Author: wamdines

Scorpions are one of the longest-running bands in music, with a career that stretches back nearly 60 years. In 2004, as they released their 15th studio album, Unbreakable, Classic Rock sat down with the band to look back on the rollercoaster journey of German’s biggest band.

Given the sporting rivalry that has long existed between England and Germany, it’s ironic that Rudolf Schenker would choose the year 1966 to form the Scorpions. But that’s what happened. At around the same time that two extra-time goals from Geoff Hurst broke West German hearts in the World Cup Final, the Schenker family was abuzz with music.

“I was learning the guitar and could already play rhythm, and my mother suggested I should play with my brother Michael,” explains Rudolf. “I was already about sixteen and had taken a job, and Michael was very young, maybe about nine. But he showed a lot of ability as a lead guitarist.”

Again thanks to his mother, Rudolf learned of three local rock musicians who were rehearsing in the basement of his local church. Until the intervention of Rudolph Schenker, none of them had had the confidence to organise a concert.

“It was 1965, and because we didn’t have a name we played as The Nameless,” reasons Rudolf. “It was just three songs, but it was a big success. Then I found a better drummer and guitarist, and at the start of the following year we began calling the band the Scorpions, playing all the Hannover clubs. We did songs by The Pretty Things, The Kinks and The Rolling Stones. I was splitting the vocals with the drummer, who was into more commercial bands like The Dave Clark Five. I would sing The Pretty Things’ numbers, things like LSD. I’m sure that my father still has the recordings somewhere.”

Committed to writing in English from the start, Rudolf was schooled in the work of The Yardbirds, The Animals and Spooky Tooth and was already becoming a proficient composer, but he knew that he wasn’t equipped to be his band’s permanent frontman. He had already approached Klaus Meine, from rival band Mushrooms, on several occasions to consider joining, but each time he was politely rebuffed. Gradually, the Scorpions’ live repertoire began to toughen up, absorbing material by Black Sabbath and Led Zeppelin.

“Klaus had just got out of the army, and I had the idea of putting him and Michael in a band together,” recounts Rudolf. “My brother and the band he was in at the time were all drinking like hell, and they were all about thirteen years old. Klaus had to go to my father and promise to take care of Michael. Which he did.”

The result was Copernicus, a band that Rudolf Schenker also managed. It was only a matter of time before osmosis took over, and both Michael and Klaus found themselves joining the Scorpions on New Year’s Eve of 1970. Rudolf, bassist Lothar Heimberg and drummer Wolfgang Dziony had been experiencing problems with an existing guitarist, and realised that they might as well make two line-up changes as one.

Although the new-look Scorpions had no trouble in finding live employment, gigging with Uriah Heep, Atomic Rooster, Chicken Shack and Rory Gallagher, record companies scoffed at their international ambitions. Eventually they had a lucky break in meeting Conny Plank, the producer who would eventually oversee the band’s 1972 debut Lonesome Crow for Metronome Records. They had been working on the music for an anti-narcotics film called Das Kalte Paradies (The Cold Paradise) when they bumped into Plank at a studio in Hamburg.

“We’d wanted to make an album, but for a German rock band there seemed little possibility,” Rudolf recalls. “We met Conny, and two days later we had a contract. In October 1971 we began recording. It was all done in six days, including all the mixing…”

“And probably even the cover drawing,” Meine adds with a laugh

Lonesome Crow surprised everybody by selling more than 10,000 copies. It was a promising record from a band still looking for an identity, and a guitarist awaiting his 15th birthday. “It had some elements that are still present,” says Klaus. “In Search Of The Piece Of Mind was a great ballad, and there was some jazzier, more psychedelic stuff. But coming out of the club scene, they were the first original songs we wrote.”

Even Plank didn’t take the band’s plans seriously. “We said to Conny: ‘Some day we will play in America’. He just laughed and said: ‘You guys have no chance,’” remembers the singers.

In the summer of 1973 the Scorpions set out on what was to be a fateful tour opening for UFO. When the headliners’ guitarist Bernie Marsden forgot his passport and failed to turn up for a gig in Regensburg, Michael Schenker was asked to deputise for the night. Although UFO bassist Pete Way hurriedly taught the young guitarist the chords to Boogie For George and C’mon Everybody in the venue’s lavatory, and the tour was eventually completed with Marsden, Michael had made an immediate impression.

“Michael was so striking with his Flying V guitar and blond hair,” UFO vocalist Phil Mogg told Classic Rock in 2000. “So we asked his older brother Rudolf if we could borrow him, and he said: ‘We’ve been trying to get rid of him for years’.”

“Ah, that’s just the English humour,” says Rudolf. “It wasn’t like that at all. When my brother told us [he was leaving] he was very drunk. He’d already said yes to UFO, but he didn’t know how to tell us. It wasn’t easy for me or the rest of the guys [to accept], but I knew he was a great guitar player and that this could be a good chance for him. At least before he went, Michael did one good thing – he spoke to [his eventual successor] Uli Roth.”

Inevitably, Michael’s departure threw the Scorpions into a state of turmoil. Metronome Records announced that they didn’t want them minus their teenage talisman, and the group almost split up. Indeed they would have done had Schenker junior not made the aforementioned approach to then Dawn Road guitarist Ulrich Roth.

“Michael left us to be a part of the famous UFO in England,” Klaus told me in 1991, failing to keep the bitterness out of his voice. “We were fucked. Left behind without a lead guitarist and a record label.”

“But we still had one very important TV show to play. And it was difficult to get Uli to agree to help us as he already had his own band,” Rudolf continues. “Eventually he agreed, it was a big success, and Uli really enjoyed it. At first Klaus didn’t think that Uli should join, but somehow I convinced him that it would work.”

Roth initially remained a member of his ex-band as well as the Scorpions, although when that arrangement proved impractical Dawn Road bassist Francis Buchholz was brought in as part of a replacement rhythm section, completed by new drummer Jürgen Rosenthal. On the strength of their televised appearance, this grouping signed a new worldwide deal with RCA Records, and co-produced the next album with the then unknown engineer Reinhart Mack, later to work with Queen, Billy Squier and Electric Light Orchestra.

“Did we think that Mack would become famous one day? Not really, but he probably thought that we wouldn’t either,” Meine admits.

However, 1974’s Fly To The Rainbow was a big improvement upon the debut. True, there were some quite nonsensical lyrics – amid the cowbell-embellished opening track Speedy’s Coming, Meine pairs up almost anything that vaguely rhymes, crooning: ‘D’you like Alice Cooper/D’you like Ringo Starr/You like David Bowie and friends/And the Royal Albert Hall’ – but Roth’s shamelessly Hendrix-inspired style gave They Need A Million, Fly People Fly and the nine-minute title track an added maturity. Uli, whose vocals were at pitiful as his instrumental prowess was inspiring, was also allowed to take to the microphone for Drifting Sun and part of Fly To The Rainbow itself.

“Uli was never a good singer,” Rudolf admits when pressurised on the subject. “Some of his singing is not so bad, because it suits the songs. Keith Richards is not a good singer either. But Uli was writing material that Klaus didn’t feel comfortable singing.”

The third album, 1975’s In Trance, took the Scorpions to new creative highs, and was their first to be produced by Dieter Dierks at his studio in Cologne. The band already knew they didn’t want to produce themselves any more, and had happened upon Dierks – whose track record with Tangerine Dream and Nektar had placed him on their wish list of collaborators – at a party.

“With Dieter, the concept of the Scorpions’ music became much stronger,” Klaus observes. “We made an album that had all our trademarks; we’d found our style.”

Before beginning work on the album, Dierks suggested the band should record German versions of The Sweet’s Action and Fox On The Run as a double A-side single.

“In Germany you received 50 per cent of the publishing rights if you did a song in a different language,” Rudolf explains now. “We got 7,000 Marks [around £2,500], which was money that we badly needed.”

In Trance’s title track was a ponderous ballad written by Klaus and Rudolf in a church, although Robot Man and Top Of The Bill were altogether slices of harder rock. Once again, Roth sang, on Dark Lady and Sun In My Hand. Indeed the guitarist’s name appears six of the album’s 10 songs. The sleeve, which featured a topless blonde straddling a Fender Stratocaster, was the first of many risqué covers.

By 1975 the band’s gig itinerary had taken in France and Belgium, the latter the homeland of new drummer Rudy Lenners, who joined when Rosenthal was called up into the army. The band also played their first tour of the UK. Although the group turned up to support The Damned at Barbarellas in Birmingham, they took one look at the audience and decided not to bother. And at Liverpool’s famous Cavern club, they were astounded when some of the audience became so inebriated that they urinated on the PA system.

“We had never seen anything like it before,” Schenker says. “We didn’t come on stage until one o’clock in the morning, and they’d been drinking all evening. They were pissing in the corners of the room, everywhere…”.

The Scorpions’ rise continued with the following year’s Virgin Killer album. It’s partly been overshadowed by its unforgiveable artwork – an image of naked 10-year-old girl that has subsequently been banned – but musically, Schenker describes the record as “definitely the hardest, hottest and craziest album we’d done up that point”. However, the creative nucleus was becoming ever more divided. On the one side, Uli Roth’s fixation with Hendrix was taking him in one direction,and the rest of the band were going in another.

“It was obvious that the Scorpions had split into two camps,” Meine nods. “Rudy and I had become a good writing partnership, but Uli was so influenced by Hendrix that he was coming up with things like [Virgin Killer track] Hell-Cat. For a while it was an interesting mix. Van Halen were very influenced by the early Scorpions sound; they played Catch Your Train and Speedy’s Coming in the LA clubs. The first time I met Eddie Van Halen, he wanted to know all sorts of things about Uli Roth. But it became very wild on stage. A lot of crazy stuff happened.”

Sure enough, there was another personnel change before the next album, Taken By Force. “The stress was too much for Rudy Lenners, who had to go from the studio to hospital because it was affecting his stomach,” Rudolf explains. Michael Schenker had met Herman Rarebell in London’s notorious Speakeasy club, and recommended the drummer to his ex-colleagues.

Rarebell met the band when they played at London’s Music Machine, and remained with them for many years to come, even releasing a solo album called Nip In The Bud in 1981.

However, for Uli time was running short. In fact, Rarebell’s appointment – opposed by Roth – merely accelerated the departure of the latter, who had co-written the song We’ll Burn The Sky with Jimi Hendrix’s ex-girlfriend Monika Danneman.

“Uli and the rest of us had drifted further and further apart on Taken By Force,” Meine reflects. “He hadn’t wanted us to hire a heavy drummer like Herman, because he was on a totally different trip. We were writing songs like Steamrock Fever and He’s A Woman – She’s A Man, and Uli was writing I’ve Got To Be Free, which seemed to say it all. It was a good album, but you could tell that the band was splitting apart.”

The sleeve of Taken By Force – their second album in 12 months – showed two kids playing with guns in a graveyard, and was once again considered too distasteful for some territories, including the UK, where it was replaced by a plain black-and-white cover with five individual photos.

The chance to play two shows at Tokyo’s Sun Plaza Hall in April 1978 was a welcome distraction from the group’s inner angst, but everybody knew that the writing was on the wall for the current line-up. Recorded for an exceptional double live album called The Tokyo Tapes, the Japanese dates served as an emotional swansong for Uli Roth, who went on to form Electric Sun. The new Scorpions guitarist was found through an advert placed in the Melody Maker. Matthias Jabs joined the band from German band Fargo whose bassist Peter Knorn coincidentally went on to manage Uli Roth Michael Schenker.

The Scorpions’ next album was the one that ushered in a golden age for the band. Released in 1979, Lovedrive even saw Michael Schenker himself return to the group briefly. Schenker had stunned UFO by walking out on them just as they were the verge of a commercial breakthrough with the Strangers In The Night double live set. He agreed to play on three of the ‘Lovedrive’ songs, and even joined the Scorpions on tour – although that arrangement lasted for a mere two weeks.

Of his second spell with the Scorpions, Michael Schenker would later tell Classic Rock: “My brother had said he needed some help [with the album]. Matthias was too fresh in the band, and they needed some excitement. Rudolf sent me a tape with four or five numbers. I did my part and everything was good, but then when I was touring I realised that it was a bad move. I had to play other people’s songs and lead breaks by someone else; it was so uncomfortable.”

Although Jabs was recalled by the band, Michael arrived at the Reading Festival site with them in 1979, telling the Melody Maker: “When I feel healthy, I can tour. With the Scorpions, I thought I was healthy, but it all came back so fast that I couldn’t believe it. I’m not a very strong person. So I went to Spain to find some warm weather.”

“Michael was in a good mental state at first, but he’d just got married, and when he and his wife went back to their house the lock had been changed and his car was gone,” explains Rudolf. “The [UFO] management had told the band that certain things were theirs, but they were only hired. It was a big shock that he’d worked like hell but was left with no money.”

The person who deserved the most sympathy was Matthias Jabs, who was dismissed from the group not once but twice upon Schenker’s return. Jabs had played his first Scorpions gig in August 1978. Having sensed trouble, he was “disappointed though also relieved” when Michael was reinstated. So he was stunned to receive a call from Schenker during the band’s tour, advising him – though not the Scorpions – that he wouldn’t play in Cologne that evening. Ignoring the situation, Jabs went on holiday to a location where there were no telephones.

“The island’s only policeman, on his pushbike with a telegram, found me,” Jabs recalls. “Would I go back to the Scorpions? They would send a helicopter. It was lucky I had my guitar with me.”

The arrangement was that Jabs would help the band finish the German tour. Schenker duly returned again, then did another disappearing act.

“Michael played the next two or three shows in France, and then Francis Buchholz rang to say that he’d failed to show up in Lyon,” Jabs remembers. “Funnily enough, my stuff was already packed as I knew the call would come. They asked if I would please help them out – and this time it would be forever.”

Michael went on to fail an audition for Aerosmith, and so formed his own group. However, while staying at manager Peter Mensch’s London flat and assembling the latter solo project with ex-Montrose drummer Denny Carmassi and future Mr Big bassist Billy Sheehan, Schenker shaved off his hair, smashed his beloved Flying V guitar and vanished again.

“He was caught between Heaven and Hell,” Rudolf says. He was playing the best I’d ever heard him, but mentally he was in a terrible shape.”

Even a quarter of a century later, Lovedrive still sounds amazing, from the chunky, riff-heavy opening strains of ‘Loving You Sunday Morning’ to the ferocious Another Piece Of Meat and Can’t Get Enough. The band had finally discarded the hippy baggage of Uli Roth, but Holiday and Always Somewhere confirmed they could still write world class ballads – a skill that would serve them very well in the future.

Besides design company Hipgnosis coming up with a cover image of a man with his hand stuck by bubblegum to the breast of a female taxi companion, the group also upped the ante with the sexual content of their lyrics. In I Can’t Get Enough he certainly issues the command: ‘Move your legs, stamp your feet/The language of your body, is right now all I need/To understand you’re ready for love’.

Lovedrive quickly became the band’s biggest album, with 500,000 copies sold giving them their first US gold disc. On their first major American tour they opened on a bill that included Ted Nugent, AC/DC and Aerosmith; their popularity in Chicago had them promoted above intended headliner Nugent. By contrast, British critics still weren’t exactly gushing with praise for the Scorpions, one of whom called them “the worst German import since the V2 bomb”.

While the following year’s Animal Magnetism album wasn’t a match for its predecessor it deftly repeated the formula and applied a quick follow-up punch. One of its best songs, Don’t Make No Promises (Your Body Can’t Keep), included the feminist-baiting couplet: ‘She started to undress, what a sight to see/Padded bra, blonde wig, not much left for me’. Keeping up the run of controversial album sleeves, the front cover showed a dog and woman staring provocatively at a man’s groin area, its reverse image seeming to portray a bout of canine-human fellatio. “Animal Magnetism could have been a lot worse,” says Jabs. “You should have seen the demo of what we wanted!”

The novelty of the group’s nationality seemed to take a while to wear off, and the band understandably tired of the clichés very quickly. “When we first went to England, all papers said: ‘Heil Hitler, crash-boom-blitzkrieg, the Krauts are here!’” sighed Klaus

“But we don’t think about the war,” Rudolf Schenker bristled. “It’s all in the past. Look, if I’m in England or America it doesn’t matter to me that those countries have been involved in wars [with Germany].”

The Scorpions were on a mission to conquer the globe, their own ambition inescapable. “There was a real sense of competition between ourselves and other bands on a similar level,” Jabs admitted a decade later. “It was always friendly rivalry, but we looked at what bands like AC/DC and UFO were doing and always tried to top it. We took particular notice of Van Halen in America and AC/DC in Europe.”

The Scorpions’ live shows had by now shaped into something very entertaining. The group became famous for their shape-throwing, posing and headbanging frantically at the front of the stage, even climaxing the show by forming grinning, human pyramids. Arriving in the UK to play the inaugural Monsters Of Rock festival at Castle Donington in August 1980, they drove themselves around in rental cars at breakneck speeds.

“If the police stopped us it was quite simple – we pretended not to speak English,” grins Rudolf, who before the Scorpions took the stage completed a lap or two of the Donington race-track circuit.

But such pranks were relatively innocent. Unlike some of their contemporaries, the Scorpions steered clear of more dangerous things, not least hard drugs.

“We’d been touring with Aerosmith when they had bad drug problems,” Jabs confides. “At one show, Steve Tyler went up to Francis [Buchholz] and said: ‘Hi, Tom’. He actually thought Francis was [Aerosmith bassist] Tom Hamilton!”

“In America cocaine was as easy to get as a beer, but we never tried hard drugs,” clarifies Schenker. “We learned our lessons early.”

Women were a different matter. The group’s videos were sometimes shot at arena concerts, and often included girls flashing their breasts at the band. Did the Scorpions get much attention from groupies?

“Groupies are very important part of rock’n’roll,” Rudolf says seriously. “At one point we had so much security that our backstage area was completely clean. We became bored. We said: ‘Let the girls in, let some people in’. If you’re having a meal, you need that spice to go with it.”

By 1982, the Scorpions had become headliners in North America. So it was all the more distressing when Meine discovered he had lost his voice as they prepared to record their new album, Blackout. Various treatments were sought for the nodes on his throat, including visits to a Viennese specialist whose clientele consisted entirely of opera singers. The singer was ordered not to talk for weeks at a time, and gradually his voices came back. However, to this day it’s rumoured that Dokken frontman Don Dokken, who receives a credit on the sleeve, contributed more than just backing vocals to the album.

“Don sings backing vocals on just one track, which I think was You Give Me All I Need, I did everything else,” Klaus says. “He was in the studio as back-up in case the worst happened. It was never really spoken about, but at one point it looked as though I might not be able to return to the band. I told Rudolf that they might have to look for a new singer.”

Putting their trials behind them, the Scorpions unveiled an album that smashed open the American market for them. Released in 1982, Blackout is among the definitive metal releases of the 80s. Containing the manic title track, the anthemic Dynamite and Can’t Live Without You, and even the band’s answer to Led Zeppelin’s Dazed & Confused in China White, it was a winner from start to finish. In America Blackout made the US Top 10 and sold more than a million copies. In 1983, they were second on the bill to Van Halen at the massive Us Festival, playing to more than 300,000 people.

Their commercial and creative success continued with 1984’s Love At First Sting. Featuring such classics as Bad Boys Running Wild, Rock You Like A Hurricane, Big City Nights and their best ballad so far, Still Loving You, Love At First Sting struck an instant connection with Middle America (and

France where it sold an incredible 1.7 million singles).

“The …First Sting album was recorded digitally and that was a minor mistake because the technology wasn’t quite perfect yet,” observes Rudolf. “The guitars sometimes sound a bit thin, but the sleeve [shot in Paris by fashion photographer Helmut Newton] was fantastic.”

However, there was trouble in paradise and during some recording sessions in Stockholm the band had come close to ousting Rarebell (“He went through a difficult time and became this crazy party guy,” says Meine) and Buchholz (“There were lots of musical problems,” adds the singer) in favour of former Rainbow drummer Bobby Rondinelli and ex-Rainbow bassist Jimmy Bain, only to change their minds at the last minute.

By 1984, they were filling New York’s cavernous Madison Square Garden for three nights as part of a tour immortalised by the following year’s double-album World Wide Live, while their opening acts included the fledgling Bon Jovi, Metallica and Def Leppard.

“We had a great time with Def Leppard, who were still young kids,” Schenker reminisces. “Bon Jovi very quickly learned from us how to be a rock’n’roll band. Doc McGhee [their manager] told them, ‘Copy how the Scorpions do it’. Before that they were a pop band, but we showed them what rock’n’roll was all about.”

“Did our success in America go to anybody’s heads?” muses Rudolf. “Egos did become bigger, but it was hard for them not to. We had our own plane and we had to learn to live this life.”

Their next album, Savage Amusement, wouldn’t emerge for four years. Partly this was down to a heavy touring schedule followed by a much-needed break. But the album itself took 12 months to complete. It would be the last album they made with longtime producer Dieter Dierks, the band’s frustration at both Dierks methods and having to work in the same studio finally reaching a tipping point.

“We knew it and so did he,” Klaus told me in 1991. “With this album, Dieter became a dictator. Love At First Sting may have been successful, but all the feeling was gone. We had a so-called perfect album, but there was no spirit.”

But they were still breaking new ground behind the Iron Curtain. In 1988, the band played 10 sell-out gigs in Leningrad (now St Petersburg) to more than 350,000 fans largely starved of Western music. The following year, they joined Bon Jovi, Ozzy Osbourne, Mötley Crüe and more at the Moscow Music Peace festival, playing before 260,000 people in Moscow’s Lenin Stadium.

Having unshackled themselves from Dieter Dierks, The Scorpions recorded their fourteenth album, 1990’s Crazy World, in America with Keith Olsen. In contrast to their previous album, just three months were spent in the studio with Olsen, who’d previously worked with Ozzy Osbourne, Santana and Whitesnake.

“We ’ve literally started a new life,” exalted a gleeful Rarebell in an interview from the time. “We feel like kids again, you can hear it in the music. Even if nobody likes [this album], we had fun doing it.”

“With Savage Amusement, we even considered giving up, but the new blood has made a huge difference,” added Klaus.

They even brought in a co-writer, Jim Vallance, most famous for working with Bryan Adams on some of the Canadian rocker’s biggest hits. “He went through our lyrics and it was so good working with the guy that we even wrote some new songs,” says Klaus.

But the album’s biggest single – and the biggest song of the Scorpions’ entire career – was written by the singer alone. Wind Of Change was an epic power ballad that had been inspired by their time in Russia. Featuring an optimistic lyric from Meine – and some memorable whistling – it topped the charts in 11 countries, bringing them an invitation to the Kremlin to meet then-Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev.

The song has been the subject of mockery from some quarters down the years, but both Meine and Schenker concur that its extraordinary popularity enabled them to ride out the grunge era while many of their rivals fell by the wayside.

“It helped us to survive and to continue playing big tours even when Nirvana and all the rest were happening,” says Schenker. “Okay, some didn’t like it, but we’re probably still here because of it.”

The most memorable show of the Crazy World era wasn’t one of their own. In July 1990, an invitation came in from Roger Waters, who wanted the Scorpions to appear in his re-vamped version of Pink Floyd’s The Wall, to celebrate the fall of the Berlin Wall the previous year. As a German band, the Scorpions couldn’t turn it down.

“We’ve played some big shows, but that one was incredible,” recalls Meine proudly. “The stage was huge. Matthias was playing in East Berlin and I was singing in West Berlin. It was an emotional experience. The Brandenburg Gate had been out of reach all our lives; you could see it, but it was as far away as the Moon. Standing there on that stage and seeing 300,000 people on top of Hitler’s bunker – what a triumph over stupidity.”

The huge success was tainted slightly by the dismissal of long-serving bassist Francis Buchholz, who also handled many of the band’s business affairs, in 1982. He was replaced by 30-year-old unknown Ralph Rieckermann “Francis was supposed to be the band’s link to the world of business, but he betrayed us and we haven’t spoken since,” Meine told me witheringly afterwards.

Following the success of Winds Of Change, 1993’s Face The Heat album leaned heavily into ballads, though it still had its fair share of quality hard rock in the shape of Alien Nation and No Pain, No Gain, plus the ludicrous Taxman Woman, a tongue-in-cheek ode to the German government taking 65 per cent of their earnings in tax. “The old we get, the funnier we get,” said drummer Herman Rarebell, by then a tax exile living in Monaco. He wasn’t laughing for long – Face The Heat would be his final album with the band.

If the 1980s and early 1990s had been the Scorpions most successful era, the second half of the latter decade was more of a struggle. 1996’s Pure Instinct was a long way from being a classic. “I know that,” agrees Rudolf. “I knew it then, too. The time was wrong. The nineties were against what the Scorpions do. So we continued playing music, and we did release some good songs, but something was missing.”

1999’s Eye II Eye had a pop flavour that polarised the fans, something Meine acknowledges. “To me, ‘Eye II Eye’ wasn’t a bad album, but it wasn’t well received,” he says.

Still, the latter saw the arrival of drummer James Kottak (“I don’t know how we made it this far without being rhythmic,” said Matthias Jabs), while certain members’ Bobby Charlton-style combovers and increasingly sparse barnets were replaced by shorter, sensible hairstyles that didn’t attempt to cover balding pates.

“It was a new millennium, so the hair had to go,” observed Jabs at the time, adding: “There wasn’t much left anyway.” “Actually, it was beginning to fall out when the band started,” added Meine, with commendable self-mockery.

They clawed back some credibility with 2000’s Moment Of Glory, which saw them re-recording some of the classic songs with with the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra. Meine denies that they were copying Metallica, whose similarly orchestral S&M album had been released the previous year.

“Actually, it was the other way around,” insists Meine. “The Berlin Philharmonic approached us in around 1994, and we were blown away because they’re the Rolls-Royce of classical orchestras. We actually met with [arranger] Michael Kamen in 1997, so we were a little surprised when we saw Michael doing the same thing with Metallica.”

Their most recent album, the defiantly-titled Unbreakable, is the back-to-basics Scorpions album that fans have long craved. They even toyed with the idea of reuniting with Dieter Dierks for the first time since Savage Amusement.

“At the time when we first worked together, he was our manager, our producer and our [music] publisher. We paid heavily for that,” explains Rudolf. “We wanted to move forward again with Dieter, to forget everything that had happened in the past.”

“Being in the same tiny studio in Cologne was a bit like being in a time warp,” agrees Matthias. “You had to pinch yourself. But it was just like the old days – Dieter didn’t seem to realise that we had a delivery date.”

The album was eventually produced by Erwin Musper, a member of their background team since the 1990s. When asked about the commercial expectations for a new Scorpions

album in 2004, Klaus is realistic.

“Whether we’ll sell lots of records again,” he says thoughtfully, “well, that remains to be seen. We’ll still have a reputation as a great live band. We’ll still rock your nuts off all night; no one can take that away from us.”

Originally published in Classic Rock magazine issue 66, May 2004

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’.

Peers of Metallica who never quite scaled the same heights as James Hetfield and co, LA’s Armored Saint were one of the great cult bands of the 1980s. In 2017, Metal Hammer sat down with frontman John Bush to hear tales of triumph, tragedy and thwarted ambition.

“I got a call from Jonny Z, who was the manager of Metallica at the time, and he said they wanted me to sing with them,” remembers John Bush, ex-Anthrax singer and longtime frontman with US metal veterans Armored Saint. “Do I regret turning that down? What I always tell people is that Armored Saint was developing and we were doing well, and these guys were my buddies, you know? Metallica were doing well, but it wasn’t like it was Metallica in 1987. It was a few years before that. So, I didn’t want to leave my band. I liked them and I still do!”

There are two things that every thrash connoisseur knows about John Bush. Firstly, he could have been the singer in Metallica. Secondly, he has had first-hand experience of Anthrax’s once-inexplicable revolving door vocalist policy. You may also be aware that he recorded voiceovers for Burger King commercials. In truth, however, the most pertinent fact about John Bush is that more than three decades after forming in Los Angeles, California, his first band, Armored Saint, are still a very potent going concern and are heading to the UK for a rare proper tour this March. Beloved of diehard metalheads but still comparatively unknown in the rock mainstream, the band’s career has been somewhat episodic, with at least one seemingly final split along the way. But today they have the wind in their sails. 2015’s Win Hands Down album was widely acclaimed, and confirmed that these lifelong friends have still got plenty of shared chemistry to exploit.

“Oh yeah, our friendship goes all the way back to us being little boys,” John grins. “Gonzo [Sandoval, Armored Saint drummer], Joey [Vera, bassist], myself and Phil [Gonzo’s brother, guitarist] went to the same elementary school. We met each other around the 3rd or 4th grade, when we were around eight or nine. Obviously Gonzo and Phil knew each other because they’re brothers! But that’s when the friendship developed, and I’d say it was a strong friendship through the rest of our teenage years, and it just kept going. Obviously there was a little time when I joined Anthrax that the relationship became a little more distant, but we didn’t have phones back then, so I’d be on tour and looking for a damn pay phone, ha ha!”

Formed in 1982, Armored Saint stood out from the start, not least because the majority of metal bands in their native LA were firmly in the sleazy, Sunset Strip camp, as MTV began to take notice of heavy music’s burgeoning popularity. By the time the band’s debut album, March Of The Saint, emerged in 1984, the thrash movement was noisily underway too, but John Bush and his bandmates’ bluesy and melodic but precise and muscular take on the old-school metal template didn’t fit into that scene either.

“We’ve always been in a kind of limbo state,” John shrugs. “We started in ’82 and we played with all the bands that came out of LA, so that’s Ratt, WASP, Quiet Riot, Steeler, Black ’N Blue, Great White, everybody. They were great shows and those bands were cool and we got along with them. But we sounded a little different from the bulk of the LA bands and that became more obvious as time passed. We always wished we were from England, and I mean that honestly. Our favourite bands were Priest, Motörhead, Sabbath and UFO.

“When thrash happened, we had some songs that were fast, but we were always more of a bluesy hard rock, heavy metal band, and we’d write slow songs, so that didn’t really fit in with that scene. We did tours with Metallica, and I’m sure we could have done the same with Anthrax and Slayer, but we weren’t in that scene, so people would be like, ‘So, what are they?’ Back in the day it was somewhat frustrating, because we couldn’t connect with a scene, but as time has gone on, I’m happy, because we ended up doing our own thing.”

Despite their undeniable square peg status, Armored Saint retained a sizeable following of heavy metal connoisseurs throughout the 80s, and were approaching the 90s and the recording of their fourth album with a degree of optimism until original guitarist Dave Prichard succumbed to leukaemia and passed away in 1990.

As they mourned their friend, John and his fellow Saints made a collective vow to finish working on the songs that Dave had been writing prior to his death. The result was 1991’s Symbol Of Salvation, widely regarded as Armored Saint’s masterpiece, and an album that, with hindsight, suggested the band were better equipped than most to weather the oncoming storm of grunge and nu metal. Unfortunately, the emotional fallout of losing a cherished comrade, coupled with years of hard slog, brought the first chapter of Armored Saint’s story to a premature end.

“I think we probably had these expectations that Symbol… was gonna be bigger than it was,” John remembers today. “But truthfully, even though we received a lot of acclaim on that record, we didn’t get the results that perhaps we’d expected. There was some frustration on the US tour that we did after the album came out. It was one of the most miserable tours I’ve ever done in my life. We were driving through the Rockies with all our luggage and 10 guys in a van. I thought we were going to die every time we hit the road and there were a lot of short fuses in the band. It felt like a big sigh, you know? We’d made Symbol… but we were exhausted, mentally, physically and emotionally. The tour was terrible and then Anthrax came along. It just seemed like the right time to end it.”

John Bush jumped ship to join the New York thrash legends in 1992 and went on to record four well-received studio albums, culminating in 2003’s classic We’ve Come For You All. But Armored Saint was never truly done and dusted, and the strength of its members’ friendship ensured that the band were back in action again when the 21st century dawned, releasing their fifth album, Revelation, in 2000. Unlike many of their earlier peers, the band’s sound was fluid and malleable enough to be deftly upgraded for a new era, and John’s soulful rasp had never sounded better. It would take the band a further decade to make a follow-up, 2010’s La Raza, but with the logistical intricacies of the is-our-singer-in-Anthrax-or-not debacle receding in the rear-view mirror and the universal thumbs-up given to Win Hands Down, the last few years have been among the band’s most successful to date.

Having quit Anthrax after the birth of his children to avoid being away on tour for long periods, John Bush admits that Armored Saint will never return to a full-on touring schedule again, but the chance to attend to some unfinished business in front of an ever-expanding, multi-generational and international audience is too good an opportunity to waste.

“There are still a lot of territories that Armored Saint have never played that I do want to go to,” he says. “We’ll try to make that happen. We just have to find a way to do it so we’re not gone for months at a time, because then I’ll be divorced and a junkie, and that’s not the road we want to go down, ha ha! It worked out perfectly when I left Anthrax, because I’d just had my daughter and it seemed like the right thing to do for my family. The one thing you can’t get back is time. But I do love performing. I love singing. It’s one of the few things in my life I do well!”

It’s hard to imagine that John Bush doesn’t occasionally daydream about how his life might have turned out if he’d accepted Metallica’s offer all those years ago. But in 2017, he could hardly be happier, and Armored Saint have never been more in demand. Sometimes slow and steady wins the race, hands down.

“We’ve always just believed in ourselves. Not to get too spiritual, but the Armored Saint thing is just here. We’re a cool entity! We’re pretty unique, and not too many people can say that they’re in a band with people they’ve known for 40 years. We’re only in our 50s and we’ve known each for four decades. So there’s a lot of history here and it’s pretty awesome. I dig it!”

Originally published in Metal Hammer magazine issue 294, March 2017

Dom Lawson has been writing for Metal Hammer and Prog for over 14 years and is extremely fond of heavy metal, progressive rock, coffee and snooker. He also contributes to The Guardian, Classic Rock, Bravewords and Blabbermouth and has previously written for Kerrang! magazine in the mid-2000s. 

It’s July 1990 and hotter than hell in New York City. Jon Bon Jovi and I are perched on the first-floor veranda of his manager’s Manhattan offices, gazing out at the taxi cabs crisscrossing Central Park South. Jon explains this is the very spot he and the rest of Bon Jovi first met to plot the seeds of a success story none of them really believed possible. All except for Jon, of course.

“Back then we didn’t have the price of a cup of coffee between us,” he says. “You ask me has the success changed me since then, I say sure, man. It changes everybody.”

He looked downcast. He confessed that the mammoth, life-changing success of the band’s album Slippery When Wet four years earlier had affected him both positively and negatively. “I think I’m a little more cynical and sceptical. I hope I am nicer, but people will say what they want about you. Everyone’s got their stories, you gotta deal with them. I just hope there’s more good than bad. But on the outside I’m a lot more cynical these days. A lot more.”

It was true. You could see it in his much older man’s eyes. The gee-whiz 22-year-old I had first encountered backstage at Wembley Arena in October 1984 was long gone. In his place stood a jaded 28-year-old who’d already been everywhere and seen everything. As he’d begun one of his most prophetic songs, Wanted Dead Or Alive: ‘It’s all the same, only the names will change…’

Back in ’84, Bon Jovi had just played their first London show, opening for Kiss, and a friend had asked if I’d let “the kid” be my plus-one to the Kiss after-show party. Newbies Bon Jovi might be the support act, but that didn’t mean they got to hang out with the headliners.

Jon smiled nervously as I waltzed us past security straight to the free bar. He couldn’t stop thanking me. Kid in a sweet shop time.

He still had that wide-eyed ‘I must be dreaming’ demeanour when we met again six months later. Same big city, different, smaller venue: the Dominion Theatre. Bon Jovi’s first London headline show. Jon was so proud he flew his folks in from New Jersey for the occasion. When I interviewed him the next morning by the pool at his hotel, various family members were seated nearby waving and calling across to him.

There had been two Bon Jovi albums so far and neither had made the earth move. Their first single, Runaway, had been pop enough to make US radio take notice, and Jon’s boy-band looks had helped the video score high with MTV.

Their debut album, Bon Jovi, released in January 1984, came smeared with rock credentials but diluted by outside writers: Runaway was junior Journey; Roulette, written by Jon and guitarist Richie Sambora, was jacked-up AOR; Shot Through The Heart was Billy Idol without the peroxide; the rest was Risky Business-meets-Ferris Bueller safety-first pop-rock. Fronted by a poodle-haired Rob Lowe type.

In Kerrang! a glowing album review was typically matched by a trashing of a live show. “I remember it very well,” Jon said. “‘Bon Jerk-off,’ I think the guy called us.”

Their second album, 7800° Fahrenheit, in March 1985, was consciously heavier – the title being the melting point of rock. Cos the rock’s so hot, baby! In order to emphasise its one-for-all authenticity, this time no outside writers were involved. This wasn’t a Jon Bon solo album in disguise. This really was an album written, sung and played entirely by the band. Well, that’s what it said on the credits, which even included a co-write for drummer Tico Torres on the chugalug Secret Dreams. Although none for bassist Alec John Such, 10 years older than Jon and not always first choice in the studio, put it like that.

The problem they faced was a familiar one for rock bands in the 80s: no hit singles. Not even a Top 40-adjacent ‘radio hit’ like Runaway. First single Only Lonely, co-written by Jon and keyboard player David Bryan, sounded like it was retrieved from the skip in which Survivor dumped their rejects. The second, In And Out Of Love, written by Jon, was Def Leppard without Mutt Lange. There was also an obligatory power-ballad single, Silent Night, that was so cringe-inducingly awful it made Mötley Crüe’s simple-minded Home Sweet Home, also released as a single that month, sound like I Want To Know What Love Is. None of 7800º Fahrenheit’s tracks would survive into their live show beyond the lifespan of the album.

Bon Jovi spent the rest of 1985 touring US arenas opening for then hot-as-a-pistol LA glam metallers Ratt. In August they were third on the bill at that year’s Monsters Of Rock festival at Castle Donington, beneath Marillion (then at their commercial peak) and ZZ Top (ditto) and one up from cool-as-fuck Metallica.

When the helicopter carrying Jon and crew inadvertently flew over the stage during Metallica’s set, however, hard-core Donington fans were outraged, interpreting it as a deliberate slight to Metallica. James Hetfield had the words ‘Kill Bon Jovi’ engraved on his guitar, and any hope Jon had previously entertained of his band appealing to serious-minded 80s metallists was crushed for ever.

They would continue crisscrossing America with Ratt for the rest of the year. By the final show in Las Vegas on New Year’s Eve, Bon Jovi were now all in with the Ratt crowd. On stage, Jon had taken to wearing tight, no-VPL spandex, leopardskin shirt undone to the waist, midnight-blue make-up, his fully-primped hair waving like corn in a field above a bright pink headband. Hey, it was 1985! Crüe’s Tommy Lee went on stage bare-ass naked in leather chaps. Even Ozzy was tottering around like a tattooed Liberace.

Looks wasn’t what was holding them back. Nor work ethic nor attitude, all of which Jon exemplified. Bon Jovi had big guns behind them. Hence the high-profile tours. But as far as record sales went, it was so far so meh.

As Bon Jovi’s larger-than-life manager Doc McGhee later told me: “It took a couple years building them from the ground up, but they were finally ready. We knew if we could just get one damn song on the radio, one big video on MTV, things could start to roll.”

But where did you find one of those?

John Charles Barrett was a 32-year-old singer-songwriter from Florida known professionally as Desmond Child. After his own band, the R&B-driven Desmond Child & Rouge, flamed out, he tried writing songs for others. His break came when Paul Stanley invited him to co-write the 1979 Kiss disco hit I Was Made For Loving You. Child would go on to write or ‘co-write’ I Hate Myself For Loving You, Joan Jett’s bubblegum metal anthem, and Dude (Looks Like A Lady), the overnight rock classic that gave Aerosmith their biggest hit for 10 years. Child would go on to write so many hits for so many artists that he became one of a coterie of go-to 80s songwriters – which also included Jim Vallance, Holly Knight and Diane Warren – that everyone from Alice Cooper to Barbra Streisand sought out for hits.

But the keys to Desmond Child’s kingdom would be the songs he was about to co-write with Jon Bon Jovi and Richie Sambora. The ones that would transform them into superstars.

Child later maintained that when he first got together with Jon and Richie, “their scheme was they would collaborate with me because I was a pop writer, and we would pitch songs to other artists so they could make money and keep their band going. But the first day that we got together, I pulled out a piece of paper with the title You Give Love A Bad Name on it and Jon’s face lit up. So we wrote the song and they decided to keep it for their band, and we continued writing together.”

Paul Stanley introduced them and they hit it off immediately. Both Jon and Desmond were musical misfits shape-shifting to get by. Both leaned more towards Bruce Springsteen and Elton John than towards Judas Priest and Iron Maiden. Both were so ambitious that they would do whatever it took to make it big. Because both knew they had to. “There was no plan B,” Jon told me. “Even if we didn’t make it, I knew I’d still end up singing and playing in some bar in Jersey.”

“It was time for a do-over,” McGhee said. “New writers, new producer, new studio. It felt like last chance with the label so we had to give it our best shot.”

Early in ’86, they entered Little Mountain Sound studios in Vancouver, Canada where 36-year-old producer Bruce Fairbairn was waiting to take them to the next level – musically and figuratively.

Another talented musician whose own career never gained traction, Fairbairn had produced the first four Loverboy albums, all multi-platinum, two of them Top 10 in the US. Working out of Little Mountain with his protégé Bob Rock, in the same five years Fairbairn produced albums for Blue Öyster Cult, Krokus and Honeymoon Suite, whose The Big Prize went triple-platinum in Canada that year.

Like everyone associated, after doing Slippery Fairbairn’s career skyrocketed. Like Child, his next major gig would be working on Aerosmith’s big ’87 comeback album Permanent Vacation. After that, AC/DC were waiting.

“That’s what happens when you’re the guy that just produced a huge million-selling record,” Doc McGhee said, smiling.

The were several factors involved in that winning Slippery formula, however. “For the first time, we were allowed to be us in the studio,” Jon recalled. Fairbairn told Classic Rock in 2006: “I’ve been lucky enough to work with so many different talents. But Bon Jovi may be the finest. There was record company pressure to deliver the hits, but they were a joy. People seem to concentrate so much on their success that they lose sight of how good these guys are.”

Ultimately it was all down to the songs. The ones Desmond Child worked his magic on to help fashion into huge international hits. “Jonny was defining who he was,” Doc said. Once Desmond came on board and lit the way, Jon knew where to go. “He kept his formula of songwriting, the choruses, and all those hits, they all sound the same. Like everybody else. Elton John writes the same fucking song a hundred times.”

Child didn’t sit around waiting for inspiration to hit, either. He went right to work. He began by dismantling one of his existing songs, If You Were A Woman (And I Was A Man), written for Bonnie Tyler and included on her then just-released album Secret Dreams And Forbidden Fire. Child took the big vocal harmony intro and melded it with a Jon song from the first album called Shot Through The Heart. The result was the infallible rock classic You Give Love A Bad Name. “I saw Jon’s billion-dollar smile and we never looked back,” Child recalled with glee.

Desmond and Jon worked out the album’s other giant hit, Livin’ On A Prayer, sitting around a table in a dingy basement. Jon and Richie told Desmond “they wanted a working-class anthem”. So he did something he’d made it a rule never to do, and drew ideas from his own personal experience.

“The Gina character [who ‘works the diner all day’] is Maria Vidal,” he revealed. Maria had been in Rouge. “But [her] waitressing name was Gina Velvet.” As for Tommy with ‘his six string in hock’, “that’s me,” he said. “It was originally Gina and Johnny, but Jon said: ‘I can’t sing Johnny, that’s my name.’ So Johnny became Tommy. The struggling couple were ‘halfway there, livin’ on a prayer’, and the rest is history.”

The ingenious composer brought more than just words and melodies, though.“I read somewhere that the most successful music has some element of soul and R&B in it,” he said. “So you can hear that in Bon Jovi. The songs I co-wrote with them, the bass lines are just right out of Motown.” In particular Livin’ On A Prayer, whose crisp blend of white rock and black R&B could be traced all the way back to I Was Made For Lovin’ You. He knew that Bon Jovi “were supposed to be heavy metal”, but because they had a piano and organ “they had that Jersey sound like Southside Johnny and Bruce Springsteen, but with AC/DC and Rolling Stones mixed in”.

Desmond Child titled his 2023 autobiography Livin’ On A Prayer – Big Songs, Big Life. Because for him that song will always be “most special. To this day it’s the biggest song that I’ve ever collaborated on.

“In the beginning, Jon wasn’t thinking the song should go on Slippery– he thought it was too sentimental, maybe too soft. Richie and I got on our hands and knees and begged him. ‘Please, at least record the song.’ Then when they got in the studio with Bruce Fairbairn, and their engineer Bob Rock… magic happened!”

Some years ago, I fell into conversation with a highly respected producer of music radio and TV. He was not an especially avid rock fan, he explained, but in his opinion Slippery When Wet was “one of the most perfect ten-out-of-ten records of all time.” He went on: “Technically it’s spot-on, the sound quality, the sequencing of the tracks, the whole thing feels like it’s been built in the laboratory to be absolutely perfect.”

I felt a ‘but’ coming on…

“No buts,” he said. “It’s quite perfect. That’s all there is to it.”

It was true. Side One, as it was originally conceived, was a flawless five-song suite. Opening with Bryan’s sonorous mad-maestro at the pipe organ intro to Let It Rock, this was heavy rock on the grand 70s-scale of a Deep Purple but with the added gloss of 80s-style Def Leppard harmony vocals. Five minutes-plus of Deep Leppard and Def Purple that became a returning musical mantra throughout the album.

From there it’s the wham-bam-blam of You Give Love A Bad Name and Livin’ On A Prayer, both of them destined to become No.1 in the US chart when they were released as singles in the summer and autumn of 1986.

All killer, followed, surely, by some quick-breather filler? Not a chance. Instead we’re off to groovy town with some sticky-fingered Rolling Stones in the form of Social Disease; rock as nasty stuff for badass boys – and especially girls; and the chef’s-kiss finale of Wanted Dead Or Alive, a self-mythologising cinematic epic that would serve for Bon Jovi as Stairway To Heaven had for Led Zeppelin. It was the first monumental Bon Jovi hit that Desmond Child had nothing to do with, written entirely by Jon and Richie.

If Side Two had merely comprised standard-fare 80s claptrap, Slippery would still have been an outstanding piece of work. Instead it continued to reach for the stars with two Jon-and-Richie standouts in the gloriously uplifting Raise Your Hands, and Never Say Goodbye, like one of Rod Stewart’s scarf-waving singlongs from the 70s.

The album ended with Jon’s Wild In The Streets, his unashamed homage to Bruce Springsteen, if by homage you mean straight rip. But that Noo Joisey boy just loved him some Broooce. As evidenced by the other two numbers he and Richie co-wrote with Desmond Child: Without Love, which channelled the Boss’s 80s top-five hit Hungry Heart, and I’d Die For You, which sounded like every down-on-one-knee backstreet-testifying anthem Springsteen ever wrote.

Released worldwide in August 1986, Slippery When Wet was the first of what to date is six US No.1 albums for Bon Jovi. In the UK it reached No.6 and went triple-platinum. It also bent the charts out of shape in loads more countries, eventually selling more than 30 million worldwide.

By the time Bon Jovi returned to London in November for the first of four sold-out nights at Hammersmith Odeon, the band still exuded the elation of finally having made it – not just anywhere, but everywhere, all at the same time.

Afterwards in the dressing room, Jon was the same goofy lotto-winner as before. “I’m like the kid whose Christmases just keep coming,” he gurgled at me, all toothy grin and puppy-dog eyes.

Richie Sambora was the one who looked most comfortable in his new celebrity skin. He told me he was off the next day to meet up with his new best friend Jimmy Page at a guitar shop in Earls Court where they would spend the afternoon in the store’s basement “just jamming on all these great guitars”. He said he was hoping Jimmy might share some of his secret Zeppelin tunings with him.

The next time I saw Jon Bon Jovi was when the band headlined Donington the following summer. Sequestered in his own purpose-built VIP-within-the-VIP section, the kid was now gone. The Slippery world tour was more than 200 shows old by then and still had another three months to go. Two nights before, they’d mimed their fourth single from the album, Never Say Goodbye, on Top Of The Pops before the band were taken out for the night at some millionaire’s pleasure dome in Soho.

Jon didn’t just look tired, he looked completely burned out. Sitting with him in his large empty dressing ‘area’, the conversation was stilted. I recall asking him what it was about the cowboy image evinced in Wanted Dead Or Alive that really spoke to him. His answer was telling, I still think: “It’s just that kind of lifestyle. It’s like life on the road. I feel that you ride into town, you don’t know where the fuck you are. You’re with your ‘gang’, stealing money, getting what you can off any girl that’ll give it to you, drinking as much of the free alcohol as you can and being gone before the law catches you – before someone wakes you from this wonderful dream and says: ‘You’re an asshole, you’re going to jail.’ Because it’s not the real world I’m living in. It’s a dream sequence, a big fucking wet dream.”

A slippery when wet dream, you might say.

Mick Wall is the UK’s best-known rock writer, author and TV and radio programme maker, and is the author of numerous critically-acclaimed books, including definitive, bestselling titles on Led Zeppelin (When Giants Walked the Earth), Metallica (Enter Night), AC/DC (Hell Ain’t a Bad Place To Be), Black Sabbath (Symptom of the Universe), Lou Reed, The Doors (Love Becomes a Funeral Pyre), Guns N’ Roses and Lemmy. He lives in England.

Hawkwind’s fifth studio album, 1975’s Warrior On The Edge Of Time, might easily be their most prog-friendly, but its genesis was far from easy with the band seemingly at each other’s throats the entire time. Still, from chaos came greatness as Dave Brock and others told Prog for this 2025 cover story…

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“It’s getting to be like a war, isn’t it?” – Dave Brock, December 1974.

At the beginning of 1975, Hawkwind were at the peak of their commercial success. The band were in the middle of their annual UK winter tour – extended over three months – and were playing to thousands of adoring fans each night in sold-out city halls up and down the country. They’d also started to break North America, having toured there twice the previous year, with their last album Hall Of The Mountain Grill making a decent showing on the Billboard chart. They were a band in demand, and apparently destined for even greater things.

But they were also physically and mentally exhausted, and fast approaching burnout. As the quote above (taken from a Melody Maker interview with Allan Jones in February 1975) highlights, bandleader Dave Brock felt they were in the middle of a ceaseless military campaign. Hawkwind had a reputation as a hard-gigging band, with their early success built on bringing the good news of the counterculture to every town in Britain, creating a dedicated following in the process. Yet despite working as much as possible outside of the mainstream music industry, they increasingly found themselves on a corporate treadmill, spending months away from home on the road and operating more and more like a traditional rock group.

In fact, ever since their 1972 single Silver Machine had become an unexpected smash hit around the world, Brock and saxophonist frontman Nik Turner in particular had become concerned about losing touch with Hawkwind’s roots as a ‘people’s band’. The money generated by the single had enabled them to mount the Space Ritual Tour, which had acted as a springboard for their current trajectory as a major cult band breaking into the big time. But it meant the days of Hawkwind being able to play a benefit gig for free at the drop of a hat were long over.

Looking back today, Brock remembers it as a stressful time: “When you’re doing one album after another, and it’s successful, the record company want you to knock another one out as soon as possible. There was a lot of pressure all the time. It did us in. We did one tour of North America, had two weeks in England, then back to America again. All of us in the band had problems, not being home that much. And everybody had American girlfriends, it was all very complicated…”

Things came to a head in the latter stages of the UK tour in February 1975. Hawkwind had already played three concerts in London that month, but they’d booked an additional show on the 16th at the Roundhouse, originally intended as a benefit for the charity Radical Alternatives To Prisons. However, following the theft of both Simon King and Alan Powell’s drum kits from the band’s west London lock-up, the show had turned into a means of buying new equipment (despite both kits being recovered before the gig happened). Speaking to International Times, Turner expressed his displeasure at the change: “I’m told that our financial situation is what governs that sort of decision and that’s what pisses me off, having to come to terms with the fact that it is a business… That is the sort of situation I very often find myself in, torn between what I really believe in and the reality of the situation.”

The reality of the situation at the Roundhouse was heavier than just
a clash over where the money was going – with the gig sold out once again, around a thousand people had been locked out of the venue, some of whom decided it’d be a good idea to try and burn down the side entrances. Not for the first time at a Hawkwind gig, the police had to attend to restore order. For the band, it was the final straw, with the rest of the tour cancelled to allow them some time to properly recuperate.

There was also the small matter of making their next album. In the UK and Europe, Hawkwind were in a state of record label limbo, the band’s contract with United Artists having ended after the recording of the Kings Of Speed single in January. Released in March, hopes had initially been high for it, with Simon King commenting at the time, “It’s the same as Silver Machine. Well, near enough, anyway.” But it failed to repeat the success of the original, with John Peel commenting in his review for Sounds, “Hawkwind exist in some curious time-warp in which no account is taken of what may be happening elsewhere.”

While this was the prevailing view among many in the press, it wasn’t entirely accurate. Kings Of Speed would end up on the album to come, but its stoned cosmic boogie wasn’t representative of the much more progressive direction the band were travelling in. Key to this new sound was keyboardist and violinist Simon House, a classically trained musician who had previously been in the brutally psychedelic High Tide and the avant-medieval Third Ear Band. Drafted in as a replacement for Hawkwind’s legendary electronics duo of DikMik and Del Dettmar, House’s Mellotron and synth work had significantly augmented the band’s sonic palette on Hall Of The Mountain Grill, and his playing on the next album would dramatically build on this foundation.

Alan Powell also played an important role. Hawkwind’s newest member, he’d joined the previous summer as a temporary replacement for an injured Simon King, and then remained in the line-up after King had recovered. Thus was born “the Drum Empire”, as bassist Lemmy would witheringly refer to the band’s double drummer configuration. Yet this wasn’t just an exercise in brute force. As well as being a seasoned session player, Powell was a skilled percussionist and budding songwriter, and would make a telling contribution on his first album with the band.

With the United Artists contract at an end, manager Doug Smith had wasted no time in securing a new US deal for the band with Atco, an imprint of Atlantic Records. But in combination with another American tour lined up for May, this added further pressure to the band’s schedule, with Atco stipulating that a new album had to be out to coincide with the tour.

It was fortunate, then, that Brock and the band had already started putting new material together, based around a rough concept suggested to them by leading fantasy author and regular collaborator Michael Moorcock. In fact, there had been talk for a while of mounting a full-scale theatrical rock show based around his Eternal Champion books, with Arthur Brown earmarked for a lead role. In the end, this didn’t come to fruition, but a couple of Moorcock’s spoken-word pieces – Standing At The Edge and Warriors – that had already been in the band’s live set for some time would appear on the new album. And the title that Moorcock gave them – Warrior On The Edge Of Time – positioned Hawkwind away from their science-fiction roots, aligning them instead with the burgeoning ‘sword & sorcery’ genre.

However, the band that entered Rockfield Studios in March 1975 were still suffering from the after effects of their relentless live work, and interpersonally wasn’t in the best place, to say the least.

Brock remembers, “We were doing very well, but there was friction within the band, and a lot of weird things going on at that time. We had two drummers, which Lemmy hated. And there were problems with Turner squawking on his saxophone…”

Brock had talked at length about this friction in his interview with Allan Jones in February ’75. Like the rest of the band, he was losing patience with Lemmy.

“At Hammersmith, Lemmy’s lead kept coming out of the amp, and he carried on playing. He’s so deaf he didn’t even realise. That’s what annoys Simon House, Lemmy plays so loud he can’t hear a thing we’re playing. And we’re all shouting to Lemmy, ‘Your fucking lead, man!’ and he still didn’t understand. Then somebody plugged it in and I told him, ‘If you do that again, I’ll fucking kill you.’ And sure enough he did it again. We were all freaking out about that.”

Lemmy’s amphetamine habit was identified as being at the root of the problem, with the band often at loggerheads with their speed-wired bassist. As Turner told Carol Clerk in The Saga Of Hawkwind, “Everybody had agreed that it was increasingly difficult to work with him because of the drug situation, and because he always had to be right.”

Turner expanded on this latter point in The Spirit Of Hawkwind, the book he wrote with Dave Thompson: “Lemmy would come up with these hare-brained schemes and then get upset and angry when the rest of the band said, ‘Well, no.’”

In his autobiography White Line Fever, Lemmy conceded, “I was just too forward for the rest of the guys.”

But his own personal ire was reserved for the Drum Empire: “Simon and Alan’s two drum kits were set at the centre of the stage in this huge semi-circle of percussive effects. It jolly well made sure that you knew your place! I’ve seen a lot of pompous drummers in my lifetime, but this pair were ridiculous. As far as I’m concerned, this was the end of Hawkwind because those two killed it between them.”

And while Turner was wrestling with his conscience as the band became more of a business than a community project, his lack of discipline as a live musician was irking Brock, as he recounted to Jones: “Some nights I’ve unplugged my guitar and marched across the stage to sort Nik out. He keeps playing the saxophone when I’m singing and I’ve told him a thousand times not to do that.”

Overall, the picture he painted was far from pretty.

“You wouldn’t believe some of the scenes that go on backstage. All the fucking rows, people losing their temper when things go wrong or somebody’s not doing it right.”

Given the general level of unhappiness within the band, it would have come as no surprise if the Rockfield sessions had quickly descended into a mass brawl. But what the angry quotes above don’t capture is the fact that, despite the simmering resentments, all those months on the road had turned Hawkwind into an incredibly powerful musical entity with an intuitive sense of interplay between members. And despite the pressure they were under, Hawkwind went into Rockfield and, in just three and a half days, recorded the backing tracks for what many consider to be their finest studio album. They then returned to London, and spent another three days in Olympic Studios overdubbing and mixing the songs. Warrior On The Edge Of Time, a classic of progressive space rock, had taken less than a week to make.

The album begins with the two-fisted punch of Assault And Battery
and The Golden Void, segued to create a seamless, and mind-bendingly trippy, 10-minute track. Sonically, it’s one of Hawkwind’s most ambitious pieces of music, thanks largely to the free rein given to Simon House to embellish and illuminate it wherever possible. His blazing Mellotron, in tandem with Lemmy’s irresistibly propulsive bass line, immediately conjures visions of Moorcock’s fantastical worlds, Assault And Battery surging forward like an eldritch army about to engage in battle.

Brock is also in commanding voice, his opening lines, ‘Lives of great men all remind us/We may make our lives sublime’ taken from A Psalm Of Life by 19th-century American poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Speaking to Malcolm Dome for the sleeve notes of WOTEOT’s 2013 reissue, Brock said, “I used to read a lot of poetry in the 1960s, and that’s probably where I came across it. But the notion of a rock musician taking a quote from a great poem wasn’t anything new. Bob Dylan had done it for years, and let’s face it, everyone is always borrowing from various sources.”

The Golden Void is even more dramatic, its brooding opening
section moving into an intense bolero-style summoning of the old gods, House’s synths weaving an incredible basket of light as Brock delivers another committed vocal. And if Turner wasn’t always the most reliable player live, his sax solo at the end of this song is just glorious, and arguably his finest performance on a Hawkwind record. Even Lemmy, who perhaps understandably didn’t have much time for WOTEOT, called it “a beautiful track”.

Next up is the first of the album’s three spoken-word pieces, The Wizard Blew His Horn, recited by Moorcock himself. Some critics have characterised these tracks as a misstep, and Moorcock has described his performance as: “Hasty. I was in a hurry to go and see a movie and did all the numbers too quickly. I didn’t like The Wizard… much and would rather have done something a little less ‘fantasy’, but Dave liked it.”

Yet these atmospheric interludes add to the album’s uncanny charge, the eerie backings created by Powell, King and House verging on the avant-garde.

The instrumental Opa-Loka begins with waves before locking into a mono-chordal hypnotic groove that strongly recalls the krautrock minimalism of Neu! (Brock wrote the sleeve notes for the UK release of their debut album). A Powell composition, he describes it as “a studio jam I’d made a demo of in my flat. Lemmy was unavailable, so Dave Brock played the bass on it. It’s basically trance rock… In the early 90s, when raves were the big thing in America and everybody was taking ecstasy, Opa-Loka was apparently played a lot.”

Fittingly, its title comes from Opa-Locka, a town in Florida with Arabic architecture inspired by One Thousand And One Nights.

Despite its stark title, The Demented Man is one of Brock’s loveliest acoustic-based songs, with a weathered warmth to both his finger-picking and voice. It’s a sympathetic and affecting portrayal of someone losing touch with sanity, although Brock suggests it can be interpreted in a number of ways:.

“It could be a lunatic asylum – ‘White walls stretching in the sun…’ Or
it could be about being born, a baby’s first experience of coming from the womb into a hospital. It’s up to the individual to work it out.”

Kicking off side two in a Hammer horror-style squall of wind and rain, Magnu features one of Brock’s most memorable stun guitar riffs, and another formidable sound clash between his roiling wah-wah, Turner’s bubbling sax and House’s banshee violin. This time, Brock borrows lines from The Invisible Knight by Polish writer Aleksander Chodz´ko and Hymn Of Apollo by Percy Bysshe Shelley.

“That was a major inspiration for the song. Shelley had taken the idea from ancient legends, so I was claiming it back,” he told Malcolm Dome.

The second spoken piece is the chilling Standing At The Edge, with Turner voicing the anger of a damned immortal army, ‘Veterans of a thousand psychic wars’. This is followed by House’s joyous Spiral Galaxy 28948, a glittering synth-drenched instrumental in jazzy 6/8 time, and further proof of Hawkwind’s desire to expand the boundaries of their music.

“Simon is a very clever musician,” Brock said to Dome. “This track is typical of the sort of thing he’d come up with, but it tends to confuse the rest of us poor chaps!”

The title is a not-quite-accurate reference to House’s date of birth: August 29, 1948.

Warriors is the final spoken track, delivered by Moorcock through a Dalek-style ring modulator, its words paraphrased from his 1970 novel, The Eternal Champion. It leads into Turner’s songwriting contribution to the album, Dying Seas, Lemmy’s querulous bass line underpinning a quirky but appealing song with a mysterious syntax-mangling lyric. With the band unable to recreate the vibe of the original demo at Rockfield, they decided to include it as was, though in Brock’s opinion, “I don’t think that detracts at all from the quality.”

The album was rounded off with the inclusion of Kings Of Speed. Often assumed to have been tacked onto the end at Atco’s request, Brock had already suggested to Allan Jones that it was in fact part of the WOTEOT concept. Closer inspection of the Moorcock-penned lyric bears this out with its references to the world of Jerry Cornelius, the writer’s anarchic, androgynous character who offered a modern spin on the eternal champion trope.

Not only did WOTEOT feature a strong and varied selection of material, it also sounded distinctly fantastical, the mix a thing of shape-shifting magic, somehow both murky yet startlingly present.

Brock told Dome, “I sat up all night sometimes working on the album… someone had to take responsibility for the way it was sounding, and it usually ended up being just me.”

However, not everyone was impressed, Alan Powell in particular: “The sound and production was at best amateurish – it sounds like it was recorded on a Sony cassette player. But Dave wanted it ragged and messy, it’s just the way he liked to hear it.”

Warrior On The Edge Of Time was released on May 9, 1975, just eight months after Hall Of The Mountain Grill. With contractual negotiations still ongoing, United Artists had to license it from Atco in order to release it in the UK and Europe – ongoing licensing issues were the reason why the album would be officially unavailable during the 90s and 00s, only rectified in 2013 with a box set reissue from Atomhenge that included a Steven Wilson remix.

Reaching No.13 in the UK charts, it would be Hawkwind’s highest-placed studio album, and also their last to make the US Billboard chart, at No.150. It was a bitter irony, then, that the American tour they had rushed to complete the album for finally led to a decisive break in their ranks.

Crossing the border into Canada on May 11 for a show in Toronto, Lemmy was arrested for the possession of a suspicious white powder. Released the following day when it turned out, of course, to be amphetamine sulphate rather than cocaine, Lemmy made it to the show. But it had proved to be one headache too many for the rest of the band, and in a meeting afterwards, their talismanic bassist was fired. This would be just the first of a series of ructions that would knock the band off course for the next few years – and for many fans, it’s the point at which ‘classic’ Hawkwind ends.

Warrior On The Edge Of Time remains Hawkwind’s most prog-friendly album, but as with all their output, it’s uniquely their own take on the idea, assimilating the sonic adventurism of the progressive bands into their dark rhythmic churn. And in Assault And Battery, The Golden Void and Magnu, it gave the band three of their most loved and long-standing live tracks. As Brock said to Dome, “It is a genuine Hawkwind classic – there’s some really great stuff on it.”

It’s possible that the friction within the band was at least partly responsible for the album’s strident, often fierce sound – as Hawkwind fan John Lydon would point out a decade later, ‘Anger is an energy.’ But as Brock ruefully concludes, “Probably if we’d persevered and kept things together and stopped arguing, we could have all been multi-millionaires – but we didn’t!”

Joe is a regular contributor to Prog. He also writes for Electronic Sound, The Quietus, and Shindig!, specialising in leftfield psych/prog/rock, retro futurism, and the underground sounds of the 1970s. His work has also appeared in The Guardian, MOJO, and Rock & Folk. Joe is the author of the acclaimed Hawkwind biographyDays Of The Underground (2020). He’s on Twitter and Facebook, and his website is https://www.daysoftheunderground.com/. 

“I recommend anyone reading this who’s a psycho and can buy a gun to shoot George Bush. I’m serious. l would consider it myself. I live in a country that I hate! I live in a country where I wanna shoot politicians, where the only way you can make a real dent is not voting, it’s murder.”

It’s October 1988, and speaking to Melody Maker writer Steve Sutherland ahead of the forthcoming US presidential election, R.E.M.’s Peter Buck is delivering a somewhat provocative state-of-the-nation address. The guitarist is in a Athens, Georgia drinking den named the GA Bar, and, by his own admission, he’s “a little tipsy”, drinking Bloody Marys in an attempt to battle the jetlag he’s feeling having flown home from London the previous day.

A music writer since 1993, formerly Editor of Kerrang! and Planet Rock magazine (RIP), Paul Brannigan is a Contributing Editor to Louder. Having previously written books on Lemmy, Dave Grohl (the Sunday Times best-seller This Is A Call) and Metallica (Birth School Metallica Death, co-authored with Ian Winwood), his Eddie Van Halen biography (Eruption in the UK, Unchained in the US) emerged in 2021. He has written for Rolling Stone, Mojo and Q, hung out with Fugazi at Dischord House, flown on Ozzy Osbourne’s private jet, played Angus Young’s Gibson SG, and interviewed everyone from Aerosmith and Beastie Boys to Young Gods and ZZ Top. Born in the North of Ireland, Brannigan lives in North London and supports The Arsenal.