Toto was always more than the ubiquitous “Africa” from Toto IV. In fact, as this list of Top 10 Toto songs illustrates, that may not even be their best work.
Of course, Toto will always be associated with their fourth LP, which closed with “Africa.” That’s what happens when a single disc spins off three Top 10 hit singles, goes four-times platinum and earns six Grammys – including album of the year. This was also a redemption story. Toto had slipped out of the Top 40 before the arrival of their 1982 blockbuster.
“IV left the biggest mark, for obvious reasons,” Toto’s Steve Lukather said during a 2012 interview. “We were almost thrown off the record label before we delivered that one. We were trying to find out why. It took us a while to realize we just had to be ourselves. When we did that, when we did what we wanted to do, it went well.”
Perhaps inevitably, the following countdown is dominated by this era. But Toto would have an impressive resume even without “Africa” and its gaudy diamond-certified sales. (The song, written by David Paich with a key rhythm contribution from the late Jeff Porcaro, is also their only chart-topper.)
Toto had notable hit singles before (1978’s three-million-selling Top 5 song “Hold the Line”) and after Toto IV (1986’s gold-certified No. 11 song “I’ll Be Over You”), while also reaching platinum heights with their self-titled debut. Four other LPs went gold on either side of their best-known album, including 1979’s Hydra, 1981’s Turn Back, 1984’s Isolation and 1986’s Fahrenheit.
In keeping, the following list of Top 10 Toto songs includes plenty of favorites from Toto IV while also dipping into key moments from the group’s other sometimes-overlooked eras. A few of them, in a twist, move far afield of the ballads that always seem to lift Toto toward the top of the charts. They were always more than the sum of their soft rock, too.
“The pop hits, if you listen to the whole album, they would take a single off of it — and it would be the ballad, or a softer song,” according to Lukather. “But there was always rock stuff on all of the albums. … We’ll morph from style to style. That was the thing that was confusing about us, and it maybe pissed off the critics. But it gained us a lot of other people who actually buy records.”
No. 10. “Georgy Porgy” From: Toto (1978)
Sung by Lukather but composed by Paich, the smooth-grooving “Georgy Porgy” was a bust on the pop charts, stalling at a paltry No. 48. But then Toto found themselves soaring into the Billboard R&B Top 20. Maybe that shouldn’t have come as a surprise, considering the influences that shaped its creation: “‘Georgy Porgy’ was inspired, first of all, from growing up around a father who played jazz,” Paich said in 2014, “but when I heard Leon Ware’s song for Marvin Gaye called ‘I Want You,’ it was a big influence on my life. At the time, Quincy Jones had done The Dude and different instrumental albums. Throw in a little bit of Barry White, too, on the drum riff,” he added with a laugh, “and you have that song basically.”
No. 9. “St. George and the Dragon” From: Hydra (1979)
In a sign of things to come, this Top 40 album’s sales were driven primarily by the hit ballad “99.” But Hydra actually starts off with a surprisingly proggy theme. Toto follows St. George (but from the perspective of the beast he’s trying to defeat) across the layered title track and into “St. George and the Dragon.” “I listen to that album, and I think, ‘How high were we?,” Lukather said with a laugh. “You can hear the youth in it but at the same time, we were trying to find our way. We were just experimenting, and we didn’t care what anybody thought. They already hated us! It’s fun to listen to and think: ‘Wow, that was really cool!’ And also: ‘That lyric, whoa. Are you kidding me?’ We have a really good sense of humor about all of it.”
No. 8. “Make Believe” From: Toto IV (1982)
This Paich-written, Bobby Kimball-sung rocker wasn’t a huge hit, but it illustrated something – with every tough Lukather riff – that’s often lost in the ballad-driven public persona of Toto. The truth is, they could rock. (Toto was just as adept at crunchy pop, world music, funky shuffles and even free-form prog, too.) Yet the simmering slow jams seemed to lodge most completely in the public’s consciousness. Their sensitive side translated into hits for others like Boz Scaggs (“Miss Sun”) and Michael Jackson (“Human Nature”), too. Even “99,” which only climbed to No. 26 in 1980, gets played more than the similarly charting but more uptempo “Make Believe.” Still, that takes nothing away from its power.
No. 7. “I’ll Be Over You” From: Fahrenheit (1986)
With his soaring background vocals, Michael McDonald would seem to be the key collaborator here. But it’s actually co-writer Randy Goodrum. He’s contributed to a number of hits for others, including Chicago (“If She Would Have Been Faithful”) and Journey‘s Steve Perry (“Oh Sherrie,” “Foolish Heart”), while working on Lukather solo albums dating back to his 1989 self-titled LP. “He’s really good at what he does. That sounds like a throwaway line, but he’s a brilliant musician,” Lukather later argued. “Randy’s sense and knowledge of music, of not doing the cliché thing, is there. When you co-write with people, there is a certain chemistry that has to be there.” It showed again on “I’ll Be Over You.”
No. 6. “Good For You” From: Toto IV (1982)
“Good for You” is another of this project’s drum-tight lesser-known gems. Co-written by Lukather and Kimball, this song boasts a Cuisinart-y blend of genre feels and styles. There’s a crunchy synth riff (think Keith Emerson in the Emerson Lake and Powell era), an unforgettably ear-wormy chorus, a dream-sequence middle-eight and, finally, a scorching solo from Lukather at the fade. And, through it all, they never let go of this relentless R&B-infused groove. Then there’s Bobby Kimball. He matches the lyric’s unvarnished carnal desire, performing with a reckless, edgy abandon. (Unfortunately, that approach likely contributed to the reedy texture of Kimball’s voice in later years.)
No. 5. “I Won’t Hold You Back” From: Toto IV (1982)
Written and sung by Lukather, “I Won’t Hold You Back” shot up the charts in 1983 with a chorus assist from Timothy B. Schmit, the honey-voiced singer from Poco and the Eagles. The song seemed custom-built to fill the ballad spot on Toto IV, but “I Won’t Hold You Back” instead dated back to Toto’s previous album. “I actually wrote that during the Turn Back sessions,” Lukather said in 2011, “but I thought, since we were trying to make more of a harder-edged record, that it didn’t fit. We were coming to do Toto IV and a lot of people were bringing other types of songs to the party. It became more of a band-written record. That was when the band came into its own.”
No. 4. “99” From: Hydra (1979)
This David Paich lyric pays tribute to George Lucas’ directing debut, THX 1138, set in a totalitarian 25th century where people are simply numbered drones. Toto’s futuristic video was even fashioned after one of the film’s scenes. Yet Lukather sings “99” so sweetly that the song resonates anyway. Too bad he struggled so mightily with its goofy past. At one point, Lukather went on record as saying he hated the song and “99” even disappeared from the set list. “That’s an example of talking out of the side of your mouth,” he finally admitted. “People still ask me about it. It’s an example of how the Internet is so viral. At first, I did think it was a cheesy lyric. But we played it on the last tour – just to prove that I was just kidding.”
No. 3. “Africa” From: Toto IV (1982)
“Africa” provided a key early roadmap for the emerging “world music” genre. “It’s funny, Sting always says the record is just a blueprint for what actually will take place later on – and I believe that,” Paich said in 2013. Credit Porcaro’s ageless rhythm, but there’s also Paich’s deeply involving keyboard figure. He fooled around on an early Yamaha synth until he achieved a sound that resembles a kalimba. “We were searching, trying to break some new ground,” Paich added. “That was typical Toto. We not only used that, but also an instrument called a flapamba, which you’ve heard on Steely Dan‘s ‘Rikki Don’t Lose That Number.’ It was an exotic wooden African instrument, from the xylophone or marimba family. It was really fun to experiment.”
No. 2. “Rosanna” From: Toto IV (1982)
Jeff Porcaro created a canny update of Bernard Purdie’s legendary half-time shuffle, then Toto played along while everyone assumed the utterly lovestruck lyric was about actress Rosanna Arquette. (She’d been dating Porcaro’s sibling bandmate, keyboardist Steve Porcaro.) A rocket-ride key change probably required that vocal handoff from Lukather to Bobby Kimball, who still possessed a stratospheric tenor. But Steve Porcaro’s outburst of a solo remains the song’s lasting wonder. Porcaro and Paich carefully created it after dabbling with a Yamaha CS-80s, a GS1, a Minimoog and several other keyboards. Through it all, “Rosanna” somehow got stuck at No. 2, behind the Human League‘s “Don’t You Want Me” and Survivor‘s “Eye of the Tiger.”
No. 1. “Hold the Line” From: Toto (1978)
Powered by a sharp riff from the very big-haired, still-teenaged Lukather, Paich’s “Hold the Line” completes Toto’s argument as a rock band. The video, with its old-school picture-in-picture editing, is just as gritty and tough. “Hold the Line” came on TV years later when he was at the house of a movie-star friend and his much younger girlfriend, Lukather recalled in 2012. Nobody recognized Lukather – but the song still resonated. “This girl is laughing, saying: ‘Yeah, I know that song. I wasn’t born then.’ They don’t know it’s me, but they know the music. It’s timeless. … You feel almost weird when you’re somewhere, and they’re always playing old classic rock, but I’ve embraced that. I’m honored to be a part of it.”
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Kiss have confirmed that they will perform live together for the first time in nearly two years at the Kiss Army Storms Vegas event this November.
The three-day convention, which takes place Nov. 14 through 16 at Virgin Hotels Las Vegas, will be highlighted by what the band’s press release labels “a live ‘unmasked’ performance by Kiss.” This is explained in further detail as an electric set featuring Paul Stanley, Gene Simmons and unspecified special guests.
The event celebrates the 50th anniversary of their formation of the Kiss Army fan club, and the 30th anniversary of the first Kiss fan convention.
Former Kiss guitarist Bruce Kulick will also perform at the three-day convention, which will also feature sets from Kiss tribute bands, Q&A sessions with the band members, interactive activities and other exclusive experiences.
On March 22 an e-mail went out to the band’s fans, declaring that the event would feature “the first time Kiss has performed together since retiring from touring in December 2023.”
Kiss concluded their 250-show End of the Road world tour on Dec. 2 at New York’s Madison Square Garden. But band founders Gene Simmons and Paul Stanley were always clear that special one-off shows would be possible in the future. “Kiss is so far from over, although Kiss as we know it is done,” Stanley told the Daily Times.
Kiss Army VIP members (a $50 yearly subscription) will get first access to tickets to the three-day Kiss Army Storms Vegas event via a March 28th pre-sale. Packages range from $999 to $4909 per person and include an escalating assortment of merchandise, concert seating and soundcheck access. Tickets go on sale to the public on April 7.
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Terry Manning has died after working as a producer and engineer with Led Zeppelin, ZZ Top and Joe Walsh, among many others. He was 77.
His son Lucas Manning confirmed his death on Tuesday at home in El Paso, Texas. The Memphis Flyer, from Manning’s long-time career base, reported that he’d suffered a “sudden fatal fall.”
Manning’s most important early rock engineering job was 1970’s Led Zeppelin III. Manning was a musician in his own right, and Jimmy Page first met him when Manning’s band Lawson and Four More opened for the Page-era Yardbirds in 1966 on Dick Clark’s Caravan of Stars.
“We were really very good friends and in close touch,” Manning later told Memphis Magazine. “Jimmy would send me cassette copies of the first two albums before they were even released. ‘Oh here’s what we’ve done, what do you think?'”
Manning issued his first solo album, Home Sweet Home, the same year Led Zeppelin III arrived. He said Led Zeppelin’s first two LPs “showed great promise,” but “they weren’t super diverse – and I think Jimmy really knew that the third album is so important to a band … the third has always been the real thing that turned on the question of, ‘Are we a group that will last a long time?’ So he really went in with the intent of doing something way beyond what they’d done before.”
Led Zeppelin III would become a chart-topping six-times-platinum success. Later, Page described the LP as “the real beginning of the band.”
Born in Oklahoma, Manning moved around a lot as the child of a traveling minister. He landed in Memphis after lobbying for his father to take a job there because one of Manning’s first music purchases had been “Last Night” by the Mar-Keys. The single listed the address of Stax Records, 926 E. McLemore, Memphis, Tennessee. Manning showed up there unannounced in 1963, and studio ace Steve Cropper helped him get a job sweeping up.
By 1966, Manning had become one of nearby Ardent Studios’ first employees. He also worked with legendary Hi Records producer Willie Mitchell. Manning was soon recording a parade of R&B legends, including Isaac Hayes, the Staple Singers and Cropper’s band, Booker T. and the MGs.
“I got a full education,” Manning told Memphis’ Commercial Appeal. “I learned the technical side from [Ardent founder] John Fry and the emotional aspects with someone like Willie Mitchell, and the music and in-between parts from people like Steve [Cropper] and Booker. T. [Jones]. I could not have asked for any better school.”
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More recent Manning albums included a tribute to Bobby Fuller called West Texas Skyline and Playin’ in Elvis’ House, which was recorded in Elvis Presley‘s first home on Memphis’ Audubon Avenue. After Led Zeppelin III, however, Manning would become best known for his studio work with some of rock’s biggest acts.
A long run of collaborations with ZZ Top began with 1973’s Tres Hombres and included engineering 1983’s multi-platinum Eliminator. His most recent project with the group was 1990’s million-selling Recycler.
He spent time in the mid-’80s working out of Abbey Road Studios in London, and also opened his own recording facility, Studio 6. In the early ’90s, Island Records owner Chris Blackwell asked Manning to oversee the renovation of Compass Point Studio in the Bahamas, and Manning operated and managed the space for the next two decades. He launched a record label for archival Memphis acts called Lucky 7 and, late in life, launched a successful second career as a photographer.
“The people and places I’ve bumped into have been amazing,” Manning told the Commercial Appeal. “To have been in Stax, in Ardent, Abbey Road, Compass Point. I can’t believe it sometimes. I’m just lucky, very lucky, to have done all that.”
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(Image credit: Ozzy Osbourne: Mick Hutson/Redferns | Paul McCartney: TT News Agency / Alamy Stock Photo | Robert Plant: Steve Eichner/WireImage | Jim Morrison: Michael Ochs Archive/Getty Images | Joe Strummer: Randy Bachman/Getty Images)
In 2020, live music, along with the rest of the world, went into lockdown. With tours cancelled and no shows to review, Classic Rock asked its writers to reminisce about their most memorable gig-going experiences. Cue vivid, nostalgia-soaked memories of The Beatles, The Doors, Peter Green’s Fleetwood Mac, David Bowie, Ramones, Guns N’ Roses, Iron Maiden, The Clash, Black Sabbath, Nirvana and more.
Guns N’ Roses: Dallas Starplex Amphitheater, July 23, 1988
In the moments before Guns N’ Roses went on stage there was a strange atmosphere in the band’s dressing room. Slash, having turned 23 the previous day, was presented with a cake on which it was written in icing: ‘HAPPY FUCKIN’ BIRTHDAY YOU FUCKER’. But amid the boozy celebrations there was tension emanating from Axl Rose, who warmed up by singing to The Needle Lies by Queensrÿche – a thinly veiled warning to the other members of the band.
I had seen Guns N’ Roses four times in 1987, at the Whisky in LA, the Marquee, a half-empty Manchester Apollo and a packed-out Hammersmith Odeon. But at this show in Dallas in 1988, with GN’R opening for their spiritual forebears Aerosmith, and with their debut album Appetite For Destruction about to hit No.1 in the US, they were at their peak. It was the classic line-up, with drummer Steven Adler still a force of nature, and they knocked 20,000 rowdy Texans dead, with an eight-song set beginning with It’s So Easy and ending with Paradise City. Aerosmith were great that night, too. But there was something in the air – a sense of a changing of the guard – and you could feel it. (Words: Paul Elliott)
The Clash: Sheffield Top Rank, January 27, 1980.
There they were: The Clash, at the back of the Top Rank’s barely lit stage, wearing trench coats, collars turned up, grinning like naughty schoolboys, skanking away to support act Mikey Dread’s sliver-tongued toasting. Most of the audience couldn’t see them, but I did because I was at the very front, clinging on to my tour programme, The Armagideon Times, ready to pogo, albeit through hemmed-in necessity rather than artistic statement.
The Clash didn’t look like naughty schoolboys 45 minutes later when Mick Jones cranked out the introduction to set opener Clash City Rockers. Four decades and hundreds of shows later, I’ve never seen anyone who sizzled like the only band that mattered at the absolute peak of their powers. Jones the myth-making rock guitarist; Joe Strummer the charismatic Old Testament prophet of the inner cities; Paul Simonon cooler than cool; and ye gods what a drummer Topper Headon was. They hurtled through their early peaks, most of London Calling, and I couldn’t breathe. Not just because I’d never seen anything so heart-stoppingly thrilling before, but also because the people behind me were ramming me into the stage.
The next day I went to school bruised and, somehow, bloodied. In truth, I’ve never healed. (John Aizelwood)
Black Sabbath: Birmingham NEC, December 4/5, 1997
Ozzy Osbourne onstage at the NEC (Image credit: Mick Hutson/Redferns)
It was the night heavy metal came home. All four original members of Black Sabbath on the same stage in the city of their birth for the first time in almost 20 years.
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Of course, Sabbath had never officially split up, merely trundled along with a rotating line-up of ringers orbiting ever-present guitarist Tony Iommi. The latter had even reunited with Ozzy Osbourne and Geezer Butler for a run of dates under the Black Sabbath banner on the US Ozzfest earlier that year (no Bill Ward that time, proving that with Sabbath some things never change).
But their two shows at the Birmingham NEC at the tail-end of ‘97 were something else. This wasn’t a late-career cash-grab; it was four working-class outsiders who inadvertently forged everything that followed, putting aside years of petty rancour and reaffirming both their musical godhead and their personal friendships.
What did they play? Oh, everything they always played: War Pigs, Iron Man, Paranoid, Black Sabbath itself. Back then they still chucked in some curveballs too, this time in the shape of Electric Funeral, Lord Of This World and an unexpected Spiral Architect. But it was about more than just the music. By the end of the shows on both nights, grown men were visibly weeping. Black Sabbath had come full circle, and with them heavy metal had too. It was, as they say, emotional. (Dave Everley)
Frank Zappa: Brighton Centre, April 16, 1988
Frank Zappa onstage in 1988 (Image credit: Steve Eichner/Getty Images)
Although I was a mere stripling of 18 years, by the time Zappa’s Broadway The Hard Way tour rolled into my adopted University seaside town, I’d notched up a few decent gigs – a clutch of Doningtons, a hat-trick of Hawkwind, a brace of Marillion, and, to my eternal regret, I had an unused ticket for Guns N’ Roses at the Marquee. Zappa, however, was next-level stuff, something that, with all due respect, Magnum at Penyrheol Leisure Centre had ill-prepared me for.
After strolling on stage with a crack 12-piece band, complete with brass section, the drum count-in to set opener Stinkfoot still reverberates in my cerebellum 30-odd years later, 18 being a particularly ripe age for every sort of imprinting. At around the four-minute mark, Zappa picked up his guitar from its stand and received a level of audience approbation previously heard at only Cup Finals.
The band were in playful mood, the customary improvised in-jokes abounded, and even a thrown drink didn’t mar proceedings. Jazzy digressions and covers were the most memorable: the Ike Willis-fronted I Am The Walrus was played with a remarkably straight bat, and a precocious codreggae Stairway To Heaven sparkled as an encore, its guitar solo rendered flashily by the brass section.
The tour collapsed a few months later amid accusations and recriminations, and it was the last time Zappa ever toured. But, as they say, I was there. (Tim Batcup)
Rainbow: London Rainbow, November 13, 1977
The “killer-diller” best night of four, Geoff Barton wrote in Sounds a week after the show. Sometimes you just get lucky…
Every seat in the Rainbow was draped with a paper banner bearing the slogan ‘Long Live Rock’n’Roll’ – the title of the one new song Sounds had primed us to expect in a set that, disappointingly, omitted Stargazer. But when the lights went down, all cares melted in the maelstrom of the frantic Kill The King. On the slower-paced Mistreated, Sixteenth Century Greensleeves and Catch The Rainbow, the changing colours of the rainbow arch spanning the front of the stage added magic. Beneath, Ronnie James Dio mesmerised and Ritchie Blackmore played at the top of his game, frequently unaccompanied, improvising as if possessed.
In truth, Long Live’s raucous singalong was no substitute for Stargazer. But as the painted backcloth of the guitar castle from the first album fell to reveal the rising fist of the second, Man On The Silver Mountain hefted everything to a new level. A burst of Blues, a snatch of Starstruck, and then into the epic set closer Still I’m Sad climaxing around Cozy Powell’s unforgettably bombastic drum solo.
The audience’s rabid reaction throughout had made Blackmore a happy chappie, so he did return to encore, with Do You Close Your Eyes, torturing his Stratocaster to destruction and my teenage self to utter delirium. (Neil Jeffries)
The Replacements: London The Marquee, April 15, 1991
Alternative legends play like champions – and split three months later. The ultimate outsiders, reckless, drunken, shambolic, prone to almost comical self-sabotage, as far as legendary bands go The Replacements were always in a league of their own.
Having fallen apart following their disastrous stint supporting Tom Petty in the US in ‘89, the fact that Paul Westerberg and crew were back on stage in London for two nights was nothing short of miraculous. Right from opener I Will Dare, Westerberg was tuned in to the word-perfect audience’s positive vibes and the good-natured song shout-outs (“If Only You Were Lonely – please!”).
Material from their infamously smoothed-for-radio album Don’t Tell A Soul sounded far ballsier, and then there were the established classics: Valentine, Never Mind, Androgynous, Swingin’ Party. A ragged I’ll Be You had Westerberg cracking up, while Bastards Of Young, IOU and I Don’t Know trod the familiar Replacements thin line between thrilling and disaster. A bit of a genius at delivering melancholic contemplation, Westerberg didn’t disappoint with a superb cover of Deadwood, South Dakota, his voice cracking with emotion. Left Of The Dial, Alex Chilton and a typically messy Hootenanny brought things to a rapturous close.
The fact that it would be a staggering 24 years before they’d play the UK again makes the memory even sweeter. (Essi Berelian)
Radiohead: London Astoria, September 3, 1997
Talk about perfect timing. In 1997, with Radiohead on the crest of their two best albums – The Bends and OK Computer – I befriended a member of the band’s W.A.S.T.E fanclub, who plus-oned me into a secret gig identified only by the queue of miserabilists snaking down Charing Cross Road.
Radiohead killed it. I remember Airbag’s stop-start skitter, still not quite believing my luck. The tear-up at the end of My Iron Lung. The surge of bodies and baking air when those four brittle chords lit the fuse of Just. The release-valve outro of The Bends, Jonny Greenwood tearing at his Telecaster like a psychopath plucking a chicken.
They didn’t need Creep any more, instead throwing us cork-sniffers a couple of cult-hero b-sides, in Talk Show Host and Banana Co. Admittedly, I don’t remember them covering Carly Simon’s flouncy Bond theme Nobody Does It Better – twice – but the internet insists that it happened.
Almost nothing from that night exists now, with the Astoria having been torn down in 2009 to make way for a Crossrail stationery cupboard, and Radiohead heading left-field to make a series of bleep-bloop albums that left me increasingly cold. But on that night they were my own personal storm cloud. (Henry Yates)
Peter Gabriel: London Earls Court, June 28, 1987
If drug addicts spend their whole lives chasing that first high, then I was a theatrical rock junkie from day one. Well, gig two to be honest. But Peter Gabriel’s So tour set so high a bar and loaded me so full of big-gig expectation that it took several years for me to get over the fact that most bands had the gall to just come on stage, pick up guitars and play songs.
On this night, the actual stage came alive – lighting cranes resembling gigantic android angle-poise lamps probed and observed Gabriel from above as he marched through Games Without Frontiers and gibboned through Shock The Monkey. Eventually, as No Self Control reached its maniacal chorus, they attacked, beating him down until he lay cocooned in foetal position for Mercy Street, the lights studying him like alien scientists.
The rest was sheer set-piece spectacle: the airpunching righteousness of Biko; the Afrobeat danceoff with Youssou N’Dour on In Your Eyes; the point during the dark, tribal Lay Your Hands On Me when Gabriel, in crucifix pose, fell backwards into waiting arms and was carried across the audience. And a real moment of legend – as Don’t Give Up reached its tremulous chorus, the spotlight fell on Kate Bush, making one of her precious few live appearances of the 80s for that night only, her voice entirely drowned out by the screaming audience. An unrepeatable rush. (Mark Beaumont)
Peter Gabriel – No Self Control HD (Live in Athens 1987)_lyrics – YouTube
A momentous year, 1977 had over-delivered on its promise. Customarily fuelled on pure adrenaline, we prepared for its final act.
The Rainbow was heaving, the foyer’s fountain was dry but the gent’s toilets were flooded. We padded through piss to our cheap seats, sick with anticipation. A dazzling Rezillos rose to the occasion, before Generation X – too pop for the hard-core – posed hard to muted response.
Then, there they were. The ultimate exemplification of the D-U-M-B punk ideal. The leather-jacketed stormtroopers of the three-chord apocalypse. 1977 had been a year of rapid-fire six-string assaults. Blurred fists pummelling at over-cranked humbuckers. Automatic-weaponry tempos. Angst, amphetamines, fury. But nothing, not even their records, could prepare you for the original Ramones at their peak.
Drilled like a crack military unit, they dispatched 28 songs, including three encores, in 54 minutes. Sometimes there was space between songs for star-jumping Dee Dee to rattle of a “one-two-three-four”, before Johnny brutalised their next selection, sometimes not. Hunched Joey brayed odes to Blitzkreigs and Beaches as Tommy performed miracles behind his kit.
New Year came and went. We haunted the stage door, stayed out all night. Tomorrow? If not the world, at least The Roxy. What a time to be alive. (Ian Fortnam)
Iron Maiden: London Marquee, December 9, 1979
This gig changed everything. It was the night that NWOBHM came into its own, as Maiden’s performance proved they would be a major name as we headed towards the new decade.
The queue for entry snaked all the way up Wardour Street from the early afternoon; a few hundred didn’t get in. Those of us who were fortunate to make it into the packed club knew this was a special occasion.
The atmosphere was ecstatic even for impressive opening band Praying Mantis. But Maiden were on a different level. The walls were steaming as the band raged, roared. Much of the material came from what would be their self-titled debut album, released three months later. Singer Paul Di’Anno was possessed of a monumental devilish spirit. He was so exhausted by the end that he stumbled off the stage and out of the venue and collapsed on a parked car.
Songs like Sanctuary, Prowler and Phantom Of The Opera were tidal waves, and Iron Maiden itself had everyone screaming along while a mask – an early version of Eddie! – attached to the backdrop poured out red smoke.
I still get shivers of excitement when recalling this era-defining event. (Malcolm Dome)
Nirvana: New York Marquee Club, September 28, 1991
I was standing in the balcony at the Marquee, sated, jet-lagged and sweat-soaked. When I arrived in New York a few hours earlier I had no idea that Nirvana, whose Nevermind tour had begun a week earlier, were even on the East Coast.
The set? Don’t ask me to explain. Sweat and long hair and screaming and righteous guitar riffs, venom and anger… it disappeared into a mess of blurred emotion long ago. Doubtless they played Teen Spirit and Lithium. Doubtless I thrashed along with the most crazed of them, head inside bass bins.
The song Nirvana were playing during the encore… was it a song? It surfaced only twice in their live set, and as a demo in ’87… Vendettagainst. It sounded like there was an orchestra of guitars playing, despite the fact Kurt clearly wasn’t holding one as he crowd-surfed the rabid, raving audience. Sound desk trickery? Pre-recorded instruments? Bloody unlikely. Grohl and Novoselic kept up a thunderous beat behind the wail of noise, while Cobain scream/moaned his way across the heads of the audience. A Nirvana song without guitars? Photos exist. Recordings exist. I still can’t believe it happened. Terrifying. (Everett True)
The Jam: London Michael Sobell Sports Centre, December 12, 1981
It’s Christmas. Snow on the ground, Thatcher in power, and the Human League’s Don’t You Want Me at No.1. At an all-ages show, thousands of school-kid mods try to act cool while shivering in the cold. Or is it the prospect of facing the gangs of skinheads rumoured to be massing at Finsbury Park station to pick off stragglers afterwards?
None of it matters during an electrifying 21-song set in which Going Underground, Start! and David Watts are greeted with huge roars – all from a crowd fuelled by nothing stronger than fizzy drinks. The announcement of a new song, a month before its release, is greeted with total silence, but A Town Called Malice sounds incredible. “Bear this in mind!” Paul Weller says sagely before a final When You’re Young triggers one more euphoric teenage rampage.
On the way out, a trestle table full of CND paraphernalia and a huge Christmas tree in the foyer get trashed to mass chants of “We are the mods!” before it’s back to grim North London reality. Down in the Tube station at midnight, ecstasy morphs into terror. Whispers in the shadows. The distant echo of faraway voices boarding faraway trains.
It hits me: this isn’t just music to live your life by. This music is my life. Now that’s entertainment. (Paul Moody)
The Doors: London Roundhouse, September 6 & 7, 1968
(Image credit: Middle Earth Ltd)
There are two scenes from this show that I can still replay in my head any time I want. One: Unknown Soldier. Jim Morrison, in floppy white shirt and indecently low-cut leather trousers, ‘ties’ himself to the microphone stand as Robby Krieger takes aim with his guitar and fires – accompanied by a piercing rim shot from John Densmore. Morrison flies backwards, arms and legs flailing, and tumbles to the floor, invisible to all but the front row. The silence that follows is deafening. It is eventually broken by a high, quivering keyboard note and a low, indistinct mumble from the still invisible Morrison. As the song picks up, Morrison springs up to finish it.
Two: The End. “Turn the light off,” Morrison says as the opening guitar pattern settles in. The single spotlight shrinks until Morrison is visible just from the waist up. He remains motionless. “Turn the fucking light off”. The spotlight shrinks again until it is just framing his face. There’s a clunk as the microphone hits the floor, and Morrison is gone. The spotlight turns off. Morrison returns, and begins: ‘This is the end…’ At the first crescendo the spotlight returns. Morrison drops the microphone again and walks off. The spotlight turns off. The Oedipal saga is performed in darkness apart from a couple of glowing red amplifier lights and daylight peaking through the Roundhouse roof. (Hugh Fielder)
Rammstein: Download Festival, June 16, 2013
After decades spent witnessing hundreds of world-class rock shows, Rammstein’s headline set at Download 2013 should have been just another minor distraction to my jaded, over-saturated senses. But the Teutonic totalitarian porn-metal overlords delivered a fire-breathing, blood-splattered, spunk-spurting carnival of bondage and buggery that took stadium-punk spectacle to a whole new level.
Their stage set, a hellish pageant of flamethrowers, fireworks and erotic torture instruments, looked like Mad Max re-imagined by Hieronymus Bosch. Simultaneously mocking and celebrating centuries of lederhosen-clad German Romanticism, Rammstein left Download in no doubt that Wagner invented heavy metal. In fact he liked it so much he put a Ring on it.
The band’s brawny, Herman Munster-lookalike singer Till Lindemann certainly imbued gloomy power ballads like Sehnsucht and Ohne Dich with Wagnerian high seriousness. Even so, a deep seam of cheerfully grotesque ironic humour ran through this performance, especially the scenes of simulated sodomy between Lindemann and wimpy keyboard player Christian ‘Flake’ Lorenz.
As the show climaxed, Lindemann straddled a giant penis cannon that blasted a jizzard of white foam into the crowd. Subtlety is not Rammstein’s forte. But by gleefully highlighting heavy rock’s latent homofascistic sub-text, this jaw-dropping, eye-opening, arse-widening show was both audaciously bold and hugely enjoyable. After a vigorous BDSM ear-shafting from these burly Berliners, everything else feels disappointingly vanilla. (Stephen Dalton)
The Beatles: London Hammersmith Odeon, January 15, 1965
(Image credit: Bettmann)
The ticket was a present from Uncle Pete, received in astonishment on Boxing Day. Three weeks later I sat on the back of his Lambretta scooter and we whizzed down Chiswick High Road. The Odeon was swarming with fans leaving the early show. Inside, the noise was unlike anything I’d ever heard. Girls fainted into the arms of St John’s Ambulance men. Some group called The Yardbirds sauntered on. Pete pointed out Eric Clapton.
After a hiatus, they appeared on stage! We levitated. John, Paul, George and Ringo were dressed as Arctic explorers in search of the yeti, also and performed other variety-show sketches.
Intermission: snack ladies selling Kia-Ora’s and Wall’s ice creams.
Finally, at 9.45 the boys swept on stage and delivered the goods. The 11 songs began with Twist And Shout and ended with Long Tall Sally – battle of the larynxes for John and Paul. Four numbers from Beatles For Sale included a classic Baby’s In Black, the modern I’m A Loser, George’s Everybody’s Trying To Be My Baby (Ringo sang Honey Don’t) and Rock And Roll Music. But the singles! Can’t Buy Me Love and A Hard Day’s Night… they creamed that Odeon. It was the sound and smell of the future. So good to be alive in ’65. (Max Bell)
Elvis Costello: Belfast Ulster Hall, St Patrick’s Day 1978
Anticipation was fever pitch, so an off-school early cider (in the alley behind the venue) was called for. In spring ’78 Elvis’s mighty This Year’s Model album presented him newly boosted by the nerve-jangling brilliance of his very own peerless rock’n’roll trio. Live they went to a next level – fittingly, in a venue just across the road from the Europa, the hotel where, six months earlier, The Clash held court when their Ulster Hall Belfast debut was called off, by the man.
From the sheer local perfection of opener Waiting For The End Of The World to the scary intensity of Night Rallies, bug-eyed Elvis bathed in blue light on a stage that also platformed Ian Paisley’s demagoguery, this show felt like a crazy, impossible victory. What a mad, brilliant band they were too – cranky, militaristic beats, those dizzying unsettling Nieve organ lines. Costello’s Geek That Snarled persona owned the stage, and he had the material to match.
The combined effect of the perfectly targeted lyrical arrowheads, breakneck pace, unrelenting sonic Semtex, took much longer to wear off than the cider. Could Elvis ever be so great again? Could anyone? (Gavin Martin)
Europe: Bursa Kültürpark Open Air Theatre, Turkey, June 9, 2015
Europe take a bow at Bursa Kültürpark Open Air Theatre, Turkey (Image credit: Will Ireland)
When you hear ‘rock concert in Turkey’, chances are you think ‘Istanbul’. So it was with curiosity that I joined Europe on this leg of their 2015 tour, on the back of War Of Kings (part of their latterday, de-80sifiying rock renaissance). How much of an appetite would there be for them in this relatively orthodox pocket of northwest Turkey?
In a festival line-up composed of Turkish pop and classical acts, Europe were the sole rock band. The space was packed. The bar sold only popcorn, soft drinks and candyfloss. In the UK you’d expect the audience to consist largely of people who remember the band from the 80s. Here the dominant group was 20-somethings in War Of Kings, AC/DC and Slayer T-shirts, who enthused about Europe, Iron Maiden and Cinderella. For some it was their first gig.
Europe played superbly, but it was the crowd that made this feel special. From the beefy, ‘grown-up classic rock’ new material to classics like Carrie, the response was one of giddy delight – and all without a drop of alcohol in sight. From the side of the stage, as the opening synths of encore The Final Countdown sounded, I watched Joey Tempest ready himself to stride back out. He looked happier than almost any rock star I’ve ever seen. And as the cheers swelled and confetti cannons exploded, it seemed that happiness had spread to everyone. (Polly Glass)
David Bowie: Wembley Empire Pool, May 8, 1976
For us teenage space cadets it was exciting enough just visiting London for the first time, and weird sitting three rows from the front of what’s now Wembley Arena. And then a woman’s eyeball was cut open with a razor. Not really. This was Un Chien Andalou, the 1928 Bunuel-Dali surrealist film that served as Bowie’s ‘support act’.
The instant it finished, there Bowie was, just yards away in the something more artful than flesh. The Thin White Duke in black and white, spectral yet glowing against a stark, sparse backdrop that made you feel like you’d been dropped into a forest of shadows, punctuated by blinding light, the music bringing the heat.
The Isolar tour primarily promoted Station To Station, and the sheer drama of those train noises and the sinister opening notes as Bowie prowled, a wilfully bloodless enigma, was an out-of-body experience. The train got faster. From Suffragette City to Fame, from Stay to Rebel Rebel, guitarist Carlos Alomar and the Raw Moon band were chucking lightning at us. It would have been a buzz to see Bowie for the first time under any circumstances. To see him being not Ziggy but this chilly Weimar vampire was one magical moment. (Chris Roberts)
Johnny Thunders & The Heartbreakers: High Wycombe Nag’s Head, March 3, 1977
For many, The Heartbreakers was their first chance to see two living New York Dolls after Johnny Thunders and Jerry Nolan’s new band found themselves stranded in London after the ill-fated Anarchy tour. From those first Roxy club appearances causing “loony-bin scenes” (their description), Thunders, Nolan, singer-guitarist Walter Lure and bassist Billy Rath towered above the punk hopefuls, playing their self-described “combination of the fifties and eighties rock‘n’roll”, stamped with four disparate personalities that screamed: ‘classic line-up’.
After the recently formed Siouxsie And The Banshees, witnessing The Heartbreakers in a suburban pub loft was unbelievably exciting as they careered through songs slated for L.A.M.F., including Chinese Rocks, Born To Lose, Going Steady and Get Off The Phone, with jaundiced panache, New York street swagger and innate professionalism not yet dissipated by heroin. Thunders gyrating through The Contours’ Do You Love Me a few feet away, sans guitar, remains one of the great visions of rock‘n’roll’s purest essence it’s been my pleasure to witness. “I’ve never been so happy in my life,” he told me later.
On this magical night, Johnny was fronting the greatest rock‘n’roll band in the world. (Kris Needs)
The Cramps: London Hammersmith Palais, May 28, 1984
The departure from the band of guitarist Kid Congo Powers and the rescheduling of this tour from January to May didn’t so much create disappointment as generate heightened anticipation. And with the release of Smell Of FemaleThe Cramps were not only back on vinyl, but also countering the bootleggers who’d filled the void during their prolonged absence.
With Powers’s replacement Ike Knox bedded in, The Cramps turned up the heat on an already sweltering night. As six-string dominatrix Poison Ivy coaxed lysergic emanations from her instrument, singer Lux Interior soon went topless and feral, while the sold-out audience of punks, rockabillies, goths and in-betweeners responded with a unified frenzy of dancing atypical of a London crowd.
Covering Shorty Long’s Devil With A Blue Dress via Mitch Ryder and delivering a genuinely unhinged reading of the Count Five’s Psychotic Reaction, The Cramps were both history lesson and cathartic release. But it was with their own material that they defined their aesthetic of deviancy and delinquency, not least on the call-to-arms You Got Good Taste and Human Fly’s fuzzed-up schlock-horror.
Unrelentingly thrilling, this is the night The Cramps corrupted a whole new generation into the joys of neat, undiluted primal rock’n’roll. (Julian Marszalek)
Jimmy Page And Robert Plant: London Weekend Television Studios, August 25, 1994
The chain of events that conspired to put me in the audience for the this show were unlikely and serendipitous, but it all started when I wrote off my bicycle during a downpour on the Euston Road, and culminated at LWT studios on London’s South Bank, watching an MTV show that was anything but unplugged.
The performance that eventually became the Unledded album was bewildering in the best possible way. This wasn’t a meek, introverted take on a band’s catalogue. It was a dazzling reinvention of songs from it, throwing in at various points a hurdy gurdy, some banjo, former Cure guitarist Porl Thompson, Indian singer Najma Akhtar (on The Battle Of Evermore), Hossam Ramzy’s Egyptian Ensemble and the London Metropolitan Orchestra. It was vivid, and uproarious, and surprisingly loud.
Led Zeppelin were always Jimmy Page’s band, but for one glorious night they felt like Robert Plant’s; his backing band, his love of North African music embedded in the best moments. And Kashmir was the pinnacle; 12 minutes of mystery and menace, with dazed audience members looking at each other as if to confirm the actuality of their presence.
I didn’t get to Zeppelin’s London O2 show 13 years later, but it can’t have been this good. (Fraser Lewry)
The Police: Exeter Routes, December 18, 1978
Exeter was 11 miles away, and we had to wait until Graham Burch had passed his driving test to go there. And we were pretty excited, because not only were the headliners Alberto Y Los Trios Paranoias at their peak (charting with Heads Down No Nonsense Mindless Boogie, from their great Skite album) but also The Police were supporting. They weren’t punk, particularly, but their three great A&M singles had come out that year (the third, So Lonely, was still hanging around the back end of the charts), and radio and TV presenter Anne Nightingale was a big fan.
My memory of the Police’s set is a blur. They seemed insanely loud (they probably weren’t) and they were incredibly fierce, determined in the short term to win over the audience and in the long term to rule the world. I remember, for some reason, that they played their debut single Fall Out, perhaps because even then it seemed incongruous in a new wave/reggae set. They did all of their singles, and they were great. And after a great set from poet John Dowie and a fantastic headline one from the Albertos, everyone came on stage for the Albertos’ encore, Fuck You, during which Sting played a large placard.
It was my first gig, and remains one of the best I’ve ever seen. (David Quantick)
Peter Green’s Fleetwood Mac, Huddersfield Technical College, June 16, 1968
I don’t recall much in the way of proper details, but I really can still remember feeling the buzz of being just feet from the band. I mean, I wasn’t a virgin when it came to proper gigs, having seen The Nice at Leeds Poly and watched, open-mouthed, Keith Emerson rocking and sticking knives into the keys of his Hammond organ (bloody hell!), but there was something so effortlessly cool about Peter Green’s Fleetwood Mac (as they were billed then), and especially Peter Green.
Thinking about it now, I’m convinced that I must have felt dizzyingly elated when they played songs I had been playing over and over again for weeks previously – Shake Your Moneymaker, My Heart Beat Like A Hammer, The World Keep On Turning, Long Grey Mare – and others that were thrillingly new to me. And Peter Green was easily the second-best guitarist I’d ever heard. One thing I do remember quite clearly is wondering why the other guitarist, Jeremy Spencer, started at least three numbers with the same slide lick, and those songs were pretty much the same tune but with different lyrics.
I was learning to play bass, and loved watching John McVie, partly because he was playing stuff that I could play just as well as him (I thought), which wasn’t the case with my other infatuation at the time, Jack Bruce, with Cream, and partly because this guy was on John Mayall’s Beano album!
While memories of that gig are vague, there’s enough to remind me that for me it really was a pivotal experience. (Paul Henderson)
Queensrÿche: London Town & Country Club, November 9, 1988
1988 was a watershed year for progressively tooled heavy metal concept records. Iron Maiden released Seventh Son For A Seventh Son, and at the third attempt, Queensrÿche broke through with their storytelling masterpiece, Operation: Mindcrime.
The Seattle band bowled up at the T&C (now The Forum) and played a set full of power, authority and intent. Many years afterwards, in the pages of Classic Rock, Queensrÿche singer Geoff Tate said this show was a “legendary” moment in the band’s fortunes.
They played six songs including Queen Of The Reich and Walk In The Shadows, before riotous scenes greeted I Remember Now, the intro to Operation: Mindcrime. They played a large chunk of that red-hot new album, beginning with Anarchy X and Revolution Calling and heading into the home straight with Breaking The Silence, I Don’t Believe In Love and Eyes Of A Stranger, then an encore of The Lady Wore Black and Take Hold Of The Flame.
Historically speaking, this was the right band, with the right album at exactly the right time, playing to an audience who knew they were witnessing a precious moment in hard rock history. (Dave Ling)
These reports originally appeared in issues 276, 277 and 278 of Classic Rock (June, July and August 2020)
Classic Rock is the online home of the world’s best rock’n’roll magazine. We bring you breaking news, exclusive interviews and behind-the-scenes features, as well as unrivalled access to the biggest names in rock music; from Led Zeppelin to Deep Purple, Guns N’ Roses to the Rolling Stones, AC/DC to the Sex Pistols, and everything in between. Our expert writers bring you the very best on established and emerging bands plus everything you need to know about the mightiest new music releases.
If progressive rock bands are supposed to be boring, nobody told Marillion. The making of their classic album Misplaced Childhood – in early 1985, at Berlin’s Hansa Studios – was effectively one almighty bender. Singer Fish led the debauchery, blowing his wages on hookers, sampling heroin for the first (and last) time, stripping naked in a bar to win a bet, crashing a car in a race round the city, and throwing bricks over the Berlin Wall in an attempt to set off landmines.
Marillion might have been inspired by the music of Genesis and Yes, but they could party like Guns N’ Roses. Formed in Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire in 1979, the band were originally named Silmarillion after a posthumously published work by JRR Tolkein.
The name was shortened in 1981, the same year that charismatic Scotsman Fish (born Derek William Dick) joined the group. After signing to EMI the following year Marillion released four studio albums – all of them UK Top 10 hits – before Fish left for a solo career in 1988. His replacement Steve Hogarth, formerly of The Europeans, has now been Marillion’s frontman for over three decades.
Yet Hogarth will always be considered ‘the new guy’, such was the impact of the music that Marillion made with Fish, especially Misplaced Childhood and its hit single Kayleigh, a song which had the singer credited for inventing an original name. As he recently commented: “I’ve got used to signing autographs for 13-year-old Kayleighs.”
In the Fish era, Marillion were standard bearers for progressive rock, but with Hogarth the band have been progressive in the broadest sense. Their music has evolved far beyond those primary influences, and after being dropped by EMI in 1996 Marillion created a new, internet-based business model that has seen them thrive as an independent cottage industry. Eight years before Radiohead sold In Rainbows exclusively online, Marillion financed their album marillion.com by inviting 30,000 fans on their database to pre-purchase the album before it was even recorded.
It’s ironic that a band once derided for sounding like the dinosaurs of 70s rock should prove to be pioneers of the internet age. But this forward thinking has secured Marillion’s future: 2016’s Fuck Everyone and Run (F E A R) was a new creative peak – and a Top 5 album in the UK –and the following year the band sold out London’s iconic Royal Albert Hall in minutes. An Hour Before It’s Dark, released in 2022, saw the band maintaining the momentum.
…and one to avoid
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Freelance writer for Classic Rock since 2005, Paul Elliott has worked for leading music titles since 1985, including Sounds, Kerrang!, MOJO and Q. He is the author of several books including the first biography of Guns N’ Roses and the autobiography of bodyguard-to-the-stars Danny Francis. He has written liner notes for classic album reissues by artists such as Def Leppard, Thin Lizzy and Kiss, and currently works as content editor for Total Guitar. He lives in Bath – of which David Coverdale recently said: “How very Roman of you!”
“I listened a lot of prog when I was growing up in the early 70s, because my older sister was into it. She took me to see Camel play at the Free Trade Hall in Manchester when I was about 10 – and it was pretty life changing.
They played some of Mirage and some of The Snow Goose, and they had this huge screen behind them with the camel and the pyramid projected on it, and then The Snow Goose cover as well. I don’t even think I’d been to a gig before that, apart from maybe Supertramp a little while before.
I’d never even seen a screen that big. I remember something in me changing when the lights went down, and thinking, ‘I don’t know what this is – I want to be part of this world because it’s absolutely amazing!’
The Revealing Science of God (Dance of the Dawn) – YouTube
Yes’ Tales From Topographic Oceans was another big one for me. I’d loved the Roundabout single; it’s one of my all-time favourites, especially the bass playing on it. But Tales was something completely different.
It was like some sonic adventure where anything goes. If they wanted to do 32 bars of weird intricate acoustic guitars while everyone else waits to just slam into it, they’d do it.
I’ve got distinct memories of listening to it in someone’s bedroom. I can’t remember exactly whose bedroom it was, but I remember thinking, ‘What is this? What’s going on? Where are we?’
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Rick Wakeman – Catherine Aragon (2009) from “The Six Wives Of Henry VIII” – YouTube
When he announced he was doing Henry VIII at Hampton Court Palace [in 2009], I went online and brought 12 tickets. It was me, my wife, my sister and her husband… pretty much everybody. I watched the whole thing and I thought it was just brilliant. But I could see my wife thinking, ‘What the fuck is this?’”
In 2005, as Alice Cooper prepared to tour the UK in support of that year’s Dirty Diamonds album, he told Classic Rock about what he’d learned in four decades of music. “I’m financially at a point where I don’t have to do this,” he told us. “Ozzy, Aerosmith, McCartney – they don’t need the money. Why are they all touring? That’s what we were born to do.”
It’s not yet 10am and Alice Cooper has been up for ages. He already has one interview under his belt by the time ClassicRock is invited into his plush hotel suite in London’s Victoria. Alice – born Vincent Furnier – is in splendidly fine fettle.
Suntanned and relaxed on the sofa in an open-necked shirt and jeans, Cooper looks quite a bit younger than his almost pensionable years – something that he acknowledges matter-of-factly: “The whole rock’n’roll thing is all about attitude and being in shape.”
Certainly, he appears fitter, healthier and extremely level. After all this time in the business, he’s learned everything he needs to know: what’s right, what’s wrong and what keeps him on top of his game.
Alice Cooper and Vincent Furnier – they never meet I get up in the morning and play 18 holes of golf, and then I go to the mall with my daughter or my wife, and then I have lunch and I do interviews or take a nap, go to the show – and then for about an hour before the show I turn into Alice.
For two hours I’m Alice and it’s fun and really intense I do put myself totally in this character. As soon as the curtains close, Alice is gone. He won’t be there until the next night. I put him to bed and I go and play poker with the boys.
The one thing that Alice has in common with Hannibal Lecter is that heconsiders swearing vulgar He’s a gentleman. Alice is an aristocratic, arrogant villain.
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If a girl pops her shirt open to show her breast, Alice goes (sigh), “Howvulgar” He might say, “I’m going to slit your throat in a second,” but he’d be very gentlemanly about it.
(Image credit: Michael Putland/Getty Images)
I like a song that’s well written Cook all the juice into it, don’t cook the juice out. You can have a bad song and you can polish it up to look shiny and new, and the third time you hear it you say, “There’s really nothing there.”
This article originally appeared in Classic Rock 83 (Summer 2005)(Image credit: Future)
You can noodle around with a song But it’s cos you’re trying to shove a square peg in a round hole.
I honestly don’t think it’s possible to shock people any more If anybody should know, it’s me. I don’t think you can shock an audience short of killing yourself or somebody else, or chopping an arm off.
Bands have been having sex on stage for a long time People shake their heads – “Seen it.”
It was easy to shock in the 70s Parents didn’t want their kids going to see that [Alice Cooper]. Now you turn on CNN and there’s a hostage standing there and they chop his head off in front of you on television. Well, how does my show compare with that?
Rock’n’roll right now needs a really good shot of garage rock I’m glad that there are bands like Jet and The White Stripes, groups that are just good little snotty rock’n’roll bands.
Alice Cooper and his band onstage at the Budweiser Stage, Toronto in September 2017 (Image credit: Igor Vidyashev/ZUMA Wire/Alamy Live News)
There were times in the past when I carried a gun around with me Two times – right after the Charles Manson thing, cos I lived maybe two miles from there, then after the John Lennon thing. I don’t carry a gun any more. Ted Nugent is probably the only one armed. He goes to Iraq, totally trained.
I’m in better shape at 57 then I was when I was 37 I never smoked. I haven’t had a drink in 23 years. I’m happily married. I’ve never cheated on my wife in 29 years. I don’t have a lot of stress in my life. If you’re leading a stressful life, it’s going to show.
I was always financially in good condition I always had a manager who made sure of that. There was never a time when I was sitting there going, “Oh man, I’m so worried about this, I’m so worried about that.” To me, it was always, “Go on stage and do the work, get in the studio and do the work.” To me, that was the whole deal, being the consummate professional.
The most important thing I tell bands is you have to write great songs andyou have to be professional You really must do the work. This isn’t an overnight success thing. You’re never going to be so big that you can be late for an interview, that you’re allowed to show up late for a TV show and not know your lines. If you do that, you’re not belonging in the business. How dare you think that your time is more important than the interviewer’s? I’m here 40 years later because of that.
Shep Gordon [manager] and I have been together for 37, 38 yearsand we still don’t have a contract I always said, “You do the money and I’ll do the performing and the artistry.” I don’t think there was ever one time where I said, “How much are we getting?”
I know how much I’m worth I get a statement.
Alice Cooper – Under My Wheels (The Old Grey Whistle Test, Nov 9, 1971) – YouTube
Nobody wants to be an alcoholic Nobody starts out saying, “I want the mansions and the pretty girls and the great cars and… let me see… I want to be an alcoholic; I want to be a nervous wreck.” It just hits you and you don’t know where it came from.
I went to a hospital for three weeks when I wasthrowing up blood I couldn’t walk from here to that door without a drink, and it was time to stop. This was in ’82, ’83. You come out of the hospital and people say, “Oh, you’re cured.” I said, “No, I was healed.”
Aerosmith are at AA meetings every day Everybody I know that’s a cured alcoholic is in AA or is having therapy or is having bouts with temptation. I’m the most compulsive person you’ve ever met – I have no willpower at all – but I can look at a drink, an ice-cold Budweiser, and I would as soon drink that as put a gun to my head. I’ve never once had a craving for a drink since the hospital. So, in all reality, I walked out totally healed of it.
I think it’s spiritual healing It was like I had cancer one day and not the next day. I’ve had doctors. I’ve told them the whole story. They’ve said, “I agree with you. Very rarely does anybody as addicted as you not ever have a fallback. You’re healed.”
The last year of my alcoholism was hell The rest of it, believe me, I had a great time drinking. I’m not going to sit here and tell you I didn’t.
Alice Cooper’s point of view is always a little more satirical than otherpeople’s And his delivery is always a little more venomous.
Alice has certain victims on stage, the characters in the show that are hisadversaries The audience are safe… just as long as you don’t get on the stage. If you do that, then you’re at Alice’s mercy. The first 20 rows are my gasoline.
Only Women Bleed – Alice Cooper | The Midnight Special – YouTube
If you’re going there thinking that I’m going to change your life, you’rewrong I’m going there to take you away from your life for two hours and return you back safely.
John Lennon was a big influence There are songs of mine that people said sounded like him. Almost every ballad I’ve done has that kind of feel to it. I don’t think of John Lennon when I’m writing them, though.
I don’t particularly like the message in Imagine “It’s just us and we’re in control.” I’m a Christian. I would hope that there’s a higher power that’s in control of all of us. Imagine is an escapist song. It’s universalism. It’s saying that all roads lead to heaven, which isn’t something I believe.
If we were all alike, how awful would that be? That’s pretty much what John’s saying in there. It would be nice if nobody fought, if nobody was richer or wiser or funnier than the other, if this and that and this. And it would be really boring. The dynamics of our lives are all different. It’s a great musical song, but it’s absolutely opposed to what I believe.
I learnt how to write lyrics from Chuck Berry and Ray Davies When I was younger, I tried to write a three-minute story, tell you about the characters and have a little twist at the end.
The general consensus when we started out was that we were one of FrankZappa’s little freak bands That was the furthest thing from our mind.
We have different snakes on stage There are times when we’ll go three or four shows without using the snake, and then we’ll think, “Bring the snake back.”
The only reason Alice is here is not the snake, it’s not the guillotine, it’s notthe straitjacket. It’s the 14 or 15 Top 20 songs That’s the reason I’m still here. If we spent 10 hours rehearsing, nine hours was on the music, one hour was theatrics. We realised that without the music, our show was a puppet show. I say to bands, “Guys, if you don’t have the cake, I hope you don’t try to put the icing on. You’d better have that music as the guts of everything.”
The Muppet Show – 307: Alice Cooper – Backstage #1 (1978) – YouTube
I’m a firm believer that Satan isn’t a person sitting around with horns and atail, some fictitious character I say to people, “This is someone that wants to destroy your life. Why would you ever invite him in?”
My lyrics are very positive, very anti-Satanic They make fun of our society, but they always kind of point to a higher force.
I’m a practising Christian I do Bible study on Wednesday mornings and I go to church on Sunday. I grew up in a Christian home. About 14 years ago, it was time for me to make a commitment, to change my life. I became baptised.
I play rock’n’roll but I don’t buy into that lifestyle I don’t go into the strip clubs, I don’t get drunk, and everybody knows that. The way people know I’m Christian is in how I talk and how I act.
I don’t confine myself to my room I go to the movies, sign all the autographs, take pictures with everybody. I live a full life.
Dead Babies was never, “Let’s kill babies” It was about child abuse. It was about how parents don’t take care of their children – ‘Deadbabies can’t take care of themselves’. Nobody ever bothered listening to that lyric. It was supposed to make you go, “What?”
The shock value is in the title |It’s like Only Women Bleed – “Let them digest the song.” It’s saying that men will bleed physically, but women… It’s a very feminist statement. It’s been recorded by 13 different women.
Alice Cooper – Love It To Death Tour (French TV Report, 1971) – YouTube
Always leave the audience on a party The encore is party time. We’ve made it through the show, now it’s time to celebrate – balloons, confetti, School’s Out! Everything’s okay.
In all these years, I’ve never had an audience that wasn’t standing and cheeringfor me I always said that if I get on stage and there’s nobody there, or if the audience doesn’t react or if at the end of that show I cannot get them standing and cheering and screaming for me, it’s over. I’ll say, “Guys, it was a great run and now I’m going to do something else.”
There might be a time when I just don’t feel like doing it any more I want to travel the world with my wife and I want to watch my youngest daughter grow up. She’s 12 right now.
I’m sure there’s a point in everybody’s career – “I’m ready to write mynovel/my play/my movie” or “I’m ready to direct rather than act” There’ll come that point, but oh no, not yet – at all.
This interview originally appeared in Classic Rock 83 (Summer 2005)
“The quality is unreal. How is this even possible to have?” Record shop owner finds 1962 Beatles’ audition tape that a British label famously decided wasn’t good enough to earn Lennon and McCartney’s band a record deal
(Image credit: Hulton Archive/Getty Images | Rob Frith Instagram)
A Canadian record shop owner has found an audition tape that The Beatles recorded in 1962 for Decca Records, which the record label famously decided didn’t show enough promise for them to sign the band.
Rob Frith, the owner of Neptoon Records in Vancouver, discovered the reel-to-reel tape labelled ‘Beatles 60s Demos’ last week, but originally believed that the recording was merely a bootleg. He subsequently learned, however, that he had in his possession a rare, direct copy of an audition tape The Beatles recorded for Decca on January 1, 1962, eight months before Ringo Starr joined the band, replacing original drummer Pete Best.
Posting on his Instagram account, Frith wrote: “I picked up this tape years ago that said Beatles Demos on it. I just figured it was a tape off a bootleg record. After hearing it last night for the first time, it sounds like a master tape. The quality is unreal. How is this even possible to have, what sounds like a Beatles 15 song Decca tapes master?”
Frith was subsequently put in touch with Jack Herschorn, the former owner of Vancouver’s Mushroom Records, who originally brought the priceless recording to Canada.
Herschorn revealed that he had been given the tape by a producer friend while visiting London in the 1970s, and it had been suggested to him that he could sell copies of the recording across North America.
“I took it back and I thought about it quite a bit,” the former record label executive admits to CBC. “I didn’t want to put it out because I felt… I didn’t think it was a totally moral thing to do. These guys, they’re famous and they deserve to have the right royalties on it… it deserves to come out properly.”
Speaking about the quality of the tape, Rob Frith said, “It seemed like the Beatles were in the room”, and as proof, he’s posted a snippet of the recording, featuring Paul McCartney, John Lennon, George Harrison and Pete Best playing Money.
Understandably, Frith isn’t looking to sell this priceless artefact, but he has said Frith that he is willing to give Decca a copy if they wish to correct their historical faux pas and release it. Alternatively, he says that if Paul McCartney visits his record shop, he will hand over the recording to him in person.
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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.
Ed Sheeran tried and failed to turn a Toys R Us into a live music venue in Ipswich, according to Cradle Of Filth singer Dani Filth.
The frontman makes the claim during a new interview with Kerrang!, saying that the pop singer/songwriter’s hopes of converting a disused toy superstore into a new club were shot down by Ipswich City Council. Filth and Sheeran are both natives of the city and have collaborated on a yet-to-be-released song together.
“I don’t understand Ipswich Borough Council at all, because my acquaintance / friend, Edward Sheeran, he told me he wanted to buy this Toys R Us,” Filth says (via NME).
“It’s been vacant for years and years and years, and he put in an offer for it – he wanted to turn it into a music venue. Ideal. Massive car park, like, perfect. Couldn’t be more perfect. On the biggest roundabout in Suffolk, right? The noisiest. It’s as you come into Ipswich, which is just perfect.”
However, the council said the proposed venue would result in too much noise, a ruling that confuses and irritates Filth.
“And I mean, Ed Sheeran to Ipswich Borough Council is like chalk to cheese, you know?” he continues. “They have such a relationship. You know, he’s on murals all around the town. He sponsors Ipswich Town’s football kit and stuff. And yet they still didn’t even give him a break on this. And he was buying the place! ‘I know we’re going to redevelop this place. It’s going to bring so many more people to the town.’ But no.”
Sheeran is a longtime Cradle Of Filth fan and the two artists recorded a collaborative track together in 2022. Despite the band recently announcing their new album The Screaming Of The Valkyries for release this Friday (March 28), the long-anticipated team-up remains on the shelf.
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Filth explained the delay in getting the track out during an interview with Metal Hammer in January. “We don’t want it to overshadow the record,” he said. “But we are going to bring it out. Originally, everybody wanted us to bring it out to glorious fanfare but Ed’s management weren’t keen on that.
“We’re not absolutely sure how it will emerge, but it’s been done, mixed and it’s sitting on the shelf somewhere… you know, virtually. And it’s fucking fantastic. But only a handful of people have actually heard it. My mum hasn’t even heard it.”
When asked what the song sounds like, Filth answered, “Like a cross between Ed Sheeran and Cradle Of Filth! You hear it and go, ‘Oh, my God, fuck me, acoustic guitar, that’s Ed Sheeran.’ Then at the same time, you can flip the coin and go, ‘Fuck me, this is a Cradle Of Filth song: blastbeat, Dani screaming.’”
Cradle Of Filth tour North America in April and May and will play across Europe in June and July. see details and get tickets via the band’s website.
The story picks up with Templeman, who had already produced Van Halen’s first two albums, catching up with the band at the end of their tour in support of Van Halen II, and witnessing the inspiration for what would become one of the most important songs on their next album, 1980’s Women and Children First:
At the end of their 1979 tour, I saw their show in Phoenix. I’d catch them live whenever I could because I found that I’d pick up little ideas that could be used on their upcoming album. That night, I stood at the side of the stage and watched. In between songs, Dave launched into this rap about all the hot girls in the audience. He said something like, “You Arizona guys out there are some lucky fuckers! But hey, I get it! Everybody wants some, and I want some too! How about all of you?”
The crowd went crazy.
After the show I went backstage. I grabbed Dave and said, “Write that down in your notebook. That’s a great idea for a song.” That was the beginning of “Everybody Wants Some!!”
The development of that song is a good example of our working relationship. At the time, Ed had put together a little melodic chorded intro before the main riff of the song kicked into gear. I thought it was a good idea when we worked on it in the basement, but when we got into Sunset Sound in December 1979, I thought it was kind of lame.
But it was all we had, so we went with it when we initially tracked it. I don’t remember what Dave’s original ideas were for the song, but he and I didn’t like them all that much. So when Dave asked, “Hey, Ted, got anything?” I reminded him of what I’d heard him say in Phoenix. His eyes lit up. He said, “Oh yeah!”
He flopped into a chair and started writing on a notepad. In less than ten minutes, while Donn was polishing the sound of Alex’s tom-toms, he came up with a lyric pretty close to what ended up on the album. Now I wasn’t surprised, because he has an uncanny ability to come up with words on the spot. He’d done nearly the same thing with “Jamie’s Cryin’” back in 1977.
His last-second writing bursts produced quality too, because what he came up with was both clever and unique. To top it all off, when he sang the words to me, he had the melody as well. When Dave was locked in like that, you couldn’t ask for more as a producer.
The song had a steamy breakdown propelled by Alex’s jungle drums, an atmosphere that Dave contributed to with his vocalizations. Hearing that gave me an idea that took me back to my childhood when I’d hang out at my grandfather’s music store. I suggested we cop the drum intro of the Cadets’ “Stranded in the Jungle.” They were a fifties R&B group, and “Stranded” had been one of my favorite records when I was a kid.
Hear the Cadets Perform ‘Stranded in the Jungle’
Alex’s drumbeat worked wonderfully as an opening for the song, and so we scrapped Ed’s chorded intro. Even though Dave’s first passes at his vocals were usually pretty rough, I always wanted Dave in the vocal booth when the other three guys were laying down tracks together; I firmly believed that Dave needed to sing with each and every take. He’d settle in after a while, and Donn and I would get some good performances from him on tape.
At the end of the recording process, we’d comp his vocals from his multiple takes as needed or, if necessary, bring Dave back in the studio to repair any bum notes on his live takes. This approach of having the vocalist always sing along while the instrumentalists recorded their basic tracks is not something that I always had my other acts do, but Ed, Al, and Mike really played off Roth as he did his thing.
I’d watch him in the booth, listening to those guys as they recorded. It was like having the Big Bad Wolf cartoon character in full view of, and in the headphones of, the other three guys, and that was especially true for “Everybody Wants Some!!” It made the vibe great.
What we got on tape from Dave was always memorable. His ad-libs were hilarious. He interjected all of these X-rated asides during the song’s breakdown. Donn and I sat in the control room and cracked up, listening to all of these lines that Dave put on tape. The three other guys were out in the studio having a blast too, while Dave’s spouting all of this stuff. Dave’s tongue-in-cheek approach to recording that song kept us all loose. Of course we had to edit out almost all of his lines, but you can still get a taste of them on the record. He was just a genius when it came to all of this stuff.
From Ted Templeman: A Platinum Producer’s Life in Music. Used with permission by ECW Press.
