Tag: Guns n’ Roses

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Old against the soul

 

 

One week before November 22nd, the evening I went to see Welsh rock band the Manic Street Preachers perform at Singapore’s Star Theatre, I read John Niven’s satirical 2018 novel Kill ‘Em All.

 

Kill ‘Em All is a sequel to Niven’s Kill Your Friends, written a decade earlier.  It continues the adventures of Steven Stelfox, a record-company A&R agent so devoid of things like conscience, empathy or decency, and so determined to climb the corporate ladder and make pots of money, that he’ll countenance doing anything, murder included.  In Kill ‘Em All, Stelfox has become a millionaire through helming a hit reality TV show called American Pop Star – I wonder if Niven had a real person in mind when he constructed that scenario? – and the immoral, money-grasping monster has taken to the late 2010s, the era of President Donald Trump, like the proverbial pig to shit.  He’s particularly enamoured with the phenomena of fake news, online conspiracy theories, social-media rabbit-holes, and bot-farm-generated misinformation and propaganda, which the Trump presidency elevated to a new level.  At one point, referencing the title of the Manic Street Preachers’ 1998 album, he sneers: “This Is My Truth Tell Me Yours, those Welsh socialist miner f**ks sang, way back in the day, before all of this happened.  Nowadays?  This Is My Lie Prove Me Wrong.”

 

That wasn’t the only coincidence I experienced with the November 22nd show.  I’ll explain the other coincidence later.

 

Anyway, the backdrop for the Manic Street Preachers’ gig in the plush, sweeping amphitheatre of the Star Theatre seemed in defiance of Stellfox and the rapacious, corporate world he represents.  It was a reproduction of the cover for their 2011 compilation album National Treasures – the Complete Singles, depicting a girl clutching a French horn, clad in a brass-band uniform (presumably a colliery band) and standing in front of a pithead (presumably a Welsh one).  Reassuringly, this suggested the Manics – who in 2000 released a single called The Masses against the Classes (2000), which begins with a quote by Noam Chomsky and has the Cuban flag on its sleeve – remained proud ‘Welsh socialist miner f**ks’.

 

© Columbia

 

Nonetheless, I felt apprehensive about what lay ahead of me.  I’d only seen the band once before, in 1993, when they were promoting their album Gold Against the Soul.  They turned up in the Japanese city of Sapporo, where I’d recently started a job, and delivered one of the most memorable live-music shows I’d ever attended.  It was also rather odd.  In Britain they might have had a reputation for being radical, shit-stirring retro-punks, but in Japan they were seen as a sort of Guns n’ Roses-lite, possibly thanks to their predilection for wearing eye-liner and slightly glam clothes.  Accordingly, their gig at Sapporo’s Penny Lane attracted a squad of young Japanese ladies dressed in floppy hats and silk scarves who spent their time squealing ‘Rich-ee!’ at the band’s iconic but troubled guitarist, Richey Edwards.  Tragically, Edwards was to disappear, and never be seen again, two years later.

 

That 1993 gig was emblematic for me.  The young Manic Street Preachers had throbbed onstage with a brash, youthful energy that mirrored how I felt too at the time – I was young, full of beans, ready to take on the world.  And later, looking back, the memory of it made me feel a little melancholic in a wistful, where-did-my-youth-go? sort of way.  This was emphasised by something that happened a decade afterwards.  I listened to my copy of Gold Against the Soul, which I’d bought in Japan, for the first time in ages.  It was only then that I discovered the bulky CD case contained a second tray I hadn’t noticed before.  This tray held a second, bonus CD – a live one of them performing during their 1993 Japan tour.  I played it and immediately felt a nostalgic sadness, for in the crowd I could hear those ladies shouting “Rich-ee!” again at the Manics’ now-vanished guitarist.  It wasn’t so much a CD as a time capsule.

 

So, how would the band strike me in 2023, now that they and I were well into our middle-age?  And in the Star Theatre, a venue that seemed the antithesis of the small, intimate and cheerfully dingy place that Penny Lane had been?  (One major point of difference between them was the purchasing of alcohol.  In Penny Lane you got tins of Sapporo beer out of a cheapish vending machine at the back of the little auditorium.  At the Star, where your bags were painstakingly checked before you entered the premises to ensure you weren’t bringing in any food or drink – not even water – you joined a long queue for the privilege of buying a pint of beer for 24 Singaporean dollars, which is about 14 British pounds.  Phew.  Steven Stelfox could have been running the catering.)

 

But enough of the brooding introspection.  The Manics came onstage just after half-past-seven and launched into Motorcycle Emptiness, from their first album, Generation Terrorists (1992).  And undeniably, they sounded good.  They didn’t show the raw, sometimes-nervous, sometimes-ragged energy that they’d shown in 1993, but played with the confidence and professionalism you’d expect from an outfit who’ve been together for more than three decades.

 

 

Yet it wasn’t the slick, on-autopilot, by-the-numbers performance of a jaded old rock band.  The Manics retained their pleasing idiosyncrasies of old.  Sporting a white dress-jacket and (for a bloke his age) an astonishingly skinny pair of jeans, tall, gangling bassist Nicky Wire still looked like he’d been assembled out of pipe cleaners – and still ambled about like a man with a new pair of legs who was testing out what they could do.  Meanwhile, vocalist / guitarist James Dean Bradfield, during those moments when he let himself go, behaved like a dad secretly dancing to his favourite music in his bedroom, twirling around, pogoing on one leg, attempting a Chuck-Berry-style duck-walk.

 

When the Manics had played Penny Lane in 1993, their set had consisted entirely of numbers from Generation Terrorists and Gold Against the Soul, the only albums they’d released by then, so tonight I was treated to much broader palette of music.  There were five songs from Generation Terrorists: Little Baby Nothing, Slash ‘n’ Burn, Stay Beautiful and You Love Us, as well as Motorcycle Emptiness.  Wire dedicated Stay Beautiful to the memory of Richey Edwards.  From Gold Against the Soul – an album that, despite me really liking it, has never been highly regarded in the Manics’ oeuvre – only From Despair to Where got an airing.  From the late 1990s, when the band were perhaps at their commercial and critical peak, they played A Design for Life, Everything Must Go, Australia (all 1996), If You Tolerate This Your Children Will Be Next and You Stole the Sun from My Heart (both 1998), while the band’s 21st-century career was represented by a smattering of singles like Your Love Alone is Not Enough (2007), Walk Me to the Bridge (2014) and International Blue (2018).

 

Thus, it was almost a greatest-hit package, which went down well with the audience.  Many of them seemed to be long-term fans.  Despite the constraints of the Star Theatre, with its wall-to-wall seating, a lot of folk were soon on their feet, jumping about as if they were in an open venue.  Two big, macho-looking guys a few rows in front of me, obviously well refreshed, got extremely emotional – arms wrapped around each other, bodies swaying precipitously from side to side.  If the gig had lasted another half-hour, they’d probably have shagged each other in public.  I even thought I heard a distant, communal chant of “Wales! Wales! Wales!’ at one moment.  (In addition to the backdrop’s picture of a Welsh colliery, a Welsh flag was draped over one of the units behind the band, and Bradfield and Wire mentioned their home country several times during their between-songs banter.)

 

 

Most bands who are still recording would pepper their set-list with ‘new songs’ off the ‘new album’.  But the Manics trotted out only one number from their most recent offering, 2021’s The Ultra Vivid Lament, an album I’d never heard and knew nothing about.  I was really surprised, then, when the song they played from it turned out to be called Still Snowing in Sapporo.  Later, when I researched the song, I discovered that it’d been inspired by the concert they’d done in Sapporo 30 years ago – the one I’d attended.  According to songfacts.com: “When the Manic Street Preachers toured Japan in 1993 they played a gig there.  The song is a reverie of a magic moment, when they felt they could pretty much do anything.”  Wow!  That was how I’d felt about myself, that I could do anything, when I saw them.  And how weird to hear them perform a song inspired by a long-ago gig and realise I was (probably) the only person in the audience who’d been at that long-ago gig.

 

So, now, I feel more psychically attuned to the band than ever…  Strictly speaking, though, the Manics’ Sapporo concert was on October 22nd, 1993, which makes the song-title Snow Falling on Sapporo redundant.  Snow wouldn’t have started falling on the city yet.  But I’ll allow them poetic licence.

 

When the band finally trooped off the stage, they left behind an extremely satisfied crowd.  A man beside me remarked, “Suede will have to be bloody good to top that.”

 

Oh.  Did I say Suede were playing on the bill too?  Well, they were.  But that’ll be the subject of another blog-post.

 

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Live bands behaving badly

 

© Warner Bros.

 

I see the rock band Royal Blood have landed themselves in hot water.  They took to the stage at Radio 1’s Big Weekend event in Dundee on May 28th and reacted to what they felt was the crowd’s lack of energy and enthusiasm by impersonating Victor Meldrew in the TV sitcom One Foot in the Grave (1990-2000).  They behaved like curmudgeonly old farts.  Vocalist and bassist Mike Kerr berated the audience, who mainly consisted of folk come to see the also-on-the-bill popstars Niall Horan and Lewis Capaldi, with such cantankerous remarks as: “Well, I guess I should introduce ourselves seeing as no one actually knows who we are.  We’re called Royal Blood and this is rock music.  Who likes rock music?  Nine people, brilliant…”  And: “We’re having to clap ourselves because that was so pathetic…”  Plus, he flipped the crowd off while leaving the stage.

 

Small wonder that the band has been roasted on social media since then.  Particularly brutal was a Twitter posting likening them to the long-running British TV glove puppets Sooty and Sweep.

 

Now I quite like Royal Blood’s music and I have a copy of their eponymous 2014 debut album somewhere in my record collection.  Also, not being a pop fan, I would probably find a concert featuring Niall Horan (who was once in One Direction) and Lewis Capaldi (who I admit does have an awesome second cousin once removed) about as pleasurable as poking a sharp stick into my ear and twisting it.  But if you’re in a rock band and find yourself lined up to play at an event that’s obviously going to be thronged with pop fans, you should know what to expect, leave your prejudices offstage, get on with the show and make the best of it…  Or just cancel your appearance.

 

Come to think of it, I did once attend Radio 1’s One Big Sunday event in Ipswich in the summer of 2002, while I was working in the area.  That was because I wanted to see two bands on the bill, Edinburgh rockers Idlewild and Bristol electronica outfit Kosheen.  I didn’t let the fact that the bill also contained Liberty X, Ms Dynamite and Natalie Imbruglia, whom I had zero interest in, interfere with my enjoyment.  As I said, at an eclectic do like this, you make the best of things.

 

Anyway, the recent stushie involving Royal Blood has made me look back over my gig-going career and wonder…  What instances of bad behaviour by live bands have I witnessed in my time?

 

The most memorable onstage meltdowns came while I was living in the city of Sapporo, in Hokkaido, northern Japan, during the 1990s.  Visiting Western performers frequently got annoyed at what they saw as the passivity of Japanese audiences, forgetting that there were obvious cultural reasons why a Japanese crowd might seem less extrovert and exuberant than a Western one.

 

From wikipedia.org / © Mari

 

The number-one musical misery-guts during my Japanese years was Ian Brown, frontman of the Stone Roses, who performed at the Sapporo Factory venue in 1995 to promote their recently-released album Second Coming.  Brown soon got riled by what he perceived as the audience’s inactivity.  “Sapporo,” he snarled, “wake up!”  At this point, some New Zealand guys whom I knew yelled from the back of the hall, “Oh, you’ve remembered which city you’re in!  Well done!”  Brown then commented sourly about “those people at the back with faces like well-skelped arses.”  I was standing a few yards from the front of the stage and couldn’t help shouting back at him, “That’s rich coming from you!”  My comeback seemed to rattle Brown and I saw him both gesturing towards the side of the stage and pointing furiously down at me.  “Oh shit,” I thought, “he’s trying to get the venue’s security staff onto me!”  I decided I should make myself less conspicuous.  This was difficult because I was rather taller than the average Japanese person and my head and shoulders stuck up prominently above the crowd.  I spent the rest of the gig with legs awkwardly bent at the knees, trying to reduce my height, so that Brown and his security goons wouldn’t notice me.

 

To be fair, Brown had recently been beaten up in a club in Tokyo, supposedly by a trio of Australian bodybuilders, which’d no doubt left him in a foul mood for the rest of his band’s Japanese tour.  Still, he behaved like a dickwad that evening and put me off the Stone Roses for a long while afterwards.

 

Also losing it with their northern Japanese audience were the punk band Fluffy, who in 1996 supported the Sex Pistols (in the middle of their Filthy Lucre reunion tour) at the Hokkaido Koseinenkin Hall.  Singer Amanda Rootes sneered at the end, “Thank you, Sapporo, for your boring hospitality!”  But it was hardly the crowd’s fault.  The Hall seemed designed to strangle any atmosphere at birth – as far as I remember, it was an all-seater venue, which limited one’s ability to get up and bop and jump around to the music, and it was brightly lit.  Also, the tickets had said nothing about a support band and people were still filing in to take their seats while Fluffy performed onstage.  The band continued to fume about the experience later.  A mate of mine who worked in a pub in Susukino, Sapporo’s nightlife district, reported that the band came into his establishment for a drink after the gig and had a moan about how horrible the city was.

 

On the other hand, I’ve seen a Japanese audience – well, a Japanese audience sprinkled with a number of foreigners – have a go at a band for not being lively themselves.  In the mid-1990s the American outfit Sugar played at Penny Lane, Sapporo’s best small venue.  Their singer, guitarist and leader Bob Mould was so intense, wrapped-up-in-himself and non-communicative between songs that, eventually, someone with a North American accent roared at him, “Why don’t you speak to us!”  I should say that years later I saw Mould again, performing solo at the Oran Mor arts / entertainment centre in Glasgow, and he seemed way more chilled and looked like he was enjoying himself much more.

 

From wikipedia.org / © Masao Nakagami

 

Penny Lane was also where I witnessed a meltdown by Richey Edwards, the iconic but doomed guitarist – two years later, he’d disappear, never to be seen again – with the Welsh rock band the Manic Street Preachers.  This was in 1993 and the Manics were promoting their new album Gold Against the Soul.  The gig was excellent, but Edwards was clearly on edge.  At one point he raged against an illuminated fire-exit sign at the auditorium’s far end that he claimed was distracting him.  In a typical face-saving Japanese compromise, the venue manager didn’t turn the sign off.  He just tied a big strip of cardboard over it so that nobody, including Richey, could see it, but it stayed switched on in accordance with fire regulations.

 

Away from Japan, I’ve observed some unprofessional behaviour onstage that was the result of physical or emotional dysfunction within the band.  In 1995, in New York, I went to a gig by Shane MacGowan and the Popes.  The famously raddled MacGowan – who’d already parted company with his earlier and more famous band the Pogues because of his ongoing state of dissolution – lasted all of two songs before sinking onto his haunches, clutching his head between his hands, and then slinking offstage.  The rest of the band, the Popes, gamely played a few instrumental tunes for another 25 or 30 minutes.  Then they buggered off too.  And then there was a riot.  Happily, when I saw MacGowan on two later occasions – with the Popes at the 1998 Fleadh Festival in London’s Finsbury Park and together again with the Pogues in Newcastle-upon-Tyne in 2004 – he was in better physical shape.  Well, a bit better.

 

Meanwhile, by the time I saw the Jesus and Mary Chain in Edinburgh in 1998, the relationship between the band’s founding members, brothers Jim and William Reid, had become toxic.  It showed onstage.  (Jim Reid once said of the Jesus-and-Mary-Chain experience: “It’s like being locked in a cupboard with somebody for 15 years.  If it wasn’t your brother, you could kick him out.”)  At one point, in front of the audience, Jim roared, “William, just shut up!” when his sibling started singing a song intro off-key.  It was no surprise when, the following year, the news came through that the band had split up.

 

© Creation / Astralwerks

 

I’ve also seen folk, full of boisterous, joking bonhomie, fail to read the room and say something they regretted.  Most notably, I remember Primal Scream playing on the bill at a one-day event on Glasgow Green in 2000.  While they were limbering up to play the song Sick City from their new album XTRMNTR, bass-player Gary ‘Mani’ Mountfield cheerfully barked into the microphone, “This is dedicated to Glasgow because it really is… a sick city!”  That went down like a cup of – appropriately enough – cold sick among the multitude of Glaswegians assembled before them.   So pissed off were they that, later, Mani felt obliged to announce that he was only jesting and, really, “Glasgow isn’t a sick city at all!”  Incidentally, this was in the days before ‘sick’ acquired its modern, slang meaning of ‘amazingly good or impressive’.  (I should add that I think Mani, most famous for playing in the Stone Roses alongside Ian Brown, is a decent bloke.  His surname even inspired the pseudonym Jim Mountfield, which I use when I write horror stories.  That day, he just let his mouth run a little bit ahead of his brain.)

 

Elsewhere, I recall seeing the Subways in Norwich in 2008.  Singer Billy Lunn didn’t endear himself to me or the rest of the audience when, sporting a cheesy grin, he raised a hand and exclaimed at us, “Aha!” in the manner of Alan Partridge – Steve Coogan’s gormless, idiotic TV-presenter character who, of course, is supposed to hail from Norwich.  “What a knobhead,” I thought.

 

Finally, I can think of a few examples of the opposite happening – when the audience behaved badly and the people onstage managed the situation with admirable skill.  Back in 1984, I saw the late, legendary Mark E. Smith’s band the Fall at Aberdeen Ritzy, with support provided by abrasive post-punk / noise-rock band the Membranes.  The audience was populated with serious Fall fans desperate for the support act  to exit the stage as quickly as possible so that their hero Smith could come on.  Accordingly, they kept yelling “F*ck off!” at the Membranes between songs.  Bassist / vocalist John Robb took it in his stride and started doing funny impersonations of the abusers.  “F*****ck off!” he drooled into his microphone.

 

From wikipedia.org / © Frank Schwichtenberg

 

And in 1997 in Melbourne, I was at a gig by the Henry Rollins Band when a woman at the edge of the stage got a little too vociferous in telling the band which songs she wanted them to perform.  The fearsomely muscled Rollins declared, loudly, patiently, contemptuously: “Lady, we decide what songs we play, when we play them, how we play them.  Sometimes you get what you want in life.  Sometimes you don’t.”

 

It’s been a long time since I saw a live band behaving badly.  This is probably because I spent most of the 2010s living in Sri Lanka, where the only option for seeing live rock music (away from the country’s holiday resorts, where hotel bands played cover versions of the Eagles and Bryan Adams to audiences of sweaty middle-aged Western tourists and local would-be hipsters) was to indulge in the thriving Sri Lankan heavy metal scene.  And many of those heavy metal bands had an amusing habit of showing boundless Sri Lankan politeness and gratitude to the audience for turning up to see them.  In between songs, they kept saying, “Thank you, thank you very much, thank you for coming, thank you so very much…”  Then, a half-minute later, they were emitting blood-curdling, throaty black / death metal gurgles and screaming “F*CK!  F*CK!  F*CK!”

 

The pandemic obviously ended my gig-going for a few years.  Now that I’ve relocated to Singapore, I’ve been able to see a couple of Western bands again and they’ve been impeccably well-behaved.  Even Guns N’ Roses, who had a reputation for being dicks and subjecting audiences to some notoriously poor concerts over the years, were perfect gentlemen when I saw them at Singapore’s National Stadium last year.  They even treated the crowd to a three-hour set.  Maybe they were simply happy, post-Covid-19, to be on the road again.  Actually, considering how expensive concert-tickets are here, the last thing I’d want would be to find myself in a pricy gig with the performers being arseholes onstage.

 

Mind you, if one of those Korean pop bands like BTS or Blackpink, massively popular in Singapore and elsewhere in East Asia, were to play here and sign up Royal Blood as the support act…  I might pay money to see that.

 

From twitter.com / © Cadell’s Ltd / Entertainment Ltd 2003

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Jack the lad

 

© jackwhiteiii.com / David James Swanson

 

After I’d been deprived of live music for nearly two years, courtesy of Covid-19, my luck certainly enjoyed an upswing this mid-November.  On November 12th, I got the chance to see Guns N’ Roses at Singapore’s National Stadium.  Two days later, Jack White rolled into town on his Supply Chain Issues Tour, which kicked off in White’s home city of Detroit on April 8th and concluded three days ago in Christchurch, New Zealand, with five continents visited along the way.

 

The Singaporean leg of the gig was held in the Capitol Theatre in the Capitol Building, the picturesque 1929 neoclassical building on Stamford Road, whose refurbished interior also contains an atrium of ‘modern and classical dining establishments’, a retail mall and the luxury Kempinski Hotel.  My partner and I had tickets for the upper circle, getting to which was a little weird.  The theatre’s entrance is in the middle of the atrium, among the eateries.  For the circle seats, we were directed through a door out of the foyer and into the atrium again, up a couple of modern escalators that climbed the atrium’s side, and through another door that brought us back inside the theatre.

 

 

The theatre – whose auditorium retains its 1929-vintage appearance – quickly filled up.  It would have been nice to report that the crowd was immensely varied and contained everyone, to quote White’s most famous song, “from the Queen of England to the hounds of hell”, but it largely consisted of Western expats.  These included both suited, sombre ones who’d just arrived from work and casually dressed, hanging-out, shooting-the-breeze ‘dude bro’ ones.  Unfortunately, the yaketty guys sitting directly in front of us belonged to the second faction.  There were a few Singaporean-looking folk in attendance, though, such as a guy admirably clad in a death-metal T-shirt and ragged denim shorts, with long hair and an impressive amount of tattoos; or a bloke in a white T-shirt I could see below in the stalls, pressed against the front of stage, who reacted to the music with such berserk jigging and gyrating that several times I thought he was going to start a fight with people he crashed into on either side of him.  He must have been Jack White’s biggest fan in Singapore.

 

White and his three band-members – bassist Dominic John Davis, keyboardist Quincy McCrary and drummer Daru Jones – came on stage to the strains of the MC5s’ Kick Out the Jams (1969), a famously hectic song whose hecticness, it’s fair to say, they matched during their two-hour, 23-song set. They delivered a gloriously intense and relentless barrage of rock ‘n’ roll noise.  Commendably, they also achieved a balance between performing with utter musical virtuosity and, from the look of things, having an extremely good time.  McCrary’s keyboards were agreeably high in the mix, giving the band’s sound, to my ears at least, a faintly Doors-ian or Stranglers-esque tinge.  Meanwhile, kudos to the instrument tech team, who had their work cut out scurrying constantly about the stage and making sure all the instruments and equipment, including White’s fleet of guitars, were functioning correctly and bearing up to the strain.

 

Dressed in a dark suit, white boots and a patterned, chest-revealing shirt and sporting a slicked-back shock of hair whose colour can only be described as ‘metallic blue’, White resembled a character Nicolas Cage might have played in a sweaty, disreputable thriller directed in the early 1990s by Brian De Palma.  Some of his more histrionic stage-moves evoked the mighty Nicolas Cage too, come to think of it.

 

The set gave a neat overview of White’s musical career.  The songs played ranged from Cannon, off the White Stripes’ eponymous debut album in 1999, to two items from White’s last solo album, Entering Heaven Alive, released in July this year.  In fact, about half the songs came from White’s solo work, Blunderbuss (2012), Lazaretto (2014), Boarding House Reach (2018), Fear of the Dawn (April 2022) and the afore-mentioned Entering Heaven Alive.  Of these I’m familiar only with Blunderbuss.  That’s not because I stopped liking or lost interest in White after 2012.  It’s just that during the last decade I’ve lived in places where it’s been difficult to keep up with contemporary Western music.  However, the solo stuff fitted in seamlessly alongside the older stuff performed, which mostly came from his celebrated noughties band the White Stripes.

 

The bulk of that White Stripes material was found on their third and fourth albums, 2001’s White Blood Cells (Dirty Leaves and Dirty Ground, Fell in Love with a Girl and We’re Going to be Friends) and 2003’s Elephant (Ball and Biscuit, The Hardest Button to Button and the inevitable Seven Nation Army).  Nothing appeared from their last two albums, Get Behind Me Satan (2005) and Icky Thump (2007), which at least meant we were spared their rather fearful version of Corky Robbins’ Conquest (1952), the one with the bullfighting-themed video, which I’ve always thought was a rare White Stripes misfire.  Bravely, Seven Nation Army was played not as a crowd-pleasing finale but as the opening number.  It did resurface late on, though, after the band had ended their main set and left the stage and before they returned for their encore – because the crowd started chanting its memorable riff: “DAAAH-DAH-DAH-DAH-DAAAH-DAAAH!”  At this point, I tried to get a chorus of “Oh, Jeremy Corbyn!” going, but nobody played ball.

 

Also aired were songs by the bands White played in during the noughties that weren’t the White Stripes – the Raconteurs’ jaunty Steady as She Goes (2006), and the Dead Weather’s ominously organ-heavy I Cut Like a Buffalo (2009).  The one song of the evening not to belong in any way to the Jack White canon was a cover of 1992’s 7 by Prince and the New Power Generation.  It didn’t surprise me that he included something by the diminutive Minneapolitan musician-singer-songwriter.  Prince, with his tireless prolificity and penchant for new projects, self-invention and basically never standing still, strikes me as an obvious role-model for White.

 

© Third Man / J / XL

 

Neither did it surprise me that Another Way to Die, the song he did with Alicia Keys as the theme for the unloved Bond movie Quantum of Solace (2008), was left off the setlist tonight.  While it’s better than the anodyne, play-it-safe themes the Bond producers have used on the most recent films, Another Way isn’t great.  But it would have been fun for me to hear a second Bond theme played live in 48 hours, after Guns N’ Roses performed Live and Let Die (1974) on November 12th.

 

Talking of which, the audience was told in plain terms before the gig not to use phones to film or take pictures.  This meant, mercifully, we were spared the experiences of the Guns N’ Roses concert, where often it seemed I was peering at the stage through a galaxy of phone-lights – or indeed, through a galaxy of Samsung Galaxy phone-lights.  Audience members were encouraged instead to obtain official photos from White’s website, which is what I’ve done for the pictures at the top and bottom of this entry.

 

Actually, looking through the site’s gallery of photos from the Singapore gig, I see that the tour photographer, David James Swanson, managed to snap one of the guy in the white T-shirt who was moshing crazily in the stalls.  I bet he’s happy about that.

 

© jackwhiteiii.com / David James Swanson

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Only a few Duff moments

 

 

I’ve had a hellishly busy week.  That’s why this report on Singapore’s big musical event of the month is reaching you nine days late…

 

It was with misgivings that I bought a ticket for the concert by the legendary – not always legendary for the right reasons – hard rock / heavy metal band Guns N’ Roses at Singapore’s National Stadium on November 12th.

 

Like many things in Singapore, the ticket was not cheap and, given Guns N’ Roses’ reputation for pissing off gig-goers, I wondered if I would get anything near my money’s worth.  I knew about, for example, their notorious 1992 appearance in Montreal when, thanks to both coming onstage late and leaving it early, they triggered a riot.  (“Come Monday morning, the mayor was looking for apologies and fans were looking for refunds.”)  Or their performance at the O2 in Dublin in 2010 when, after another late arrival onstage had angered the crowd, they played for 20 minutes, then walked off, and only returned an hour later after being strong-armed by the event organisers, by which time many fans had given up and gone home.

 

This year, the band was still being associated with crappy concerts.  Two July spots at the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium in London suffered from “appalling sound, everything was muffled, couldn’t hear Axl’s voice, the support act was cancelled, GNR came on real late, kept fans later, no apologies, fans walking out.”  Their next scheduled gig, in Glasgow, was then cancelled ‘due to illness and medical advice’.

 

Meanwhile, I’m not a fan of stadium rock shows, where the venue’s scale and the distance between most punters and the stage kill any sense of intimacy.  And I was not enthused about seeing a band at Singapore’s National Stadium because I’d read some complaints about it on Trip Advisor.  The main gripe was that the place doesn’t let people bring food or drink onto the premises, obliging them, inside, to spend ages waiting in queues at the stadium’s vendors, where refreshments are sold at predictably high prices.

 

I had to work on November 12th until six o’clock.  As Guns N’ Roses were officially due onstage at seven – “Huh,” jeered a colleague, “do you really expect Axl Rose to come onstage at seven?” – I hopped on a taxi and went straight to the stadium lugging a knapsack full of important work material.  This meant I had to spend a couple of minutes at a security desk outside one of the stadium’s entrances while a lady went through every nook and cranny of the knapsack, rummaging among papers, books, stationery, my (empty) lunchbox, etc., with airport-style thoroughness.  But that security lady was undeniably chatty and pleasant.

 

Having made it inside, at about 6.50, I joined a queue to get some beer – also airport style, with lines of people threading through twisting passages formed by retractable-belt stanchions – and spent the next 20 minutes glancing nervously down into the arena and at the distant, empty stage, hoping that Axl Rose and co. would come on a little late.  I also feared that the beer would have run out by the time I reached the counter, although I was reassured when a guy propelled a trolley past me, laden with crates of Tiger beer, in the direction of the vendor.  Presumably much needed.

 

 

Each customer, incidentally, was allowed to buy a maximum of four alcoholic beverages at a time. If you purchased four Tiger beers – as I did, not wanting to experience that queue a second time – these came in four plastic glasses planted in an eggbox-like tray.  Transporting them without spilling anything, down to my seat near the bottom of one of the terraces, required mind-reader levels of concentration.  Furthermore, I had to decide where to stash those drinks when I reached the seat. The only space for them was on the floor between my feet, which meant I spent the gig reminding myself, “Keep your legs apart!  Keep your legs apart!”

 

Most of the stadium is roofed over.  Only one section of it, directly opposite the stage, is exposed to the elements.  The cheapest concert-tickets were for seats in that open area but, this being the wettest month in the Singaporean calendar, I’d decided not to risk it. There’d been a downpour earlier that day and, sitting there, it was possible that whilst listening to Guns N’ Roses performing their famous ballad November Rain, you’d be subjected to November rain for real.  Thankfully, the bad weather held off that evening.  The show’s most expensive tickets, meanwhile, were for the pitch, which was beyond the barrier a few rows below where I was sitting.  Spectators there could snuggle against the front of the stage.  Also, they were enviably unconstrained by having rows of seats all around them and could dance and jump and jig around as much as they liked.  Although the folk passing on the other side of the barrier, heading towards the stage, seemed to be mainly moneyed, middle-aged expats and I doubted if Axl and the gang would be looking down on much mosh-pit action tonight.

 

 

So, there I was, weary from a long day at work, jaded after waiting in a lengthy refreshments queue, worried that an accidental twitch of my foot might knock over my hard-won quartet of beers, and wondering if the evening ahead would prove to be a giant waste of money.  Then, at 7.30, the lights dimmed and…  The general stadium-crowd roared with excitement.  The well-heeled crowd pressing against the stage-front suddenly became densely spangled with light as hundreds of smartphone-cameras sprang into action.  From the speakers rushed the blood-stirring chords of It’s So Easy, a song on the first and best Guns N’ Roses album Appetite for Destruction.  And on the towering screens that flanked the stage, there appeared…  Axl Rose!  Duff McKagan!  Slash!  Or as someone sitting near to me exclaimed, “Sla-a-a-a-ash!”

 

 

I’d seen footage of Axl performing a few years ago, as temporary vocalist for AC/DC, and he’d looked worryingly porky.  But he’s slimmed down since then and is in decent shape again.  McKagan looked admirably lean and mean.  As for Slash…  Well, he’s evidently been putting too much middle-age spread on his sandwiches lately, not that the excess pounds affected his guitar-playing.  He and Jacob Rees-Mogg remain the only two men on the planet in 2022 who aren’t embarrassed to wear top hats in public.

 

While Axl, Duff and Slash loomed large on the screens, I wondered why Dizzy Reed didn’t appear on them too.  Keyboardist Reed, after all, has been in Guns N’ Roses since 1990.  He remained in the band after Slash, Duff, guitarist Gilby Clarke and drummer Matt Sorum quit in the 1990s, and he even stuck with Guns N’ Roses throughout the seemingly never-ending recording of the Chinese Democracy album, finally released in 2008.  This was when Axl operated a ‘revolving door’ policy regarding Guns N’ Roses membership – though guitarist Richard Fortus and drummer Frank Ferrer, recruited during this period, remain in the present line-up – and, apart from Reed, the band sometimes seemed to consist of Axl ‘and your granny on bongos’.  So where was Dizzy?  Did he have a hump on his back or a wart on his nose that made his bandmates too ashamed to show him off?  It wasn’t until halfway through proceedings that Axl announced ‘Mr Dizzy Reed on keyboards’, and the screens finally gave us a glimpse of this elusive but long-time and loyal bandmember.  I snatched a picture of the moment.  Here’s Dizzy!

 

 

This evening, Guns N’ Roses played 27 songs over three hours, a very pleasant surprise.  Considering some of those notorious past performances, I feared I might get three songs in 27 minutes before they called it a night.  The lengthy setlist did have a few drawbacks, though.  It meant we were treated to the whole musical smorgasbord that is the Guns N’ Roses experience, which in my opinion contains a few lows as well as numerous highs.  There were a few too many wibbly, wanky guitar solos designed to remind us that Slash hasn’t lost his musical prowess, as if anyone needed reminding.  That said, it was fun when he did an instrumental workout of Albert King’s Born Under a Bad Sign.

 

Also, though the setlist was weighted towards their late 1980s / early 1990s stuff, with a half-dozen songs coming from the mighty Appetite for Destruction, it was inevitable that something would slip in from the long-awaited, then much-derided Chinese Democracy.  I actually like the title track, which they bravely served up immediately after It’s So Easy at the start.  But the same album’s Better, which came a few songs later, just sounded a mess.

 

And then there were the ballads.  I realise that every heavy metal band in the world feels obliged to record a ballad now and again – well, every mainstream heavy metal band, as I don’t recall Cannibal Corpse ever recording something slow and smoochy to keep the ‘lay-deez’ sweet – but there is something about your average Guns N’ Roses ballad that sets my teeth on edge.  Probably it’s Axl’s voice, a melodramatic beast at the best of times.  When it’s emoting through the likes of Don’t Cry from the 1991 album Use Your Illusion I, for which tonight Axl donned a show-bizzy silver-lame jacket, I find it hard going indeed.

 

 

But my least favourite Guns N’ Roses ballad is the afore-mentioned November Rain, also from Use Your Illusion I, which seems to drone on forever.  Two hours into the set, the song hadn’t been played, and I began to entertain hopes that I’d get through the evening without hearing it.  Maybe the band would forget to play it?  But no.  Axl sat down at a piano and began tinkling its ivories and the bloody thing started.  At this point, a large percentage of the crowd, who thought November Rain was the best thing ever, sprang to their feet and started waving their lighters, or phone-lights, en masse in the air above their heads.  This made me feel like I’d suddenly been teleported into a Bryan Adams concert just as Bryan was starting to sing Everything I Do, I Do It for You (1991).  At least, for this rendition of November Rain, Slash didn’t attempt to play his guitar on top of Axl’s piano, as he’d done in the song’s video.

 

 

But enough of the negatives.  What of the positives?  Well, there were plenty.  Lots of spiffing tunes off Appetite for Destruction for a start: Welcome to the Jungle, Nightrain, Rocket Queen, etc.  Though for some reason not Mr Brownstone, which, the show’s official statistics tell me, makes this the band’s first gig since 1993 that they haven’t played the song.

 

I was also pleased that they treated the crowd to their bombastic cover versions of Wings’ James Bond theme Live and Let Die (1974) and Bob Dylan’s Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door (1973).  Yes, they throw all subtlety and nuance out of the window and, basically, murder both songs – but they murder them gloriously.  For Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door, Axl put on a cowboy hat, which made me wonder if he was acknowledging the fact that Dylan originally wrote the song for the soundtrack of Sam Peckinpah’s masterly western Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (1973).

 

Splendid too were their covers of the Who’s The Seeker (1970) and the Stooges’ I Wanna Be Your Dog (1969).  The latter was sung by Duff McKagan with the instrumentation stripped back and it made for an impressively intense couple of minutes.  Commendably, McKagan wore a Motörhead T-shirt for part of the show.  Also, by coincidence, I’d just finished reading Sing Backwards and Weep (2020), the autobiography of the late, great grunge singer Mark Lanegan, in which Lanegan credits McKagan with helping to rescue him from homelessness and drug addiction in the late 1990s.  An all-round top bloke, then.

 

 

And I was very happy that, for the third song of their set, they performed Slither (2004) by the underrated Velvet Revolver, the group Slash, McKagan and Matt Sorum formed with Scott Weiland of the Stone Temple Pilots during their estrangement from Guns N’ Roses.

 

Even with 27 songs played, it was inevitable that they missed out a few things I’d have loved to hear.  They performed nothing off their album of punk and hard-rock covers, The Spaghetti Incident? (1993), which nobody in the world seemed to like apart from myself.  Their boisterous version of the UK Subs’ Down on the Farm (1982), which Axl sings in a hilarious ‘Mockney’ accent, would have slotted in nicely tonight.

 

And I’d have welcomed a rendition of the sweary, vitriolic and exhilarating Get in the Ring, off their other 1991 album, the imaginatively titled Use Your Illusion II.  Get in the Ring is basically a rock ‘n’ roll update of the Scottish poetic tradition of flyting.  It contains such lyrics as “I got a thought that would be nice / I’d like to crush your head tight in my vice,” and takes aim at all the “punks in the press” who “want to start shit by printing lies instead of the things we said…  Andy Secher at Hit Parader, Circus Magazine, Mick Wall at Kerrang!, Bob Guccione Jr at Spin…”  If they updated that shit-list for 2022, which modern-day journalists would be on it, I wonder?

 

Oh well.  You can’t have everything, I suppose.

 

As the band took the stage at 7.30 that evening, and as everyone around me went wild, it occurred to me that this was the first time in almost two years I’d been at a concert.  After all the restrictions imposed by that cursed bloody virus, it felt marvellous to experience live music again.  Yes, I had a massive, uplifting sense of joy and relief…  Just because I was seeing Axl Rose and the crew amble into view on two giant stadium screens.  Not something I ever expected to happen, but it did.  Thanks, guys!

 

Posted on

My life as a tape-head

 

From unsplash.com / © Tobias Tullius

 

I was surprised to hear the news last month that the inventor of the audio cassette, Lou Ottens, had passed away at the age of 94.  Surprised because the audio cassette seemed such an elderly piece of technology to me that I’d assumed its inventor had been dead for many years, indeed, many decades already.

 

I used to love cassettes.  They were small, light and portable whilst at the same time durable and not vulnerable to the scratches and occasional breakages that bedevilled my vinyl records.  Though of course when their tape got caught in the tape-heads of a cassette player, having to free and unravel the ensuing tangle was a pain in the neck.  Much of my music collection consists of cassettes and I suspect I must have something in the region of a thousand albums in that format.  But, like most of my worldly possessions, they’ve spent the 21st century occupying boxes in my Dad’s attic in Scotland.

 

Cassettes seemed old-fashioned even in the days before the appearance of the compact disc, a type of technology that itself must seem prehistoric to modern youngsters brought up in a world of Internet streaming.  I remember in 2019 entering a second-hand record shop in Edinburgh and being amazed, and delighted, to find that it still had several shelf-loads of cassettes on sale.  (The shop was the Record Shak on Clerk Street and sadly, due to its owner’s death, it’s closed down since then.  But at least the Record Shak managed to outlive most of the other record shops that once populated south-central Edinburgh, like Avalanche, Coda Music, Ripping Records and Hog’s Head Music, so in its humble, durable way it was like the retailing equivalent of a cassette.)

 

I was such a tape-head that even during the 1990s, when the CD was supposed to have achieved market dominance, I still indulged in that most cassette-ish of pastimes – creating cassette compilations of my favourite music of the moment, which I’d then inflict on my friends.

 

I also made party cassettes.  For much of that decade I lived in the northern Japanese city of Sapporo, was something of a party animal and would hold regular shindigs in my apartment.  My home was a typically modest, urban-Japanese one, consisting of two normal-sized rooms plus a little bathroom and toilet, but that didn’t prevent me from piling in the guests.  During one do, I did a count and discovered I’d squeezed 48 people into the place.  I even managed somehow to set aside one room as the ‘dance floor’.  And before each party, for the dance-floor room, I’d compile a few cassettes of songs that I judged likely to get the guests shaking a leg.  How could anyone not shake a leg when, in quick succession, they were subjected to the boisterous likes of the Cramps singing Bend Over I’ll Drive, the Jesus and Mary Chain doing their cover of Guitar Man, Motorhead with Killed by Death, the Reverend Horton Heat with Wiggle Stick, AC/DC with Touch Too Much and the Ramones with I Wanna be Sedated?

 

At the party’s end, if somebody complimented me on the quality of the music, I’d simply give them the party cassettes and tell them to keep them as souvenirs.  By the time of my next hooley, I’d have discovered a new set of tunes and slapped them onto some new cassettes.  Who knows?  Maybe those 1990s party cassettes are still being played at gatherings in Sapporo, where the partygoers are no longer young and wild, but grey and arthritic instead.  Surely they’d be considered priceless antiques today – the cassettes, not the partygoers.

 

Anyway, feeling nostalgic, I thought I would list here the most memorable cassette compilations that other people have given to me over the years.

 

© Factory

 

Untitled compilation – Gareth Smith, 1991

I never imagined that in 2021 I’d still be humming tunes performed by the now-forgotten New Jersey alternative rock band the Smithereens or the equally forgotten 1980s Bath / London combo Eat.  The fact that I am is due to a splendid compilation cassette that my brother put together and sent to me while I was working in Japan. Actually, the reason why I’m humming those tunes today is probably because they weren’t actually written by the Smithereens or Eat.  The Smithereens’ track was a cover of the Who’s song The Seeker, while the Eat one was another cover, of The Lovin’ Spoonful’s Summer in the City.

 

As well as featuring those, the cassette contained the epic six-minute club mix of Hallelujah by the Happy Mondays.  No, this wasn’t a cover version of the Leonard Cohen song, but the Mondays’ impeccably shambling dance track that begins with a falsetto voice exclaiming, “Hallelujah!  Hallelujah!” and then proceeds with Shaun Ryder intoning such lyrical gems as, “Hallelujah, hallelujah, we’re here to pull ya!”

 

On the other hand, the cassette contained the hit single Right Here, Right Now by Jesus Jones, which I thought was quite good and which induced me to buy their new album when I saw it on sale soon afterwards in my local Japanese record shop.  Big mistake.

 

Songs from Brad’s Land – Brad Ambury, 1991

Around the same time, I received a compilation cassette from a Canadian guy called Brad Ambury, who worked on the same programme that I was working on but in a different part of northern Japan.  I think Brad saw it as his mission to convince me that there was more to Canadian music than the then-popular output of Bryan Adams.  He must have despaired when several years later Celine Dion popped up and usurped Bryan as Canada’s number-one international musical superstar.

 

Anyway, he made this cassette a smorgasbord of Canadian indie and alternative-rock bands with quirky names: Jr. Gone Wild, Blue Rodeo, the Northern Pikes, SNFU, Spirit of the West, the Doughboys and so on.  During the rest of the 1990s, whenever I was introduced to Canadian people, I’d waste no time in impressing them with my encyclopaedic knowledge – well, my shameless name-dropping – of their country’s indie / alt-rock musical scene.  All thanks to that one cassette.

 

Actually, stirred by curiosity 30 years on, I’ve tried Googling Brad and discovered he has a twitter feed that’s headed by the logo for the Edmonton ‘punk-country’ band Jr. Gone Wild.  So it’s good to know he hasn’t succumbed to senile old age and started listening to The Best of Bryan Adams just yet.

 

© Jr. Gone Wild

 

A Kick up the Eighties – Keith Sanderson, 1993

I must have received dozens of cassette compilations from my music-loving Scottish friend Keith Sanderson and this one was my favourite.  It even looked distinctive because, for a sleeve, he packaged it in a piece of flocked, crimson wallpaper.  As its title indicates, A Kick up the Eighties was a nostalgic collection of tunes from the then recently departed 1980s. These included pop hits, new wave and indie classics, Goth anthems and lesser-known tunes that were both ruminative and raucous: the Associates’ Party Fears Two, Blancmange’s Living on the Ceiling, Ian Dury and the Blockheads’ Hit Me with Your Rhythm Stick, Elvis Costello’s Watching the Detectives, Bauhaus’s Bela Lugosi’s Dead, Killing Joke’s Love Like Blood, Aztec Camera’s Down the Dip and Girlschool’s Emergency.  The collection was disparate yet weirdly balanced, and even songs I hadn’t particularly liked before, such as Rush’s Spirit of Radio and UFO’s Only You Can Rock Me, seemed good due to their calibration with the music around them.

 

However, when I played this cassette at parties, I had to make sure I stopped it before it reached the final track on Side A.  For my friend Keith had sneakily inserted there, like a street-credibility-destroying booby trap, Hungry Like the Wolf by Duran Duran.

 

Japanese and English Guitar Pop – Yoko Koyama, 1994    

By the mid-1990s I was lecturing in a university in Sapporo.  My Japanese students there gradually came to the realisation that, despite being a curmudgeonly git, I had one redeeming quality, which was that I was into music.  So a steady stream of them presented me with cassettes of tunes they’d recorded, which they thought I might be interested in.  I can’t remember who presented me with a recording of the Flower Travellin’ Band, but well done that person.

 

A smart indie-kid in one of my classes called Yoko Koyama gave me a cassette compilation of what she termed ‘modern guitar pop’, i.e. melodic pop-rock stuff with lots of pleasantly jangly guitars.  Apparently, this was a sound that a few Japanese bands of the time, like Flipper’s Guitar and Pizzicato Five, were into.  She’d interspersed their tracks with ones by what she described as four ‘English’ practitioners of the same sub-genre.  These were Teenage Fanclub and the BMX Bandits, from Bellshill near Glasgow; Aztec Camera, from East Kilbride in Lanarkshire; and the Trash Can Sinatras, from Irvine in North Ayrshire.

 

© Polystar

 

I expressed my thanks but observed with some bemusement that the four so-called English bands on the collection were actually all from Scotland.  Yoko smiled politely but said nothing.  However, a year later, she wrote a feature about this type of music for our faculty’s English-language students’ newspaper (which I edited) and made a point of talking about ‘Scottish guitar pop’.  So despite my multiple failings as a teacher, I managed at least to teach one fact to one person during the 1990s.

 

Guns N’ Roses bootlegs – the guy who collected my Daily Yomiuri payments, 1996

While living in Sapporo, I subscribed to the English-language newspaper the Daily Yomiuri, which is now the Japan News.  One evening every month, a young guy would arrive at my apartment door with the newspaper’s monthly bill, which I paid in cash.  (Direct debits didn’t seem to be a thing at the time.)  When I opened the door for him one evening, The Spaghetti Incident by Guns N’ Roses happened to be playing on my stereo.  The guy’s face immediately lit up and he exclaimed, “Ah, you like Guns N’ Roses?”  We then had an enthusiastic ten-minute conversation – well, as enthusiastic as my rudimentary Japanese would allow – about the gloriousness of Axl Rose, Slash and the gang.

 

A month later, when the guy came to collect my next Daily Yomiuri payment, I was immensely touched when he presented me with two cassettes, on which he’d recorded two Guns N’ Roses bootleg albums.

 

Okay, strictly speaking, these weren’t compilation cassettes.  But I’m mentioning them here as a testimony to the power of the audio cassette.  They allowed the Japanese guy who collected my newspaper-subscription money and I to bond over a shared love of Guns N’ Roses.

 

Yeah, beat that, Spotify.

 

From pinterest.com

Posted on

They’ve got the biggest balls of them all

 

From twitter.com/acdc

 

You don’t need me to tell you that 2020 has been the calendrical equivalent of a giant reeking pile of horse manure.  However, recently, amid the daily tsunamis of bad news, I saw a headline in the Guardian that performed the now-difficult feat of putting a smile on my face.  The headline was: AC/DC REUNITE, FEATURING THREE FORMER MEMBERS.

 

Yes, AC/DC – the proper AC/DC – are back.

 

After several years of disarray, the band has got back together with as near classic a line-up as is possible in 2020, with that famously cap-wearing and impeccably gravel-voiced Geordie Brian Johnson on vocals, Cliff Williams on bass, Phil Rudd on drums and Angus Young, presumably still in his schoolboy uniform, on lead guitar.  Alas, Angus’s brother Malcolm passed away in 2017 but their nephew Stevie Young has taken his place on lead guitar.  They’ve returned with a new album called Power Up, to be released in November, and a new single, A Shot in the Dark, which is available now and sounds like every song that AC/DC have done in the last half-century.  That’s an assessment that, as any bona fide fan of the band will tell you, is a compliment rather than a criticism.

 

AC/DC and I go back a long time together.  Their 1979 album Highway to Hell was among the first albums I ever bought.  The album starts with the title track and rarely have a set of opening chords sounded so much like a statement of intent: DUH-DUH-DUH!  DUH-DUH-DUH!  DUH-DUH-DUH, DUH, DUH-DUH!  Here were an outfit, it seemed, who were single-mindedly determined to use their guitars to blow your arse off.  Which was surely what heavy metal, and for that matter, rock and roll itself, were all about.

 

Around the same time I took it upon myself to throw a party for my school friends at my family’s farmhouse in Peebles, Scotland, one Friday when my parents were away for the evening.  Predictably, most of my guests turned up armed with copious and illegitimately purchased bottles and cans of booze.  They also turned up armed with AC/DC records.  Indeed, it seemed that the AC/DC song Touch Too Much, recently released as a single, wasn’t off the turntable for the entire, chaotic, alcohol-drenched evening.  No wonder that after that the music of AC/DC was indelibly linked in my mind with images of dissolute and drunken teenage misbehaviour.

 

Incidentally, during the margin of time between the party ending and my parents returning, I managed to cram all the empty bottles and cans into two big sacks and hide them in the rarely-accessed roof-space of a rarely-used outhouse, where they remained undiscovered for nearly 20 years.  They weren’t found until the late 1990s when my parents had the outhouse converted into a holiday cottage.  After the discovery, the building contractor worriedly asked my Dad if he was a secret drinker.

 

From blabbermouth.net

 

Sadly, though with a horrible-seeming inevitability, AC/DC’s original vocalist Bon Scott died from alcohol poisoning related to heavy-duty partying in 1980.  Briefly, it looked like I’d discovered the band too late, for Malcolm  and Angus Young, the band’s driving forces, considered calling it a day at this point.  Instead, though, they recruited Brian Johnson as a replacement and AC/DC rumbled on for a further four decades.

 

It helped that the band’s first post-Bon Scott album, 1980’s Back in Black, was a cracker.  It featured such splendid tunes as the title track, You Shook Me All Night Long and the epic Hell’s Bells, which begins with the clanging of a huge church-bell before Johnson starts hollering apocalyptic lines like ‘Lightning flashing across the sky / You’re only young but you’re gonna die!”  By now I was in my second-last year at Peebles High School and Hell’s Bells never seemed to be off the turntable of the stereo in the upper-school common room.

 

The nice thing about AC/DC was that they never changed.  No matter what terrible events were happening in the world – wars, revolutions, earthquakes, droughts, famines, Simon Cowell – they just carried on, churning out the same (or very similar) riffs and singing songs about partying, shagging, boozing and having a generally good time.  I soon tracked down and listened to their back catalogue  Their 1976 album High Voltage had an opening track called It’s a Long Way to the Top if You Wanna Rock ‘n’ Roll, which exposed me to the lethal combination of electric guitars and bagpipes.  Despite being officially Australian, the Young brothers and Bon Scott had been born in Scotland and liked to honour their Caledonian roots.  The same year’s Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap had a stonking title track and the naughty music-hall pastiche Big Balls, whose lyrics included such gems as “Some balls are held for charity / And some for fancy dress / But when they’re held for pleasure / They’re the balls that I like best.”  Yes, it’s sad that I still remember this stuff.  Meanwhile, their 1978 album Powerage was identified by no less a personage than Keith Richards as one of his favourite records ever.

 

There was a lot of love for AC/DC in the world, though you wouldn’t have thought so reading the music press of the time.  Writers in 1980s music magazines like the New Musical Express and Melody Maker, if they got around to acknowledging the band’s existence at all, were of the opinion that AC/DC and heavy metal generally represented everything ignorant, crass and embarrassing in the musical world, unlike their two favoured musical genres, punk rock and indie music.  For the record, I should point out I’m a big fan of punk and indie too.

 

This disdain was shared by many people I met when I went to college in the early-1980s, who were fans of the likes of the Smiths, the Style Council and Simple Minds.  I remember one early college flatmate, a supercilious type who’d been schooled at the prestigious Glasgow Academy, wandering into my room one day, finding me listening to Highway to Hell, and demanding, “How can you listen to that shit?”

 

To be honest, AC/DC didn’t help their cause during the 1980s because they released a series of shonky albums that were shadows of their 1970s predecessors: 1983’s Flick of the Switch; 1985’s Fly on the Wall; 1986’s Who Made Who, which was the musical soundtrack to Maximum Overdrive, writer and big AC/DC fan Stephen King’s ill-advised attempt to try his hand at directing a film; and 1988’s Blow Up Your Video.  It wasn’t until 1990 that the band rediscovered their mojo with The Razor’s Edge.  Although it wasn’t great, it served up two of their best songs for a long time, Are You Ready and Thunderstruck.  The latter track is so rousing that, Wikipedia informs me, Atlético Madrid play it in their team coach every time they travel to their opponents’ stadium for an away game.

 

From bravewords.com

 

The band’s star was back in the ascendant too because those pretentious music critics who’d dissed them in the 1980s had been replaced by a younger generation of critics who, like me, had grown up listening to and loving AC/DC and were happy to give them some overdue praise.  AC/DC had also proved more influential than anyone had predicted.  Their sound is imprinted on the DNA of acts like the Cult, Foo Fighters, Queens of the Stone Age, Beastie Boys and many more.  It’s even said that Back in Black was the first song a 14-year-old Kurt Cobain learned to play on guitar.

 

Thankfully, the band managed to preserve their reputation through the 1990s and early 21st century with a series of albums that, while not earth-shattering, at least delivered the goods and always yielded a single or two that sounded satisfyingly AC/DC-ish: 1995’s Ballbreaker, 2000’s Stiff Upper Lip, 2008’s Black Ice and 2014’s Rock or Bust, which contained the jolly single Play Ball.  As you may have gathered, the word ‘ball’ plays an important role in the AC/DC lexicon.

 

But the same year as the release of Rock or Bust everything seemed to go pear-shaped for the band.  First of all, they lost Malcolm Young after memory-loss and concentration-loss caused by dementia left him unable to play.  Later that year, the band parted company with Phil Rudd after he ended up in court on drugs charges and, bizarrely, an allegation of ‘attempting to procure a murder’ (though this was dropped soon after).  Then in 2016, Brian Johnson departed due to damaged hearing, which he claimed was caused less by his fronting one of the world’s loudest bands than by his indulgence in auto-racing.  And in 2016 too Cliff Williams announced his retirement and played his supposedly final gig with the band.

 

What was left of AC/DC continued performing with Axl Rose, of legendary glam-metal band Guns n’ Roses, doing vocal duties.  Rose’s recruitment was met with dismay by many fans, though I have to say I don’t dislike Axl Rose or Guns n’ Roses.  Indeed, their albums Appetite for Destruction (1987), Use Your Illusion I and II (1991) and The Spaghetti Incident (1993) occupy prominent places in my record collection.  It’s just that Rose’s tremulous American voice didn’t sound right singing the AC/DC back catalogue.  Also, it didn’t help that he debuted with AC/DC confined to a wheelchair thanks to a broken foot and looking like a heavy metal version of Doctor Strangelove.  This hardly seemed to bode well for the vitality of this weird new incarnation of the band.

 

Anyway, that’s all academic now because, thankfully, the real AC/DC are ready again to strut the world’s stages.  Well, once this pandemic comes to an end, whenever that will be.  Let’s hope that to the list of ghastly things to which AC/DC and their gloriously unchanging sound are impervious – wars, revolutions, earthquakes, droughts, famines, Simon Cowell – we can add the coronavirus too.

 

© Albert Productions