little wasted in this context) orchestral string arrangement.  Bizarre.

Like I said, nobody makes LPs like Violation any more.  Which I think is a real shame, I like that lets-give-it-all-a-go unselfconsciousness that rock had back then, there is a faith in simple talent that we seem to have mostly lost under a screed of image and whatnot.  So all hail the sugary, sweaty, sinister charms of Starz! God bless them all and particularly Joe X. Dubé their luxuriantly moustachioed drummer.

895 Down.

*like enabling dumbass Welsh dudes to peddle their opinions about everything all the time like they were an unholy cross between Carl Sagan and an encyclo-motherflipping-pedia.

**as no lesser authority than God wrote us in 1 Corinthians 13:13 –

 And now these three remain: faith, hope and a luxuriantly moustachioed drummer. But the greatest of these is a luxuriantly moustachioed drummer.

^think Debbie Dunham from American Graffiti.

^^another Jack Douglas production of course.

^*don’t worry bands from the 1970’s rock is one of the essentials we still have left, now we have dispensed with all the fripperies like economic stability, basic human rights and environmental sustainability.

A funny thing happened last Friday.  So there I was in Chester doing a bit of Christmas shopping for my nearest and dearest, and I accidentally found myself right outside Grey & Pink Records* I popped in just to rest my weary legs for a second, or two. 

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before.

Well, long story short I found a very reasonably priced copy of Van Halen Women & Children First, which I had thought about hearing again for a good decade now.  Then I spotted two equally pristine copies of Diver Down and Fair Warning, all UK originals, all priced very reasonably.  Having obviously contracted sunstroke** at some point earlier that morning and so I blacked out and bought them.

Now it’s an interesting one, despite Why Can’t This Be Love being my fourth ever single, I have never really gone a whole bunch on Van Halen.  I owned Van Halen and 5150 but I always found their sound a bit treble-y and lacking a bass wallop, plus there was something about DLR’s Diamond Dave schtick that just pissed me off^.  The only track I truly loved of theirs was ‘Jump’. 

But suddenly, last Friday I got it somehow, I got them.  Maybe it was the residual meds swimming around in my system from my shoulder problems, but if so, good. Each LP I played I liked better, but the one that really sold it for me is Fair Warning.  There’s a darkness and a cussedness about that one which really does it for me, this is very much California after dark. 

Even Diver Down, which I was wary of because of its running time and number of cover tunes was truly excellent, I love it all. 

So I have now accidentally pulled the trigger online and bought Van Halen II and 1984.  I used to own II when I was 15 and just never thought it was heavy enough, or good enough – I sold it after a year.  What was I thinking?!  I think I like it better than Van Halen. 

I am really pleased that I have found some great ‘new’ LPs to listen to and also at the evidence that I am capable of revising some of the views I have held since 1987.  Some of them.  Maybe this is what maturity feels like? Bloody hell, if I’m not careful I’ll end up being broadminded. 

So forgive me if you run into me and I start telling you all about ‘this great new band I’ve discovered … you won’t have heard of them, Van Halen’. 

899 (Diver) Down (Still). 

*after a brisk 15 minute stroll and a number of perilous road crossings. 

**or was it frostbite, or malaria, or just a bit of a runny nose? whatever, I was totes delirious, is what I am saying.  

^as opposed to his interviews which I usually liked. 

Ooh, here’s one I forgot about until very recently, Blues Pills; I bought it, grooved along to it, it made the hallowed turf of my top 11 LP’s of 2014 and then, for no good reason apart from musical gluttony I sort of forgot about it for the last 2 years.  That is a sad fact that reflects badly on me and not at all on the quality of this LP. 

How to describe Blues Pills? how about Full Tilt Boogie backing Amy Winehouse? or maybe a young Janis Joplin fronting Free? or just in their own terms, as a drop-dead great Swedish hard rock band with an excellent vocalist?

The band take their inspiration from the early 70’s, injecting plenty of volume and hurt  into their rollicking tales of gypsies*, heartbreak and good times/bad times.  The three musical chaps involved (two of them being ex Radio Moscow dudes) Dorian Sorriaux (guitars), Zach Anderson (bass) and Cory Berry (drums) have it all down to a fine art, able to play it tastefully sorry and even better raucously wild.

Before you rush to man the accusatory cannons and load them with retro grapeshot, hold fast.  Yup this is ‘classic rock’, but hey there is a reason they call it ‘classic’, man; this is brilliant.  This is not challenging new music, but that does not diminish its qualities one jot.

Let’s face it the Blues Pills may occasionally stand on the shoulders of giants but they really do not sound like any of them, there’s enough of their own grit and spin here to avoid any accusations of museum-piece-ary.

Take the barnstorming album opener ‘High Class Woman’, which kicks down the doors to start things off on a real high. Just, wow.  Second track ‘Ain’t No Change’ lopes into view on a decidedly limber drum and bass shuffle, before Sorriaux adds some spicy licks and the whole tune catches fire when Elin Larsson hoves into view to sing the living bejeezus out of the whole concoction.  Now there’s a voice for you – as strong as you need, as silky as you crave;  all basses covered.

The band break the wah-wah pedals out for the space truckin’ likes of ‘Jupiter’ and ‘Black Smoke’, to excellent effect.  The former has me twitch dancing away like a brown acid casualty down on Yasgur’s Farm, especially when Sorriaux really lets rip at the end, the man can play.  Ditto the great ‘Astralplane’, which benefits from some great squalls of guitar. 

The Blues Pills tracks that stay with me longest after the platter stops spinning tend to be the more contemplative ones, rather than the hard chargers.  Take ‘River’ for example, where we get treated to a slow moving drama courtesy of Larsson’s perfectly judged vocals – she never over sings a note**, never commits the heinous act of mistaking volume for passion, it is all about the control.  See also LP closer ‘Little Sun’ and my late night favourite ‘No Hope Left For Me’.

I won’t bore on about it all in too much detail, nobody needs that.  Suffice to say that Blues Pills is a great, atmospheric album.  A perfect soundtrack to a late night glass of the hard stuff in a darkened room, watching the Christmas lights flickering on the blinds.  There are a couple of gentle missteps here, nothing too glaring, but mostly this is the sound of a really good tight band, recorded really well^ giving a great performance.  There really are times when that’s all I need in the whole wide world, a class act.

A note on the rather fabulous artwork by Marijke Koger-Dunham, which was a real pull for me, especially on this double picture disc edition – WOW!!  I was a fan anyway from her work on Incredible String Band 5000 Spirits and the Hollies Evolution, her painted guitars for Cream and the various bits and pieces she designed for Apple.  Go here to ogle more wondrous stuff.   Oh and the cover art here won the inaugural Lou Reed Memorial Award for semi-nudity on a LP cover.  Word up.

904 Down.

*fair play to Blues Pills, they are the first band to write about mysterious gypsy women since Ronnie James Dio had intensive courses of hypnotherapy and CBT to get over his major obsession with them in the mid 80’s.

**over singing will be a capital crime when I am inevitably elected as emporer of Earth.

^the production by Don Alsterberg (also producer of my fave Graveyard LP) does another fine job here, the sound is like getting into a warm bath at times.

So there I was, dear reader, having just finished a Bob Dylan review and wondering how I could possibly take 1537 higher and bigger.  So I mentally scrolled down the List Of The Gods* chiselled into the side of Mount Olympus looking for the next potential Nobel Laureate candidate.  Then I saw his name, carved in letters 10 feet tall, picked out in flame eternal … Porkbeast.  Of course.

Now as even the smallest child in some of the most remote undeveloped backwaters on earth** knows, Porkbeast was the bassist for Leicester grebo outfit Crazyhead.

Together with his friends Reverb, Anderson, Fast Green Dick and Vom they made various unsavoury loud noises in the late 80’s, released a brilliantly named debut single called ‘What Gives You The Idea That You’re So Amazing, Baby?’ and played the Namibian Independence Day concert to an audience of over 50,000 people.  Truly that decade really wasn’t all about Spandau Ballet, my friends.

For the unenlightened ‘Grebo’ was West Midlands slang^ for a rocker and was used briefly by the music press to describe a scuzzy, oily, (pre-Seattle usage) grungy rock sound, which briefly took off when played by the likes of Gaye Bykers On Acid and Pop Will Eat Itself; not when Crazyhead did though.

I picked up a 12″ called Baby Turpentine a little while ago and it’s great.  One of the first few records on Food Records, produced by former Teardrop Explodes dude and record company head David Balfe^^. 

The band’s sound is a scuzzed-off rock, with similarities to touring mates the Cult and label and touring mates, Zodiac Mindwarp.  ‘Baby Turpentine’ kicks like a cold turkeying punk on a rockabilly bender, it’s a brilliant propulsive track with the killer refrain ‘don’t get sick baby’.  It sounds like a million dingy pubs with suspiciously sticky floors and broken toilet seats.  Everything about it sounds thrillingly inadvisable.

Second track ‘I Don’t Want That Kind Of Love’ is another real jolting rocker.  The guitars churn and bite in a decidedly misanthropic way.  The other two tracks on Baby Turpentine are a sinister rocking cover of Cher’s ‘Bang Bang’ (which is a great track anyway) and a bit of a lesser, in this company, track called ‘Sinking Feeling’. 

I have to say Baby Turpentine and Crazyhead both really stood the test of time for me.  It’s a gloriously raucous, slightly abrasive, unsafe treat delivered by some dudes who really should have known better and have been better known.

All hail the bass playing beast of pork!

913 Down.

PS:  Porkbeast’s real name is, I just found out, Dr Alex Peach – well, his name is Alex Peach and he did a doctorate.  I’m running out of hails for him.

*capital letters just seemed appropriate here.

**I’m talking to you here Carmarthen, pay attention!

^or so my mate Vince from Stourhead told me.

^^Food Records first LP was Crazyhead Desert Orchid in 1988, which may or may not have been playing in the background when I lost my virginity. True story.

Foreigner?  Nein danke mate … it’s all limpAORiwannaknowwhatloveisradiopap, innit?  I’m far too cool what with all my metal and punk and hardcore and achingly esoteric 90’s trip-hoppolloza.

Or so I thought. 

Last year I bought a copy of Foreigner mostly because I couldn’t see anything else in the shop I wanted to buy more and because I really like ‘Cold As Ice’.  Oh and I have a bit of a thing for LPs with really crap pictures of trains on the sleeve*.  True story. 

So I played it a couple of times, liked the hits and then thought nothing of it until I fished it out again about a month ago.  Foreigner has been pretty much glued to my turntable since then.  I have to play it almost every day, twice today even.  Maybe I’m now a limpAORiwannaknowwhatloveisradiopap fan?

Right from the opening bars of ‘Feels Like The First Time’ Foreigner hits home.  Never mind feeling like the first time, there is something so well-crafted and honed about these tracks that hearing them is like accessing some dimly-held ancestral memory; you never hear these songs for the first time, they’re already in there!  

As an opening salvo ‘… First Time’ and ‘Cold As Ice’ really pack a wallop.  What strikes me now are the Bad Company meets Beatles-isms of them both, the piano on the latter is particularly great.  Music this good simply bypasses all your feeble cool defences and just storms the citadel of your heart, pitchfork in hand.  And rightly so, this is music designed to make you turn your radio up.

Next up is the brilliant comedy track ‘Starrider’, where the band send up gormless goofy 70’s pretensions with a faultlessly deadpan take on every bit of cosmic rock nonsense possible.  All synths, hilarious lyrics, multi-tracking and straining for meaningful.  Hilarious stuff.  Oh … serious? you sure? … oh.  Oops, it’s okay nobody actually reads any of this anyway.

Mick Jones gets to play it faux tough on ‘Headknocker’ and it doesn’t really suit, despite some (intentionally) amusing lyrics, the whole thing sounds like a Bad Company B-side/demo version/rough mix/riff origins tape.  I rather like the overblown wimpiness of ‘The Damage Is Done’ despite myself.

Monday, sad, sad Monday

She’s waiting for me 

But I’m a long, long way from home

Long, Long Way From Home

Never mind all that, just clear the decks for Foreigner (the LP and the band) best ever moment: ‘Long, Long Way From Home’.  Yeah, boy!  I am utterly obsessed with this track.  Everything about it is just spot on for me, the length of it (2:53) is perfect; Gramm, on his best vocal performance, has never sounded so great mixing rock and street tough R&B just right; the fact that beneath Mick Jones’ well-mannered guitar churn lurks a solid horn section; great me-and-you-against-the-world-babe lyrics; Ian McDonald plays an absolute blinder on this one too**.  I have to crank this at least six times every time I hear it.

… which makes the sub-Wings flatulence of ‘Woman Oh Woman’ even harder to take.  The less said about that the better.  Okay so it is immaculately-crafted tosh, but tosh nonetheless.

Still, it tees up ‘At War With The World’ brilliantly, with its’ not-quite-as-clever-as-they-think-they-are lyrics and hard rocking swagger.  I really like this one, even the incongruous synth solo in the middle enhances rather than trashes it.  Some particularly neat vocal harmonising and guitaring throughout.  This was an unexpected treat.

Foreigner ends well too, the quite beautifully designed no-sharp-edges ‘Fool For You Anyway’ and the rawer ‘I Need You’ close things out nicely, the latter again letting Mick Jones exercise his fingers to the max.   

I understand why Foreigner has really grabbed my attention and it isn’t totally about the singles either, or even about the high levels of musicianship involved.  What really strikes me here is just what a brilliantly listenable LP this is, even the few tracks I’m not very keen on just blend beautifully with the rest.  It’s that classic sports cliché about a team being better than the sum of its parts and a bit of a lost musical art too, making an album that has no real agenda other than to sound great.  there should be more of this sort of thing.

Oh and that really is an undisputed all-time hall of fameTop 10 crap back cover.

914 Down.

PS: This post was going to be finished on Monday, hence the title, ah well. Life.

*genuinely, I swear on my gerbil’s life that I am not just frantically casting around here trying to retroactively justify a purchase.  No sirree.

**the man providing the often sought link between Foreigner and King Crimson.  Yowza!

So, there I was in the European Capital of Sin* all by myself for three days and I thought I would investigate the famously vibrant Amsterdam vinyl scene … who could possibly predict the tangled web of misunderstandings and hilarious scrapes that ensued? still it was nice to make some new friends, even if I don’t share their rather intense hobby**.

So, my son and I were bound for three days in Amsterdam last week, until whilst trying to pull on his skinny jeans at 4.30am he fell and cracked his elbow on the edge of the bath.  Ouch.  I had 5 minutes to decide whether I stayed, or went abroad by myself for the first time ever.  After a brief bit of agonizing, I nervously decided to go for it. 

I have been to Amsterdam once before, briefly and it was even more beautiful than I remembered it last week, in soaring February temperatures I might add.  I am a big walker and a city explorer and so I reckon I walked almost every square inch of the city centre in my three days.  It is great once you get away from the louts guffawing at the naughty bits and start to explore where the locals go. 

I arted myself into a frenzy in the Van Gogh and Rijksmuseum, pretended to be a local browsing the street market in De Pijp and eating fab food in  the parks, kicking back and meeting some folk in my favourite canalside bar and gurgling some of the best coffees I have ever tasted.  I even took in a couple of films on a wet Wednesday morning. But, this isn’t some kind of travel blog^, what about the good stuff?

Depending on whether you are married to me or not, you’ll either be pleased, or despairing to learn that I had bought my first two LPs within 30 minutes of dropping my bags off at the hotel.  There were more I wanted in Velvet Music but I decided two LPs were quite enough for a short holiday. 

Anyway, 5 hours later Second Life Music proved to be a real treasure trove and I bought another 4 LPs to complement the rare Cramps 12″ I had bought about an hour before that in Record Palace.  Oops. 

To generalise everywhere was friendly and chatty; apart from one hipper-than-thou place I didn’t buy anything from*^.  I saw more jazz and world music there than you ever see in the UK and a great deal of it more reasonably priced too. 

Oh and there’s some of my very favourite art, architecture and parks in Europe there too.  As well as great food and drink.  But mostly there’s vinyl.

So I’m back and after a very unproductive January / February blog-ically speaking, I better knuckle down and get some MF-ing LPs reviewed.

915 Down (in the canals).

*capital letters just seemed justified there.

**Big 1537 shout-out to ‘Shiny’ Pete, Jurgen and all the guys at Slick Nick’s World of PVC. 

^you want next door, 1538, for that.

*^as if they were hipper than me – I have a BLOG people, a blog! You can only dream of the kind of female attention I derive from that!

The dim lamp light reflected on the glossy tip-on style LP sleeve as our weary, cynical auralnaut drew out the bright blue heavyweight vinyl exhibiting his catlike grace.  Touching the needle down he settled down in the rocking chair**, daring Uncle Acid & The Deadbeats to impress him with their Blood Lust. 

Five minutes later he was screaming for sheer so-good-it-sears-my-soul joy as he extricated himself out of the back wall of the room which ‘I’ll Cut You Down’ had pinned him to, sobbing.

I was born a bitter man, no hopes or dreams

I get my kicks from torturing and screams

         I’ll Cut You Down

So after a week and a half of spinning my wheels, being thoroughly disillusioned by RSD 2019, half-heartedly staring to write about one or two records and then grinding to a halt*, I needed something to re-kickstart my MF-ing heart.  Last night I had an epiphany and decided to plump for a record I had owned for 7 years that never made much of an impression on me at the time, Blood Lust. 

It was totally and utterly soul-cleansingly life-affirming as only a LP boasting track titles as life-denying as ‘I’ll Cut You Down, ‘Death’s Door’, ‘I’m Here To Kill You’ and ‘Ritual Knife’ can be!

Crom!  What strange mood must I have been in the first^ time I played this beauty before not to immediately acclaim it to the heavens?  Almost solely amongst all the doomy psych bands I like, Uncle Acid & The Deadbeats manage to reach further back into the graveyard mists, to a time before Black Sabbath.  They have an appreciation for the undercurrents and building blocks that came before that bunch of likely lads from Birmingham and their on music is all the stronger for it.

But let us go back to basics, back to the beginning again, put the needle on the first track again and shake your long hair to ‘I’ll Cut You Down’ one more time.  It isn’t the riff, it isn’t those eerie phased vocals, it is that incredible stomping (old-style) glam rock beat that does the damage, marking Blood Lust as something truly special, something truly different.

This is exactly why I am and always will be a rocker.

What I admire so much about this album is that Uncle Acid never take the easy route, simply cranking everything into the red and clubbing you into submission they play it far more cannily, like those earlier groups did. 

Just cue up ‘Curse In The Trees’ and tune in and drop dead to it’s pulverising blues beat, guitar heroics and strange psychedelic washes.  Even more so ‘I’m Here To Kill You’ with its hyperactive 60’s stylings and full-on jazzy drumming; Careless Santana, anyone?  Uncle Acid hail from that perfect musical sump just south of Altamont where psychedelic burn-outs grooved along with the raggedy nihilists railing at the dying of the hippy light.

My some counterintuitive sleight of hand it is this journey back into the past that makes Blood Lust sound so incredibly fresh, that and a brilliant knack for writing some great tunes.  Just spin ’13 Candles’ to dig some real melodic sensibilities amongst the doom, ditto the mellotron flourishes in the epic closing track ‘Withered hand Of Evil’. 

It also helps that for all the blood curdling song titles and lyrics there is something decidedly cheap and B-movie-esque about the whole vibe.  It’s decidedly Hammer Horror and far less menacing as a result. 

Friends tell me that Uncle Acid are an incredible live act and that these Cambridgeshire doomsters have done far better LP’s since, I wouldn’t know yet; but I will.  Main man Kevin Starrs aside, the band seem to have had a fluctuating line-up over the years.  Whoever Red and Kat may be (drummer and bassist respectively) the musicianship is absolutely superb. 

But don’t just take my word for it, treat yourself to Blood Lust there just isn’t a duff second here. 

923 Down.

*yes, J, including Screaming Trees Last Words, 125 words typed and mounting, counting. 

**it is actually a rockin’ rocking chair. 

^and I am embarrassed to say, possibly only.