Author: Web Rock Radio News Dept

Another seven days have come and gone, and another name enters the Tracks Of The Week pantheon of greatness. This time it’s hotly-tipped Canadians Deraps who led the way, coming in just ahead of Welsh valley boys Those Damn Crows. Swedish melodic rockers H.E.A.T. complete this week’s international podium of rock triumph.

This week, another eight combatants enter the fray. You’ll find them below, bristling with rockcitement.

This week, just like every other, we’ve found another eight songs to excite all the different parts of your auditory system. They’re below.

Creeping Jean – God Bless Honking Clover

Released as part of their The Clothes Shop 7” for Record Store Day, God Bless Honking Clover finds the Brighton rock’n’rollers channelling their inner Jack White through deliciously gritty, swaggering grooves. “Honking Clover was a mysterious social media profile that interacted with our content, claiming to be the ‘tiniest man in the world’,” guitarist Rod explains. “After drinking a few too many Spritz in Venice during our tour with the Rival Sons last year, we decided to investigate and it turns out it wasn’t the tiniest man in the world, or even a man.”

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Skunk Anansie – Lost & Found

Peaking with one of our favourite Ace guitar solos (simple but searingly effective) from the new album The Painful Truth, Lost And Found builds up from staccato piano and minimal beats into one of their smartest, most stirring ballads yet, Skin’s voice all smoke, vulnerability and poise. “We wanted to evoke the loneliness and desperation that can occur in a split second by one tiny mistake,” she says. “Any of us at any time can lose the security built up over a lifetime whether it be via an accident, or a sudden twist of fate.”

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Star Circus – One Hit Wonder

Part livewire glam stomper, part heartstring-tugging pop rocker in the vein of Cheap Trick with a touch of Thin Lizzy, One Hit Wonder had us happily bobbing along within seconds. “It’s about someone I worked with in the music industry a few years ago,” frontman Dave Winkler explains. “One Hit Wonder tells a story from the perspective of a ‘hired gun’ who has been used and discarded. The song delves into themes of exploitation and manipulation from an ego-driven individual, hiding behind a saintly, heroic persona, a ‘man of the people’ mask.”

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Eureka Machines – The Lovers And The Lost

There’s a moody yet sunny Lennon/McCartney-esque thump n’ swing to the verses of this piece of the Eurekas’ new album Everything, before easing into a warm, lighter-swaying chorus that mixes Britpop glitter with their own pensive but forward-kicking heart. All of it accompanied by a video in which the band sign a shit-tone of vinyl with the aid of many, many pints. Excellent.

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Goat and Graveyard – Light As A Feather

Two elegantly nostalgic Gothenburg rock bands, one rather cool Record Store Day collaboration, released at the weekend as part of an exclusive 7”. Light As A Feather might not have typical pop song furniture (verses, choruses, vocals that last beyond the first stretch…) but it kept us firmly hooked, all dreamy but riffy, melodic late 60s/early 70s hippie energy, like Fleetwood Mac and The Who skipping through a meadow together after a massive bag of ‘shrooms.

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The Virginmarys – My Nettle

This is one of our favourite tracks on Ally and Danny’s latest album, The House Beyond The Fires, so we were delighted to see it getting the full single/video treatment. Brimming with urgent heat that thumps you square in the chest, it soars with a brilliantly fiery yet stirring chorus that Ally started cooking up years ago, and now comes to fruition as an ode to the love in his life. Catch them out on tour across the UK in April and May – the show the VMs put on as a duo is blinding, well worth seeing.

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The Sheepdogs – Down At The Khyber 

Canadian rocker Joel Plaskett turns 50 this week, and, to mark the occasion, a shedload of fellow musicians recorded a tribute album entirely in secret. In addition to acts like current Sex Pistol Frank Turner and Bluenose icons Sloan, you’ll find our old favourites The Sheepdogs, who’ve turned Plaskett’s 2001 slow-burning Down at the Khyber into something suitably smooth and Sheepdoggian. Plaskett didn’t know anything about the release until he was confronted with it while visiting a record store in Victoria, B.C, a moment captured in a rather lovely video.

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The Mars Volta – Cue The Sun

Last month, The Mars Volta supported Deftones and played their then-unreleased latest album Lucro Sucio; Los Ojos Del Vacío in full, a typically Mars Volta thing for the Mars Volta to do. The album also confounds expectations, with the high-octane fury of their early work replaced by jazz-flecked streams of woozy, atmospheric transience. The rather lovely Cue The Sun is typical, like Herbie Hancock fooling around with Massive Attack while simultaneously toying with Hans Zimmer. You might have missed it, but the album’s out now.

Polly is deputy editor at Classic Rock magazine, where she writes and commissions regular pieces and longer reads (including new band coverage), and has interviewed rock’s biggest and newest names. She also contributes to Louder, Prog and Metal Hammer and talks about songs on the 20 Minute Club podcast. Elsewhere she’s had work published in The Musician, delicious. magazine and others, and written biographies for various album campaigns. In a previous life as a women’s magazine junior she interviewed Tracey Emin and Lily James – and wangled Rival Sons into the arts pages. In her spare time she writes fiction and cooks.

The nine years since he’d released his previous album of original material, 1989’s superb Journeyman, had been fraught with trauma for Eric Clapton. Having overcome his 80s alcoholism, Ol’ Slow Hand then lost tourmate Stevie Ray Vaughan and three crew members in a 1990 helicopter crash and his four-year-old son Conor in a tragic fall in 1991, prompting the heartbreaking Tears In Heaven.

He’d also recently begun a relationship with a woman 31 years his junior. No wonder Clapton sounded exhausted on 1998’s Pilgrim, his pace slowed to a casual jazz shuffle, his voice careworn, his production – perhaps down to the soporific touch of Climie Fisher’s Simon Climie – solemnly inoffensive.

Two of Pilgrim’s tracks are about Conor: the heartfelt but surprisingly upbeat My Father’s Eyes and Circus, a forlorn flamenco about his son’s last trip to Chipperfield’s. The latter – and the sense of loss that infects the sombre River Of Tears – is deeply moving, but the aura of resigned glumness dampens Clapton’s trademark roar into a tired Albert Hall slouch on the title track, One Chance, Needs His Woman and the Celtic-piped Broken Hearted.

He’s only roused by his new romance on Fall Like Rain and You Were There; otherwise it’s as if, after decades of pouring his heart and soul into other people’s blues, his own sucked the life out of him

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Every week, Album of the Week Club listens to and discusses the album in question, votes on how good it is, and publishes our findings, with the aim of giving people reliable reviews and the wider rock community the chance to contribute.

Join the group now.

Other albums released in March 1998

• Contact from the Underworld of Redboy – Robbie Robertson
• III – Van Halen
• Snake Bite Love – Motörhead
• Virtual XI – Iron Maiden
• Twilight in Olympus – Symphony X
• XIII – Rage
• Colma – Buckethead
• Space Heater – Reverend Horton Heat
• Boggy Depot – Jerry Cantrell
• 12 Bar Blues – Scott Weiland

What they said…

“The deadened sonics would make Pilgrim a chore even if there were strong songs on the record, but only a handful of tunes break through the murk. Considering that Journeyman, his last album of original material, was a fine workmanlike effort and that From the Cradle and Unplugged crackled with vitality, the blandness of Pilgrim is all the more disappointing.” (AllMusic)

“Pilgrim is easily Clapton’s most ambitious, introspective piece of work since his days with the legendary, lacerating Derek and the Dominos. Paradoxically both slickly polished and surprisingly intimate, the album is a loosely themed soul-song cycle in the tradition of Marvin Gaye.” (Rolling Stone)

“With its mournful tone and its surfeit of mid-tempo, string-enhanced ballads (even the orchestra is forced to play blues licks), Pilgrim does have the feel of a somber musical wake. But it never matches the emotional intensity and visceral passion of his previous pain-as-art masterpiece, Layla.” (Entertainment Weekly)

What you said…

Chris Elliott: A brief review would be simply more dull than usual. Imagine Sade’s backing band on a really bad day and you’ll be close.

I have never got the appeal/legend status of Clapton. Yes Cream were good – Layla is worth it’s reputation – but 1969 is a long time ago. He represents most of what I dislike about the 70s (coke-addled self-indulgence) followed by the dullest coffee table blues through the 80s. Being part of the reason behind Rock Against Racism – for all the wrong reasons – didn’t make me receptive.

Dale Munday: Once upon a time there was a renowned guitar player, so revered in fact that some called him god (whatever that means). And then one day…

Chris Downie: We all know of the well-worn cliché about the legacy artist who has the black sheep (sometimes even two or three) in their back catalogue, that album that serves as either a creative misstep, taken during difficult personal/professional circumstances, or under record label duress, or a contrarian choice of hidden gem for diehards who will proclaim the masses just ‘didn’t get it’ at the time.

In truth, there’s little to either love or hate about this period in Clapton’s career, which puts it in neither of the aforementioned camps, despite the fact many have continually given it a wide berth. Instead, it stands on its own as a statement made at a particular time in the artist’s life, which has some flashes of greatness but is overshadowed by the weight of other, more illustrious eras. Definitely worth a listen, if only for completion’s sake. 7/10.

Gary Claydon: Clapton’s desire to make “the saddest album ever” and the reasons for that are well documented. However, Pilgrim is so determinedly understated it’s almost soporific. Intimate and highly introspective, Clapton’s vocals and guitar have a pleasing subtlety to them in places but unfortunately, the production, particularly the drum machines and the (frankly annoying) backing vocals overwhelms everything and never really lets the emotion break through.

The title track is the best thing here but overall, the attempt to add a contemporary feel doesn’t really work. The material is largely forgettable and Pilgrim is at least four tracks too long. As cathartic as it may have been for the man himself, the end result is an album that is something of a chore, rather than a pleasure, to listen to.

Greg Schwepe: When you have a career as long as Eric Clapton has and your album output veers from your tried and true music to something slightly different, you’re bound to tick off your hardcore fans, but gain some new ones along the way. Pilgrim might be a good example of this as your “I won’t listen to anything past Slowhand’” fans give way to “I like the new Eric Clapton song I heard on the Lite Rock station” fans. Along with fans he picked up after the success of the Unplugged album.

I call this “Adult Contemporary Clapton” or “Soundtrack Clapton” (as he had a lot of success with similar songs on movie soundtracks. Can you say Tears In Heaven?). Smooth, grooving songs over this 1 hour and 15 minute album (too loooooong!).

The feel-good, slow, chugging My Father’s Eyes opens this album. Immediately you hear alongside Clapton’s guitar, the star of this album… the programmed drum beats! They’re here for the entire album. Some may not be a fan of this, but I am.

The next four songs really (and I mean really) test your patience if you are waiting for Clapton to let it rip. That won’t happen until later. River of Tears, Pilgrim, Broken Hearted and One Chance bring more slow, grooving jams. Background vocals and strings complement many of these songs.

Sick and Tired finally has Clapton starting to turn up the volume on his Stratocaster, as this slightly bluesy tune ups the volume and pace a little. Nice tune if you’ve stuck it out to this point. She’s Gone has Clapton dialing it up a little more. Wah-wah filled guitar work and the slinky bass and programmed drums make this the standout song on Pilgrim.

Is this a good Clapton album? Yes! As I mentioned before, will the Clapton purists like it? No! Will the average music fan who stumbles onto it via an Adult Contemporary radio station like it? Yes!

8 out of 10 on this one for me. Not your Father’s Clapton, but one your “Lite Rock” loving Aunt just might like.

Mike Canoe: Eric Clapton’s Pilgrim is alright if you like drum machines.

The constant clacking of programmed beats stands out to me more than Clapton’s voice or guitar. It’s not necessarily bad and often serves as a bedrock for a gentler, warmer Clapton.

Two of the first three songs were very pleasant surprises. River of Tears is as gentle as a lullaby and Clapton’s warm voice serves as a nice counterpoint to the despairing lyrics. The title track is also a sublime beauty with Clapton singing in a soft falsetto. One Chance and Circus are also pretty songs aided by cooing background vocals.

With the exception of Sick And Tired, the rest of the album passes by in a metronomic haze. However, it’s arguably not good when what catches your attention is Clapton singing about taking a shotgun and blowing his woman’s brains out. So, not always a gentler, warmer Clapton then.

Pilgrim has moments of revelation, but over the course of 75 minutes (roughly a minute shorter than an official double album, Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs, for comparison) it becomes more about the end destination than the journey.

John Davidson: Two songs in and I’m already bored. The backdrop to Clapton’s singing and guitar playing is utterly monotonous. The vocals emphasise diction over emotion And the guitar work is largely forgettable.

Things improve very briefly with One Chance, which at least has a decent groove, but overall this is bland stuff, dominated by mechanical drumbeats and by the numbers backing vocals.

Adam Ranger: Apparently Clapton asked Steve Gadd how he felt about making the saddest album ever. I think he mispronounced “Dullest”

This is really monotonous and dull, especially the first few tracks. It was an effort to plough through the dirge. To be honest, I nearly gave up.

Somewhere between smooth pop and modern R’n’B (sadly not the maximum R’n’B of The Who or Bo Diddley!)

A couple of the later tracks liven it up a bit, but not enough to give this a good review.

Every artist has the right to change their sound, and we can’t always expect the great songs of the late 70s, but Eric is so dull here. Not sad or melancholy in the style of great blues songs, just plain dull.

Philip Qvist: The album starts off promising enough with My Father’s Eyes but sadly that’s where it ends. Circus was okay and there are a couple of other decent tracks on Pilgrim, but at nearly 75 minutes long, it was an ordeal to listen to it all in one go.

Monotonous vocals, muted guitars and drum machines do not make for a good album, and Pilgrim is dull to the extreme. Having Simon Climie on it as producer, main musician and co-writer of many of those songs just makes an already bad situation even worse.

Eric Clapton has released some very good albums throughout his career, and I would highly recommend his records with Cream and 461 Ocean Boulevard, but this album is definitely not one of them. In short, Pilgrim is a cure for insomnia.

T.C. Grantham: To really understand and appreciate Pilgrim, you have to look into its background as well as look at it as an objective piece of music.

As we all know, Clapton lost his son, Conor, in August 1991. We also know that he wrote the song Tears in Heaven for him. But it wasn’t until this album that he was able to fully purge the pain and darkness from himself. Many of the songs stem from this pain.

Clapton himself has stated that when the emotions started coming up, he played them rather than going back into alcoholism. This may make the album monotonous is some areas, but it was what he was feeling at the time. So, in a way, this album was a form of therapy for himself.

Pilgrim was an album that he had to make. He had to make it to move forward. It may not be everyone’s cup of tea, but it was definitely an important album for Clapton at this stage in his career.

Final score: 5.38 (39 votes cast, total score 210)

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In 2009, Curved Air vocalist Sonja Kristina looked back on the band’s 1970 debut album – which was the first picture disc to be released by a rock band.

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Curved Air were different. Even in the early 1970s when being individual was the norm, this was one band that somehow stood apart from everyone. And vocalist Sonja Kristina believes she knows why.

“For a start, it was rare for any progressive band at the time to have a female singer,” she says. “It just didn’t seem to happen. And secondly, we combined rock music with innovation. By that I mean that Darryl [Way, violin/vocals] and Francis [Monkman, guitar/keyboards] were heavily into the sounds coming from the West Coast of America, and also people like Jimi Hendrix. You add an interest in the modern classical music scene back then, and you have Curved Air.

“I think all of this made us more accessible. I’m not knocking what bands like King Crimson and Yes were doing at all, but they could come over as being very precious.”

Kristina arrived after Way, Monkman, bassist Rob Martin and the gloriously named drummer Florian Pilkington-Miksa had already got together and were searching for the right singer. “I had been in a production of Hair for two years,” she recalls. “During that time I’d fallen pregnant and had my first child. But the only performance I missed in all that time was when I gave birth. I was managed by a chap called Roy Guest, who was very big on the folk scene. He got to hear about this group of musicians who were looking for a female singer.”

At first, things didn’t go completely smoothly. “One day, the guys decided that maybe they didn’t want a girl fronting the band after all. So there was this situation where they made me wait in another room while they all took turns trying to sing. After they’d all had a go, the boys came to the decision that, yes, I was needed. I suppose it was a little rude – however, once they’d realised I could do the job, then things were fine.”

Except for a moment with an unnamed member of the band. “I won’t tell you who it was, but he said to me that the music was the most important thing and that I had to fit in wherever I could – if I found it difficult to sing a tune in a certain key, then tough, I just had to deal with it. Oddly, this is someone I get on very well with!”

The next challenge for Kristina was to come up with suitable lyrics for music that had already been created by the others. But it was something she tackled with a real relish. “There were some tunes that were only half-formed, so I could help to mould them. Others just needed words. So I dug deep into my psyche to come up with the lines. But the music was so atmospheric, it really was a pleasure to do it.”

We were travelling up and down the country in a Transit van, taking turns to drive, even though only one of us had a licence!

At the time, the band lived together in one flat in Hampstead, North West London. It was to become a haven for artists and musicians. “That place was amazing. Apart from us, the cast of Hair were also in the building. And at different times you had members of Led Zeppelin, Hot Chocolate, Stone The Crows, America and Roy Harper in and out. Someone should put up a blue plaque there [87 Redington Road, if you’re keen to visit] – it was an incredible time.

“We were travelling up and down the country in a Transit van, taking turns to drive, even though only one of us had a licence! We had all the equipment stuffed in there, and played every club we could. It was important; it helped to really develop the songs for the first album.”

In 1970, Curved Air – now signed to Warner Bros via Lymark Productions, a company started by manager Mark Hanau – went into Island Studios in Basing Street, London, and recorded what was to become debut album Air Conditioning, released in November that year and initially presented under the title ‘Airconditioning.’ Kristina recalls the studio experience as extremely positive.

“It might have been because I was taking loads of psychedelics back then! But I remember it as a happy time. We were inexperienced still, and so was our producer Mark Edwards. But we got through it all. The important thing was that we captured the spirit and freshness of the band. We were really cooking, and it helped that all the songs had been worked out live. The studio itself was a huge room with a great vibe. I recall having to sing on a raised platform, just three feet from the ceiling. But it was all quick and orderly.”

The only problem was that Martin had injured his hand, which forced him to quit, leaving Curved Air without a bassist. “Ian Eyre was just about to join us, but he wasn’t in the studio, so Francis ended up playing all the bass parts.”

I really do believe that we went into the studio and got exactly what we wanted

The album reached Number 8 in the UK charts – the highest position the band were ever to enjoy. But it wasn’t just the music that captured people’s imagination. The artwork stood out in the record shop racks. “That was all the work of Mark Hanau,” Kristina affirms.

“He had been a photographer and was really creative. I remember that, as part of our live show at the time, we had a strobe light mounted on a spinning replica of the front cover album art; it had this amazing psychedelic effect. Especially if you were tripping, as a lot of people were at our gigs.”

Air Conditioning was also the first rock album to be released in a picture disc format – another idea from Hanau. “He had connections with a factory in Holland, who could manufacture this sort of thing, and got them to do it. I know that another British psychedelic band, Saturnalia, try to lay claim to being the first rock band to do something like that. But their album Magical Love came after ours [it was released in 1973].

“The problem with the picture disc was that it had the artwork under clear vinyl and it kept on picking up static, so the sound quality wasn’t as good as on black vinyl. But it was still a really good idea.”

Hanau and Curved Air soon parted, falling out on the band’s first US tour. “Things went wrong,” Kristina says, ”and when that happens you always blame the manager. So we fired him.”

She looks back on Air Conditioning with a huge degree of satisfaction: “It represented what we were all about at the time. I really do believe that we went into the studio and got exactly what we wanted.

“It was actually a really fine period to be in Curved Air. We were all getting along so well, and knew exactly where we were headed. I don’t think we ever had such a degree positivity on any of our other albums.”

Malcolm Dome had an illustrious and celebrated career which stretched back to working for Record Mirror magazine in the late 70s and Metal Fury in the early 80s before joining Kerrang! at its launch in 1981. His first book, Encyclopedia Metallica, published in 1981, may have been the inspiration for the name of a certain band formed that same year. Dome is also credited with inventing the term “thrash metal” while writing about the Anthrax song Metal Thrashing Mad in 1984. With the launch of Classic Rock magazine in 1998 he became involved with that title, sister magazine Metal Hammer, and was a contributor to Prog magazine since its inception in 2009. He died in 2021.

The late Jimmy Bain played with everyone from Rainbow and Dio to Kate Bush and Roy Harper. In 2016, shortly after his death, Classic Rock looked back of the life of a bassist whose playing was matched by his character.

When the MSC Divina set sail from Miami for Def Leppard’s Hysteria On The High Seas Rock Cruise on January 21, no one could have known how ill-fated its five-day journey would turn out to be.

The omens didn’t look good from the start. Leppard were forced to cancel one of the sets they were due to play when Joe Elliott was struck down by laryngitis, leaving bandmates Viv Campbell and Phil Collen to cover for him.

But that wasn’t the worst thing that happened on the ship. On January 23 Jimmy Bain, veteran bassist with Last In Line, was found dead in his cabin by the ship’s staff. No one saw it coming. The 68-year-old Scot had been receiving treatment for pneumonia, but he’d played a pre-sail gig and soundchecked with the band he’d formed with fellow former Dio members Viv Campbell and Vinny Appice. What nobody – including Bain himself – knew was that the bassist was also suffering from lung cancer.

“Jimmy played great and even sang that night while holding a heavy bass guitar,” Appice said in a statement. “Never complaining, never asking for help. He didn’t want to let anyone down.”

Ronnie Dio used to say proudly that he had sung on three of the most influential hard rock albums in history: Rainbow’s Rising, Black Sabbath’s Heaven And Hell and Dio’s debut album, Holy Diver. Jimmy Bain also played on two of them, although the perception of him as a sideman means his contributions have been overlooked.

“Jimmy didn’t crave superstardom,” says Viv Campbell. “ He could be a frontman but was just as comfortable as a supporting player. He was a very creative guy, but the problem was that he’d never follow through. He’d write a gem of a song and then put it away in a box somewhere.”

If Jimmy Bain had been just a great musician and songwriter, that would have been enough. But he was a far more colourful character than that. There was boozing and drugging, arrests and 24-hour parties. He even married into aristocracy in the 80s, tying the knot with the daughter of the Marquis of Bute (it ended in divorce). Like his friend Phil Lynott, he was an unrepentant rogue dedicated to the romance of rock’n’roll.

“I was famous for being lit up, falling over and still being able to play,” he once said. “It almost became part of the show.”

Bain was born in Newtonmore, Scotland in December 1947. He cut his teeth with such bands as Nick And The Sinners, The Embers and, after his family emigrated to Canada, Street Noise. In 1974 he returned to the UK and founded Harlot. Classic Rock photographer Ross Halfin, then a teenager, became friendly with Bain at the the time.

“Jimmy would sneak me and my friends into the Marquee or buy us pints up the road in the Ship because we were too young,” Halfin recalls. “He was a genuinely nice guy. Even later on, you always felt welcome with him wherever you were. It was probably a Scottish thing.”

Bain’s break came when Ritchie Blackmore saw Harlot at the Marquee in the summer of 1975. While the band were a shambles that night, the ex-Deep Purple guitarist was impressed enough with Bain to offer him a job with his post-Purple band Rainbow. It was in Rainbow that he met keyboardist Tony Carey.

“Jimmy and I became the terrible twosome and got into all sorts of scrapes,” Carey says of his bandmate, who later served as best man at his wedding. “My first lesson in rock’n’roll economics came when we visited a lawyer’s office to sell our souls for the next million years. My contract said simply that the terms and conditions of my employment were the same as those of Jimmy Bain, and Jimmy’s document repeated it in reverse. We were paid peanuts, but we didn’t care.”

Bain’s tenure in Rainbow lasted just two years and one studio album, the groundbreaking Rising. In 1977, following a Japanese tour, he and Carey were given their marching orders.

“Maybe they thought I was drinking too much,” Bain told Classic Rock in 2011. “It never affected my playing. I know it got wild and wacky in Japan, but we had been working our asses off for a year. We were winding down. I was kind of pissed off that I didn’t get to stay longer, but I can never say anything bad about Rainbow. I was only in it for two years, but it’s done me a lot of favours.”

Bain’s time in Rainbow marked him as a straight-down-the-line hard rock bassist. In truth he was far more versatile than that, though it would take his death to remind people of the fact. He worked with ex-Velvet Underground bassist John Cale in the late 70s, played on folk-rock maverick Roy Harper’s Unknown Soldier album in 1980 and appeared on several tracks on Kate Bush’s 1982 album The Dreaming.

But he was most at home when he was surrounded by like-minded people. He was friends with Thin Lizzy’s Phil Lynott, with whom he shared a fondness for pharmaceuticals. Lynott had Bain play bass on the track With Love on Lizzy’s Black Rose album. After Rainbow, he teamed up with guitarist and fellow Scot Brian ‘Robbo’ Robertson in Wild Horses. Robbo had just been ejected from Lizzy, and he shared the same cavalier attitude towards life as Bain. The new band allowed the bassist to indulge his two favourite passions: music and partying. It’s no coincidence that their self-titled 1980 debut album featured a song called Dealer.

“We were very much into substance abuse,” Bain told Classic Rock in 2008. “Back then, if somebody offered me something I’d take it first and ask afterwards what it was. Even in the Dio days, I’d swallow a pill, wind up unconscious in the limo and have to be carried back to my room. I’m less crazy now, but it’s amazing I still have a brain.”

Life in Wild Horses was never dull. When Ross Halfin, by now working as a photographer, shot the band in London’s Ladbroke Grove, he was given cocaine for the first time, by Bain. “At home I couldn’t eat my tea,” Halfin says with a laugh. “My mum was furious.”

If Bain was a livewire, he was never malevolent. “The thing about Jimmy is that he always had a twinkle in his eye, he was a little imp,” says drummer Clive Edwards, who played in Wild Horses. “A wind-up was never too far away. You would never accept a cup of tea from him, because he thought it hilarious to piss into the kettle.”

Sadly, the friendship between Bain and Robertson unravelled over the course of two albums, and the guitarist quit following 1981’s Stand Your Ground. Robbo always regretted the decision to allow Bain to sing. “Steve Perry from Journey phoned us up out of the blue and said he wanted to join but we turned him down,” said Robertson (who declined to be interviewed for this piece). “What idiots!”

Bain tried to revamp Wild Horses after Robertson’s departure, but with no success. He was subsequently approached by the Scorpions to play on their Love At First Sting album when the German band were having problems with their bassist, Francis Bucholz. Bain’s name didn’t appear on the album, but the pay cheque made up for it. Bain was credited for his work with Phil Lynott on his solo albums, Solo In Soho and The Philip Lynott Album (a song he co-wrote for the latter, Old Town, was later covered by The Corrs).

If Bain was unhappy with life as a jobbing sideman, he didn’t show it. And once Ronnie Dio re-entered his life, it didn’t matter.

Bain was just winding up Wild Horses when he got a call from Ronnie in 1982 asking if the bassist knew any good guitarists for a new band he was putting together. Dio later suggested that Bain had misunderstood him – that he was looking for a guitarist, not a bassist. “Jimmy took it on himself to bring his bass and kind of made the assumption he was in too,” he later said.

Irrespective of how it came about, Bain proved to be an integral part of Dio the band for seven years, from 1982 to his departure in 1989 (he was with them again between 1999 and 2004). As well as contributing to some of their most pivotal songs, including Stand Up And Shout and Rainbow In The Dark, he made good on Ronnie’s request about guitarists. Jimmy remembered a young Irish hotshot named Viv Campbell, whose band Sweet Savage had supported Wild Horses.

“At three a.m. one morning the phone rang, and my father answered,” Campbell recalls now. “He said: ‘A drunken Scotsman wants you.’ Jimmy was with Ronnie and Vinny, and asked whether I could go to London for an audition the following day.”

Campbell is speaking to Classic Rock from Miami, just three days after Bain’s death. He’s understandably emotional, though the warmth in his voice conveys a fondness for his old friend.

“Jimmy was a generous man who’d give you the shirt off his back,” says Campbell. “He could be the clown, the drunk, the drug addict, but he had a very kind and gentle spirit. You could see how he would bump into Roy Harper or Kate Bush and the following day be in the studio with them. His persona made people want to hang out with him.”

Bain and Campbell’s respective original runs in Dio ended acrimoniously amid disputes over money. But there were good times too. The guitarist’s favourite memory dates back to sessions for the band’s debut album, 1983’s Holy Diver.

“We were listening to a playback of the song Rainbow In The Dark, but it lacked that final element to fulfil its potential,” says Campbell. “So Jimmy wanders over to a Yahama DX7 keyboard in the corner of the room, a drink in his left hand and a cigarette in the right, and, still holding the drink – and the cigarette between his lips – proceeds to play that lick everyone now knows. A real keyboard player would’ve put down the drink and cigarette to create something overly elaborate, but what Jimmy played was perfect.”

After Dio, Bain resurfaced in LA band World War III alongside Dio bandmate Vinny Appice and singer Mandy Lion. But the halcyon days of 80s heavy metal were fading. Bain found himself swimming against the tide.

“WW III was a pretty extreme band, and the belief of someone of Jimmy’s stature brought so much additional strength,” Mandy Lion says today. “He partied harder than us all, he had more sex than anyone – one night it would be a model, twenty-four hours later the cute grandmother that drove the limo. Jimmy was every rock-star cliché made flesh. He lived every moment like it was his last.”

In truth, the 90s and 00s weren’t easy for Bain. After leaving World War III, he tried to get a new band, 3 Legged Dogg, off the ground, and played with the Hollywood All Starz alongside members of Lynch Mob and Quiet Riot. Motörhead guitarist Phil Campbell became close to Bain after his own band relocated to LA in the 90s.

“We’d go to one another’s houses and drink, and of course we played music together with our bands,” Campbell recalls. “When I first knew Jimmy he had a big house with a swimming pool. And then he got divorced and, unfortunately, everything changed.”

His personal life may have been a mess, but Bain retained his sense of humour. “Jimmy’s dog went missing, and he asked to borrow my car for an hour and a half to drive around and look for him,” says Campbell. “He then dropped off the radar. Three days later I still couldn’t get hold of him. I left an angry answerphone message demanding we meet at the Cat & Fiddle, an English pub on Sunset Boulevard. Eventually he comes in, screaming at me – they say attack is the best form of defence. I found out the dog was at the house all along; he’d just needed a car. It was typical Jimmy.”

It was an altogether less humorous automobile-related incident that put Bain back in the headlines in 2012, when the bassist was arrested for DUI (drink-driving) twice in one day in LA. He was driving a 1995 Toyota Camry, a wreck of a car, which only underlined the situation he was in.

“The sad truth is that Jimmy really couldn’t take care of himself,” says Viv Campbell. “He didn’t pay much heed to the demands of real life. By the end he was almost living in poverty. That’s why he was so excited about Last In Line.

Bain had reunited with Campbell and Appice as Last In Line in 2012. Originally playing songs they’d recorded with Dio in the 80s, by 2014 they had enough original material for an album.

“Even during those later days, which you might describe as his wilderness years, Jimmy never gave up hope and would always have a bass or a guitar with him,” says Campbell. “He still wrote songs. Someone less determined might have said bollocks to it, but he lived and breathed for music and was never more than a few feet away from an instrument.”

“Quite recently Jimmy wrote a song called Victims. It was something that George Michael could have recorded,” adds Clive Edwards. “Jimmy had more to say than ‘I want to rip your knickers off’. His natural writing style had more in common with the work he did with Phil Lynott. He wasn’t just a horns-up metal guy. He wasn’t even a metal guy at all.”

Everyone who knew Bain says that he had turned things around before he died. “Jimmy really was sober for around eighteen months,” Viv Campbell stresses. “While we worked on the Last In Line record, he was in a halfway house where you are tested for drugs and alcohol after his DUI incident. We had to schedule some of our activity around him, because he was only allowed out after four p.m.”

According to friends, Bain was being treated for pneumonia, but he didn’t know he had lung cancer. “Jimmy called me two days before he died,” says Mandy Lion. “He wanted to console me after my dog died. Not a word was mentioned about his illness.”

While he was clearly unwell when he boarded the MSC Divina, no one knew how serious things were. “I think Jimmy just wore out,” Tony Carey says. “My dad went at sixty-eight, too, and he wasn’t particularly rock’n’roll.”

The last time Classic Rock spoke to Bain was at the end of 2015, for a tribute to mark the 30th anniversary of Phil Lynott’s death. He remembered a “very poignant discussion” he and Lynott had in a pub over Christmas 1985, a few days before Lynott passed away.

“We were still in our thirties, and neither of us could believe that we were still doing rock’n’roll,” said Bain “When you start out, you assume that it’ll all end in your twenties. So we had this conversation about how fortunate we were, and how the two of us were still working on our musicianship – trying to get better. And then just a week or two later Phil was gone.”

And now Jimmy Bain has gone too. Wherever he is, we hope that he’s happy.

Originally published in Classic Rock issue 221, February 2016

Dave Ling was a co-founder of Classic Rock magazine. His words have appeared in a variety of music publications, including RAW, Kerrang!, Metal Hammer, Prog, Rock Candy, Fireworks and Sounds. Dave’s life was shaped in 1974 through the purchase of a copy of Sweet’s album ‘Sweet Fanny Adams’, along with early gig experiences from Status Quo, Rush, Iron Maiden, AC/DC, Yes and Queen. As a lifelong season ticket holder of Crystal Palace FC, he is completely incapable of uttering the word ‘Br***ton’.