A WORD FOR OZZY

Posted on July 27, 2025 by kevinsmusicblog

This post was meant to be a celebration of Black Sabbath‘s monumental Back to the Beginning metal-thon and all the Sabbathian goodness and rekindled love it inspired. Who hasn’t been on a Sabbath bender of late?

Following huge media coverage of Glastonbury and Oasis in the previous few days, Back to the Beginning could not have been timed better: the festival spirit was already overflowing but this time, July 5th, it was for heavy rock and metal. The historic aspect of BTTB was never in doubt but once you got into it and started watching and reading more about it, it really sunk in just how big a deal this actually was.

It was on-stage closure for the people who started it – in their home city, supported by the bands who drew on their influence and came back to pay tribute. Poignancy played a huge part in all this. It was so much more than a final gig by a legendary band. It was a moment that will go down as one of the great events in rock.

Then Ozzy passed away just days later. And it’s knocked everything sideways.

Instead of being a celebration of music and legacy, Back to the Beginning has rapidly become something else – not just a send-off for a band but a send-off for a life, too. No wonder our thoughts have stalled and become blurred … it’s too fast a transition from loved-up afterglow into shock. In some ways, Black Sabbath have been pushed a little further back within the memory of this event and Ozzy – understandably, right now – is up front and centre. We’re in Ozzy mode.

Unlike Black Sabbath’s back catalogue, Ozzy’s solo music isn’t enough my thing, despite some awesome tunes. But his OTT Hammy-horror videos and album covers, shred-glam guitar sounds and widescreen wild man personality were so integral to growing up in the 80s that it might as well be. He helped define what rock sounded like in that decade and for anyone who spent time programming the video recorder for The Power Hour, Raw Power and Noisy Mothers in the deep, dark small hours on ITV, Ozzy was inescapable. We grew up with him. We knew and got to know the musicians he picked. We knew the bands he toured with. He’s always been there, a connector of souls.

The only Ozzy records in my stash* are Tribute and the Just Say Ozzy live EP so they’re being revisited right now. Suicide Solution and I Don’t Know always, always work. Records like this are inseparable from teenage memories, even down to the way they feel – the Tribute record cover is oddly grainy.

Funny to think that Geezer Butler played on Just Say Ozzy. The rotation and crossover of band members in the post-70s Sabbath/Ozzy orbit blows your mind, as does Ozzy’s ultimately short-sighted approach towards playing his former band’s tracks. In the sleeve notes, he wrote, “The Sabbath songs – to have recorded them one last time with Geezer Butler, Zakk and Randy, says it all for me. It’s a chapter of my life I can now close.”

That was 1990. But the chapter didn’t close – not until July 2025.

Farewell, Ozzy Osbourne.

*adding a couple of CDs now though. Diary of a Madman and No Rest for the Wicked are the chosen ones

Ozzy Osbourne and Randy Rhoads - Tribute album cover — Double tribute

A WORD FOR JOHN SYKES

Posted on January 29, 2025 by kevinsmusicblog

RIP TO THE GUITAR TONE THAT DEFINED A COMMERCIAL ROCK COLOSSUS

Some guitarists take us home.

They might not be the ones we listen to the most, we might not even have played them for years – but they’ve been in our lives the longest, on those played-to-death records from formative teenage years. That kind of exposure doesn’t just vanish, no matter how cutting edge we think we are. It’s hardwired into the unconscious. Play that music again and the strength of connection hits hard, sometimes unexpectedly so. It takes you into yourself and, crucially, back to yourself.

Home.

And this is why the news of John Sykes passing away – cancer, age 65 – is hard to take.

1987 was an album I played the life out of as a 14 year-old. The ballads were tolerated (no skipping with the record/tape format) and the keyboards mostly stank but the monstrous stop-start attack of Still of the Night was, and still is, a hard rock thrill for all time. Same for Crying in the Rain and deep-cut favourite, Children of the Night. And the thing that made the best of that album sound the way it did – the speeding rhythmic riffing, the shred-melodic solos and incomparable guitar tone – was John Sykes. He WAS 1987. His sound defined it and mega millions got sold on the back of period piece (cough) videos he never appeared in. Sykes has an exalted place in 80s rock history.

Credibility-wise, Whitesnake get short shrift – no surprise. For me, they were an adolescent band of a moment, but that moment put John Sykes out there. When his Blue Murder debut came out in 1989, firing out all the best bits of 1987 and far fewer of the worst bits, that album got played to death too – until the 90s took hold and both records got ditched without sentimentality as hair rock relics.

Wrong move.

You can’t shake that stuff. Many years later, realising that I needed that Sykes attack close to hand, I repurchased 1987 and Blue Murder. And in the past few years, I’ve been keeping gentle tabs on John Sykes activity – which is another reason why his passing away last week shocks.

There always seems to have been the promise of new music and a return to business. Fans were well up for it. Interviews with Tony Franklin and Carmine Appice said they’d been touch with him and the door was open so the rumblings were positive. Sykes himself said in 2019 that he had stuff ready to go … and each year passed by without. So everyone waited for further word, hopeful that one day something would appear.

A Carmine Appice interview published on YouTube in 2024 threw out the same Blue Murder question but where there was optimism before, now there was resignation. Appice said, “John…. know no-one knows what he’s doing.”

All too sadly now, I think we can guess.

So, this week has seen many riffs raised to a guy who made some of the best and made it all look so easy. Great singer too, the complete hard rock package. Watch the live version of Billy by Blue Murder on The Big Al Show – link below – from 1989 (?) and see. It comes with a Mullet Warning but the music and the performance is astonishing. The whole band smokes, every beat and note. And how Sykes sings, plays and peels off a screaming solo so effortlessly is something else. Favourite bit? Possibly the super-tight post-pause riff that explodes into the first solo. Or the casual intro.

Actually, all of it.

He was missed when he was alive. What more can you say now?

Not much, really. Better just pick a track, riff or solo, celebrate the gift of Sykes – and share it.

Some Sykes clips:
Thin Lizzy, Cold Sweat – The Tube, 1983
Whitesnake, Children of the Night audio, 1987
Blue Murder, Billy – The Big Al Show
John Sykes, Dawn of a Brand New Day, 2021

Blue Murder repurchased

GEORDIE WALKER: THE OTHER VOICE OF KILLING JOKE

Posted on November 28, 2023 by kevinsmusicblog

PREMATURE R.I.P. TO THE SOUND THAT DEFINED A DEFINING SOUND

There’s been a defiant inevitability about Killing Joke in the last 15 years or so. They just seemed to keep going and getting better with (middle) age, fired by a different kind of impetus since Paul Raven’s passing pulled them back together and into the studio for a long, late-career golden run that started even earlier with Pandemonium. Seeing the reformed line-up deliver the live and recorded goods so constantly was almost one of rock’s certainties and there was never a sign it wouldn’t happen again. No talk of retirement. You just sort of knew they’d be back…on their terms. When the time was right.

But this isn’t on anyone’s terms, is it? Geordie Walker’s departure at 64, just months after the Royal Albert Hall gigs and the vital-sounding Full Spectrum Dominance single. Hell, it was only last year that we had the Lord of Chaos EP and the Honour the Fire tour. A full album was surely brewing.

Live, it was always Walker who captivated. The whole band did obviously, we’re not ranking players or anything, but the concentrated force of Geordie’s guitar won you over by wearing you down first. Every KJ gig has felt, to me, like slightly hard work at the start before submersing you into a strange state of battered awe by the end, and much of that comes from the hypnotic power of Geordie Walker. He doesn’t move and barely seems to even touch the guitar, yet whatever resonance/dissonance he conjures from those oversized chords and shapes just does something to your brain, shifting you from agitation to submission.

And because there are no solos, the fullness and volume of his noise is permanent. For all the right reasons, it’s no wonder he didn’t get the job with Faith No More when he auditioned back in 1994. Here’s what Mike Bordin said in Small Victories: The True Story of Faith No More:

“We liked how he played, we liked his texture within the music. We liked the fact he was incredibly aggressive with his tone, but wasn’t a soloist. He was cool, talked about jamming with Jimmy Page, smoked a lot of cigarettes…it was probably a bit of a long shot, even to get him to do it. But it was fucking fun.”

Billy Gould said, “He’s a great guitar player, one of the best I’ve ever seen. He would have been amazing, but he is so distinctive. I think he would have rendered us into a Killing Joke cover band.”

Even when talking about the genius of Trey Spruance, who joined Faith No More to record King for a Day…Fool for a Lifetime, Gould couldn’t quite shake Walker’s impact off, saying, “He [Trey] could do whatever he wanted and do it better, but he didn’t have the animal thing that Geordie had. There was a certain violence about Geordie. Trey doesn’t have a violent bone in his body.”

Distinctive is the word. Gould and co made the right call. Killing Joke was home, the only possible place. RIP Geordie Walker.

More Geordie:
The Damage Manual
Full Spectrum Dominance
Gig review from Hammersmith Apollo, 2022

HEY COLOSSUS – My Name In Blood: TRACK OF THE MONTH

Posted on August 5, 2023 by kevinsmusicblog

JULY REWIND: QOTSA STORM WORTHY FARM, HEY COLOSSUS GET BLOODY, ZAMILSKA CHANNELS REZNOR

Right-o, where are we? July … no, it just left dammit, another sign of not getting any writing done. But before we scrape together a handful of ace new noises from the past couple of months, we can’t let Glastonbury go unmentioned, even at this late post-Worthy Farm hour, because

Queens of the Stone Age: is this as good as live rock music gets?

Of course, it’s the TV version we’re talking about – no chance of actually being there – and even though the ever-expanding BBC TV/radio ubiquity of GLAS-TON-BERRRYYYY often easily grates, this year it didn’t. Seeing Glastonbury through the media means it’s very much a headliner-centric prism but, for rock fans of a certain vintage, the nostalgia-meets-car-crash potential of Guns N’ Roses was impossible to resist. Non-nostalgic sparks flew with, er, Sparks (sorry), Nova Twins, Working Men’s Club and more, but it was the Sunday night Other Stage headliner that promised a special moment.

One of our bands, in the big slot. And it feels like a big deal because although they’re obviously popular, there’s still something a little cult-y about QOTSA – something not quite mainstream. A little bit outside, singular, defiant.

In an interview with Mary Anne Hobbs for 6 Music, Josh Homme quipped that when it comes to Glastonbury, they get asked to do the slot no-one else wants. Last time, it was when Beyonce took the Pyramid Stage. This year, the small matter of Elton John’s Last Ever UK Show was the same-time competition.

The resulting gig was a badass statement in how to step up and own a festival gig. Apologies for the vacuous state of these few words, they don’t add up to a review and definitely offer zero news or insight. They’re just a fumbling attempt to express how exceptional QOTSA are live … a drilled unit with gang attitude who’ve got the chops to do exactly what they want. Stunning show, can’t get enough. Last year, Robert Plant and Alison Krauss turned in a spiritual set that touched on the divine. This year, Queens do the same but with devilish, high-energy relish.

All of this means the QOTSA love-in continues round here, no doubt helped by the heat of In Times New Roman, but the occasional new sound still managed to creak on through.

Shall we?

HEY COLOSSUS – My Name In Blood

Having only got two Hey Colossus albums meself – In Black and Gold and Happy Birthday – and not really getting on with the latter while bloody loving the former, we’ve got no choice but to dodge the Hey Colossus backstory and take this tune entirely on its own terms.

And those terms go something like this: sticky dank crawling spidery Slint-y trudgy hypnosis, all via the medium of RIFF. Never has an ascending sequence sounded less positive (disclaimer: I have no actual evidence for that) and those vulnerable shoegazer-esque vocals make a neat juxtaposition. Intricately, gothically doomy and very nearly uplifting, give it a shot and wallow in its dank.

MEMORIALS – Boudicaaa

Matthew Simms, guitarist in Wire. Verity Susman on vocals. Sprightly, catchy post-punk shapes that you might expect but given extra crunch you might not quite expect with an ultra-satisfying heavy low-end oomph that resolvethe main hook. Boudicaaa doesn’t last long and even then, Susman’s vocals disappear long before this already-short track fades away, making it less a song than a sketch that happens to be complete. Neat headbang and no excess.

ZAMILSKA – Better Off

In trying to create something that captured the trip hop and heavier guitar sounds she listened to growing up, Polish electronica artist Zamilska has conjured a little magic here – a stark beat utilising Nine Inch Nails’ signature sonic decay and Massive Attack’s Mezzanine black-hole teetering. Whether Better Off is typical of Zamilska’s sound or a guitar-enhanced one-off, I don’t know, but it’s a darkly seductive electro strip.

HEAVY LUNGS – All Gas No Brakes

Jerky shouting with a near-funk punk stab to match, All Gas No Brakes hits you like a rough, rowdy, non-digital guitar-band version of a Working Men’s Club track, an incessant one-note bass pulse that judders, lurches and agitates more than it grooves. Wakey wakey, losers.

And there we go – a long overdue round-up, must try harder.

‘til next time!

Northern Quarter, Mamchester — Manchester, Northern Quarter

A WORD FOR MARK LANEGAN

Posted on February 27, 2022 by kevinsmusicblog

MARK LANEGAN PASSED AWAY. SOME WORDS AND A GIG REVIEW REVISITED

It’s all out of proportion. Mark Lanegan’s presence, I mean. There aren’t that many Lanegan albums in my collection but it feels like there are, and he’s been top of mind since the rock world dimmed on word of his passing on Tuesday 22nd February, 2022. My thoughts have been drawn his way more than they’ve been drawn towards other departeds, even some whose music I play a lot more.

Why?

Probably because he came across as … a person. A being. And a serious one too, not to mention flawed. Seemed to have the whole human experience baked into his voice. Deep smoked and lived-in. Potent and intense. You don’t need too much, a small dose carries far. It connects, even when you don’t know its owner.

Presence.

He’s always been there too, certainly for anyone who came of age in the early 90s and sucked up the alt-rock scene. He’s been with the bands that mattered. We see him as a Seattle name but it was the desert-scene players he stepped in with more often, orbiting their many satellite projects. Low key but bigger than a bit player. It’s almost like he needed a collective of like-minded spirits loose enough to attach to and detach from at will.

Here’s a Mark Lanegan Band gig review I wrote in 2017. At that time, Lanegan wasn’t someone whose albums I bought devoutly. Bubblegum was the last but the chance to see him sing just down the road was a no-brainer.

Re-reading the review, it chimes a lot more strongly with today’s news and mood than expected. His physical frailty was a shock. But so was his generosity, and this is what’s coming up time and again in fans’ comments and memories of the guy: his latter-years openness, if you can call it that.

Now he’s gone and we’re revisiting the music. With Animals, his 2018 release with Duke Garwood, made a real impact when listening to it again yesterday. Seriously beautiful. The fact that it took Mark’s death for me to cue it up is a brutal reminder that we need to pay more attention to our artists and their music. Slow the fuck down, listen better. Because I don’t know when I’d have next dug it out and it deserves better than that.

Presence. Something Mark Lanegan didn’t lack. I haven’t read his memoirs and don’t think I want to – Sing Backwards and Weep too grim? Devil in a Coma, maybe. But there will be more albums to pick up, selectively, in good time. His musical flow has many tributaries and none of us have paddled the same route.

Blues Funeral just finished. Press play again.

COZY-UP WITH A WINTER SOUL-WARMER FROM CURTIS H.

Posted on January 22, 2022 by kevinsmusicblog

After days of trying and failing this week, Cult of Luna‘s Somewhere Along the Highway finally got played in full yesterday. Glorious. But why the protracted arsing about just to play an album?

The conditions weren’t right. Nearly, but not quite. It is winter, which is a start. And we had the sub-zeros outside, finally. But it was also TOO BLOODY SUNNY every morning to do justice to Highway’s cold weight.

Winter music. Seasonal listening. Frosty bites. What gets you through?

Scratch that last question – it makes winter sound like the enemy, a battle to be endured and escaped from. It’s not. It’s Optimum Music Season. Short dark days and the great indoors are primed for music, books about music, and winter music selections.

This gives you every excuse to dig out some music specifically for the time of year and then agonise over exactly the right time to play it. You want to turn it into a 3-D experience: surround sound with seasonal mood and vision.

As we know, some albums just sound better at certain times. Not like there are any rules, rights or wrongs about it, it’s down to preferences. But, more than any other time of year, winter encourages this hibernatory Right Moment fixation.

For example, David Bowie‘s Blackstar and The Next Day (and a few other Bowie albums) are never bright-light listens, not for me at least. They’re autumn-winter affairs or soundworlds for the smallest hours. The dead of night? That’s when they’re most alive. Never the heat.

Henry Rollins touches on music’s relationship with time, season and place a lot in his books, and it’s one of the things that makes him a really good music writer. He writes as a fan, not a critic. You won’t get in depth reviews or high brow critical perspectives, he knows that’s not his space. But you do get words and fanaticism about buying music, playing music, what memories it stokes, when it got/gets played and what it soundtracks in life. And when you read this, you realise you’re not alone in your nerd-world musical indulgences. He’s out-nerding everyone, doing it for a living. It’s on a different scale. But it’s good to know because it validates your own quirks.

Back to the seasonal sounds, though. Which albums make for a winter-enhancing selection box?

It starts with the nice long seasonal build-up to Christmas. Childhood pop for the magic-of-Christmas mainline (Frankie Goes to Hollywood ALWAYS, some other pre-teen pop as well usually). Uncool 80s metal for another childhood link. Lyrical storytelling and sparse folk – Bob Dylan, Mark Knopfler, Michael Chapman – for long nights, low lights and late mornings. Accessible jazz or blues, ditto. Post/Scandi metal for the harsher realities once the Christmas vibe is retired.

On top of that there’s a pull towards music that’s warm. Not sunny warm but intimate warm. Close-up instrumentation warm. Analogue 60s/70s productions warm. Late-era Beatles, that kind of stuff.

Something new that really tuned in to the 70s analogue spirit this winter was a 2021 album:

If Words Were Flowers by Curtis Harding.

Ho-lee shit, go check it. Ultra warm soul with just enough backbone funk to swing a tail. Gospel sweep and widescreen strings. Bass clarinet rasps and tenor sax uppers. Soft psychedelic fuzz. Hip-hop stiffness on the beats. And I dare you not be melted by The One‘s gentle heavy groove.

File near Mayfield, Axelrod, Kiwanuka? This might be glib and obvious (what did you expect) as a batch of references, and maybe I’m riding high on the first-plays thrill of a new discovery that’s fitting the mood, but it’s all we can manage right now. Haven’t even checked the lyrics yet.

Tip? Crank it up on a walk out in the frost. Soul with a scarf on.

Veering off now to a different thought:

When will Nick Cave and Warren Ellis do a winter album? Even wilder, what about a Christmas one?

Surely it would leap to the top of the seasonal stack with Low’s Christmas and the Sufjan Stevens box set. Quiet moods, small-watt ambience, ghost tales, long shadows – Cave & Ellis are surely built for this? COME ON FELLAS! Let’s get the rumour started. They’re a fixture in my seasonal listening anyway, might as well go full hog with an official St Nick Christmas Album.

Right, that’s it for now. Nice talking with you. See below for a few words on three winter aces, lifted lazily with no edits from a previous post. The sentiment’s the same.

BJORK – Vespertine

Top of the winter pops is Vespertine, always. Somehow, it’s the essence of snow in musical form, yet it doesn’t sound like it’s contrived to be a winter album – it feels like it just turned out that way. Hidden Place pushes against wind and snow drifts before the chorus sweeps you up and out, flying over white patchworks. Frosti, Aurora and An Echo, A Stain make for an especially frost-twinkled run of three, but the whole of Vespertine has a softness of sound that is flakes falling, ice forming. Magical. It only ever gets played at this time of year. That’s the deal.

NICK CAVE AND WARREN ELLIS – White Lunar

Where Vespertine exposes your inner wonder to winter’s call, White Lunar tracks the harsh, bleak end of the same season – let your mind go with The Rider #2 or Zanstra and conjure a whiteout. Song for Jesse and Micro Sucker could have fallen from Vespertine’s branches, but really, it’s isolation and loneliness that dominate these heavy scores …. like Srey Leak, disc 2. Plug in for barren, wintry detachment from civilisation this Christmas.

CULT OF LUNA – Somewhere Along the Highway

Or Salvation. Or Vertikal and Vertikal II. But probably Somewhere Along the Highway. Less seasonal than the others here, but I always get more Cult of Luna in the diet in winter. Slow-moving, heavy and intense, the Swedish post-metal masters rarely waver far from their template and yet, like Mogwai, refine it pretty much every time they put a record out. This, their fourth album, may be their best. Dim soars to a higher mellow than they’d managed before, and Back to Chapel Town is a timeless snowbound pounder. Just get the whole album on, it’s a class act.

KARMA TO BURN … NO MORE

Posted on September 7, 2021 by kevinsmusicblog

R.I.P. WILL MECUM, KARMA TO BURN FOUNDER AND RIFFMEISTER

Plenty of musicians pass away and we can’t comment on them all, nor should we even try. But this one? Karma to Burn have featured a few times in this blog so yes, we’re doing it.

Will Mecum died of a head injury after a fall at the end of April. He was 48. Weirdly, four months later, that’s pretty much still all we know.

It feels like small media noise for a band who, if you got them in your life, seemed like a pretty big name. You felt they were known to everyone in the rock-metal-stoner scene, not least because of their pretty unique format and on-off links to John Garcia. But maybe they weren’t. Maybe they really were still cult.

They were definitely a conundrum. Sometimes you’d play their albums and revel in the greatest of no-bullshit rock sounds, that instrumental riff metal thing that took its cues from the AC/DC, Ramones or Motorhead school of Ain’t Broke No Fix and just rocks like a bastard. Sometimes that’s all you need: pure rock, no solos, no art, no words. The subversive power of guitar-bass-drums amplification.

At other times, you’d get a bit bored by the one-trick repetition and lack of adventure (never the debut though – always killer, that one).

Similar thing live, depending on which incarnation you caught. Last time I saw Karma to Burn was 2018 and it was a good gig but didn’t quite fly for a band you want to be totally smoked by. But Audioscope 2011 – man, that was something. Three badass road dogs and plentee amps upstairs in a pub made for a shit-kicking headliner set. Mecum was into it yet anonymous next to his more animated bandmates, the genial Rich Mullins on low-hung bass and the wildman-unkempt Rob Oswald on drums.

Watch a clip from that very gig. This is the Karma to Burn and Will Mecum that lives on.

Wild, Wonderful Purgatory rocking hard while writing this. It sounds better than ever. And now that K2B have joined the departed, it probably always will.

So long, guys. And eternal thanks for the live introduction to Desert Storm.

PLANT AT KNEBWORTH 1990: REWIND THE RADIO TAPE

Posted on June 24, 2021 by kevinsmusicblog

You know what it’s like. You see a reissue or a magazine profile or a landmark album anniversary or a musician’s death or something and you end up triggered into a back-catalogue sinkhole. It’s part of the music-fan game. We love it.

Unsurprisingly, a bit of this happened after picking up the Robert Plant Knebworth 1990 EP on Record Store Day last week.

I dug out my TDK D90 radio taping of the gig and played it before the EP.

Haven’t pressed clunk-click on that one in decades. As well as the 4 EP tracks (Hurting Kind, Liar’s Dance, Tall Cool One and Wearing and Tearing), what else would be on there?

Not much, I reckoned. Another couple of tracks, maybe.

How wrong.

By the time Rock and Roll played out at the end of the cassette recording, I’d noted eight tracks in the setlist. Immigrant Song works way better than you might have thought, while Hurting Kind and Tie Dye on the Highway are solid enough, kinda what you’d expect from Plant ’90. He was rocking his hardest solo album to date, but vocally not quite home. That would be Fate of Nations and everything solo that followed it.

Jimmy Page joins for Misty Mountain Hop. Ha. Not quite all over the shop, but taut it ain’t. Wearing and Tearing though, that’s a different beast. Forceful and ragged, it snaps you to attention.

Here’s the track listing from the tape. Can you see what’s missing?

Hurting Kind (Got My Eyes On You)
Immigrant Song
Tie Dye on the Highway
Going to California
Tall Cool One
Misty Mountain Hop (with Jimmy Page)
Wearing and Tearing (with Jimmy Page)
Rock and Roll (with Jimmy Page)

Yep. NO LIAR’S DANCE.

So, now I know – finally – what it was that bugged me back at the time. It was having Liar’s Dance cut from the radio airing that I’d conscientiously and fanatically made the effort to tape (nerd is as nerd does) – and when you’ve seen or heard the Knebworth version, which I must have done (TV broadcast, I guess) you’ll know exactly why that track’s omission from the tape bugged the shite out of ma much younger self. It’s a performance and a half, definitely the track of the set. Doug Boyle hits that acoustic hard.

But now, with the new RSD EP, we’ve got the audio version so I guess that’s some sort of closure after 31 years. It turns out that my taping was a Radio 1 replay of the gig, not the live broadcast from the day itself – Tommy Vance said so, right after Rock and Roll. Ah well. And by doing a bit of setlist digging for this post, it turns out that Plant played Nirvana that day too, so that’s another one to go and find.

If you haven’t seen it, here’s Liar’s Dance in all its windblown brilliance. Check that shirty billow, Boyle on fire and in command throughout. What a player.

While we’re here: RIP Phil Johnstone, co-writer and keyboard player through Now and Zen, Manic Nirvana and Fate of Nations. Crucial albums all, and his part in them was huge.

WHO MADE YOUR 2021 RECORD STORE DAY?

Posted on June 14, 2021 by kevinsmusicblog

ROBERT PLANT LIVE AT KNEBWORTH 1990? YES PLEASE. AND A MOGWAI SOUNDTRACK? IT WOULD BE RUDE NOT TO….

Finally, after many years of hoping-but-failing, we have a Record Store Day release to buy without hesitation. This might sound strange for RSD fanatics but, for me, the day/event has always been a contrived effort (see Great RSD Swindle? post) despite the good intentions.

But thank Plant for a 2021 turnaround: a nice little twelve incher that collects 4 tracks from Robert Plant’s Knebworth 1990 set. Taped it from the radio at the time and still have the cassette, but when the whole thing got aired on the tellybox, didn’t some halfwit decide to cut Liar’s Dance? There’s something about that Knebworth broadcast that annoyed. Pretty sure it was having one of Plant’s best tracks chopped.

Or maybe that’s an invented memory. Dunno*.

Anyway, back to Truck Store and this EP is what an RSD release should be: something previously unavailable, tarted up so it’s a bit spesh (yellow vinyl), not obscenely priced, and for a lifelong Robert Plant fan this does the job in spades, buckets and shovels. Thank you, RSD peoples.

Robert Plant live at Knebworth 1990 — Robert Plant at Knebworth: keen as mustard

RSD 2021 part 1 didn’t quite end there. Mogwai’s ZeroZeroZero soundtrack stuck its tongue out and taunted a budget stretch. Shit. Went home to ponder and check some audio online first, which sounds ridiculous because it’s Mogwai, and Mogwai fucking rule, right? Yes. Especially this year.

Then again, it is a soundtrack. But a few seconds’ worth of random ZeroZeroZero samples said yeah, get it or forever be fool. Of regret.

Mogwai ZeroZeroZero white vinyl — Mogwai ZeroZeroZero: who can resist?

So, a much better Record Store Day at this end. How was yours?

*not invented after all – check the next post

EDDIE VAN HALEN RIP: Overlooked maestro?

Posted on October 7, 2020 by kevinsmusicblog

EDDIE VAN HALEN PASSED AWAY YESTERDAY, OCTOBER 6, 2020.

Is it possible for the most influential guitarist of his generation, a guy whose band was one of hard rock’s biggest-selling stadium-slaying behemoths, to be overlooked?

I think maybe, and here’s why: it’s because we’re too cool. At least, we think we are. Maybe not all the time, but enough to overlook Van Halen’s musicianly credibility. And why do we do this? Because of Jump. Because of mega sales. Because of hair, smiles, girls, lights, showmanship, entertainment, innuendo, feuds, all that stuff. Because Van Halen weren’t alt, avant, art, fringe, prog, hostile, underground or anything ‘credible’ once you’d discovered thrash, grunge and the Lollapalooza bands. They were a catchy California sunshine crew at a time when Seattle matched our late adolescent moods better. So, we moved on. Sidelined the records we’d bought when younger, denied them as we got a little older. Van Halen are a band it’s easy to be a bit sniffy about.

But this isn’t cool. This is Poserville, a place we’ve all visited and maybe even stayed a while. It’s important to see the place, sure – but you’ve got to leave.

Eddie’s death might prompt more of us to leave. It might get more people to simply sink into the glory of Van Halen’s prime, whichever track, album or era it might be for each person, because there IS glory in those records. Not everything for everyone, though that may be true for some. But there is something for pretty much anyone – just gotta dig around and listen with guards dropped and scepticism binned. Then enjoy Eddie and his band’s music for what it is: highly musical, highly melodic pop-formatted rock with revolutionary playing that never gets in the way of a song. Ever. They were a song band, a popular song band, not a deep band or an issues band or a muso band, and this is why Eddie’s ability could be overlooked by the broader music world and the more tribal music fans.

Van Halen entertained and delivered a good time. They just happened to have one of the all-time rock sound innovators within. They didn’t really step outside that. Didn’t do a Beatles, didn’t do a Radiohead. But the guitar playing was already far enough ahead and the first album proves it. So do the next three.

There are many people who’ve passed away whose music means a lot more to me than Van Halen’s does, and yet I felt the need to write a little something. I think it’s because there’s conflict between what we think Van Halen is/were, which puts us off, and the pure joy (and awe) that comes from the best of their music when you play it and surrender to it. Going back to those first albums is revelatory. And they make you feel good, too. They are celebratory.

But if you need an outsider musician’s validation before giving yourself permission to cue up a Van Halen record, check Julian Cope’s review. He knew. His review might even get you to read David Lee Roth’s Crazy From The Heat (persuaded me, totally worth it).

Right then. Better get on with that Fair Warning review that’s stalled and been left unfinished. So long, Eddie.

Late addition: check VAN HALEN FAIR WARNING review

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